William Dean Howells: Defining American Literary Realism

Publication Context and Foundational Realist Tenets. Criticism and Fiction (1891) is a collection of influential literary criticism written by William Dean Howells in his column "The Editor's Study" in Harper's Magazine from 1886 to 1890. This period marked a crucial development in his conception of literary realism. The fundamental principles he championed included the importance of fiction that depicted everyday life in America, the ordinary speech of the people, and the simple, average truths of human nature: "fidelity to experience and probability of motive." He advocated for the aim of "life-likeness" rather than "book-likeness," meaning fiction should be judged by comparison to life rather than to other literature. This realist agenda represented a deliberate departure from the adventure and romance characterized by the "fantastic and monstrous and artificial things" found in many novels of the earlier 19th century.

He admired the kind of book, he says somewhat facetiously, in which "nothing happens; that is, nobody murders or debauches anybody else; there is no arson or pillage of any sort; there is not a ghost, or a ravening beast, or a hair-breadth escape, or a shipwreck, or a monster of self-sacrifice, or a lady five thousand years old in the whole course of the story; . . . Yet it is all alive with the keenest interest for those who enjoy the study of individual traits and general conditions as they make themselves known to American experience." The outlandish extremities of heroism and passion of romantic fiction, he thought, precluded perception of the subtleties of closely and carefully observed life, the nuances of courtship, marriage, parenting, and work. This perspective underscores his commitment to representing the ordinary rather than the sensational.

Scientific Observation and Moral Perspective. A sense of scientific observation colored Howells's conception of literary realism as spelled out in Criticism and Fiction. As with the scientist, he thought, the author could not deem any part of life to be beneath notice. Furthermore, an empirical method of recording observed life had to take priority for the realist author over abstractions, idealizations, or the creation of "types" that lacked the detail and complexity of character that rang true to experience. At the same time that he advocated calm, scientific observation, he declared that it was not enough for a realist author simply to provide "facts"; the meaning of observed details—and a moral perspective without "overmoralizing"—had to be supplied. Indeed, his own fiction exemplified this by putting ethical and moral concerns at its center.

The "Smiling Aspects" and Critical Reception. Perhaps somewhat unfortunately, Howells's conception of realism has sometimes been reduced to the declaration in Criticism and Fiction that American novelists should "concern themselves with the more smiling aspects of life, which are the more American . . . It is worthwhile, even at the risk of being called commonplace, to be true to our well-to-do actualities." What is "peculiarly American," he added, is "the large, cheerful average of health and success and happy life." Such comments cemented Howells's reputation for looking only at the happy, mundane dailiness of middle-class America, rather than at the underside of American life, its poverty, injustice, and tragedy.

Familiarity with his fiction belies this characterization, as does his championing of literary naturalists who probed into the darker dimensions of American life. And as Howells's career progressed, his conviction that American life was characterized by happiness, the "cheerful average," and "smiling aspects" certainly changed, leading to a change in his conception of the proper subject matter of American fiction.

International Scope and Literary Legacy. Although Howells was deeply concerned with the features of a national literature and described a literary realism special to America, his range of reference in Criticism and Fiction was truly international. Here, as in his literary criticism throughout his career, he called to his readers' attention a host of writers in other countries—notably to Honoré de Balzac, Gustav Flaubert, and Emile Zola of France; Leo Tolstoy and Ivan Turgenev of Russia; the Norwegian author Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen; and Armando Palacio Valdés and Benito Perez Galdós of Spain. Attuned to the range of development in literary realism of his day, he stands with Henry James as one of the most sophisticated American critics and theorists of literature of the late 19th century.