19th-Century Realism and Naturalism in Literature

Realism and Naturalism

Realism and naturalism are art movements from the latter half of the 19th century. Transformations in 19th-century European society led to a heightened awareness of social importance. The influence of society and the collective dimension of humanity came to the forefront.

Realism is a cultural movement characteristic of bourgeois society, which rejected idealistic romantic fantasies.

From Romanticism to Realism

Presenting realism as entirely antagonistic to romanticism isn’t accurate. Besides their temporal overlap (Stendhal’s pre-realist Red and Black and Victor Hugo’s romantic Hernani both appeared in 1830), realism owes some debts to romanticism:

• Realism develops a taste for the regional and local, typical of romanticism.
• Romantic styles influenced the realistic novel by fostering types, characters, and environments reflecting specific national and social realities.
• Melodramatic tones and impassioned rhetoric from romantic narratives survive in some realist techniques.
• Romantic landscapes anticipated the descriptive detail of realist narrators.

General Features of Realist Literature

1. Observation and Accurate Description of Reality

Writers meticulously documented field notes about characters and settings or consulted books for accurate information. Real life became an aesthetic object. Realistic novels are filled with details of everyday life: behavior, dress, food, and atmosphere.

2. Setting Contemporary Events

Realist authors wrote about familiar subjects, setting their work in nearby places. They focused on the everyday, eliminating subjectivity and fantasy while controlling imagination and sentimentality.

3. Social and Political Criticism

Realist authors depicted societal vices and evils, proposing solutions. The idea of “useful art” was reborn. Socio-political intent varied with each writer’s ideology.

• Conservative authors described reality to highlight its degradation and advocate for traditional values.
• Progressive authors also showed social ills, but attributed them to a conservative mentality hindering progress.

4. Simple and Sober Style

Realists abandoned romantic themes and rejected pompous rhetoric. Clarity and accuracy were ideal, reflecting the desire to align writing with scientific observation.

5. Preference for the Novel

The novel became the dominant genre, reaching unprecedented popularity. Realists believed prose narratives best reflected reality:

“A novel is a mirror carried along a road. At one moment it reflects the azure sky, at another the mud puddles underfoot.” – Stendhal

The realistic novel demanded the novelist be a psychologist, sociologist, historian, and an interpreter of history, exploring various city sectors (favoring urban over rural settings) to gather material for plot and story.

Typical Features of the Realistic Novel

1. Verisimilitude

Realistic narratives focused on describing and presenting real life from all angles. Stories were fragments of reality, based on everyday experience with believable characters and settings. Implausible events and fantastical adventures disappeared. While not primarily moralistic, writers sometimes inserted their views, judging events.

2. Individual or Group Characters

Protagonists were individuals struggling with their world or social groups representing contemporary society. The former emphasized psychological analysis; the latter described diverse environments and behaviors, including previously ignored social groups (bourgeoisie, proletariat, beggars, outcasts). Two novel types emerged (sometimes combined):

• Psychological novel
• Social novel

3. Omniscient Narrator

The omniscient narrator controlled the story, knowing future events and characters’ hidden thoughts, offering judgments and addressing the reader. They intruded to draw conclusions, summarize events ethically, sociologically, psychologically, or historically. Often, the omniscient narrator acted as a philosopher, expressing an ideological position. This wasn’t incompatible with pretending to be a chronicler or notary of witnessed reality. Over time, objectivity led to fewer narrator intrusions.¹

¹ The omniscient narrator has a “behind” view, knowing and revealing more than the character. Other perspectives include internal (narrator knows the same as the character) and external or “from outside” (narrator knows less than the character).

4. Linear Structure

Events unfolded linearly, though flashbacks to past episodes sometimes interrupted the narrative flow.

5. Free Indirect Style

The 19th-century novel introduced free indirect style, minimizing the narrator’s presence and enhancing objectivity. It conveyed intimacy (memories, feelings, sensations, ideas) from within, connecting reader and character. The technique removed visible narrator intervention, such as opinion verbs and linking phrases. Free indirect style was crucial, leading to techniques like interior monologue that revolutionized narrative, enabling 20th-century novels to depict mental reality and psychological intimacy.

6. Detailed Description

Detailed descriptions of exteriors, interiors, and characters often dominated the narrative, reflecting realist writers’ positivist obsession with accuracy. This led to capturing specific character traits through detailed physical and psychological portraits.

7. Colloquial Language

Narrative language, aligned with ideological assumptions, approached conversational language, elevating it to literary status. Authors adapted language to characters’ status, origin, and particularities.

Themes of the Realist Novel

Love, a staple of emotional stories, took concrete forms in realism and naturalism: adultery (mostly female) or love affairs with priests. 19th-century novels highlighted relationship difficulties, arising from:

• Age differences (e.g., Victor Quintanar and Ana Ozores in The Regent)
• Social disparities (e.g., Galdós’s Torment)
• Ideological clashes (e.g., Rosario and Pepe Rey in Galdós’s Doña Perfecta)
• Psychological and life differences (e.g., Fortunata and Maximiliano Rubin in Fortunata and Jacinta)

Adultery, often with fatal consequences, was a recurring theme. Female adultery was more condemned socially. Male adultery, while morally reprehensible, was sometimes excused as succumbing to natural tendencies.

Several novels centered on love affairs with priests, highlighting the “priestly crisis” and the conflict between divine and human love. While sometimes resolved without trauma (e.g., Valera’s Pepita Jiménez), outcomes were often unhappy.

Naturalism

Literary realism evolved into a “documentary” style, presenting reality as a study object without subjective transformation. In 1871, the naturalist school emerged in France with Émile Zola, who outlined his theory in essays and articles. Zola’s ideas stemmed from a deterministic² approach, seeking the causes of phenomena.

² Determinism posits that humans aren’t free; biological inheritance and social circumstances determine fate, behavior, beliefs, and attitudes.

Naturalism resulted in a scientific social novel characterized by:

• Addressing human misery, corruption, alcoholism, mental illness, inheritance, and marginalization. Characters had physical or mental defects, inherited or caused by poverty.
• Impressionistic environments reflecting authors’ pessimism: sordid, ugly, sad, and negative. While realists described the bourgeois world with occasional forays into working-class or marginalized settings, naturalists focused on these sectors.
• Maintaining realism’s emphasis on documentation and observation, taken to extremes.

Besides Zola, key naturalists included the Goncourt brothers, Alphonse Daudet, and Guy de Maupassant.

Realist Literature in 19th-Century Spain

Realism’s triumph in Spain was delayed due to social and historical circumstances. Urban development lagged behind countries like England and France, making realist themes like city life and progress’s effects less relevant. The historical context for realism emerged after the 1868 revolution, with a bourgeois society, new freedoms, and the end of literary censorship.

Journalism’s rise was crucial for realist prose. Most 19th-century prose writers worked in newspapers, which fostered direct, flexible prose free from romantic bombast. The costumbrista article became the realist novel’s precursor, focusing on faithfully reproducing environments and contemporary reality.

Before the realist novel, a pre-realist novel existed in the 1850s and 1860s, close to costumbrismo and built on scenes. Besides costumbrismo, other influences shaped the Spanish realist novel:

• European realists
• Serial novels (read by Spanish realists, used and parodied in their novels)
• Romantic historical novels (serving as a counter-model):

Finally, 16th and 17th-century prose (Cervantes, picaresque, Quevedo) influenced the Spanish realist novel. The transition from romantic prose manifested in Fernán Caballero (Cecilia Böhl de Faber) and Pedro Antonio de Alarcón’s works. Realism consolidated with Juan Valera, José María de Pereda, Emilia Pardo Bazán, Benito Pérez Galdós, and Leopoldo Alas “Clarín”.

A Unique Naturalism

Spanish naturalism had unique characteristics. Naturalist doctrines arrived via Emilia Pardo Bazán’s articles, collected as The Throbbing Question (1883). Spanish naturalism was more formal than ideological, influencing techniques rather than worldview. It addressed social issues and explored sordid aspects of existence, reflecting moral and material misery. However, due to the Christian view of humanity, social and biological determinism wasn’t fully accepted. Characters were free, not products of determinism. Spanish naturalism incorporated a few elements into the realist novel.