A History of American Literature

Reconstructing, Reimagining: 1865–1900 255

class. Above all, he showed them that it was possible to do what, at the outset, he

aimed to do: to lead the reader, sometimes “imperceptibly” and always “step by

step,” to a full awareness of “the unjust spirit of caste.”

The Development of Literary Realism and Naturalism

Capturing the commonplace

“The talent that is robust enough to front the every-day world and catch the charm

of its work-worn, care-worn, brave kindly face, need not fear the encounter,” wrote

William Dean Howells (1837–1920) in Criticism and Fiction (1891). “The arts must

become democratic,” he added, “and then we shall have the expression of America

in art.” For Howells, realism was the appropriate response to the drastic changes

taking place in America in the late nineteenth century. And the writer who could

achieve that realism could also be described as the creator of a truly democratic,

essentially American art that captured the importance and the meaning of the

commonplace. “Commonplace?” declares a character in Howells’s 1885 novel The

Rise of Silas Lapham:

The commonplace is just that light, impalpable, aerial essence, which they’ve never

got into their confounded books yet. The novelist who could interpret the common

feelings of commonplace people would have the answer to “the riddle of the painful

earth” on his tongue.

Howells’s fiction was an attempt to capture that impalpable essence; to resist the

romantic and sentimental, the contrived and the melodramatic and to register as

accurately as possible the way Americans were living. It was, in a sense, a skirmish

around the notion of the “commonplace.” In disclosing the meanings of the appar-

ently ordinary lives of apparently ordinary Americans, Howells was choosing to

establish how far from “commonplace” (using that word in its accepted sense) the

“commonplace” (as a measure and index of realism) actually was. There is a moment

in The Rise of Silas Lapham when some of the characters take a trip on a boat. “The

greater part of the crowd on board,” the narrator observes,

looked as if they might not only be easily but safely known. There was little style and

no distinction among them; they were people who were going down to the beach for

the fun or relief of it, and were able to afford it. In face they were commonplace, with

nothing but the American poetry of vivid purpose to light them up.

It is that “vivid purpose” – the challenges it had to meet in a rapidly changing society,

its social and moral consequences, the political consequences it engendered – that

Howells tried to negotiate in his stories and novels. He was, in his lifelong allegiance

to literary realism, pursuing what he saw as the only truly American poetry, to be

found in the experience and expressions of average Americans.

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