Overview
Notes
- Between 1865 and 1914, the United States transformed from a country just emerging from a destructive civil war to an imperial nation with overseas possessions and coasts on both the Atlantic and Pacific. »full text
- Though these years brought wealth to some and stature to America in the eyes of the world, the undesirable consequences of rapid territorial, population, and industrial expansion were felt most by those least able to resist the greedy, unscrupulous, and powerful. »full text
- The literature of this period appears in the context of the dramatic diversification of American experience, both ethnic and regional, and the small but insistent movement among authors to combat the social inequities arising from too-rapid growth. »full text
- To face the challenge of representing these dynamic cultural changes, American authors turned to the international aesthetic of realism, which was an attempt to accurately represent life as authors saw it through concrete descriptive details that readers would recognize from their own lives. »full text
- A distinct aesthetic response to the late nineteenth century, American naturalism continued the realist attempt to represent new and unfamiliar types of characters, but naturalists concentrated on lower-class, marginalized people and merged the realist attention to detail with a strong belief in social determinism rather than free will. »full text
- Another crucial development of realism was regional, or “local color,” writing, an attempt to capture distinct language, perspectives, and geographical settings before industrialization and cultural homogenization erased them. »full text
Full Text
Between 1865 and 1914 the United States transformed from a country just emerging from a destructive civil war to an imperial nation with overseas possessions and coasts on both the Atlantic and Pacific. Completed in 1869, the transcontinental railroad opened up the interior to settlement by homesteaders and prospectors, who arrived to exploit cheap land and discoveries of gold and other useful ores. Such innovations as the development of telegraph, telephone, and electricity networks helped develop these new Western settlements along with the East and allowed a burst of economic prosperity and industrialization. Enticed by promises of ready work made by businesses trying to keep wages down through an oversupply of labor, a massive influx of immigrants arrived, mostly from Europe and East Asia, and swelled the ranks of New York, Boston, Chicago, and San Francisco. By 1893, so many Americans had moved westward that the historian Frederick Jackson Turner declared the frontier closed. Americans subsequently turned their attentions overseas, toward new territories in Samoa and Hawaii and former Spanish possessions in Cuba, the Philippines, and Puerto Rico, in an attempt to join the European empires on the world stage.
Though these years brought wealth to some and stature to America in the eyes of the world, the undesirable consequences of rapid territorial, population, and industrial expansion were felt most by those with the least resources to resist the greedy, unscrupulous, and powerful. The Native American populations of the Great Plains, whose cultures depended on the free-roaming buffalo herds, faced the shock of interference in their hunting grounds by crisscrossing telegraph lines and railroad tracks. The federal government developed small reservations to replace hunting traditions with farming, always with the expectation that Native customs and distinctiveness would eventually vanish. Much of the land stolen from Natives was acquired cheaply by railroad companies and land prospectors, even though the Homestead Act of 1862 had intended the land to be improved by small farmers and immigrant families. Those homesteaders who did settle the plains were squeezed by the pricing policies of railroad monopolies that attempted to corner the transportation market and eliminate all competition. In the railroad industry, as with steel, oil, meat packing, and banking and finance, corporate power was focused in the hands of a few powerful men such as Gould, Stanford, Vanderbilt, Carnegie, Morgan, Hill, and Rockefeller. The plight of workers in the major cities was dire, not just because of the monopolists’ control over inhumane and often dangerous working conditions, but because of corrupt government officials who allowed them to act without hindrance. Early efforts to organize labor against the monopolists were often violent and had to fight against social prejudices favoring unfettered capitalism and a hands-off approach to business. In the same way, small farmers often failed to organize because of an abiding desire for independence that trumped the benefits of collective action.
The literature of this period appears in the context of the dramatic diversification of American experience, both ethnic and regional, and the small but insistent movement among authors to combat the social inequities arising from too-rapid growth. Immigration from Europe and Asia resulted in a newly heterogeneous American population, now no longer mainly of New England descent, and now more diverse in terms of class and ethnic backgrounds. As populations in large urban centers and all geographic areas of the country increased, newspapers and magazines focusing on specific ethnic and regional readerships flourished. Among many others, the Jewish Daily Forward, founded by Abraham Cahan, catered to a Yiddish-speaking New York reader, and the Overland Express was the first periodical to feature Western-themed fiction and journalism. With new publishing opportunities available to depict previously underrepresented and “marginalized” peoples, many fictional characters, often created by authors from the same cultural and economic backgrounds, began to challenge received notions about the American character. But this new diversity often resulted in suspicion, antagonism, and cultural paranoia, triggering a cultural unease that pitted urban against rural, labor against management, and immigrant against native. In response, a generation of writers spoke out against social, economic, and political injustices in newspapers and magazines. Among these were journalists known as “muckrakers” for their devotion to exposing the dangers of the city and the evils of monopolies. Some notable muckrakers included Hamlin Garland and Frank Norris, who took on the railroad monopoly on behalf of small farmers, and Lincoln Steffens, who exposed the corruption of government officials like Boss Tweed of New York. Other writers took advantage of the new periodical media to write the “literature of argument,” which brought the spirit of reform to sociology, philosophy, and economics: some examples include Helen Hunt Jackson’s A Century of Dishonor (1881), which attacked U.S. injustices against Native Americans, Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Women and Economics (1898), which explored wealth and women’s rights, and Thorstein Veblen’s Theory of the Leisure Class (1899), which examined the “conspicuous consumption” of the super-wealthy business magnates. Booker T. Washington’s Up from Slavery (1900) and W. E. B. Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk (1903) are two examples of nonfiction prose that responded to racial injustices by challenging white audiences to work toward political solutions.
To face the challenge of representing these dynamic cultural changes, American authors turned to the international aesthetic of realism, whose European practitioners include Leo Tolstoy, Henrik Ibsen, and Gustave Flaubert. American realism was an attempt to accurately represent life as authors saw it through the use of concrete descriptive details that readers would recognize from their own lives. William Dean Howells advanced a type of realism that concentrated on affectionate portrayals of ordinary, middle-class characters in an attempt to make the novel more democratic and inclusive. Henry James and Edith Wharton, meanwhile, focused on refined mental states, rather than exterior surfaces and surroundings. Their “psychological realism” attempted to find a precise language for intangible moral situations. The realism of Mark Twain was devoted to rendering the vernacular dialects and colloquialisms of his ordinary characters, often using humor to help readers sympathize with roguish heroes like Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn.
A distinct aesthetic response to the late nineteenth century, American naturalism continued the realist attempt to represent new and unfamiliar types of characters, but naturalists concentrated on lower-class and marginalized people and merged the realist attention to detail with a strong belief in social determinism rather than free will. Building on the theory of natural selection proposed by Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species (1859), naturalists like Frank Norris, Stephen Crane, Theodore Dreiser, and Jack London tried to represent life scientifically rather than providentially. Characters in naturalist novels exist in worlds where the environment determines character, events happen randomly, the strong prey on the weak, and protagonists often have neither the intelligence nor the resources to overcome adversity. But despite these bleak and unforgiving features, naturalist novels present their characters as case studies to suggest social solutions: Crane’s “The Open Boat,” for example, emphasizes the individual frailties of its protagonists in order to commend how they eventually band together and survive.
Another crucial development of realism was regional, or “local color,” writing, an attempt to capture distinct language, perspectives, and geographical settings before industrialization and cultural homogenization erased them. Some regionalist writing relied on nostalgia to generate interest in authentic but vanishing characters. In the West, writers like Bret Harte, Twain, and Owen Wister romanticized the lone cowboy and frontiersman, while Native American writers like Sarah Winnemucca offered a Native alternative. But other writers found regional specificity to be a vehicle for social change. Hamlin Garland used local descriptions of the Midwest to combat nostalgic stereotypes and depict the real plight of farmers. Women writers found regional writing an important opportunity to record their perspectives. The fiction of Sarah Orne Jewett, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Mary Austin challenges readers to attune themselves to women’s thoughts and rethink society’s privileging of men. Kate Chopin’s The Awakening is a regional work that demands respect for a feminine perspective while also critiquing the patriarchal constraints of Catholic Louisiana.