Realist Zeitgeist (1830s–1870s)

According to Linda Nochlin, art historian, the Realist credo is “a truthful, objective and impartial observation of the real world, based on meticulous observation of contemporary life.” (Realism)

Realist literature/art typically includes many of these elements:

painstakingly detailed representation of “real” world (often a photographically precise delineation of surroundings)
unobtrusive, transparent style for filtering “objective reality”
a preoccupation with the Here and Now
emphasis on the ordinary, the everyday, the domestic, the secular, on the humble, trivial, and even sordid
objective, even scientific, documentation of the visible world, of material/physiological life
de-emphasis of mystical, transcendent aspects of religion
a clinical approach to sex, disease, death
attention to social problems: bureaucracy, commercialization of human interactions, “progress,” institutional corruption, sexual and other exploitation
depiction of the middle class [the bourgeoisie]: often highly critical of its materialism, self-interest, mediocrity, snobbery and oppressive moral codes, its “Philistinism”
criticism of socially-defined or -assigned roles in life
criticism of sexual hypocrisy (including double standard) in “respectable” society
portrayal of the lower classes/ordinary working people: their problems and virtues (maintains Romantic sympathy for the down-trodden)

Many Realists recycle Romanticism, placing its values into the above framework, either to mock them as absurd or outdated or to mourn them as no longer possible in the later nineteenth century, or even both at the same time.

According to English cultural critic George Henry Lewes (George Eliot’s partner), in Realism and Art, 1859:

“Realism is … the basis of all Art, and its antithesis is not Idealism, but Falsism. When our painters represent peasants with regular features and irreproachable linen; when their milkmaids have the air of Keepsake beauties, whose costume is picturesque, and never old or dirty; when Hodge [a working-class man] is made to speak refined sentiments in unexceptionable [perfect] English, and children utter long speeches of religious and poetic enthusiasm … an attempt is [being] make to idealize, but the result is simply falsification and bad art.”

According to Jules and Edmond Goncourt, writers of an 1864 Realist novel called Germanie Lacerteux:

“Living in the 19th century, in a time of universal suffrage, democracy, liberalism, we asked ourselves whether what one calls ‘the lower classes’ have no right to the Novel; whether this society, below society, the common people, had to remain under the weight of literary interdict [prohibition] and of the scorn of writers who have, up to now, kept silence on the heart and spirit [the common people] might have. We asked ourselves whether there should still exist, be it for writer or reader in these times of equality, classes too unworthy, sufferings too low, tragedies too foul-mouthed, catastrophes whose terror is not sufficiently noble. We began to wonder whether … in a country without caste or legal aristocracy, the sufferings of the poor and humble could touch our interest, our pity, our emotions, as sharply as the sufferings of the rich and mighty …”