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11 Naturalism, Realism, and Impressionism

Adam Parkes, Professor of English, University of Georgia, Athens, GA, USA

Published: 05 December 2016
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Beginning with the legacy of nineteenth-century realism, this essay traces the emergence of specifically literary notions of naturalism and Impressionism in British and Irish writing of the long fin de siècle . While noting theoretical differences between naturalism and Impressionism, special attention is paid to how often they overlap in the literary practice of such authors as Henry James, George Moore, John Galsworthy, Virginia Woolf, Ford Madox Ford, Jean Rhys, and James Joyce. Impressionists and naturalists often use the same metaphors and settings; some works usually associated with Impressionism are governed by naturalistic plots. At the same time, realism never really dissolves; it persists and renews itself even in some of modernism’s most experimental narratives.

‘After the Realists we have the Naturalists and the Impressionists. Such progress!’ Flaubert exploded in a letter to Turgenev in 1877. 1 The first exhibition of the impressionist painters in Paris had been held a mere three years earlier, and it would be another two years before the first sustained attempt to define literary impressionism appeared in print. 2 Le Roman Expérimental , Zola’s best-known manifesto for literary naturalism, would not appear until 1880. 3 Already, Flaubert was consigning all three of these modern movements to the grave. So much for all those literary efforts to create an accurate representation of everyday life (realism), or incorporate scientific ideas about heredity and the environment (naturalism), or capture the encounter between external reality and consciousness (impressionism). Like the modern myth of progress itself, these movements were passé. So soon? Such progress!

It is hard to overestimate Flaubert’s significance for literary modernism, in Britain and Ireland as in France, but was he right to dismiss realism and its most significant early modernist developments in such summary fashion? Had aesthetic modernism already lost the power to shock the audience that Madame Bovary had demonstrated on its publication in 1857? One answer is that it had if Flaubert said so. The pre-eminent writer associated with the term realism by nineteenth-century French critics was tired of it. ‘I execrate what is commonly called “realism”, even though I’m regarded as one of its high priests,’ Flaubert exclaimed in 1876. He declared himself a ‘rabid old Romantic’ instead. ‘I value style first and above all, and then Truth,’ he added, forging an opposition between style and realism that his own writings barely support. 4 Despite its strenuous attention to the details of ordinary middle-class life, and despite its claims (articulated by, among others, Flaubert) to describe this life from an impersonal point of view, realism scarcely gave an objective picture of the world. Even as it worked out various ways of trying to represent the world as it actually was, or as it seemed, realism (like any other literary mode) subjected reality to aesthetic stylization.

While Flaubert’s dismissal of realism and its early modernist developments might be understood as an expression of impatience with the aesthetic debates of his time—debates that struck him as excessively concerned with artificial and, at best, partially useful labels—the impatience itself suggests tensions or paradoxes that proved endemic to realism, and that in some ways defined it. ‘Realism, throughout the nineteenth century,’ George Levine reminds us in a recent chapter, ‘remained an ambivalent and often self-contradictory mode. It was most consistent in its determination to find strategies for describing the world as it was. It was inconsistent because every artist’s conception of what the world was like differed and because the world changed from moment to moment, generation to generation’. 5 Paradoxically implicated in idealism, realism ‘accommodates vague forms as well as concrete ones, and … it activates social visions as well as social facts’, as Matthew Beaumont notes. 6 Liberating when viewed from one angle, because it bestows the ‘freedom to feel and say’ that Henry James called for in his essay ‘The Art of Fiction’ (1884), from another angle such elasticity could seem excessive, worryingly close to meaninglessness and formlessness, as James intimated elsewhere by describing nineteenth-century novels as ‘large loose baggy monsters’. 7 If realism consisted of an ongoing effort to negotiate the ‘broad notions of plausibility’ to which it generally conformed, 8 sometimes those notions appeared to be stretched to the point of im plausibility. And if implausibility was an inevitable outcome, the so-called realist novelist might just as well describe himself as a romantic—Flaubert’s point, precisely.

Another answer to our question is that Flaubert could not have been more wrong. Just as Claude Monet—in the sometimes overlapping, though not always parallel realm of painting—continued working the vivid colours and diffuse atmospheric effects of his impressionist style until his death in 1926, the aesthetics of realism, naturalism, and impressionism would imprint themselves in numerous ways on the literature of the long fin de siècle and beyond. The emergence of naturalism and impressionism helped to ensure literary realism’s survival, if in newly complicated forms, through the modernist period. With its commitment to documenting social reality, naturalism did not differ significantly from realism in verbal style or narrative procedure. Rather, naturalism distinguished itself from realism by a theoretical narrowing of vision that emphasized logically incongruous ideas about the determinative influence on human personality both of the environment (which found the key to the self in external factors) and of heredity (which turned the search for that key inward and downward). 9 Linked less by logical compatibility than by a shared rhetoric of the extreme, naturalism’s competing theories delivered tales of violence, degeneration, and downward social mobility. 10

Unlike naturalism, literary impressionism tended to differentiate itself formally and stylistically from earlier models of realism, employing such techniques as achronological narration, multiple narrators, limited point of view, and intensely visual imagery to emphasize how the sense of reality depends on the perceptions and reflections of an individual human observer. Impressionism, too, offered tales of dissolution or breakdown, but its portraits of fragmentation typically occurred in the mind, not in society—or, if they did occur in society, they did so because they had happened in the mind first. In a seeming departure from George Eliot’s canonical definition of realism as a ‘faithful account of men and things as they have mirrored themselves in my mind’, impressionism takes up Eliot’s own quibbles—‘The mirror is doubtless defective; the outlines will sometimes be disturbed; the reflection faint or confused’—and extends them to the point where defectiveness, disturbance, and confusion seem to be the rule, not the exception. 11 In this way, literary Impressionism, like naturalism, gravitates towards the extreme case. As it does so, however, its theoretical differences from naturalism break down, as the borders between internal and external worlds start to wobble and blur—as, indeed, they do in the theory and practice of naturalism.

The literary record affords ample evidence against Flaubert’s claim about the fate of ‘the Realists’ and ‘the Naturalists and the Impressionists’. The obvious examples are both French: the twenty novels of Zola’s Rougon-Macquart cycle, the major monument of literary naturalism published between 1871 and 1893, and Proust’s impressionist masterpiece, À la recherche du temps perdu , published in seven instalments from 1913 to 1927. But numerous examples might be summoned from other modern European literatures: the realism of the Scandinavian dramatists Ibsen and Strindberg, or the naturalist novels of Verga in Italy and Alas in Spain, or the impressionist fiction of the Russians Chekhov and Turgenev. 12 We might consider examples from North America: naturalism in Chopin, Dreiser, London, or Norris, Impressionism in Crane or James. Or we might turn to Britain, where realism, naturalism, and impressionism, far from dwindling into low-impact aesthetics, continued to assert their power to shock and surprise their readers, upsetting moral, social, and aesthetic expectations and provoking public controversies reminiscent of the Madame Bovary trial.

When Walter Pater published his Studies in the History of the Renaissance (1873), one of the founding texts of literary impressionism, some of his fellow Oxonians were affronted by its seemingly impious, hedonistic implications. 13 In 1888, after the House of Commons had debated the ‘rapid spread of demoralizing literature in this country’, legal proceedings were initiated against Zola’s English publisher, Henry Vizetelly, and a second trial, in 1889, resulted in Vizetelly’s imprisonment. Press accounts characterized Vizetelly as a purveyor of ‘dirty fiction’, while ‘Zolaism’ was called a ‘disease’, a ‘literature of the sewer’, insults that would be recycled by hostile reviewers of two of the twentieth century’s most famous banned books, Lawrence’s The Rainbow (1915) and Joyce’s Ulysses (1922), both of which were explicitly compared with Zola. 14 Ibsen, too, incited strong reactions when his work appeared on the London stage. Championed as an implacable realist of the ‘everyday’ by George Bernard Shaw, Ibsen developed an interest in theories of heredity and sexuality that suggested strong parallels with Zola, and when his 1881 play Ghosts was performed in London in 1891, the torrent of critical abuse from scandalized reviewers closed it down after a single performance. 15

Initially, however, it took some time for either naturalism or impressionism to make a significant mark on the British literary scene, or to distinguish itself from realism. Denying impressionism’s relevance to literature, some writers and critics persisted in seeing Impressionism as an exclusively visual art. This was in spite of evidence—such as the influence of Baudelaire’s art criticism on French impressionist painters, or the influence of those same painters on James’s prose—that literary and visual impressionism often animated each other. Ezra Pound reiterated the case against literary impressionism in 1912: ‘Impressionism belongs in paint; it is of the eye.’ 16 Thus Pound articulated a widespread resistance to work exploring affinities between different artistic media that ran counter to the interactions between literature, visual art, and music that characterized not only impressionism but also many other features of aesthetic modernism, and indeed some of Pound’s own endeavours.

Meanwhile naturalism was often conflated with realism and with the ‘novel of experiment’ more generally. In ‘The Limits of Realism in Fiction’ (1890), an essay that essentially recapitulated Flaubert’s claim that realism had already gone as far as it could go, Edmund Gosse equated naturalism with ‘the most advanced realism’. 17 Thomas Hardy suggested that even if naturalism claimed to rest on modern scientific principles, as Zola had urged, it remained wedded to realism, ‘an artificiality distilled from the fruits of closest observation’. 18 In the courtroom of public opinion, dramatized in the parliamentary debate on ‘dirty fiction’, realism simply meant Zola. 19 The formal distinction most commonly drawn in British literary circles of the 1880s was not between realism and naturalism, or between naturalism and impressionism, but between realism and romance, as illustrated in Andrew Lang’s well-known article of 1886. 20 Hence James’s effort in ‘The Art of Fiction’ to defend modern fiction against what he saw as two kinds of fantasists: moralizers such as Walter Besant, against whom James pressed the case for freedom of expression, and romancers such as Lang and Robert Louis Stevenson, whose ‘clumsy’ separation of realism from romance James simply refused. 21

As well as defending modernist realism against moralizers and romancers, James’s essay makes an early argument for literary impressionism. Revising realism and quietly pushing naturalism aside, James defines the novel as ‘a personal, a direct impression of life’. Insisting that the novelist requires, above all, ‘a capacity for receiving straight impressions’ and adding that, ‘if experience consists of impressions, it may be said that impressions are experience’, James presses the case for a modern novel of consciousness.

Experience … is an immense sensibility, a kind of huge spiderweb of the finest silken threads suspended in the chamber of consciousness, and catching every airborne particle in its tissue. It is the very atmosphere of the mind; and when the mind is imaginative—much more when it happens to be that of a man of genius—it takes to itself the faintest hints of life, it converts the very pulses of the air into revelations. 22

From this argument follows the full range of literary techniques, not all of them employed by James himself, which writers and critics have described as impressionist: not only achronological narration, multiple narrators, limited point of view, and intense visualization, but centres of consciousness, conjectural narration, narrative ellipses, and delayed decoding. James reinforces the case for Impressionism by appropriating metaphors previously claimed by British realism and French naturalism. When he characterizes experience as a ‘huge spiderweb … suspended in the chamber of consciousness’, he is remaking the web—one of George Eliot’s favourite metaphors for social relations—in a new impressionist image that emphasizes how those relations are perceived. 23 In describing this ‘spiderweb’ as ‘the very atmosphere of the mind’, James establishes the impressionist’s right to the metaphor of atmosphere over that of naturalist theory, in which the notion of an all-enveloping environment moulding every aspect of human existence is axiomatic. Thus James asserts impressionism’s early independence from realism and endows it with an air of aesthetic sophistication and refinement—think of those ‘finest silken threads’—that naturalism, with its reputation for ‘sheer beastliness’, would never have. 24

Late-coming when read in light of Flaubert’s aspersions, James’s claims for an impressionist fiction reach back not only to French models in painting and literature but also to earlier British models, especially the impressionist art criticism of Pater and Ruskin. Paint the first impression that nature imprints on your eye, Ruskin had instructed the landscape painter, and you will ‘reproduce that impression on the mind of the spectator’, a translation of realism into impressionist terms that was clearly applicable to literary as well as to visual art. 25 ‘In aesthetic criticism’, Pater had written, ‘the first step towards seeing one’s object as it really is, is to know one’s own impression as it really is, to discriminate it, to realize it distinctly’. 26 As well as reaching back, however, James’s chapter points forwards to the critical and fictional practice of Conrad, Ford, and Woolf, who followed him in reinforcing the case for impressionism in part by downplaying naturalism. 27 When Conrad, for instance, wrote that he wanted to make the reader ‘ see ’, he deprecated naturalism together with realism and romanticism as no more than ‘temporary formulas’ of the author’s craft. 28 Woolf’s famous call for a new kind of novel that records the ‘myriad impressions’ etched by experience on the human mind defines itself against ‘materialist’ fiction—against writing that, in its preoccupation with the external incident and detail of everyday life, descends from naturalism. 29

As she advances the case for impressionism, Woolf increases the resistance to naturalism and other forms of so-called materialist fiction, by trespassing on the modern urban terrain that naturalism had claimed as its own. In the well-known sentences that urge the modern writer to ‘record the atoms as they fall upon the mind’, Woolf combines the language of impressionist aesthetics with a materialist theory of shock in a manner that may suggest not only traumatic wartime experience but also the everyday shocks and concussions of urban modernity.

The mind, exposed to the ordinary course of life, receives upon its surface a myriad impressions—trivial, fantastic, evanescent, or engraved with the sharpness of steel. From all sides they come, an incessant shower of innumerable atoms, composing in their sum what we might venture to call life itself … Let us record the atoms as they fall upon the mind in the order in which they fall, let us trace the pattern, however disconnected and incoherent in appearance, which each sight or incident scores upon the consciousness. 30

Just as Woolf’s impressions ‘engraved with the sharpness of steel’ imply the thrusts of the bayonet, the image of a modern observer bombarded by an ‘incessant shower of innumerable atoms’ may also remind readers of the recently concluded First World War. At the same time, this second image perhaps evokes a wider contemporary phenomenon encountered in ‘the ordinary course of life’: repeated exposure to the sensations of modernity. Woolf seems to dramatize this double shock effect in the famous motor-car episode in Mrs Dalloway (1925). Rightly celebrated for its representation of a psyche fractured by wartime experience—the explosive sound of the car backfiring sends Septimus Smith’s mind back to the trenches—this scene also models an everyday experience in what would soon be called the modern culture of distraction. 31

Every one looked at the motor car. Septimus looked. Boys on bicycles sprang off. Traffic accumulated. And there the motor car stood, with drawn blinds, and upon them a curious pattern like a tree, Septimus thought, and this gradual drawing together of everything to one centre before his eyes, as if some horror had come almost to the surface and was about to burst into flames, terrified him. 32

The complex syntax of the last sentence draws the reader through the process by which Septimus’s mind translates what it sees and hears into what, in his shell-shocked state, he remembers or imagines. The first four sentences—short, punchy, mono-clausal—capture the mind, or minds, in a state of distraction. Thus Woolf participates in a broader trend in impressionist writing, which often took up the urban subject matter associated with naturalism and employed such techniques as limited point of view and narrative ellipsis to convey the flickering variations of individual perception as it operated, not in James’s finely aestheticized ‘chamber of consciousness’, but in the modern metropolitan arena of everyday collisions, concussions, and shocks. 33

Impressionism itself sometimes shocked its early audiences, but eventually, as the examples of James and Woolf make plain, it established its place in British modernism. Naturalism, by contrast, was often cast as impressionism’s uncouth ugly twin, or its badly behaved cousin from overseas. For naturalism was what happened in literature when realism combined with the Gothic, which manifested itself in various forms of violence and monstrosity including alcoholism, sexual degeneracy, murder, and suicide. The metaphor of monstrosity—employed by Zola, as in his description of the Voreux coal mine in Germinal (1885), to represent the capitalist system—signifies naturalism’s chief debt to the Gothic. Indeed it may be the repressed Gothic element in realism that naturalism brings back to the surface. 34

But in the eyes of many British writers and critics naturalism itself was a sign of the monstrous—especially when it was foreign, as it often seemed to be. Originating in Zola and a small cohort of French disciples that included (briefly) Huysmans and (even more briefly) Maupassant, developed by German and Scandinavian dramatists, and inherited by American writers such as Norris and Dreiser, it appeared not to belong to a native British tradition. It was not just conservative reviewers or members of parliament who reviled naturalist fiction by foreign authors as ‘bad reading for the masses’ in Britain. 35 Writers themselves made the case against naturalism. James described the subject matter of Zola’s Nana (1880) as a ‘combination of the cesspool and the house of prostitution’. This material issued not from careful observation of reality but, James argued, from the distorted, distorting vision of the author himself. 36 In Jacob’s Room (1922), Woolf emphasizes Mrs Norman’s fear of her fellow train passenger Jacob Flanders by giving her a Frank Norris novel to read, one possible implication being that Jacob is no more civilized than the human beasts roaming the pages of naturalism. Foreign naturalism, that is, not British. Whether or not this was Woolf’s intended meaning, critical tradition has tacitly confirmed the verdict—there have been few significant studies of naturalism in British literature. 37

Even writers whose work showed strong naturalist tendencies, such as Arnold Bennett and George Moore, distanced themselves from naturalism. Bennett’s Clayhanger (1910), for example, places a characteristically naturalist emphasis on the shaping power of the industrial environment, built up in painstaking detail, and on the hidden instincts and forces that impel characters often against their will. In his criticism, moreover, Bennett employs naturalist criteria to describe the novelist’s selection of subject matter. ‘Any logically conceived survey of existence must begin with geographical and climatic phenomena’, he wrote in ‘The Author’s Craft’ (1913). ‘Geographical knowledge is the mother of discernment’. Further, ‘every street is a mirror, an illustration, an exposition, an explanation, of the human beings who live in it’. A community, Bennett argues à la Zola, is ‘the net result of the interplay of instincts and influences’. Yet Bennett did not count Zola as one of the novel’s great pioneers. Unlike Balzac, Joyce, and Wells, Zola ‘did nothing new’, Bennett wrote in a later essay. ‘He was merely a supercraftsman of unsurpassed industry and tenacity of purpose … who had hours of genius.’ 38

The Anglo-Irish Moore has sometimes been cited as one of the rare exceptions to the anti-naturalist rule, but even he produced just one big naturalist novel, A Mummer’s Wife , published by Vizetelly in 1885 and later acclaimed as a ‘masterpiece’ by Bennett, before publicly renouncing naturalism and promoting Impressionism instead. 39 In Moore, as in Woolf, naturalism would now serve as a negative example against which to measure and define an impressionist aesthetic. When Moore, in Confessions of a Young Man (1888), characterized the self as ‘like a smooth sheet of wax, bearing no impress, but capable of receiving any; of being moulded into all shapes’, he was fashioning an impressionist model of subjectivity—fresh, malleable, fluctuating—in direct opposition to what he saw as Zola’s scientific determinism. Moore’s break with Zola was neither permanent nor complete: his best-known novel, Esther Waters (1894), would combine the impressionist’s attention to narrative perspective and effects of immediacy with the naturalist’s interest in degeneration plots and the pressures of environment. Before the 1880s were out, however, Moore was denigrating Zola’s books as the ‘simple crude statements of a man of powerful mind, but singularly narrow vision’. 40

Rejected, disowned, naturalism dispersed. But it didn’t dissolve entirely. It went underground, discovering various means of survival and influencing a wide range of modern writers including the early Joyce, in Dubliners (1914), and Lawrence, in Sons and Lovers (1913) and the snowbound Alpine finale of Women in Love (1920), a thrilling exploration of the natural environment’s destructive power. Despite later disavowals, Moore too invites a naturalist reading of A Mummer’s Wife , by quoting the French historian Victor Duruy in the epigraph: ‘Change the surroundings in which man lives, and, in two or three generations, you will have changed his physical constitution, his habits of life, and a goodly number of his ideas.’ The narrative itself debates this thesis, summoning tales of romantic disappointment to suggest that ‘we change the surroundings, but a heart bleeds under all social variations’. Yet, with its frequent emphasis on the surrounding grimness, where all that changes in the ‘sea of brick’ is the name of the town, Moore’s text insists on the visible supremacy of the industrial environment, tangible evidence of humankind’s ‘triumph over vanquished nature’ and, more profoundly, of economic capitalism’s triumph over pre-industrial notions of humanity. A Mummer’s Wife begins in the sickroom of the heroine Kate Ede’s husband and ends—after episodes of adultery, marital desertion, domestic violence, and alcoholism—with her own descent towards death, as her surroundings reduce her to the mixed metaphorical state of beast and machine: ‘she gradually became like a worn-out machine, from which all rivets and screws had fallen, and miserable as a homeless dog, she rolled from one lodging to another;—after a few days driven forth from the lowest for dirt and dissoluteness.’ 41

Moore’s novel was unusual among British or Irish works in declaring its allegiance to naturalism so openly, but naturalism’s major ideas and metaphors—including its Gothic incidents and images of violence—featured in the work of authors who elsewhere registered explicit objections. Hardy, for example, contended that naturalism, with its emphasis on scientific documentation of external phenomena, failed to take account of ‘what may be apprehended only by the mental tactility that comes from a sympathetic appreciativeness of life in all of its manifestations’. 42 Hardy expressed interest less in naturalism than in the literary possibilities suggested by impressionist painting, explaining in the Preface to Jude the Obscure (1895) that his novel was ‘simply an endeavour to give shape and coherence to a series of seemings, or personal impressions, the question of their consistency or their discordance, of their permanence or their transitoriness, being regarded as not of the first moment’. 43 Yet in the novel itself Hardy, who acknowledged that Zola’s own fiction was written by ‘instinct’, 44 sometimes moves closer to naturalist theory than such disclaimers allow for. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the episode when Jude discovers that his eldest son has slaughtered himself and his younger siblings. Abandoning his earlier scepticism of modern theories of heredity, Jude now expresses tragic recognition of ‘Nature’s law’ of ‘mutual butchery’. ‘It was in his nature to do it’, he tells Sue. 45 Thus naturalism has its say in Hardy’s last novel.

James, too, went back on his disavowal of naturalism, and Conrad emulated him. As we have seen, James had complained bitterly about the ‘foulness’ of Zola’s Nana . While working on The Princess Casamassima (1886), however, James declared himself ‘quite the Naturalist’. 46 As well as consulting his own impressions of London, gleaned, he said, from ‘walking the streets’, James followed in Zola’s documentary footsteps by visiting Millbank prison, in which the French mother of the hero, the diminutive bookbinder and terrorist conspirator Hyacinth Robinson, is incarcerated for killing his aristocratic English father. With its mixture of hereditary degeneracy and crime, this backstory itself clearly nods to Zola, if also to Dickens. Further, James echoes Zola’s celebrated metaphor of a monstrous capitalist system by describing Britain’s capital city as an ‘immeasurable breathing monster’. 47 This metaphor—Zola’s original together with James’s rewriting—was then re-echoed by Conrad in his own tale of terrorism, suicide, and sacrifice, The Secret Agent (1907), whose figure of the Professor, an anarchistic explosives expert, is a major fictional descendant of Zola’s Souvarine, the destroyer of the Voreux. Having deprecated naturalism, as James had done, Conrad now depicts London as a monster slumbering at the bottom of an abyss like Zola’s coal mine, devouring the city’s inhabitants. 48

Neither of these two last works presents an undiluted case of literary naturalism. James’s naturalist visions in The Princess Casamassima are contained by a larger narrative structure that seems more closely aligned with Impressionism than with naturalism. For the most part, James limits the narrative to Hyacinth’s point of view. The reader’s perspective is mediated by the impressions of Hyacinth’s sensitive consciousness: what the protagonist does not know the reader cannot know either. Similarly, Conrad’s urban subject matter in The Secret Agent is filtered through a range of impressionist narrative techniques—achronological and elliptical narration, visualization, and delayed decoding—that allow him to capitalize on the new fictional possibilities presented by a new cultural phenomenon: the shocks and aftershocks of terrorist bombings in the age of global media and mediatization. In both James’s Princess and Conrad’s Secret Agent , naturalism and Impressionism combine forces, or, rather, a naturalist metaphor of a monstrous capitalist society is presented by means of impressionist narrative strategies that control the reader’s perspective and response. In Hardy’s Jude , too, the novel’s naturalist content is delivered by an anonymous narrator who describes himself as the ‘chronicler of these lives’, on whose ‘seemings’ or ‘personal impressions’ the reader remains utterly dependent for information. 49

Insofar as naturalist visions of society in James, Conrad, and Hardy are contained within the ironic, relativizing narrative structures of impressionism, naturalism seems to be relegated to a subordinate role in an emergent Anglo-American modernism. But naturalism infiltrated the metaphorical systems of impressionist texts and invaded their plots. Formally speaking, Galsworthy’s The Forsyte Saga (1906–22) affiliates itself more closely with impressionism than with naturalism, as the limited third-person narrative is rotated among several different characters, relativizing narrative authority by suggesting how knowledge depends on each individual’s perspective. But the saga’s plot is in many ways driven by a naturalistic struggle for survival and dominance among the various members of the Forsyte family. Galsworthy indicates as much by writing of how the ageing patriarch Old Jolyon feels ‘that secret hostility natural between brothers, the roots of which—little nursery rivalries—sometimes toughen and deepen as life goes on, and, all hidden, support a plant capable of producing in season the bitterest fruits’. As this example shows, Galsworthy employs metaphor to link the rivalry plot to natural processes that issue in both fruitfulness and decay, evolution and degeneration. Sometimes it seems that the upward thrust of social ambition, embodied by the Forsyte dynasty-in-the-making, may be thwarted by the counter-thrust of naturalistic downward mobility, the fate that greets the majority of London’s middle class, seen here emerging from their cabs into the fog: ‘cabs loomed dim-shaped ever and again, and discharged citizens bolting like rabbits to their burrows … In the great warren, each rabbit for himself.’ Galsworthy reinforces his naturalist survival plot at crucial moments by using the metaphor of the beast in humanity to picture characters in states of extreme emotion. When the estranged Irene returns to the house of her first husband, Soames Forsyte, she is ‘like an animal wounded to death’ as she re-enters the ‘cage she had pined to be free of’; when Young Jolyon—Irene’s future husband and Soames’s cousin—appears at their house, Soames slams the door in his face with ‘a sound like a snarl’. 50

Naturalism invades the plots even of Impressionism’s central achievements. Ford Madox Ford’s The Good Soldier , first published in 1915, is widely regarded as a masterpiece of literary Impressionism, and the correspondences between the often self-referential narrative practices of the narrator, John Dowell, and the theoretical statements of his creator are impossible to deny. But those correspondences are sometimes taken to imply a sympathetic bond between author and narrator that hardly stands up to scrutiny. The two have obvious differences: Dowell is an American, a Quaker, and well-to-do; Ford was none of those things. But consider also what Dowell achieves under cover of relating the ‘saddest story’ he says he has ever heard: he rids himself of a wife he cannot bear, he inherits her money and then, after his friend Edward Ashburnham has cut his own throat, he gets the girl Edward could not have and acquires the Ashburnham family estate. 51

Typically read as a moving tale of tortured desire narrated by a figure reflecting the author’s own bewilderment in the face of personal and wider historical experience, The Good Soldier has at its core a naturalist tale of ruthless struggle for sex and money, a tale in which one character’s upward mobility (Dowell gets richer and richer) occurs at the expense of another’s downward slide (Edward gets poorer and poorer). One might argue that what really counts here is Dowell’s Impressionism, the narrative techniques he employs—with his creator’s backing—to convey his shock and confusion at the maelstrom of events that have torn apart what he had thought was a perfect, orderly social world. That is how The Good Soldier is usually approached: sympathetically, unsceptically, unironically. Dowell’s notorious unreliability in matters of chronology is typically seen as epistemological, not moral, his confusion as inadvertent, not intentional. Yet there is nothing in Ford’s text to reassure us of Dowell’s sincerity. Nor is there any evidence, other than Dowell’s own word, that his unreliability and confusion must be treated as symptoms of trauma, rather than as signs of a narratorial ruse, of a ploy to win the reader’s sympathy and trust as he has (he says) won Edward’s. The Good Soldier may well be an impressionist tale of bewildered subjectivity, of a disorientated self suffering from symptoms of Impressionism while attempting to confront the disorder of the modern world. But it may also be read as a naturalist tale in impressionist camouflage. It may be read, in other words, as the story of what happens when a monster fakes impressionism and gets away with it: when he uses impressionist techniques as a rhetorical strategy in a struggle (with other characters) for sex and money or (with other characters and also the reader) for narrative authority.

Jean Rhys thought that Ford himself was faking it, and in her first novel, published as Postures in 1928 but later called Quartet , she took her revenge. Like Ford, with whom she had an affair, Rhys has been read as an impressionist, and her simple, lucid sentences certainly appear well suited to render the ‘impression of the moment’, as Ford had called for, and to illuminate the operations of a human consciousness tormented by what Rhys herself termed ‘obsessions of love and hatred’. 52 But these same sentences also gesture outwards to suggest that what looks like inwardness may be a pose, a deliberate posture. Rhys redeploys The Good Soldier ’s language of bewilderment and tortured desire as a style of self-presentation to show how in all their words and actions Heidler and his wife Lois—modelled on Ford and his companion Stella Bowen—are acting out a social and sexual strategy designed to control the autobiographical heroine, Marya Zelli. Thus, as he prepares to meet with Marya and her husband, Stephan, who has just completed a prison sentence for theft, Heidler ‘carefully arranged his face to look perfectly expressionless’, echoing the blank demeanour worn by Edward Ashburnam, but with this difference: expressionlessness comes naturally to Edward, Dowell implies, because he is a dumb blond, whereas in Heidler’s case it has to be manufactured. Rhys frequently mimics Ford’s language—Marya’s relatives are described as ‘quite good people’ while the Heidlers are said to speak in a ‘tone of puzzled bewilderment’—in order to satirize not only Ford’s style but his intentions, intimating that his sentimentalism is the pose of a self-indulgent manipulator. ‘ “I love you; I can’t help it” ’, Heidler tells Marya. ‘ “It’s not your fault; it’s not my fault. I love you; I’m burnt up with it. It’s a fact. There it is, nobody’s fault. Why can’t you just accept it instead of straining against it all the time? You make things so difficult for me and for yourself.” ’ 53 In reassigning the language of bewilderment and sentimentality used by Ford’s narrator, Dowell, to Heidler, the character she based on Ford, Rhys suggests that those same qualities may amount to nothing less than a rhetoric of personality, of posture and imposture, which establishes Impressionism not merely as the innocent verbal record of intense emotional and psychological states but rather as a set of literary strategies that may be exploited for social as well as aesthetic purposes. Rhys collapses Dowell into Ford with a vengeance, indicting the author while providing indirect evidence for seeing his narrator, too, as a monster of manipulation.

Like The Good Soldier, Postures is built around a naturalist plot; unlike Ford’s novel, Rhys’s text is overt in exposing the naturalist foundations of its formally impressionist superstructure. Like all of Rhys’s novels—most famously Wide Sargasso Sea (1966)— Postures tells a tale of downward mobility, or degeneration. Marya may come from ‘quite good people’, like Ford’s well-to-do Edwardians, but she runs aground on the shoals of sex, alcohol, and poverty, and at the end of the novel is assaulted and left for dead by the duplicitous Stephan. 54 Rhys’s arrangement of her characters mirrors the ‘little four-square coterie’ described in The Good Soldier , an explicit resemblance that may have motivated her decision in 1929 to retitle her novel Quartet . Evoking the formal order of musical composition, the new title also suggests formal restriction: not so much the solid construction of Dowell’s ‘four-square house’ as the oppressive walls of a prison. ‘It wasn’t a minuet that we stepped’, Dowell exclaims, ‘it was a prison – a prison full of screaming hysterics’. 55 The prison—one of naturalism’s central metaphors for the grinding mechanisms of an oppressive capitalist society—reappears in Rhys’s text not only as Stephan’s place of incarceration but also as a figure for wider forms of social oppression. Indeed Rhys combines the prison with the Gothic metaphor of the monster: when Marya goes to visit Stephan at Fresnes, ‘a dark, dank corridor like the open mouth of a monster swallowed her up’. Rhys’s monstrous devouring prison turns its inmates into animals; the prisoner’s cell is a ‘cage’. The prison is, however, a metaphor for a larger social condition, from which there may be no escape. ‘“If anybody tried to catch me and lock me up I’d fight like a wild animal; I’d fight till they let me out or till I died,”’ Marya tells Stephan. ‘“Oh, no, you wouldn’t, not for long, believe me,”’ Stephan replies. ‘“You’d do as the others do – you’d wait and be a wild animal when you came out … When you come out – but you don’t come out. Nobody ever comes out.”’ Not content to let things rest so simply, Rhys indicates elsewhere that Marya’s sense of entrapment may be the result of her entanglement with the Heidlers, or even of her own temperament. It is by sustaining both of these possibilities at once—this may be an impressionist tale of bewildered subjectivity, or it may be a naturalist tale of the individual ensnared by larger social forces like ‘an animal caught in a trap’—that Rhys’s first novel achieves its peculiar distinction. 56

In Rhys’s text, impressionism—especially Fordian impressionism—takes an ironic turn, as it becomes inseparable from the literary naturalism against which it had previously defined itself. Or rather, it took one of many ironic turns. In his later novels, Ford’s impressionism turns back on itself and subverts its own premises, as impressions become mere impressions of impressions in a gesture that mimics the inflationary logic of the financial markets during the Great Depression: a surreptitiously realist gesture, in other words. In Woolf, too, impressionism proves unstable or double. It shifts in To the Lighthouse (1927) and The Waves (1931) towards the formal abstraction that is sometimes associated with ‘post-impressionism’, and yet returns in The Years (1937) to realism only to renew and reinforce it. 57 David Bradshaw’s annotations to Mrs Dalloway make it very clear that this text, celebrated for its formal and stylistic experimentalism, remains thick with social and historical reference. If the novel exemplifies stream-of-consciousness writing, as is often claimed, the stream has banks and those banks are lined by actual buildings and historic monuments. 58 Woolf’s London is, in this respect, a realist’s London. Moreover, in merging literary impressionist technique with a materialist theory of shock, as we noted earlier, Mrs Dalloway illustrates on another level how experimental modernism remains implicated in realism: shock is shown to be a fact of modern life.

Indeed modernism’s continued intimacy with realism is one of the crucial lessons, formally and aesthetically speaking, of the most famously experimental text of all: Joyce’s Ulysses (1922). Setting out in the free-indirect mode of his ‘initial style’, 59 Joyce changed course in the middle of the book, shifting the balance from realism to mythic symbolism to such a degree that Ezra Pound—who had championed the early episodes as the apotheosis of Flaubertian realism—felt that something had gone wrong. ‘Where in hell is Stephen Telemachus?’ Pound asked. 60 Pound wanted Joyce’s realism back. And that is what happened in the final episode. The classic case of modernist stream of consciousness and so, in a sense, of literary impressionism, Joyce’s ‘Penelope’ episode represents a return to ‘mimesis of mind’, as modernism’s supreme literary achievement, later hailed by Jean-François Lyotard as the first great postmodernist text, also reveals itself to be the last great Victorian realist novel. 61 Late Victorian into modern? Here, at least, modern shades into late Victorian.

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Abstract: In scientific research and its application, scientific literature analysis is crucial as it allows researchers to build on the work of others. However, the fast growth of scientific knowledge has led to a massive increase in scholarly articles, making in-depth literature analysis increasingly challenging and time-consuming. The emergence of Large Language Models (LLMs) has offered a new way to address this challenge. Known for their strong abilities in summarizing texts, LLMs are seen as a potential tool to improve the analysis of scientific literature. However, existing LLMs have their own limits. Scientific literature often includes a wide range of multimodal elements, such as molecular structure, tables, and charts, which are hard for text-focused LLMs to understand and analyze. This issue points to the urgent need for new solutions that can fully understand and analyze multimodal content in scientific literature. To answer this demand, we present Uni-SMART (Universal Science Multimodal Analysis and Research Transformer), an innovative model designed for in-depth understanding of multimodal scientific literature. Through rigorous quantitative evaluation across several domains, Uni-SMART demonstrates superior performance over leading text-focused LLMs. Furthermore, our exploration extends to practical applications, including patent infringement detection and nuanced analysis of charts. These applications not only highlight Uni-SMART's adaptability but also its potential to revolutionize how we interact with scientific literature.

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(PDF) REALISM IN LITERATURE
Abstract. Realism in literature is a pivotal literary movement that emerged in the mid-19th century and has since left an indelible mark on contemporary writing. This paper explores the concept of ...
PDF MAGICAL REALISM AND LITERATURE
literature, as well as creative writing, at the University of Miami. Arva s research focuses on magical realism in literature and lm, trauma theory, Holocaust studies, intermediality and representation theory. He has published essays on magical realism (Journal of Narrative Theory,), Caribbean literature and narrative theory, Holocaust ...
Naturalism and Realism
Carbondale, Ill., 1982. A continuation of Pizer's work on nineteenth-century naturalism, with emphasis on the neglected naturalists of the 1930s and 1940s (including Dos Passos, Farrell, and Styron). Pizer, Donald. Realism and Naturalism in Nineteenth-Century American Literature. Rev. ed. Carbondale, Ill., 1984.
Introduction
Abstract. The Oxford Handbook of American Literary Realism offers thirty-five original chapters with fresh interpretations of the artistic and political challenges of representing life accurately. Organized by topic and theme, the chapters draw on recent scholarship in literary and cultural studies to offer an authoritative and in-depth reassessment of major and minor figures and the contexts ...
[PDF] A Theory of Literary Realism
The European Medieval romance was far from realistic. However, the modern literary realism both in England and America has been multi-faceted. An English face of it is often the manifestation of man in search of salvation via the application of his mental capacity in a chaotic world of tension and progress. In his remote island, the hero of Daniel Defoe is concerned mainly with the development ...
Realisms
Summary. Realism is a historical phenomenon that is not of the past. Its recurrent rises and falls only attest to its persistence as a measure of representational authority. Even as literary history has produced different moments of "realism wars," over the politics of realist versus antirealist aesthetics, the demand to represent an often ...
The Oxford Handbook of American Literary Realism
Abstract. The Oxford Handbook of American Literary Realism offers thirty-five original chapters with fresh interpretations of the artistic and political challenges of representing life accurately. Organized by topic and theme, the chapters draw on recent scholarship in literary and cultural studies to offer an authoritative and in-depth ...
Twenty-First-Century Realism
Summary. Realism has a bad reputation in contemporary times. Generally thought to be an outdated mode that had its heyday in Victorian fiction, the French bourgeois novel, and pre-revolutionary Russian literature, literary histories tend to locate realism's timely end in the ferment of interwar modernism and the rise of the avant-garde.
Realism
The notion of realism, in its development as a term of literary criticism, is in origin a genre concept. "Realistic" writing is, in that sense, essentially writing that deals with "low" rather than "high" topics, with the doings of ordinary people leading everyday lives, rather than with the acts of gods, princes, or nobles; and deals with them in a "low" style, a style close ...
Magical realism and literature
Magical realism and literature edited by Christopher Warnes and Kim Anderson Sasser, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2020, 406 pp., £89.99 (hbk), ISBN 978-1-108-42630-5 Gabriel Chin University of Sussex, Falmer, UK Correspondence [email protected]
PDF A Theory of Literary Realism
English Department, Razi University, Kermanshah, Iran. Abstract—The European Medieval romance was far from realistic. However, the modern literary realism both in England and America has been multi-faceted. An English face of it is often the manifestation of man in search of salvation via the application of his mental capacity in a chaotic ...
An Analysis of the Literary Realism Movement and Its Impact
The Literary Realism movement was a movement established globally with heavy influence in the United States dur-ing the Civil War and Reconstruction eras. The Realism movement defies the Romanticism movement, with people ... This research essay examines and analyzes the Literary Real-ism movement and its impact on the United States. This essay ...
An Analysis of the Literary Realism Movement and Its Impacts
The Literary Realism movement was a movement established globally with heavy influence in the United States during the Civil War and Reconstruction eras. The Realism movement defies the Romanticism movement, with people favoring truth over falsity and reality over imagination. This research essay examines and analyzes the Literary Realism movement and its impact on the United States.
Magical realism is the language of the emergent Post-Truth world
Literature has a very important role to play in the modern world of what Rushdie calls 'impolite democracy' and, we would argue, magical realism even more so. We have noted above, for example, that magical realism—particularly in the work of García Márquez and Murakami—comes perilously close in its own praxis to 'alternative truth ...
Literary Realism and Naturalism Research Papers
In contrast to previous research, the focus thereby lies not on literature of the Fin de Siècle but on the German Naturalism: As the study shows by detailed analysis, the era of Naturalism can be regarded as an initial phase where the perceived crisis of traditional 'complementary' gender roles is being addressed in literary as well as in ...
Romanticism, Realism, and Modernism in Literature Research Paper
Romanticism focused on abstract ideas, and Realism aimed to depict real-life scenarios, while modernists revolted against the previous writing styles. The impact of these ideas can be seen in modern literature and works such as "After the Ball," which showcases a scenario of the Regency England servant's life. This paper will analyze the ...
magical realism Latest Research Papers
In this chapter, I will introduce artful writing as inquiry in science education and explain the elements of magical realism that may contribute to works that reverberate with the-more-than-human world of the Anthropocene (Faris, W. (2004). Ordinary enchantments. Vanderbilt University Press.; Manning, E. (2016).
Naturalism, Realism, and Impressionism
Abstract. Beginning with the legacy of nineteenth-century realism, this essay traces the emergence of specifically literary notions of naturalism and Impressionism in British and Irish writing of the long fin de siècle.While noting theoretical differences between naturalism and Impressionism, special attention is paid to how often they overlap in the literary practice of such authors as Henry ...
(PDF) Walt Whitman: A Lynchpin between the ...
The Cambridge Introduction to American Literary Realism. Jan 2005; ... Abstract In this paper a review of the academic research done on democracy and po-pulism in Latin America is undertaken. As a ...
Social Realism Literature
Social Realism Literature. Social realism literature is a literary movement that emerged in the 19th century, focusing on the realistic portrayal of the lives of ordinary people, particularly those from lower socioeconomic classes. It often addresses social and political issues, aiming to expose the harsh realities of society.
Persona(s) in Literature and Film
This research guide has been designed for students in To Thine Own Self Be True?, a Spring 2024 Expo course taught by Tracy Strauss.. The resources and strategies described on this page are specifically targeted: they represent our first best guesses at where you might find the information you'll need to execute Essay 3 successfully.. Remember that good research is often about following up on ...
Uni-SMART: Universal Science Multimodal Analysis and Research Transformer
In scientific research and its application, scientific literature analysis is crucial as it allows researchers to build on the work of others. However, the fast growth of scientific knowledge has led to a massive increase in scholarly articles, making in-depth literature analysis increasingly challenging and time-consuming. The emergence of Large Language Models (LLMs) has offered a new way to ...