This document provides an overview of literary realism and naturalism in 19th century short stories. It discusses how realism emerged as a reaction against romanticism, emphasizing accurate depictions of ordinary life. Realist works are characterized by complex characters, detailed settings, objective narration. Major realist writers mentioned include Chekhov, Tolstoy, Maupassant, and later American writers like Jewett and Crane. Naturalism further emphasized deterministic views of humanity struggling against hostile environments. The document provides examples of realist and naturalist short stories and encourages analytical writing about them beyond merely summarizing plots.

1. Lecture 3
Realism, Naturalism, and the Short Story
Introduction
Many readers see similarities between Melville's Bartleby and
Gogol's clerk in "The Overcoat," and these two stories typify
many of the traits we have come to associate with realism. As
literary Romanticism began to give way to more realistic traits
in writing, a group of French and European writers definitively
overturned literary conventions and heralded a new way of
writing fiction. Literary realism continued to flourish and
dominate the literary scene in Europe and North America well
into the 20th century. As writers began to experiment with this
new type of fiction, they felt free from the constraints of
traditional literary structures and began to incorporate other
literary techniques such as impressionism, naturalism, and
regionalism into their short stories. Often minimizing the very
real biases they brought with them to their works, they
enthusiastically embraced realism as a more objective way to
convey the truth of human life through fiction.
Nineteenth Century Realism
Before and during the early 19th century, the short story form
was generally considered to be formulaic and simplistic. Writers
merely followed a pattern in which the plot rose dramatically to
a crisis and then quickly resolved itself. Enlightenment and
even Romantic writers often employed stock or flat characters,
or presented characters who allegorically stood for character
traits or who were extraordinary in some way. A literary
movement developed in France in the mid-19th century that had
writers championing the ordinary person as a fitting subject for
literature. In 1857, the French novelist, Champfleury, wrote a
description of the goals of this new movement, which he called
"Le Realisme" (Drabble, 1996, p. 824). His title produced the
term realism, which has been associated with these writers and
the many British, European, and American writers who were

2. influenced by them.
Literary works of realism are classified as such when they share
most of the following characteristics:
They present the difficulties and daily experiences of
the ordinary man or woman.
Their authors are more concerned with
characterization than with other elements of fiction, as the
human individual is their primary concern.
They are set in local, specific, and highly-detailed
settings.
Their writers "stress 'sincerity' as opposed to the
'liberty' proclaimed by the romantics" (Drabble, 1996, p. 824).
Their authors view fiction writing almost as a form of
journalistic documentation, in which they can convey a slice of
life or snapshot of ordinary people and events accurately and as
objectively as possible.
They contain accurate description and dialogue,
including the use of local accents and speech patterns faithfully
reproduced.
They explore all aspects of the common person's life,
including situations and events that are sordid, unbecoming, or
trivial.
They fully explore the deep psychological choices,
ethical dilemmas, and internal feelings of their characters.
The French writers Honoré de Balzac and Guy de Maupassant
were enormously influential on other masters of realism,
including Anton Chekhov, Leo Tolstoy, and Henry James.
Maupassant famously described the writer's goal as "not to
entertain or to move us, but to make us think and to make us
understand the deep and hidden meaning of events" through
presenting "the spectacle of life . . . reproduce[d] . . . with a
scrupulous accuracy" (Maupassant, in Charters, 2007, p. 887).
This painstakingly accurate reproduction of reality is a common
characteristic of realist literature.
It is important to realize; however, that the realists' emphasis on
total objectivity and complete accuracy of representation was

3. not entirely possible, or even desirable, for "all art must select
and represent; it cannot be and has never been a simple
transcript of reality" (Lawall, 1999, p. 839). Though realism
added possible subjects fitting for art, it also excluded the
fantastic, the implausible, the romantic, and the ideal (Lawall,
1999). Though realist writers wanted to think of themselves as
objective reporters of human life, the truth is that they were
master artists with personal biases and values who crafted
stories that revealed, at least implicitly, their views and beliefs.
"Even the most artful of writers," the Modernist writer Joseph
Conrad admitted, "will give himself (and his morality) away in
about every third sentence" (Conrad, in Lawall, 1999, p. 839).
The European and Russian Masters
Chekhov's short stories present small sketches or fragments of
the life of ordinary characters, along with a narrator who is
completely detached or absent. They were enormously
influential on other writers, as were the realistic short stories
and novels of Tolstoy, Gogol, and the French realists,
Maupassant and Gustave Flaubert.
Chekhov's "The Darling" is a powerful story, further enriched
for a reader by Tolstoy's commentary "Chekhov's Intent in 'The
Darling'". The central character is complex and intricately
presented, and the story has a significant theme. Chekhov is
known for his empathy for his central characters, though his
narrators often remain seemingly detached. Indeed, Tolstoy
believed that Chekhov meant to curse his central character,
Olenka (or at least her character traits), and ended up blessing
her instead (Tolstoy, in Charters, 2007, p. 921). Readers must
decide if the story's central character represents the highest
ideal of human love and self-denial, or merely foolishness and
waste.
In Gogol's short story "The Overcoat," his protagonist, a
simple, downtrodden office clerk, shares traits with Melville's
Bartleby. With meticulous attention to detail, Gogol forwards a
story that at once comments on the trivial and heartless nature
of government bureaucracy and suggests the universal human

4. yearning for comfort, significance, and gratification. Some
readers find the story cynical, seeing in it a depiction of a
common and powerless man unable to find fulfillment or justice
in the world around him; they view the story's ending as a sort
of cruel joke that further reinforces the story's tone of futility.
Other readers find that the ending of the story suggests hope
and reinforces the central character's influence on those around
him.
Maupassant, who studied at Flaubert's feet and mastered his
skill in objectively presenting characters without the intrusion
of a narrator's commentary, is primarily concerned with
presenting the facts of a narrative in a relentlessly detached
tone. "The Necklace" is somewhat atypical of his fiction, for it
contains elements of the morality tale and the fable, with
characters seemingly more flatly depicted. However, like
Tolstoy's story "How Much Land Does a Man Need?", readers
are drawn to this story because of the truths it depicts about
human nature. Those very traits, which seem the least realistic −
the implausibility of the plots, the single-minded obsession of
the central characters, the symbolic warnings inherent in the
stories − allow both of these stories to speak in profound ways
to readers of every age and generation.
Nineteenth Century Realist Fiction
One hundred years passed between the publication of
Washington Irving's "The Sketch Book" (1819) and Sherwood
Anderson's "Winesburg, Ohio" (1919). In the intervening years
between these two influential short story collections, the short
story transformed from a simple or mythical tale to a complex,
realistic vehicle that explores the human condition through
carefully placed details and images (May, 2002). The European
masters of realism heavily influenced British and American
writers such as Anderson, Cather, Chopin, Crane, James, Jewett,
Lawrence, Howells, and London, to name only a few. These
writers uniformly embraced realism's emphasis on complex
characterization, detailed and realistic descriptions of settings,
the absence of an intrusive narrator, and themes of deep

5. psychological and ethical importance. While Jewett and Chopin
filled their stories with authentic regional dialects and
intricately portrayed geographical settings, others such as Crane
and London presented naturalistic, almost journalistic, stories
of individuals battling harsh and unforgiving natural elements.
All of these writers rejected the fantastic and the mythological
in favor of realistic stories that conveyed thetruth of human
experience as faithfully as possible.
Chopin, in "How I Stumbled Upon Maupassant," discusses the
realist conviction that fiction should convey a sort of objective
truth. She claims that in Maupassant's realist fiction, she had at
last found "something big, satisfying, convincing" (Chopin, in
Charters, 2007, p. 858). Chopin boldly (and ironically) asserts,
"Here was life, not fiction, for where were the plots, the old
fashioned mechanism and stage trapping that in a vague,
unthinking way I had fancied were essential to the art of story
making?" (Chopin, in Charters, 2007, p. 859). Realist writers
such as Chopin, desired to "look out upon life . . . with [their]
own eyes" and give their readers their "impressions," of what
they saw (Chopin, in Charters, 2007, p. 859). This technique of
conveying direct impressions of what an individual character or
narrator sees, feels, or thinks resulted in some works of realism
being labeled impressionistic. Impressionism is a type of
writing in which authors attempt to convey the truth about how
a scene or moment feels, or is experienced by a character,
through the careful and artful arrangement of details that create
a mood or emotional effect in the reader.
Literary Naturalism
Closely related to literary realism, though different in aim,
motive, and philosophy, is a literary movement and technique
called naturalism. Naturalism was primarily a philosophical
movement that maintained that everything knowable is
contained within the physical, natural world, and must have
wholly natural causes. Naturalist philosophers were deeply
influenced by the writings of Charles Darwin, and privileged
scientific methods, reason, and empirical evidence in their

6. understanding of truth. Naturalism "thus wholly exclude[d] the
philosophical position of supernaturalism, which encompasses
religious belief of all kinds, as well as belief in spirit, soul,
immortality, transcendence, or divinity" (Hiner, 2001, p. 80).
Literary naturalism developed in the 19th century as a result of
the infusion of naturalist philosophies and motives into the
techniques and aims of realism. Emile Zola, the pioneer of
literary naturalism, prided himself on his objective
and scientificmethod of writing in which he probed the
psychological recesses of his characters like "a surgeon [works]
on corpses" (Zola, in Lawall, 1999, p. 837). Literary naturalism
can best be understood as a narrow type of literary realism that
emphasizes detailed, objective, almost journalistic reporting of
the facts of characters' lives. In naturalist writing, the views and
personality of the author are ostensibly suppressed or absent.
Naturalist writers embrace the philosophical views of
naturalism and, therefore, often produce literary works in which
humans are portrayed as isolated and alienated individuals who
must struggle vainly against a hostile or indifferent physical
environment.
Both Stephen Crane and Jack London forward protagonists who
must fight against destructive natural forces. Crane's story "The
Open Boat" is a fictional retelling of an experience he had on
board the Commodore on January 2, 1897 (Hiner, 2001, p. 85).
Though his central characters, stranded aboard a ten-foot dinghy
after a shipwreck, start out believing that fate, or the gods, must
have some concern for them, they gradually realize that they are
supremely alone, and their faith turns to grief, and then rage. It
is easy to see how naturalism works, produced primarily
between 1890 and 1940, and expressed the existential sense of
fear and loneliness felt by the generation of men and women
who witnessed both world wars. The later re-emergence of
spirituality and Christianity in the works of T. S. Eliot was one
response to what some considered the arid spiritual wasteland of
naturalism and existentialism.
Writing About Short Stories

7. When analyzing and writing about short stories, it is important
that students distinguish between merely offering a plot
summary and offering a true critical analysis of a short story.
Trimble distinguishes between a plot summary and a critical
analysis in his 1975 text, explaining that a true critical analysis
forwards a new idea or assertion about the literary text. The
purpose of a critical analysis is to shed light on a familiar text
and help a reader understand the text in a new way. A plot
summary merely restates the main events of a narrative, or
merely states facts about the text that any conscientious reader
would already know (Trimble, 1975).
When writing about short stories, a student's concern should be
to forward a unique, specific, narrow, and assertive thesis that
presents a point with which few other readers would initially
agree. The student's task in the rest of the paper is to
show how and why this thesis statement is true and credible,
using textual support from the short stories (quotations,
paraphrases, and summaries), and explaining clearly the
connection between this evidence and the thesis statement.
Students should rigorously exclude anything that does not
directly support the thesis statement (or main argument of the
paper), and should be careful to make sure that all sub-
arguments or minor assertions are explicitly tied to the thesis
statement. An analysis of short stories may focus on why or how
specific elements of fiction forward specific themes, or it may
compare and contrast two or more texts in specific areas.
Additionally, it could explore a biographical or historical
context to shed light on the making of a text, its effects, or its
themes. Students may explore literary texts in various ways, but
every critical analysis should be narrow in scope and should not
assert an obvious fact about the text.
Conclusion
Though literary realism began to branch out into various forms
such as naturalism, impressionism, and regional writing, it
remained the dominant literary method for writers throughout
the 19th and 20th centuries. Students of literature can apply a

8. variety of critical methods in their study of realist short stories,
as one's understanding and appreciation of these stories is
enhanced through many forms of literary criticism. Readers
today are drawn to 19th century realism for the same reason as
was its original audience: it seems to convey accurately the
difficulties, challenges, pleasures, and joys of human
relationships and endeavors. Ironically, though these stories
depict unique characters set in specific times and places, they
also can seem to portray Everyman (or Everywoman), allowing
readers to easily identify with the stories' themes.
References
Charters, A. (Ed.). (2007). The story and its writer: An
introduction to short fiction (Compact 7th ed.). Boston:
Bedford/St. Martin's.
Davis, R. C., & Schleifer, R. (1998). Contemporary literary
criticism: Literary and cultural studies (4th ed.). New York:
Longman.
Drabble, M. (Ed.). (1996). The Oxford companion to English
literature (Rev. ed.). Oxford, England: Oxford University Press.
Harmon, W., & Holman, H. (2006). A handbook to
literature (10th ed.). Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson-Prentice
Hall.
Hiner, A. (2001). Bricks and temples: Literary naturalism and
the Christian reader's response. In H. Choi, D. Siemens, Jr., &
S. Williams (Eds.), Naturalism: Its impact on science, religion,
and literature (pp. 79-91). Phoenix, AZ: Canyon Institute for
Advanced Studies.
Lawall, S. (Ed.). (1999). The Norton anthology of world
masterpieces (7th ed.). New York: W. W. Norton & Company.
May, C. E. (2002). The short story: The reality of artifice. New
York: Routledge.
Trimble, J. R. (1975). Writing with style: Conversations on the
art of writing. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall.
Read Herman Melville, “Bartleby, the Scrivener.”

9. Read Guy de Maupassant, "The Necklace."
Read Anton Chekhov, "The Darling."
Read Leo Tolstoy, “Chekhov’s Intent in ‘The Darling’.”
Read Kate Chopin, "The Story of an Hour."
Read Sarah Orne Jewett, "A White Heron."
Read Charlotte Perkins Gilman, "The Yellow Wallpaper."
Read Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, "A Feminist Reading
of Gilman's ‘The Yellow Wallpaper.'"
Read Willa Cather, "Paul's Case."
Read Stephen Crane, "The Open Boat."