Art of the Everyday: Dutch Painting and the Realist Novel (review)

Ruth Yeazell's Art of the Everyday focuses primarily on the many connections between Dutch Golden Age painting and the realistic novel as it was to develop in France and in England. Yeazell begins with a chapter on Honoré de Balzac, moves to George Eliot, and then all the way to Thomas Hardy and Marcel Proust—the two writers who, according to her, pushed realism to the threshold of modernism. Yeazell's account of seventeenth-century Dutch paintings focuses on their range of expressive trajectories: the detailed, realistic delineations of objects and people who made up the lower and middle classes; landscapes inhabited by anonymous figures; and, finally, in opposition to the meticulous detailing of the everyday, the abstract conjuration in color and light—"the protomodernity" (193), as Yeazell calls it—of Jan Vermeer. Yeazell's grasp over seventeenth-century Dutch painting is both thorough and nuanced, and the several very interesting connections that she makes between these paintings and realistic novels will have major implications for future work on literary realism. At times, however, Yeazell's propensity to read novels exclusively in terms of their relationship with Dutch painting tends to preclude explanations that are more properly historical. This is especially true of Yeazell's reading of Hardy.

The opening chapter focuses on the most obvious continuity between Dutch painting and realist fiction: their common interest in the details of ordinary life. But Yeazell also shows that the mixture of commitment and constraint with which nineteenth-century authors related to ordinary life had been anticipated in the widespread propensity to both condemn Dutch painting for lacking the heroic subjects and intellectual energy of the Italian school and to praise it for dignifying the everyday lives of ordinary people.

The unfolding tension between the heroic and the ordinary is central to Yeazell's reading of Balzac, but her chapter on the French novelist also engages with the ways in which his fiction both absorbed and transformed strategies of visual representation. Thus she argues that Balzac is able to evoke a silent and still atmosphere around the heroine of The Quest for the Absolute (1834) by focusing on her posture, her position in the room, and, above all, by activating within his novel a painterly technique that will continue to interest Yeazell throughout her book: the use of light to achieve a particular effect. But Balzac also encodes within his novelistic "picture" of a woman absorbed in her thoughts the impulse that will shatter the synchronicity of the painterly space that frames her. For the heroine of The Quest is, in fact, crying, and the cause of her tears—her husband's obsession with a quest that threatens to bankrupt the family—will complicate the conditions in which she is initially represented. More specifically, Yeazell finds in the alchemist husband's brilliant but obsessive experiments the diachronic energy—the plot—that will break the stasis of a domestic idyll and pit against this idyll the "endless search for the unattainable" (75). Yeazell argues that the conflict between a tranquil domesticity that Balzac often compared to Flemish interiors and the irresistible pull of the grand passion lay at the heart of his novelistic aesthetic and that it was embodied in what she, following Elizabeth Barrett Browning, calls the conflict between Balzac's "Dutch hand" and his "Italian soul" (82).

Balzac's interest in bourgeois interiors was, Yeazell suggests, complicated by his monarchist and Catholic commitments. For Eliot, on the other hand, the Dutch focus on everyday life became enabling in a much more direct way. The attention that artists like Nocolaes Maes or Gerrit Dou gave to the material objects of everyday life reaffirmed Eliot's effort to "embody spiritual abstractions in concrete particulars" (110). Moreover, Eliot's identification with the "honest labor" of those nameless figures who inhabited Dutch genre painting gives us a clue to the central feature in her mode of characterization: sympathy...