Realism vs. Fantasy: The Novel’s Rise in 18th Century Literature
Realism vs. Fantasy in Restoration and 18th-Century Literature
The aim of this essay is to discuss the reasons why the novel became more realistic towards the eighteenth century and its evolution since the Restoration. To accomplish this, this essay will focus on the ideas of some critics concerning this issue.
First of all, it is important to highlight the concept of romance, which refers to works relatively free of the more restrictive aspects of realistic verisimilitude. Romances do not refer to love stories, but to fantastical stories generally composed of the constant loves and invincible courage of heroes, heroines, kings, and queens, mortals of the first rank, and so forth; set in exotic places where lofty language, miraculous contingencies, and impossible performances elevate and surprise the reader into a giddy delight.
In contrast with romances, novels are of a more familiar nature, come near us and represent to us intrigues in practice, delight us with accidents and odd events, but not such as are wholly unusual or unprecedented, such that not being so distant from our belief brings also the pleasure nearer us. It could be said that the novel is a picture of real life and manners, and of the times in which it was written; whereas the romance in lofty and elevated language, describes what has never happened nor is likely to. At the end of the seventeenth century, authors became obsessed with the audience’s taste; it was before the king’s. It’s a strategy of the writers, they want to be experimental to shock people. Changes in society throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries led to leaving aside the romances and embracing the novel.
The novel became so successful in the eighteenth century because of the possibility of being identified with the characters as they are not from the upper-class, the individual is in the center and the main characters can be inspiring because there is a society where models were very much needed as society was changing a lot and the old English classes were being disrupted by the growing middle-class, which was often made of people coming from the countryside. The novels are going to offer a very good kind of guide to behave. Due to this, the title of the novel will be the name of the main character, as it can be seen in Oroonoko by Aphra Behn or Pamela by Samuel Richardson. Through this obsession with authenticity, writers started using real places and that is also why the epistolary novel became a very successful genre (characters seeing the same event from different points of view).
In order to fully understand why the realism in the novel superseded the fancy in the romances, it is necessary to take into consideration what some critics said about this issue. Ian Watt defended that there was a rejection of traditional plots (plots that were typical in the romances) and there were no more exotic places or aristocrats and no more complicated plots. Authors become very much aware of the fact that they are innovating, and that is why they not only use the term novel after the main title, but often they begin the novel by explaining to the reader what they are doing. There is also a rejection of the stereotypical characters and so much so that for the first time, we find characters that belong to the lowest part of society (in The Beggar’s Opera), there are prostitutes, thieves… and each of them become very distinct in their description. They do not need to be criminals, they can be normal people who struggle to get what they want. This way, there is a rise of the middle class in literature. The function of memory is also important as a lot of these novels have a sort of a timeline and they progress throughout the time and the main character, as happens in Oroonoko or Pamela. In Oroonoko it can be seen how a young African prince turns into a slave in an English plantation in Surinam and he nobly endures torture and mutilation before being executed. And in Pamela it can be seen the story of a woman who goes from being a maid to being a lady. Another important characteristic is the specificity of the setting, we are not going to be confronted with some far away place, but with close places like London or somewhere in England. To sum up, these novels sound authentic in the sense that the things mentioned could happen in real life, there is no much fantasy as it used to be. Michael McKeon agrees with Watt’s ideas focusing on the importance of the rise of the middle-class to the development of the genre. The novel, the way he sees it, becomes a cultural instrument to confront intellectual and social crises. He believed there was a need for moral and social instruction. Before, in the seventeenth century, those who wrote were aristocrats (cavaliers or royalists). Finally, J. Paul Hunter finishes shaping these ideas by giving importance to contemporaneity. By being contemporary to the readers, characters are believable. People could relate to characters that were familiar to them, then there is a possibility of identification in the novel. There is also coherence because the main character narrates the story, but fragmentation because the story is going to be narrated in sections, in episodes and in these episodes, we are often going to hear digressions within the character’s view of the world.
In conclusion, the evolution of the novel is always shaped by society and its changes. This way, the reason why realism triumphed over fanciness was the persistent need of improvement among the people, the need of a role model and, most important, the need of feeling identified with the text.