Psychological realism

Henry James (1843-1916) was a realist, but not a naturalist. Unlike Howells and the naturalists, he was not interested in business, politics or the conditions of society. He was an observer of the mind rather than a recorder of the times. His realism was a special kind of psychological realism. Few of his stories include big events or exciting action. In fact, the characters in his last (and finest) novels rarely do anything at all. Things happen to them, but not as a result of their own actions. They watch life more than they live it. We are interested in how their minds respond to the events of the story.

We usually divide James’s career as a writer into three stages: early, middle and mature. James developed toward his mature – or fully developed – style rather slowly. The novels of his early period deal with his thoughts and feelings as an American living in Europe. Roderick Hudson (1876) tells of the failure of a young American artist in Italy. Although he has genius, the young man fails because he lacks moral strength. Daisy Miller (1879) is the best novel of James’s “middle period”. Again, a young, bright American girl goes to Europe to “explore life”. After many good offers of marriage, she chooses the wrong man. The most important part of the book is where she realizes her mistake. In The Princess Casamassima (1886), the hero is a revolutionary who wants to destroy the European aristocracy. But gradually, he falls in love with the aristocrat’s “world of wonderful precious things». This change of heart leads to his suicide. In The Ambassadors (1903), a middle-aged American goes to Paris to rescue the son of a friend from the “evils” of European society. In the end, the boy is happy to be “rescue” and to go back to America. Henry James never tries to give a large, detailed picture of society. Rather, in his stories, he selects a single situation or problem: often the problem is about the nature of art. In his excellent short stories, we can clearly see how this method works. In The Real Thing (1893), the problem is how art changes reality. An artist wants to create a picture of typical aristocrats. When he tries to use real aristocrats as his models, he fails. The real aristocrats are so real that he can’t use his imagination. In The Death of the Lion (1894), a famous writer faces the problem of being too popular. He becomes too busy with his admirers to write.

Another kind of problem that Henry James deals with in both his short stories and novels is the “unlived life”. The hero may be so afraid of life that he cannot really live. In The Beast in the Jungle (1903), the hero is sure something terrible is going to happen to him. Much later, he discovers that the terrible fate waiting for him “is that nothing is to happen to him”. A further problem James often studied was the introduction of children to the evil and immorality of the world around them. This is the theme of What Maisie Knew

(1897) and The Turn of the Screw (1898). The latter is a famous ghost story about two children and their nurse. The nurse is sure the children are being haunted by ghosts, but it is not clear to the reader whether these ghosts are real or only in the nurse’s mind.

Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914) was one of the few important writers in late 19^th century America who was not a realist or a naturalist. The struggles of ordinary people in the everyday world did not interest him. Like Edgar Allan Poe, he loved to describe terrifying events and strange forms of death. His famous sport stories about the Civil War – in Tales of Soldiers and Civilians (1891) and Can Such Things Be? (1893) – are actually horror stories. Irony is an important element in each of them. Bierce is also similar to Poe in his control of details. Each detail in a story is part of the single, clear impression created by the whole story.

Lecture 5

LITERATURE OF THE CRITICAL REALISM (2^nd half of the 19^th century)

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