Realism Marx Dickens and Twain

Realism
As Fiero (2010) notes, realism in the 19th century focused on depicting life as it really was—without the sentiment of the Romantics and without the pomposity of the Enlightened. Depictions of realism often focused on the commonplace—the common classes or the working class, as in the painting by Adolph Friedrich Erdmann Von Menzel, Iron Mill (1875). Writers approached realism by depicting characters and scenes that sprang from the page with authenticity—as in Dickens’ Old Curiosity Shop or in Twain’s Huckleberry Finn. Then there was Marx, with his Communist Manifesto: not content to have a literary function, Marx wanted all-out revolution. He wanted the working class to rise up and take the means of production. In any case, each of these three writers had a sense of class differences and of the oppression that some classes suffered more than others. Each had a different take on it. Twain retained his humor throughout and showed how an innocent boy could befriend a runaway slave. Dickens showed how a suburb of “red-brick houses,” where not a leaf of greenery could be found to fill the soul with the type of meditative material that Wordsworth had such abundance of at Tintern Abbey, had a dreary and downtrodden effect on the lives of the common classes: “Men, women, children, wan in their looks and ragged in attire…” (Dickens, 1841, line 30 in Fiero). This paper will examine Marx’s Manifesto, Dickens’ Curiosity Shop and Twain’s Huckleberry Finn to show how writers in the 19th century expressed concern for social and economic inequalities.
Dickens was an advocate of social justice in the 19th century: he hated that children were exploited in industries and used like slaves for labor; he hated the legal system, which seemed inclined to sentence people to death rather too easily; he hated the materialistic impulses of the modern age (Diamond, 2003). He drew attention to the dreariness of the London scene, where people were packed like sardines into tin can alleyways of brick-houses where no life or light of nature’s green goodness could be found to grow. He described, for example, the aesthetic horrors of industrialization and urbanization on human life in the city: “on every side, as far as the eye could see into the heavy distance, tall chimneys, crowding each other, and presenting that endless repetition of the same dull, ugly form, which is the horror of oppressive dreams, poured out their plague of smoke, obscured the light, and made foul the melancholy air” (Dickens, 1841, lines 15-20 in Fiero). Dickens condemned the way the industrialists and the merchants of Enlightenment thought oppressed and stifled the life and creative spirit of the working class. At every opportunity he could get, he depicted London and its smoke and smog and fog and soot as a kind of modern hell where man had lost his sense—though saving grace and virtue could still be found among some.
Twain did not project his scorn in quite the same way, but then he also was not living in London. Twain had the Mississippi as his escape, and it was on the Mississippi that he teamed up a young boy and a runaway slave as a perfect odd couple for highlighting some of the hypocrisies of American life in the antebellum South. Huck’s crisis of conscience about helping a runaway slave to freedom is depicted by Twain with great success: the two sides of the debate are shown, with Huck literally right in between them, as Jim whispers to Huck that he is “true blue” while the reward hunters looking for the fugitive display their misanthropy. Huck ultimately makes the right decision and prevents Jim from being handed over—but Twain humorously makes Huck think that he is going to hell for doing so. The irony that Twain relies upon is that American society with its Puritanical views and hypocritical racism in the light of the Constitution’s embrace of equality as an ideal was a hotbed of ridiculous notions meant to keep one class of people (blacks) oppressed so that another class (whites) could benefit.
Marx had a great deal to say about oppression, himself—but he did so in a rather cheerless manner. Even Dickens managed to squeeze some sunshine into his realistic treatment of London in the 19th century. Marx, on the other hand, was all anxiety over the working class’s need to start a revolution, seize the means of production, and become the benefactors of their own labor. Marx was a materialist through and through—the sort that Conrad would later blast in his own writing, depicting empty revolutionaries as soul-dead, myopic frauds who had no sense of the transcendental values—as in The Secret Agent or Through Western Eyes. Marx rejected the Old World values and dreamed up a new take on society and civilization that centered on life being a continuous struggle. This stemmed from the Hegelian dialectic, but Marx gave it a social twist as he saw the struggle being between the aristocratic class (the educated class) and the working class (the laborers). He despised the bourgeoisie and wanted the workers to foment a rebellion that would end in the elimination of the former.
Marx would have loved to see the takeover of Russia by the Soviets—but even that revolution was funded by foreign money from abroad and so was not a wholly organic enterprise like what Marx envisioned. Marx focused on the conditions of the working class, but instead of depicting these conditions in literature and rousing man’s sympathy and pity, he wanted to take action—and he wanted the workers specifically to take action: “WORKING MEN OF ALL COUNTRIES, UNITE!” he wrote in the Communist Manifesto, completely misunderstanding the motivation of the working class: it was not to take on the responsibility of ownership in an industrialized society as a collective but rather to simply have a job and bring home money for the family—that was all. Marx was not really in touch with the working class, however; and, as a Jew, he was somewhat out of touch with mainstream society altogether (Jones, 2000). He projected, therefore, his own sense of the problems of society onto the working class and expected them to heed his call. Of course, they did not which left the Frankfurt School in the 20th century wondering what had happened. What had happened was that the working class was never made up of revolutionaries. Marx had his finger on the pulse when he ranted about the exploitation of the laborer—that was happening, of course, as the industrialists were focused wholly on materialistic aims themselves. There were no unions to protect the worker and society had essentially become de-humanized following the Era of Enlightenment and the so-called Scientific Revolution. But Marx lacked realism in the sense that he did not recognize the spiritual side of man. The Romantics at least got that right. Dickens did not lose sight of that fact, for all his realistic portrayals of London life.
In conclusion, realism in the 19th century was depicted by artists to draw attention to the realities of life—to the coldness, depravity, hypocrisy, inhumanity and so on. It was about shedding the sentimental and pointing a finger at the honest truth. Some still got carried away, however (like Marx) and called for action of a sort that was simply incompatible with the reality. Others, like Dickens and Twain, contented themselves with depicting what they saw in humorous and/or horrific ways and leaving it at that for the public to decide how to take it.
References
Diamond, M. (2003). Victorian Sensation. UK: Anthem.
Dickens, C. (1841). The old curiosity shop. In The Humanistic Tradition.
Fiero, G. (2010). The Humanistic Tradition. NY: McGraw-Hill.
Jones, E. M. (2000). Libido Dominandi. South Bend, IN: St. Augustine’s Press.