Leonard, James S. "Realism." American History Through Literature 1870-1920. Ed.
Tom Quirk
and Gary Scharnhorst. Vol. 3. Detroit: Charles Scribner's Sons, 2006. 943-953. Gale Virtual
Reference Library. Web. 2 Feb. 2012.
PSYCHOLOGICAL REALISM: HENRY JAMES
James made his most important contribution to realism theory in his essay "The Art of
Fiction" (originally published in Longman's Magazine in September 1884), which is
regarded as one of America's classic statements of literary criticism. In this essay James
proclaims the writing of fiction to be one of the fine arts and examines at length the
comparison between fiction and painting (whereas many of Howells's detractors
compared his approach to photography). James, like Howells and Perry, regarded the
novelist more as a craftsman than as a creative genius. The writer of fiction must
meticulously observe, and turn his or her impressions into art. For James the only reason
for existence of a novel or short story is that it "represents life." The "supreme virtue of
the novel," in his view, is "the air of reality," which he explains as "solidity of specification"
(p. 12). That is, the novelist must create a convincing image of life, one that seems as if it
might really happen. James also agrees with Perry that the crucial action in a story should
be internal. Extending the comparison between fiction and painting he remarks, "A
psychological reason is, to my imagination, an object adorably pictorial; to catch the tint
of its complexion—I feel as if that idea might inspire one to Titianesque efforts" (p. 19).
Here we see James's conversion of realism to something less literal than Howells's model.
James advocated and practiced what came to be known as "psychological realism"—a
devotion not to the precise reproduction of external detail but to a rendering of the
nuances of the inner lives of his characters. However, for all his advocacy of careful
observation, he gave at least equal Page 947 | Top of Article weight to what he called in
1909 the "crucible of the imagination"—a notion not far removed from Samuel Taylor
Coleridge's "secondary imagination," which "dissolves, diffuses, dissipates, in order to
recreate." Thus, James effected a sort of fusion (sometimes identified with impressionism)
of the realistic with the Romantic that moved in the direction of twentieth-century
modernism.
Howells identified James as the "chief exemplar" of a "new school" of fiction writing
deriving from Nathaniel Hawthorne and George Eliot. James's fiction, like Howells's,
avoids the exotic and the superficially dramatic, but he plumbs the psyches of his
characters much more deeply than Howells. His fictions revolve around such situations as
a governess trying to understand the moral and psychological forces that have been
working on the children in her charge (The Turn of the Screw); a man wondering what his
life might have been like if he had stayed in America and had a "career" instead of going
to Europe and having none ("The Jolly Corner"); a man too obsessed with his own
destiny, failing to make the human connection that he might have made if he had simply
been attentive to the world around him ("The Beast in the Jungle"). In each case James
gives readers a "central consciousness" through whom they can understand the events
not simply in terms of the details of their occurrence but also in terms of their
significance. James's fiction satisfies his own and Perry's criterion that the real action of
the story should be in the minds of the characters, yet he makes that action visible by
means of symbolic entities that he uses, as he says, to "paint" the "psychological
reasons"—entities such as ghosts, "the beast," the subtly flawed golden bowl in the novel
by that title, and so forth. In this, again, he is part realist and part "modernist."
Other important writers who produced works related to Jamesian psychological realism
were Ambrose Bierce, Stephen Crane, and Edith Wharton. Bierce mined his own
traumatic experiences in the Civil War to craft stories that explored the psychological
effects of violence and the nearness of death. Crane (1871–1900), who was himself too
young to have personally experienced the Civil War, nonetheless chose it as his setting
for The Red Badge of Courage (1895), which considers how an ordinary person might
react to being thrown into a bewildering situation that demands heroic courage and
stamina. Wharton is often characterized as a lesser version of James himself, though her
works were actually more popular than his. Like James she wrote stories that treated the
psychological nuances of social life among the culturally sophisticated, in whose
conversations the unsaid was frequently as significant as the said.
