The Gilded Age: 1865-1900 Society and Culture: 1865-1900

Sources: Textbook Ch. 25 pg. 571-589 Online sources Excerpt from The Incorporation of America: Ch. 6 Fictions of The Real Concepts to Explore: Intellectual and cultural movements and popular entertainment Proponents and opponents of the new order, Realism vs Romanticism Influence of leisure time Questions to ponder: Describe the major changes in American religion (Fundamentalism vs Darwinism) and public education. What was the Beaux-Art movement and how did it impact the development of American art and architecture? Be familiar with important artists and architects. Trace the creation of popular entertainment during this era. What impact did realism have on the arts (specific literary achievements, painting, music, etc.)? Explain the concept of the new morality and how it shaped American culture. What social impact did Horatio Alger, Edward Bellamy, and Henry George have on America? Why is this era known as the Victorian Age? What values were promoted? How successful were those values in shaping culture?

Alan Trachtenberg THE INCORPORATION OF AMERICA: CULTURE AND SOCIETY IN THE GILDED AGE Chapter 06: Fictions of The Real "Realism," complained Hamilton Wright Mabie, erstwhile critic for the Christian Union, seemed bent on "crowding the world of fiction with commonplace people, whom one could positively avoid coming into contact with in real life; people without native sweetness or strength, without acquired culture or accomplishments, without the touch of the ideal which makes the commonplace significant and worthy of study." In such chiding remarks, the voices of gentility insisted on their view of art: on one side, "culture," "sweetness," "the ideal"; on the other, crowds of "commonplace people," with a broad hint of city streets and slums. Fiction, the critic implies, should display the good taste of gentlefolk; it should "avoid" vulgarity by the simple device of refusing to recognize it. Like the refined gentry, art should protect itself from common life, should concern itself with "ideal" characters, pure thoughts, and noble emotions. Although gentility had strengthened its hold on institutions of education and art, publishing and philanthropy, nevertheless critics and editors frequently took a defensive tone, challenged as much by new currents of art and literature as by vulgar politics and business. "Real ism" seemed such a threat, the term naming not so much a single consistent movement as a tendency among some painters and writers to depict contemporary life without moralistic condescension. Of course, the threats seem relatively timid now compared to the rise of modernist experiment and innovation in the arts which reached New York from Europe early in the twentieth century. In painting, for example, convention still held strong. Artists took their typical subjects from the familiar academic modes of landscape, genre, and allegory, excluding signs of contemporary conflict and disturbance. Fashionable salon art favored scenes of leisure, of polite ease amid comfortable surroundings; a passive enjoyment of sunshine and beaches, of rich interiors, of rural scenes glazed with nostalgia, struck the most frequent note. To be sure, exceptions appeared: John Ferguson Weir's industrial interiors in the 1870's, Thomas Pollock Anshutz's remarkable picture of lounging workers in "Ironworkers: Noontime" (1882), and Robert Kohler's dramatic "The Strike" (1886). But not until the "Ash Can School" at the turn of the century would a concerted movement appear to depict city life in its daily unheroic scenes. In the works of the two most prominent realists of the period, Winslow Homer and Thomas Eakins, a greater range of subject matter and a more strenuous original vision did appear as striking exceptions. Homer's variety of subject was perhaps the most extensive among established easel painters, embracing figures intent in work or sport: fishermen and women mending nets, seamen battling roiling high waters, huntsmen tracking their prey, country children at chores and games. Homer's canvases seem free of thematic concerns, certainly of moral judgments, idealizations, or simple interpretations, but they often hint at philosophical reflections on man's vulnerable condition in nature and the consequently enduring value of activity, of play as much as labor. Eakins's work was often even more overtly athletic, isolating single figures-boxers, wrestlers, rowers-as lonely performers of skill and endurance. Eakins's pictures disclose a world scrutinized in fine detail, with exacting analytical rigor. As a teacher as well as an artist, he insisted on studying anatomy directly from human models, and defied the

prudery of art schools in his native Philadelphia in employing nude models. He participated as a nude subject in the photographer Eadweard Muybridge's experiments in recording the human figure in motion at the University of Pennsylvania in the 1890's. Eakins's unflinching acceptance of the body, encouraged by his friendship with the older Walt Whitman, troubled his relations with the established art world. His famous "The Gross Clinic" (1875) was consigned to the medical section of the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia in 1876, excluded from the fine-arts exhibition because of the daring of its subject: the eminent surgeon Samuel Gross performing an operation while lecturing to a classHonesty of report, faithfulness to the act of seeing, refusal to idealize, disciplined accuracy: these features epitomized Eakins's realism, his break with the strictures of gentility, and his kinship with the rising rebellious spirit of the age. The "realist feels in every nerve the equality of things and the unity of men," wrote William Dean Howells in the late 1880's. As for the complaints of genteel critics, he observed that "the aristocratic spirit," having lost its place of honor, now sheltered itself in aestheticism: "The pride of caste is becoming the pride of taste; but, as before, it is averse to the mass of men; it consents to know them only in some conventionalized and artificial guise." By contrast, "democracy in literature is the reverse of all this. It wishes to know and to tell the truth." Realists want to know the world as it really is, to create a world of fiction congruent with "real life." Thus, the literary battle lines were drawn, in Howells's mind, on a distinct political terrain. Realism represented nothing less than the extension of democracy into the precincts of fiction. Howells launched monthly polemics against the aristocratic spirit from his seat in the "Editor's Study" of Harper's Monthly in the late 1880's and 1890's, a steady flow of reviews and screeds in defense of a fiction of the real Realism served Howells less as a doctrine and more as a conviction of rectitude. As he told Stephen Crane in 1894, realism was a corrective to faulty vision, a way of disclosing what is really there. The realist novel is "made for the benefit of people who have no true use of their eyes." Its aim is "to picture the daily life in the most exact terms possible, with an absolute and clear sense of proportion." True fiction "adjusts the proportions ... .. pre- serves the balances," and thus "lessons are to be taught and reforms won. When people are introduced to each other they will see the resemblances, and won't want to fight so badly." Seeing, picturing, recognizing: these represent realism's mode of reconciliation, the seriousness and gravity of its service to the republic. "But let fiction cease to lie about life," demanded Howells. "Let it portray men and women as they are, actuated by the motives and the passions in the measure we all know." Moreover, "let it speak the dialect, the language, that most Americans know -the language of unaffected people everywhere. Howells well understood that simply to allow characters low on the social scale to speak with the same freedom as what he dubbed "grammatical characters" constituted a kind of revolution, an overturning of those ingrained conventions which still guided popular novels. Moreover, because those conventions of linguistic representation worked hand in hand with the ever-present convention of the romantic-courtship plot, freedom of speech alone implied a radical change In the status of that plot, if not a complete elimination of it. Not until Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884), told entirely in the vernacular voice of an illiterate outcaste boy of the Mississippi valley, did the linguistic freedom implicit in realism Come to fruition in America. From the outset, Mark Twain had circumvented the

journals and the respectable publishing houses often (like Atlantic and Harper's and Scribner's) tied directly to the journals, by publishing his books on a subscription basis, sold door-to-door by traveling agents, reaching a nonliterary audience almost as large as that of dime novels and story papers sold at newsstands. Stamped thus with the onus of popularity, less an "author" than an entertainer, a personality, a "humorist," Mark Twain began his career outside the circle of respectability, and soon found a begrudging genteel acceptance. In the linguistic experiment of Huckleberry Finn, he found a freedom for the realistic telling of tales of insanity, murder, thievery, betrayal, feuding and lynching, and brutalities of racism without precedent in American fiction: without precedent, and unique until the appearance in 1900 of Theodore Dreiser, who in Sister Carrie and later novels would abandon respectability altogether, along with the very notion of "high" and "low," romantic plots, and the entire apparatus of reconciliation that lay at the heart of Howells's enterprise. For Howells, realism and America were always interchangeable terms, the one informing and assuring the other of that ultimate coming-out-all-right which held together the middle-class Protestant view. In response to Matthew Arnold's remark that America lacked "distinction," Howells respectfully if illogically replied that "somehow, the idea that we call America has realized itself so far that we already have identification rather than distinction." This means: "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 of anything else." Howells remarks improbably that America invites "the artist to the study and the appreciation of the common, and to the portrayal in every art of those finer and higher aspects which unite rather than sever mankind, if he would thrive in our new order of things." As solidarity, as order, as higher and finer aspects which unite, "America" is thus America's own romance-what Melville would call in another connection, in the same troubled days at the end of the 1880's, "the symmetry of form attainable in pure fiction."