Satire in an Age of Realism by Aaron Matz (review)

For critics at the end of the nineteenth century, realism, the predominant literary style of the preceding decades, was at worst passé and at best a vexatious genre. No less vexed for modern critics of Victorian literature are our categorization of the novels of the latter part of the era and our understanding of the role of satire in the nineteenth century. The novels of authors like Thomas Hardy and George Gissing do not fit exclusively under the heading of realism, nor do they deviate entirely from its aims. These novels expose the difficulties of genre classification and periodization; clearly beholden to the structure and scope of the Victorian novel (a difficult category itself), but with an unrelenting cynicism more akin to modernist volumes, they challenge critics to account for their discrepancies. Satire is also a difficult subject for Victorian studies, as it is usually thought to exist only in a limited way in the nineteenth century. Relatively few studies focusing on satire in the Victorian period exist, and most general studies of satire conclude their analyses in the early 1830s at the latest. By looking back to earlier forms of satire and examining the incorporation of its conventions into the realist mode, Aaron Matz’s excellent book Satire in an Age of Realism affords us a clearer, more nuanced depiction of late-Victorian realist writing.

In chapters on Hardy, Gissing, Ibsen, and Conrad, Matz examines the convergence of realism and satire in works that formed a significant part of the literary scene in the 1890s. These writers, he argues, were exploring the outermost limits of the realist style by incorporating tropes of satire in a mode he terms “satiric realism.” Despite the superficial incompatibility of these genres—satire’s hyperbole would hardly be an obvious comrade for realism’s veracity—satiric realism is a result of their complementary aims. Realism is satiric “since its method of exposure is also a mode of attack,” while satire “must persuade us that our failings are so entrenched in everyday life … that they need no embellishment or fantasy when transmuted into fiction” (ix). What follows this establishment of shared purpose is a rich analysis that begins with one of the most celebrated practitioners of the realist style, George Eliot.

Beginning with Eliot allows Matz to identify the long-existing affinity between satire and realism, showing how novelistic and satiric practices of English literature’s past inform the realist works and literary criticism of the 1890s. While the subsequent chapters each focus mainly on one author, the presence of critics like Edmund Gosse and Henry James is never far away. By contrast, authors one might assume would form a major part of this study (Dickens and Thackeray, for example) are relegated to a supporting role, and with good reason: their work tends to be selectively satiric, lacking the scope of censure or the unflinching tragedy of the writers operating in the hybrid mode of satiric realism. Although he focuses on English literary tradition (including Ibsen only as he was received in England), Matz recognizes satiric realism as part of the larger realist tradition in European literature. For example, Flaubert typically serves as a standard other satiric realists are measured against.

The individual chapters survey satiric realism and its different manifestations, taking into account each writer’s body of work, influences, and share of contemporary debates about realist expression. Hardy’s abandonment of the novel and Jude and Sue’s constant sense they are being satirized (37–38) are all the more striking when we consider Hardy’s extensive reading of satire prior to Jude the Obscure’s composition. Likewise, Gissing’s letters highlighting his satiric treatment of New Grub Street’s writers reveal the deliberate nature of realism’s turn toward satire—even though that hybridization, as Matz argues, proved to be the genre’s own undoing. Matz’s reading here provides a fresh perspective, not least because what once were considered oddities (for example, Jude’s central...