Topic Clusters

American Literature 1865–1914
Big Cities, Big Money, Big Ideas

Many labels circulate for the era between the Civil War and World War I—the Gilded Age, La Belle Epoque, the Age of Realism, the Age of Energy, the Age of Darwin, the Age of Colonialism and Empire. To imagine what America was like during this dynamic period, we need them all: this was a time of unprecedented wealth for thousands of Americans, and urban poverty for millions of new immigrants; there was political upheaval in the streets, technological revolution everywhere, and exuberant experimentation in the arts. The era was filled with artistic fashions and insurrections—the fin de siècle, Aestheticism, Symbolism, Decadence, Realism, Impressionism, Naturalism, Imagism, Veritism, Late Romanticism. This was the heyday of “isms,” of struggles for new art, and new ways of interpreting human experience. Many of these movements endured only fleetingly, and their manifestos failed. However, others made a lasting impact on the culture of the Western world.

To fully understand the times, readers should bear in mind the fact that the era consisted of an unprecedented belief in systems. An enthusiasm for big-scale planning and developing elaborate schemes to solve social and moral problems and create wealth spread into many fields of human endeavor. Boston, Pittsburgh, New York, Chicago, Cleveland, Baltimore, St. Louis, and San Francisco exploded in size because of industrial innovation, and civil leaders, in the words of Chicago’s Daniel Burnham, made “no small plans.” Mobile steam-powered equipment could now level hills and turn vast wetlands into tracts of buildable real estate. New, city-sized neighborhoods, uniform and orderly in layout (though not always sanitary or well-built), could be constructed in months. Similar technology brought in millions of people from the countryside and overseas to live in these new towns and work in milling, mining, and mass production.

The literary arts felt the impact. American realism (as promulgated by William Dean Howells and other social-minded critics) was intentionally aimed at this new tide of middle-class readers, eager to read about life as they knew it: life in contemporary cities and small towns, and the aspirations and struggles of people like themselves in an era of mobility and social dislocation. The realist had a moral and social role: to hold a mirror up to ordinary life, and help an emerging society understand itself and achieve its own voice. The major American realists, however, were fiercely independent, and rarely let ground rules of the mode stand in the way of their own imaginations. Mark Twain wrote romances about Medieval England; Edith Wharton, Henry James, and even Howells himself published ghost stories as well as novels about manners, marriage, domestic crises, and social classes. The African-American realist Charles Chesnutt and the Asian-American realist Sui Sin Far published fiction about social life in a “real” America, which James and Wharton rarely encountered and only vaguely understood.

In literary naturalism, as practiced by Crane, Chopin, London, and Dreiser, the human condition is imagined in post-Darwinist terms. In Crane’s “The Open Boat” and “The Blue Hotel” and London’s “To Build a Fire,” the narrative centers on characters who prove incapable of understanding themselves or their own predicament until it is too late—and sometimes not even then. The archetypal man or woman in American naturalistic fiction is, by the prescription of the mode, a small organism overwhelmed by social, biological, and environmental forces, with no real chance for dominion over his or her own life or destiny.

Marxism, Utopian and Fabian Socialism, Social Darwinism—these terms of the era suggest that an urge to systematize and make permanent drove political and philosophical thought. At the same time, there were reactions against this intellectual fashion: by the end of the nineteenth century, anarchist and nihilist movements rose in power. Although such anti-systems were ridden with paradox and contradiction, they reveal the fact that many did not accept the values that moved the economy, technology, and intellectual life.

General issues and questions

1. Is Edith Wharton’s “Souls Belated” a work of realism? Sentimentalism? What about Charles W. Chesnutt’s “The Wife of His Youth” and Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wall-paper?” Does determinism, as described in NAAL, play a significant role in these works? Where and how do these authors borrow from the tradition of melodrama or gothic romance? How would you classify these works?
   
2. American artists active at the end of the nineteenth century include Mary Cassatt, Thomas Eakins, Winslow Homer, John Singer Sargent, Childe Hassam, and Henry Ossawa Tanner. In a collection of American art at a local museum or on the Web, look at paintings by some of these artists, and compare for yourself the style and spirit of these works to paintings you have looked at from earlier American periods. Remembering differences between literary realism and literary Romanticism, do you see similar contrasts between the landscapes of Winslow Homer and Henry Ossawa Tanner, and those of Albert Bierstadt and Frederic Church? With regard to Eakins, Cassatt, and Sargent, consider the kinds of people and settings that these late-century artists favor, and describe the way that each artist handles light. In style, mood, and subject, do these painters remind you of specific writers from the same period? If so, why?
   
3. If stylistic connections between painting and literature interest you, look carefully at paintings of women from this historical period. Focus on two artists, such as Mary Cassatt and John Singer Sargent, artists who focused, with mixed and complex emotions, on women of the aristocracy and the new urban bourgeoisie. How would you compare the themes and tones of these paintings to works about women by James, Wharton, and Freeman?
   
4. Sigmund Freud began to publish in earnest around 1900, as did William James. Psychology as a modern science had entered a growth stage. Darwin became a central figure in American biological and social science, and pseudo-sciences like eugenics, promulgated by Caesare Lombroso and Max Nordau, flourished as well. How do the narratives of James, Gilman, Chopin, London, Crane, Du Bois, and Dreiser incorporate such doctrines? To what extent do the characters in their works gain an understanding of their situations, and their dominion over their own fates? What causes their successes or failures? If you sense social Darwinism or determinism operating as a doctrine in some of these works, are these doctrines adapted selectively? Embraced wholeheartedly?
   
5. Booker T. Washington, W. E. B. Du Bois, and Charles W. Chesnutt are often classified as authors facing a distinct set of challenges within the broader cultural ferment. What readerly assumptions does each seem to anticipate, accommodate, and resist? Have contemporary naturalistic writers like Bierce, Crane, Dreiser, and London made this conversation between the minority writer and a wide American audience easier or more difficult? Why do you think so?