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¶ … Victorian Prose and Poetry, by Lionel Trilling and Harold Bloom. Specifically, it will discuss Realism and compromise in Victorian Literature. How do Victorian writers search for realistic compromises with the world around them?
VICTORIAN LITERATURE
In Victorian literature, Realism followed the age of Romanticism, and Realism quickly evolved into Naturalism, practiced by many authors of the time, including Jack London, Mark Twain, Charles Dickens, Jane Austen, and Sinclair Lewis. "There was a time when the intellectual and spiritual life of Europe as a whole was dominated by neo-classicism; it was dominated in the next era by Romanticism; and then it was dominated by Realism, which developed into Naturalism" (Baker 58). Realism in literature attempted to portray things as they really were, scientifically and without emotion, placing man in balance with nature.
The task of realism, Howells felt, was to defend "the people" against its adversaries. The realist, he wrote, "feels in every nerve the equality of things and the unity of men." Howells's defense of the portrayal of the typical was designed to counter views that associated the average with the degraded and to widen the bonds of commonality: "Such beauty and such grandeur as we have is common beauty, common grandeur, or the beauty and grandeur in which the quality of solidarity so prevails that neither distinguishes itself to the disadvantage...
/ Well, well, it is the stronger way! / Heroic stuff is hardly made; / But one, who dallies with dismay, / Admires your boldness, half-afraid. / He deems that knowledge, bitter-sweet, /
Can rust and rot the bars of right, / Till weakness sets her trembling feet / Across the threshold of the night. / She peers, she ventures; growing bold, / She breathes the enervating air, / And shuns the aspiring summits, cold / And silent, where the dawn is fair. / She wonders, aching to be free, / Too soft to burst the uncertain hand, / Till chains of drear fatality / Arrest the feeble willing hand. / Nay, let the stainless eye of youth / Be blind to that bewildering light! / When faith and virtue falter, truth / Is handmaid to the hags of night.
The details are vivid and real, which is one of the characteristics of Realism in Victorian writing. Following Romanticism as it did, Realism attempted to bring the reader back down to earth from the heady idealism of the Romantics, replacing it with a more natural and real experience. Charles Dickens, while a Romantic at heart, wrote realistic novels of London's poor during this time, and his writing is an excellent example of Realism, portraying life in the slums as it was, gritty and difficult at best.
Compromise is also an important component of Victorian literature. Many Victorian…
References
Baker, Joseph E., ed. The Reinterpretation of Victorian Literature. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1950. Borus, Daniel H. Writing Realism: Howells, James, and Norris in the Mass Market. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1989.
Decker, Clarence R. The Victorian Conscience. New York: Twayne Publishers, 1952.
Stedman, Edmund Clarence, ed. A Victorian Anthology, 1837-1895; Selections Illustrating the Editor's Critical Review of British Poetry in the Reign of Victoria. Boston; New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1895.
Trilling, Lionel and Bloom, Harold, eds. Victorian Prose and Poetry. New York: Oxford University Press, 1973.
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