Teaching Elements of Literature through Art: Romanticism, Realism, and Culture

As an undergraduate art minor and the spouse of an African art dealer, I maintain a strong connection with the visual arts, and I believe that my literature classrooms are enriched by seeing the cultural interrelationships between the two disciplines. More specifically, I am fascinated by conceptual commonalities shared—the philosophical and social matters concerning visual and literary artists in any era—and how the concepts are manifested in various media. Not surprisingly, then, I remember fondly a wonderful graduate course at UNC-Greensboro, American Literature and Art, 1800–1940, taught by Dr. Kelley Griffith. As the title implies, we covered romanticism, realism, and modernism in this course by studying the artistic works of both authors and painters, and the course (combined with my own academic training and personal background) has influenced one of my current UNC-Pembroke classes, Literary Genres. As one might expect, the course covers a broad range of genres and topics; for my purposes here, however, I will focus on primarily one topic: realism.

To understand my pedagogical approach to teaching realism, one first needs an explanation of romanticism. I define it as a philosophy of life that was a trend in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century art. The principles I outline (along with many examples of authors and works) are:

• • freedom of the individual (the belief that all humans are naturally equal and good)

• • focus on heroes of exemplary social status/extraordinary circumstances

• • nostalgia for the remote past and the exotic/picturesque natural settings

• • celebration of (a) simpler agrarian/wilderness life (b) the strong, individualized frontiersman, and (c) primitivism ("the noble savage")

• • focus on emotions, introspection, and melancholy

• • fascination with mystery

Toward the end of the romantic period, however, new and old forces joined as a result of increased interest in the psychological focus of realism. In this movement, which peaked from 1870 to 1900, the dominant motive was to depict life accurately. Included in the material of most interest were a zest for experience and the detailed treatment of both exterior and interior reality, including occasional violence and probing of basic instincts. If we look through the lens of the three dominant prose writers in America at the time, we can appreciate the movement's characteristics.

The first is Samuel Clemens, who mocked romantics like James Fenimore Cooper. Clemens used extremely detailed sensory description, plain style, and the vernacular, complete with dialect and regional accents. His characters—everyday people, such as those found in Huckleberry Finn—reflect everyday values, such as kindness, decency, common sense, loyalty, and courage. Another is William Dean Howells, extremely influential through publishing and criticism, whose goal was honest and accurate treatment of subjects. He used representative, not extraordinary, material and upper-middle-class subjects, but his own writing tended to be rather optimistic. Third is Henry James, whose focus was definitely on inner reality, with many of his memorable imaginative characters, such as Fleda Vetch and Daisy Miller, living artistically in their own creative illusions.

Visual Art in the Literature Classroom

To illustrate the realistic movement, I use a visualizer to showcase several examples of realistic paintings. I begin with the work of Thomas Eakins. His "The Biglen Brothers Racing" (ca. 1873) is one of a number of rowing scenes realistically revealing the body straining in motion, yet with zest for the experience, and offering interesting studies of an everyday phenomenon: light reflected on water (Rogghianti 1968: 160). The surgical scene in "The Gross Clinic" (1875) contains the dramatically emotional figures of the patient's mother to the left of Dr. Gross, and what was considered—at the time—to be both shocking and brutal: the presence of blood (Lucie-Smith 1994: 8–9). Exterior reality is depicted along with its resultant effects on the mother's interior emotional state. In his later work, "The Agnew Clinic" (1889), Eakins still creates a dramatically detailed and realistic portrait of surgery. The entire scene is lighter, however, and the painting has been said to carry religious ritualistic overtones depicting the science of medicine as humanity's hope (Barker 1950: 662–63). Eakins...