Heaven and Hell on Earth: Visualizing the Unseen World of American Realism

American literary realism has traditionally been understood as an attempt to identify with the relentlessly unsentimental elements of life, an approach to writing impelled by the notion that literature is authentic only to the degree that it inhabits the unvarnished truth of human existence. Gregory Jackson’s The Word and Its Witness offers a bold and ambitious revision of the historical and conceptual parameters of American realism, expanding the term so as to include literary precursors found principally in the American Protestant homiletic tradition, as well as the religious literature of the late nineteenth century, particularly religious fiction. Thus it draws on a broad range of materials, including sermons, primers, pamphlets, catechisms, grave iconography, novels, and photography—material not typically incorporated in the genre of realism—while drawing parallels between these materials and contemporary forms of religious communication, such as video games and dramatic reenactments.

What is the “real” in American realism? In a sense, this is the underlying question that animates Jackson’s study. Is it, as it is often portrayed, a literary genre informed by an ideological quest for an empirical, materialist, and ultimately secularized understanding of the world in the face of the grim nature of life in post–Civil War, industrialized, urban America? Or can it rightly be defined more broadly as an epistemological search for the world as it really is, that world that really exists, even if portions of that world lie beyond the apprehension of the physical senses? Jackson opts for the latter, and in doing so extends the notion of realism beyond its narrowly contextualized understanding as a formal period of critical American literature. What justifies such an expansion of categories for Jackson is the claim that secular and religious forms of realism are closely linked in their quest to discover the nature of the world that human beings inhabit: “spiritual and secular forms thus share a genealogy that produced the formal and thematic conventions that we have come to associate with . . . the postbellum emergence of literary realism” (p. 6).

This expansive consideration of a spiritualized realism begins with colonial and antebellum anxieties over changes in the epistemological and theological landscape. In response to the emphasis on experience as the primary mediator of knowledge and on individual agency as the path to self-realization, the proprietors of religious knowledge sought to develop a Protestant pedagogy that took into account these new assumptions about the way human beings gained and retained an understanding of their religious faith. They augmented their homiletic discourse with more visual forms of language aimed at increasing audience participation, creating a virtual form of experience by way of the imagination, and thus offering experiences through which spiritual reality could be encountered, contemplated, and finally resolved in the reader/listener’s moral responses to them. What makes the literature of this period “realistic” in Jackson’s estimation is its shared concern to call attention to the stark realities of the unseen world and its tangible connection to the visible world, particularly to the spiritual, moral, and psychological dynamics of lived religious life.

This work is bound to provoke considerable discussion among specialists in the many subject areas and disciplines on which the author weighs in; nonetheless it is a compelling read for scholars in the fields of, among others, American literature, religion, and history.

What historical context provoked the early American turn to religious realism? In a word, hell. Or more properly, the loss of hell as a closely felt reality for colonial Americans, and more generally, the lightening of the religious mood—a loss of anxiety over quintessential Puritan doctrines concerning the severity of God. Growing colonial economic prosperity, political security, and religious pluralism, combined with a moral optimism characteristic of the Enlightenment, undermined the force of a theological system that emphasized God’s inscrutable grace and wrath, manifest in the Calvinist doctrine of election. In its place was a...