UNIVERSITY OF PANAMA

PANAMA WEST UNIVERSITY REGIONAL CENTER

Faculty of Humanities
English Department

American Literature

REALISM AND GREAT DEPRESSION

By
De Sedas, Marisol ID: 8-703-390
Mendieta, Angie ID: 8-940-2033

Professor: Rosa Mena

June 24th , 2020

Introduction

American Realism began as a rejection of Romanticism, with its emphasis on

emotion, imagination, and the individual. The movement began in the early 1830s, but
it reached prominence, and it held power from the end of the Civil War to around the
end of the nineteenth century. In this work, you will see the main characteristics,
themes, and philosophies of the Realism Period.

Women are known to be resilient in the face of adversity. The Great Depression
proved to be a time of severe adversity for America. In this work, we'll discuss how
women survived and thrived during the Great Depression, at the same time, we’ll
expose what was the Great Depression. We’ll describe what was the role of women
and black people in that era, and we'll present the most remarkable pieces of this
period. We hope that you enjoy the reading of this work.

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Characteristics of Realism Period

Detail: Realist writers used details to weave their magic, immerse us in so much detail
that we can't help but believe that what we're reading is real.

Transparent Language: One big innovation of Realist literature was the use of simple,
transparent language. Writing in a language that echoed the way regular people spoke
to each other was revolutionary in the mid-19th century when Realism got going. Before
that, the literary language was often supposed to be elevated. Realist writers tried
something new.

Verisimilitude: Realist literature is famous for the way it tries to create a world that
seems real or true; Realist writers want us to believe that we're watching real-life unfold
on the page. Realist writers often write like journalists, and their attention to specific
facts and specific details only adds to the sense of verisimilitude in their fictional works.

The Novel: Realist writers do write in other genres, too, but it's the novel that is at the
heart of the Realist tradition. Realist writers were drawn to the novel for several
reasons, but most of all, the novel is big, and it's flexible.

The Quotidian: They wanted literature to reflect the true and the daily reality of our
lives. One of the biggest preoccupations of Realism is the depiction of daily life, the
dramas, and routines of regular people.

Character: Realist authors are really into describing, analyzing, and dramatizing
personality. They investigate deep into their characters' psychologies and dig into their
motivations, actions, and emotions. Realism was all about understanding life, society,
and the world. Often, the first place these writers started was with the psychological
reality of individual people.

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Social Critique: Realist writers are all about critiquing the social and political
conditions of the worlds that they write about. Authors depicted economic and social
inequalities in their novels as a way of raising awareness about the situation of poor
people.

Class: Class is a huge deal in Realist literature. Society was changing, social
structures and classes were being transformed, and Realism reflected these changes.

Rising Literacy: Around the time that Realism got going as a literary movement in the
mid-19th century, more and more people were reading. Thanks to the printing press,
books, and reading materials had become much more accessible.

Common Themes of the Realism Period

Pragmatism

The literature of the common-place.

Attempts to represent real life.

Ordinary people--poor and middle class.

Ordinary speech in dialect--the use of vernacular.

Recent or contemporary life.

Subject matter presented in an unidealized, unsentimentalized way.

The democratic function of literature.

Social criticism--effect on the audience is key.

Presents indigenous American life.

Importance of place--regionalism, "local color".

Sociology and psychology.

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Philosophy of the Realism Period

Realism as a metaphysical doctrine is challenged by a range of suspicious

arguments. Both in classical Greek philosophy and the early modern period, dubious
arguments commonly began by appealing to our experience of such phenomena as
dreams, illusions, and hallucinations, in which our senses mislead us. Since this does,
unquestionably, sometimes happen, how do we know that it does not always do so?
How can we be sure that, on any particular occasion, what we seem to observe may not
turn out to have been illusory? More recently these arguments have been supplemented
by analogous challenges to our ability to secure reliable reference to external reality in
the use of language. Since we have no access to the world that is not mediated by
thought or language, what independent check have we upon the reliability of what we
think or say?

Such skeptical arguments do not necessarily lead to a denial of a reality

independent of thought. It is possible to hold that there is such a reality, but that we
cannot know its nature (or, perhaps, that we cannot know that we know). More
commonly, such epistemological skepticism lapses into phenomenalism, solipsism, or
some other form of denial of the existence of a reality independent of mind, thought, or
language.

In the philosophy of science, empiricists tend to be skeptical about the existence

of the entities (many of them unobservable) postulated by scientific theories. In this
view, the concepts of such entities are just convenient summaries of actual or possible
observations or grounds for prediction. Scientific realists, on the other hand, argue that
the theories in question should be understood as claiming existence for the entities
(sub-atomic particles, retroviruses, or whatever) they postulate. These claims may, of
course, be either true or false. Many sociological opponents suppose that scientific
realists are committed to an uncritical acceptance of the knowledge claims of science.
Realists may be as skeptical as anyone else about whether those claims are true. The
problem for the anti-realists is to make any sense at all of what science is about; and, in
particular, of what it might be for scientific knowledge-claims to turn out to be false.

4
Role of Women and Black People

During the Great Depression, millions of Americans lost their jobs in the wake of
the 1929 Stock Market Crash. But for one group of people, employment rates went up:
women

By the 1930s, women had been slowly entering the workforce in greater numbers
for decades. But the Great Depression drove women to find work with a renewed sense
of urgency as thousands of men who were once family breadwinners lost their jobs. A
22 percent decline in marriage rates between 1929 and 1939 also meant more single
women had to support themselves.

While jobs available to women paid less, they were less volatile. By 1940, 90
percent of all women’s jobs could be cataloged into 10 categories like nursing, teaching
and civil service for white women, while black and Hispanic women were largely
constrained to domestic work, according to David Kennedy’s 1999 book, Freedom from
Fear.

The problems of the Great Depression affected virtually every group of

Americans. No group was harder hit than African Americans, however. By 1932,
approximately half of black Americans were out of work. In some Northern cities, whites
called for blacks to be fired from any jobs as long as there were whites out of work.
Racial violence again became more common, especially in the South.

Still, discrimination occurred in New Deal housing and employment projects, and
President Roosevelt, for political reasons, did not back all of the legislation favor by
such groups as the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People
(NAACP). When the U.S. entered World War II, labor leader A. Philip Randolph
threatened to organize a march on Washington to protest job discrimination in the
military and other defense-related activities. In response, President Roosevelt issued
Executive Order 8802, stating that all persons, regardless of race, creed, color, or
national origin, would be allowed to participate fully in the defense of the United States.

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The Great Depression

The Great Depression was the worst economic downturn in the history of the
industrialized world, lasting from 1929 to 1939. It began after the stock market crash of
October 1929, which sent Wall Street into a panic and wiped out millions of investors.
Over the next several years, consumer spending and investment dropped, causing
steep declines in industrial output and employment as failing companies laid-off
workers. By 1933, when the Great Depression reached its lowest point, some 15 million
Americans were unemployed and nearly half the country’s banks had failed.

Economic historians usually consider the catalyst of the Great Depression to be

the sudden devastating collapse of U.S. stock market prices, starting on October 24,
1929. However, some dispute this conclusion and see the stock crash as a symptom,
rather than a cause, of the Great Depression.

Even after the Wall Street Crash of 1929 optimism persisted for some time. John
D. Rockefeller said "These are days when many are discouraged. In the 93 years of my
life, depressions have come and gone. Prosperity has always returned and will again."
The stock market turned upward in early 1930, returning to early 1929 levels by April.
This was still almost 30% below the peak of September 1929.

The two classic competing economic theories of the Great Depression are the
Keynesian (demand-driven) and the monetarist explanation. Various heterodox theories
downplay or reject the explanations of the Keynesians and monetarists. The consensus
among demand-driven theories is that a large-scale loss of confidence led to a sudden
reduction in consumption and investment spending. Once panic and deflation set in,
many people believed they could avoid further losses by keeping clear of the markets.
Holding money became profitable as prices dropped lower and a given amount of
money bought ever more goods, exacerbating the drop in demand.

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Authors of The Period and Their Masterpieces

-Thomas Eakins Cowperthwaite (The Gross Clinic or The Clinic of Dr. Gross)
Admired for its uncompromising realism, The Gross Clinic has an important place
documenting the history of medicine—both because it honors the emergence of surgery
as a healing profession. The painting is based on a surgery witnessed by Eakins, in
which Gross treated a young man for osteomyelitis of the femur.

-John Singer Sargent (Madame X or Portrait of Madame X) The model was an

American expatriate who married a French banker and became notorious in Parisian
high society for her beauty and rumored infidelities. She wore lavender powder and
prided herself on her appearance. The English-language term "professional beauty"
was used to refer to her and to a woman in general who uses personal skills to advance
herself socially.

-Mary Stevenson Cassatt (The Boating Party) The Boating Party depicts an unknown
woman, baby, and man in a sailboat. The boat has a canoe stern and has three thwarts.
The inside of the boat is described as yellow. It is an unusual painting in Cassatt's
œuvre. While it does show her familiar theme of a mother and child, most of her other
paintings are set in interiors or gardens. It is also one of her largest oil paintings.

- James Abbott McNeill Whistler (Whistler's Mother) Anna McNeill Whistler posed for
the painting while living in London with her son at Cheyne Walk, Chelsea. Several
unverifiable stories relate to the painting of the work; one is that Anna Whistler acted as
a replacement for another model who could not make the appointment. It is also said
that Whistler originally envisioned painting the model standing up, but that his mother
was too uncomfortable to pose standing for an extended period.

- Thomas Pollock Anschutz (The Ironworkers' Noontime) The painting depicts several
workers on their break in the yard of a foundry and is one of the most popular of
Anschutz’s paintings. Painted near Wheeling, West Virginia, it is conceived in a
naturalistic style featuring realistic anatomical depictions of men and boys similar to that
of Thomas Eakins, although Eakins never painted industrial subjects.

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- Winslow Homer (Prisoners from the Front) is a mid-19th-century painting by
American artist Winslow Homer. One of Homer's most notable early works, the painting
depicts a scene in which Confederate officers surrender to a Union officer during the
American Civil War. Homer's experience as a war correspondent likely contributed to
his rendering of the work.

- Julian Alden Weir (The Red Bridge) was painted by Weir as an impressionist work;
the artist had previously been a detractor of impressionism. The bridge depicted in the
painting was a then-new iron truss bridge built over the Shetucket River in Windham,
Connecticut. Weir initially viewed the bridge with distaste - it had replaced an older
covered bridge he was fond of - but eventually chose to paint a picture of it. According
to the Met, the painting is one of the few American impressionist paintings to refer to
industrialization.

- William Merritt Chase (At the Seaside) is a late 19th-century painting by American
artist William Merritt Chase. Done in oil on canvas, the painting depicts a seaside scene
set in Long Island, New York. The work is in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum
of Art.
Frank Weston Benson (Eleanor, Summer) depict his daughters outdoors at Benson's
summer home, Wooster Farm, on the island of North Haven, Maine.

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Conclusion

Realism was a cultural and artistic movement that influenced all fields of culture
and knowledge: literature, philosophy, painting. It was a current that bet on the return to
reality, to observe the world again without the veil that the romantics had imposed. We
must remember that this movement appeared as a response to Romanticism, a current
that placed us on more fantastic and unrealistic planes to present ourselves to
emotional characters far from reality.

With this work, we can see that during the Great Depression, which was also
known as the Crisis of 1929, it was a great global financial crisis that lasted during the
1930s, in the years before World War II.

Also, we can see the role of women and the black people during this period, the
problems of the Great Depression affected virtually every group of Americans. No group
was harder hit than African Americans, however. By 1932, approximately half of black
Americans were out of work. In some Northern cities, whites called for blacks to be fired
from any jobs as long as there were whites out of work.

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Bibliography
https://www.shmoop.com
https://www.britannica.com/
http://www.longwood.edu
https://saylordotorg.github.io/
https://study.com/
https://books.google.com
https://en.wikipedia.org
https://www.history.com

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