What Is Realism?

Formal realism is, of course, like the rules of evidence, only a convention.

—Ian Watt, The Rise of the Novel

Both critics and proponents of realism usually write as if we all know what they are talking about, but it seems to me that realism has usually has been treated much like obscenity in Supreme Court justice Potter Stewart's famous phrase, "I know it when I see it." My task in what follows is to try to specify what it is that we find in the nineteenth-century novels that are usually taken to exemplify realism. My assumption is that realism designates a set of conventions. To call a work realist is not to assert that its representation of the world is accurate, but rather to say something about how it represents the world. Realism claims a certain relationship with what it holds to be true. It attempts to tell the truth about certain elements of the world, but it may or may not succeed in that attempt. The conventions I will discuss here have been routinely associated with realist fiction. My method is not mainly to reread the works themselves but to focus on the long history of interpretation and analysis of them. In general, the conventions I identify are recognized by both champions and opponents of realism, although these groups may put their emphasis on different ones.

We recognize a novel as realist, I will argue, when it meets most of the following criteria: (1) it depicts contemporary or recent social life; (2) it provides detailed description, featuring visual and other sensory details; (3) it presents psychologically and socially plausible characters; (4) it is concerned with quotidian events or "ordinary life," including ordinary people; (5) the events are plausible given the assumptions of the audience; and (6) the narrative reveals aspects of social life that are normally not known, confronted, or represented in artistic works. Before discussing each of these conventions in detail, let me observe that they mainly concern what is represented in the text rather than how it is represented. Unlike Ian Watt, who asserts that "the novel's realism does not reside in the kind of life it presents," I will argue that certain kinds of life are more commonly encountered in realist texts than others (1987: 11). Realism in my view does not require any particular narrative style or technique—such as free indirect discourse— and it does not depend upon the effacing of an authorial voice. Realist novels, rather, are mainly identified by their content—the things, people, and events represented.

Historically, one of the most repeated markers of realism in fiction has been the setting of the plot within society contemporary with the original audience for the text. A novel set in the remote past, on a desert isle, or in the wilderness has traditionally been called a romance, which is to say, something other than realism. Watt observes that in the nineteenth century, Balzac's opponents derided "his preoccupation with contemporary and, in their view, ephemeral reality" (1987: 14). Watt argues that the novel as genre is rooted in a sense of history absent from earlier literature. Shakespeare's ancient Rome is not significantly different from his medieval England. Walter Scott's romances are, of course, rooted in a strong sense of historical change, but they are predicated on the assumption, made explicit in the opening chapter of Waverly; or, Tis Sixty Years Since, that their settings are not contemporary. Waverly is not only remote temporally but takes place largely in the Scottish Highlands, which are remote geographically and culturally. War and Peace, on the contrary, is set fifty years before Tolstoy began writing it, but the novel presents its world as contemporary. The point here is that "contemporary" is itself an effect of the realist text: the meaning of "contemporary" is not fixed by some arbitrary number of years but by the degree to which the society presented is understood as similar to that of the author's present.

We do not think of a novel as realist if the story seems to take place primarily...