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Figure 30.1 HONORÉ DAUMIER, The Third-Class Carriage, ca. 1862. Oil on canvas, 253⁄4 � 351⁄2 in. A lower-class family, consisting of a grandmother, her daughter, and two children, are depicted with the candor and immediacy that typifies Daumier’s on-the-spot visual records of Parisian life.

“Show me an angel and I’ll paint one.” Courbet

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L O O K I N G A H E A D

The Global Dominion of the West

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miles of railway track crisscrossed Europe, linking the sources of raw materials—such as the coal mines of north- ern Germany’s Ruhr valley—to factories and markets. The second half of the nineteenth century saw the unification of both Italy and Germany, the modernization of Russia, and the transformation of the United States into an eco- nomic powerhouse, fueled by abundant resources of iron ore and coal. Across the vast continent of North America railroads facilitated rapid economic and political expan- sion. As Western nations colonized other parts of the globe, they took with them the railroad and other agents of indus- trialization.

Before the end of the nineteenth century, Western tech- nology included the internal combustion engine, the tele- graph, the telephone, the camera, and—perhaps most significant for the everyday life of human beings—electricity. Processed steel, aluminum, the steam turbine, and the pneu- matic tire—all products of the 1880s—further altered the texture of life in the industrialized world. These technologies, along with such lethal instruments of war as the fully auto- matic “machine gun,” gave Europe clear advantages over other parts of the globe and facilitated Western imperialism in less industrially developed areas. In the enterprise of empire building, the industrialized nations of Britain, France, Belgium, Germany, Italy, and the United States took the lead.

Colonialism and the New Imperialism The history of European expansion into Asia, Africa, and other parts of the globe dates back at least to the Renaissance. Between approximately 1500 and 1800, Euro- peans established trading outposts in Africa, China, and India. But not until after 1800, in the wake of the Industrial Revolution, did European imperialism transform the terri- tories of foreign peoples into outright colonial possessions. Driven by the need for raw materials and markets for their manufactured goods, and aided immeasurably by their advanced military technology, the industrial nations quick- ly colonized or controlled vast parts of Asia, Africa, and Latin America. So massive was this effort that, by the end of the nineteenth century, the West had established economic, political, and cultural dominion over much of the world.

European imperialists defended the economic exploita- tion of weaker countries with the view, inspired by social Darwinism, that in politics, as in nature, the strongest or “most fit” prevailed in the “struggle for survival.” Since Caucasians had proved themselves the “most fit,” they argued, it was the white population’s “burden” to care for, protect, and rule over the “less fit” nonwhite peoples of the earth. Britain, the leader in European industrialization, spearheaded the thrust of colonization.

The self-appointed mission of Western rule in less tech- nologically developed countries is best expressed in a poem by one of the most popular British writers of his time, Rudyard Kipling (1864–1936). Three verses of his poem “The White Man’s Burden” sum up two of the key imperi- alist notions: racial superiority and the spirit of paternal and heroic deliverance.

Nations have long drawn their strength and identity from their

economic and military superiority over other nations. But during

the late nineteenth century, nationalism and the quest for

economic supremacy took on a more aggressive form. Fueled by

advancing industrialization, Western nations not only competed

among themselves for economic and political pre-eminence, but

also sought control of markets throughout the world. The

combined effects of nationalism, industrialization, and the conse-

quent phenomena of imperialism and colonialism influenced the

materialist direction of modern Western history and that of the

world beyond the West as well.

It was in this climate that Realism emerged. As a cultural

movement, Realism reflected popular demands for greater access

to material wealth and well-being. In place of nostalgia and the

sentimental embrace of the Romantic past, Realists manifested a

renewed sense of social consciousness and a commitment to

contemporary issues of class and gender. Unlike the Romantics,

whose passionate subjectivity often alienated them from society,

Realists regarded themselves as men and woman “of their time.”

As a style, Realism called for an objective and unidealized

assessment of everyday life. Artists, writers, and composers

attacked the reigning stereotypes and pursued scientifically

based fidelity to nature. Lithography and photography encouraged

the Realist sensibility. Advances in science and technology

facilitated increased mobility and transformed urban life. The city,

with its monumental skyscrapers and its bustling mix of people,

became the site of new ideas and cultural norms that propelled

the West toward Modernism.

Advancing Industrialization Industrialization provided the economic and military basis for the West’s rise to dominion over the rest of the world. This process is well illustrated in the history of the railroad, the most important technological phenomenon of the early nineteenth century because it facilitated economic and political expansion. It was made possible by the combined technologies of steam power, coal, and iron.

The first all-iron rails were forged in Britain in 1789, but it was not until 1804 that the British built their first steam railway locomotive, and several more decades until “iron horses” became a major mode of transportation. The drive to build national railways spread, encompassing Europe and the vast continent of North America. By 1850, 23,000

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READING 30.1

Q To whom might the terms “half-devil” and “half-child” apply?

Q How is the “White Man” in this poem described?

ALASKA (U.S.)

C A N A D A

U N I T E D S TAT E S

GREENLAND (DENMARK)

ICELAND (DENMARK)

DENMARK GERMAN EMPIRE

AUSTRIA- HUNGARY

GREAT BRITAIN

SW ED

EN

NETH.

BEL.

ITALY

GREECE OTTOMAN EMPIRE

PORTUGAL

MOROCCO

LIBERIA

ANGOLA

TRIPOLI

EGYPT

ARABIA

C H I N A

R U S S I A N E M P I R E

INDIA BURMA

SIAM

PERSIA

AFGHANISTAN KOREA

JAPAN

TAIWAN (JAPAN)

FRENCH INDOCHINA PHILIPPINE ISLANDS

PACIFIC ISLANDS (MULTIPLE COLONIAL

POWERS; see inset)

DUTCH EAST INDIES

A U S T R A L I A

NEW ZEALAND

ETHIOPIA

BRITISH EAST AFRICA GERMAN

EAST AFRICA

MADAGASCAR

M OZ

AM BI

QU E

GERMAN SOUTH-WEST

AFRICA

FRANCE

FRENCH

WEST AFRICA ANGLO-

EGYPTIAN SUDAN

UNION OF SOUTH AFRICA

BELGIAN CONGO

SPAIN

MEXICO CUBA

VENEZUELA

COLOMBIA

ECUADOR

PERU

CHILE

BOLIVIA

PARAGUAY

URUGUAY

BRAZIL

A R

G E N

TIN A

PUERTO RICO

E QU

AT O R

IA L

A FR

IC A

MANCHURIA

SENEGAL

FR EN

CH

CONGO

M E L A N E S I A

M I C R O N E S I A

P O

L Y

N E

S I

A

PA C I F I C I S L A N D S

P A C I F I C

O C E A N

P A C I F I C

O C E A N

AT L A N T I C

O C E A N

AT L A N T I C

O C E A N

I N D I A N O C E A N

ARABIAN SEA

CASPIAN SEA BLACK

SEA

RED SEA

HUDSON BAY

GULF OF MEXICO

CARIBBEAN SEA BAY OF BENGAL

SOUTH CHINA SEA

MEDITERRANEAN SEA

Equator Equator

Key

Belgium

France

German Empire

Great Britain

Italy

The Netherlands

Portugal

Russian Empire

Spain

United States

Other independent states

280 CHAPTER 30 Industry, Empire, and the Realist Style

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From Kipling’s “The White Man’s Burden” (1899)

Take up the White Man’s burden— 1 Send forth the best ye breed—

Go bind your sons to exile To serve your captive’s need;

To wait in heavy harness, 5 On fluttered folk and wide—

Your new-caught, sullen peoples, Half-devil and half-child.

. . . . . . . . . .

Take up the White Man’s Burden— Ye dare not stoop to less— 10

Nor call too loud on Freedom To cloak your weariness;

By all ye cry or whisper, By all ye leave to do,

The silent, sullen peoples 15 Shall weigh your Gods and you.

Take up the White Man’s burden— Have done with childish days—

The lightly proffered laurel, The easy, ungrudged praise. 20

Comes now, to search your manhood

Through all the thankless years, Cold, edged with dear-bought wisdom,

The judgment of your peers!

Kipling dedicated “The White Man’s Burden” to the United States to commemorate the American annexation of the Philippines in 1899, but the pattern for colonialism had been fixed by the British. In the race for overseas colonies, Britain led the way. The first major landmass to be subjugated was India, where commercial imperialism led to conquest, and finally, to British rule in 1858. In less than a century, the nation had established control over so much territory across the globe that it could legitimately claim that “the sun never set” on the British Empire (Map 30.1).

The most dramatic example of the new imperialism was in Africa. In 1880, European nations controlled only 10 percent of the continent; but by 1900 all of Africa, save Ethiopia and Liberia, had been carved up by European powers, who introduced new models of political and economic authority, often with little regard for native

Map 30.1 European Colonies and Independent Nations in 1900. For many of the “independent states,” such as Persia and China, the political and economic influence of the West presented an often destabilizing threat.

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beverage. The Chinese had used narcotic opium for cen- turies, but as a result of the new arrangement large quan- tities of the drug—harvested in India—were exported directly to China. In exchange, the Chinese shipped tea to Britain. Opium addiction became an increasingly severe social problem in China. Following the opium-related death of the Chinese emperor’s son, the Chinese made every effort to restrict the importation of the drug and stem the activities of opium smugglers (Figure 30.2). British merchants refused to cooperate. The result was a series of wars between Britain and China (the Opium Wars, 1839– 1850) that brought China to its knees. In 1839, just prior to the first of these wars, the Chinese com- missioner Lin Zexu (1785–1850) sent a detailed communi- cation to the British queen pleading for Britain’s assistance in ending opium smuggling and trade. Whether or not Queen Victoria ever read Lin’s letter is unknown, but the document remains a literary tribute to the futile efforts of a great Asian civilization to achieve peace through diplo- macy in the age of imperialism.

From Lin Zexu’s Letter of Advice to Queen Victoria (1839)

. . .The kings of your honorable country by a tradition handed 1 down from generation to generation have always been noted for their politeness and submissiveness. We have read your successive tributary memorials saying, “In general our countrymen who go to trade in China have always received His Majesty the Emperor’s gracious treatment and equal justice,” and so on. Privately we are delighted with the way in which the honorable rulers of your country deeply understand the grand principles and are grateful for the Celestial grace. For this reason the Celestial Court in soothing those from afar has 10 redoubled its polite and kind treatment. The profit from trade has been enjoyed by them continuously for two hundred years. This is the source from which your country has become known for its wealth.

But after a long period of commercial intercourse, there appear among the crowd of barbarians both good persons and bad, unevenly. Consequently there are those who smuggle opium to seduce the Chinese people and so cause the spread of the poison to all provinces. Such persons who only care to profit themselves, and disregard their harm to others, are not 20

populations. The partitioning of Africa began in 1830 with the French conquest of Algeria (in the north). In the decades thereafter, Belgium laid claim to the Congo, and the Dutch and the British fought each other for control of South Africa—both nations savagely wresting land from the Zulu and other African peoples.

A century-long series of brutal wars with the Asante Empire in West Africa left the British in control of the Gold Coast, while the conquest of the Sudan in 1898 saw 11,000 Muslims killed by British machine guns (the British themselves lost twenty-eight men). Profit-seeking European companies leased large tracts of African land from which native goods such as rubber, diamonds, and gold might be extracted; and increasingly Africans were forced to work on white-owned plantations and mines. The seeds of racism and mutual contempt were sown in this troubled era, an era that predictably spawned modern liberation movements, such as those calling for pan- Islamic opposition to colonialism (see chapter 36).

By the mid nineteenth century, the United States (itself a colony of Britain until 1776) had joined the scramble for economic control. America forced Japan to open its doors to Western trade in 1853. This event, which marked the end of Japan’s seclusion, ushered in the overthrow of the Tokugawa regime (see chapter 21) and marked the beginning of Japanese modernization under Meiji rule (1858–1912). In the Western hemisphere, the United States established its own overseas empire.

North Americans used the phrase “manifest destiny” to describe and justify a policy of unlimited expansion into the American West, Mexico, and elsewhere. The end result was the United States’ acquisition of more than half of Mexico, control of the Philippines and Cuba, and a dominant posi- tion in the economies of the politically unstable nations of Latin America. Although Westerners rationalized their militant expansionism by contending that they were “civilizing” the backward peoples of the globe, in fact their diplomatic policies contributed to undermining cultural traditions, to humiliating and often enfeebling the civiliza- tions they dominated, and to creating conditions of eco- nomic dependency that would last well into the twentieth century (see chapter 36).

China and the West The nineteenth century marked the end of China’s long history as an independent civilization. The European powers, along with Russia and Japan, carved out

trade concessions in China. Subsequent trade policies, which took advantage of China’s traditionally negative view of profit-taking, delayed any potential Chinese initiative toward industrialization.

More devastating still was the triangular trade pattern in opium and tea between India, China, and Britain. Established by Britain in the early nineteenth century, trade policy worked to stem the tide of British gold and silver that flowed to China to buy tea, a favorite British

1844 Samuel Morse (American) transmits the first telegraph message

1866 the first successful transatlantic telegraph cable is laid

1869 the first American transcontinental railroad is completed

1875 Alexander Graham Bell (Scottish) produces the first func- tional telephone in America

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Q What “balance of trade” is described in this letter?

Q To what extent is Lin’s letter an appeal to conscience?

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tolerated by the laws of heaven and are unanimously hated by human beings. His Majesty the Emperor, upon hearing of this, is in a towering rage. He has especially sent me, his commissioner, to come to Kwangtung, and together with the governor-general and governor jointly to investigate and settle this matter. . . .

We find that your country is [some 20,000 miles] from China. Yet there are barbarian ships that strive to come here for trade for the purpose of making a great profit. The wealth of China is used to profit the barbarians. That is to say, the great profit 30 made by barbarians is all taken from the rightful share of China. By what right do they then in return use the poisonous drug to injure the Chinese people? Even though the barbarians may not necessarily intend to do us harm, yet in coveting profit to an extreme, they have no regard for injuring others. Let us ask, where is your conscience? I have heard that the smoking of opium is very strictly forbidden by your country; that is because the harm caused by opium is clearly understood. Since it is not permitted to do harm to your own country, then even less should you let it be passed on to the harm of other 40 countries—how much less to China! Of all that China exports to foreign countries, there is not a single thing which is not beneficial to people: they are of benefit when eaten, or of benefit when used, or of benefit when resold: all are beneficial. Is there a single article from China which has done any harm to foreign countries? Take tea and rhubarb, for example; the foreign countries cannot get along for a single day without them. If China cuts off these benefits with no sympathy for those who are to suffer, then what can the

barbarians rely upon to keep themselves alive? Moreover the 50 [textiles] of foreign countries cannot be woven unless they obtain Chinese silk. If China, again, cuts off this beneficial export, what profit can the barbarians expect to make? As for other foodstuffs, beginning with candy, ginger, cinnamon, and so forth, and articles for use, beginning with silk, satin, chinaware, and so on, all the things that must be had by foreign countries are innumerable. On the other hand, articles coming from the outside to China can only be used as toys. We can take them or get along without them. Since they are not needed by China, what difficulty would there be if we closed 60

the frontier and stopped the trade? Nevertheless our Celestial Court lets tea, silk, and other goods be shipped without limit and circulated everywhere without begrudging it in the slightest. This is for no other reason but to share the benefit with the people of the whole world.

The goods from China carried away by your country not only supply your own consumption and use, but also can be divided up and sold to other countries, producing a triple profit. Even if you do not sell opium, you still have this threefold profit. How can you bear to go further, selling products injurious to others 70

in order to fulfil your insatiable desire? Suppose there were people from another country who

carried opium for sale to England and seduced your people into buying and smoking it; certainly your honorable ruler would deeply hate it and be bitterly aroused. We have heard heretofore that your honorable ruler is kind and benevolent. Naturally you would not wish to give unto others what you yourself do not want. We have also heard that the ships coming to Canton have all had regulations promulgated and given to them in which it is stated that it is not permitted to carry contraband 80

goods. This indicates that the administrative orders of your honorable rule have been originally strict and clear. Only because the trading ships are numerous, heretofore perhaps they have not been examined with care. Now after this communication has been dispatched and you have clearly understood the strictness of the prohibitory laws of the Celestial Court, certainly you will not let your subjects dare again to violate the law. . . .

Now we have set up regulations governing the Chinese people. He who sells opium shall receive the death penalty and 90

he who smokes it also the death penalty. Now consider this: if the barbarians do not bring opium, then how can the Chinese people resell it, and how can they smoke it? The fact is that the wicked barbarians beguile the Chinese people into a death trap. How then can we grant life only to these barbarians? He who takes the life of even one person still has to atone for it with his own life; yet is the harm done by opium limited to the taking of one life only? Therefore in the new regulations, in regard to those barbarians who bring opium to China, the penalty is fixed at decapitation or strangulation. This is what is 100 called getting rid of a harmful thing on behalf of mankind. . . .

Figure 30.2 Cartoon from a Paris newspaper, date unknown. The inscription reads: “I tell you that you have to buy this opium immediately so that you can poison yourself; and then you will buy a lot of tea to digest our beefsteaks in a comfortable manner.”

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To the European mind, the benefits of Western science, technology, and religion far outweighed the negative impact of colonialism. But the “gift” of progress was received in China with extreme caution and increasing isolationism. No dramatically new developments took place in the arts of China (nor, for that matter, in India) during the nineteenth century; in general, there was a marked decline in both productivity and originality. The full consequences of Western colonialism in Asia and elsewhere, however, would not become clear until the twentieth century.

Social and Economic Realities In global terms, advancing industrialization polarized the nations of the world into the technologically advanced— the “haves”—and the technologically backward—the “have-nots.” But industrialization had an equally profound impact within the industrialized nations themselves: it changed the nature and character of human work, altered relationships between human beings, and affected the nat- ural environment.

Prior to 1800, the practice of accumulating capital for industrial production and commercial profit played only a limited role in European societies. But after this date, indus- trial production, enhanced by advances in machine tech- nology, came to be controlled by a relatively small group of middle-class entrepreneurs (those who organize, manage, and assume the risks of a business) and by an even smaller number of capitalists (those who provide money to finance business).

Industrialization created wealth, but that wealth was con- centrated in the hands of a small minority of the population.

The vast majority of men and women lived hard lives sup- ported by meager wages—the only thing they had to sell was their labor. Factory laborers, including women and children, worked under dirty and dangerous conditions for long hours—sometimes up to sixteen hours per day (Figure 30.3). In the 1830s almost half of London’s funerals were for children under ten years old. Mass production brought more (and cheaper) goods to more people more rapidly, ultimate- ly raising the standard of living for industrialized nations. But European industrialization and the unequal distribution of wealth contributed to a widening gap between capitalist entrepreneurs—the “haves” of society—and the working classes—the “have-nots.” In 1846, the British statesman Benjamin Disraeli (1804–1881) described Britain under the rule of Queen Victoria (1819–1901) as two nations: the nation of the poor and the nation of the rich.

Beginning in 1848, the lower classes protested against these conditions with sporadic revolts. Economic unrest prevailed not only in the cities but in rural areas as well. The French population was two-thirds rural, largely poor, and often reduced to backbreaking labor (see Figure 30.11). Wealthy landowners in some parts of Europe treated their agricultural laborers as slaves. In America, until after the Civil War (1861–1865), most of those who worked the great Southern plantations were, in fact, African-American slaves. Between 1855 and 1861, there were almost 500 peasant uprisings across Europe (Figure 30.4). Reform, however, was slow in coming. Outside of England—in Germany, for instance—trade unions and social legislation to benefit the working classes did not appear until 1880 or later, while in Russia economic reform would require noth- ing less than a full-scale revolution (see chapter 34).

The process of colonization had dramatic effects on the Islamic world. Muslims in the Middle East, India, Arabia, Malaya, and much of Africa regarded the European efforts at colonization as an assault on their cultures and their religious faith. Europeans, who tended to see premodern agrarian societies as backward, looked upon “Orientals” (a term that lumped together all Eastern people) as inherently inferior. Unlike Japan or China, which had never been colonized, and were therefore able to retain many of their economic and political traditions, Islamic states were often debilitated and humiliated by dependency on the West.

European colonization of the Islamic world began in the late eighteenth-century. Napoleon had invaded the Near East in 1798, bringing with him a corpus of European literature and a printing press with Arabic type. Despite the failure of Napoleon’s campaign in Egypt, the country made ambitious efforts to modernize. The failure of these efforts, however, which left Egypt bankrupt, led ultimately to British occupation.

A second instance of the Western presence in Islamic lands occurred in Persia (renamed Iran in 1935). Strategically located in the Middle East, Persia was forced into wars with Britain and Russia, whose rival interests in Middle Eastern territory threatened the autonomy of the Qajar dynasty (1794–1925). In the late nineteenth century the Persian reformer Aqa Khan Kirmani (1853–1896) urged Muslims to adopt a program of Western-style modernization, to replace the sharia with a modern secular code of law and to institute parliamentary representation. Iran’s first modern college system would emerge in 1848. Others throughout the Islamic world, however, opposed the intrusion of the West and Western ways of life as a threat to Muslim traditions and religious ideals (see chapter 36). One of the most significant differences involved the political gulf between time-honored Islamic theocracy and Western representative democracy. Such issues have continued to trouble the world well into our own time.

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Among nineteenth-century Euro- pean intellectuals there developed a serious debate over how to address the social results of indus- trial capitalism. Matters of social reform were central to the devel-

opment of ideologies that dictated specific policies of polit- ical and economic action. Traditional conservatives stressed the importance of maintaining order and perpetuating conventional power structures and religious authority. Liberals, on the other hand, whose ideas were rooted in Enlightenment theories of human progress and perfectibil-

ity (see chapter 24), supported gradual reform through enlightened legal systems, constitutional guarantees, and a generally equitable distribution of material benefits. The British liber- al Jeremy Bentham (1748–1832) advanced the doctrine of utilitarianism, which held that governments should work to secure “the greatest happiness for the greatest number of people”; while Bentham’s student, John Stuart Mill (1806–1873), expounded the ideology of social liberalism.

Mill emphasized freedom of thought over equality and personal happiness. He held that individuals must be free to direct their own lives,

Figure 30.3 ADOLPH FRIEDRICH ERDMANN VON MENZEL, Iron Mill (Das Eisenwalzwerk—Moderne Zyklopen), 1875. Oil on canvas, 5 ft. 1⁄4 in. � 8 ft. 35⁄8 in.

Figure 30.4 KATHE KOLLWITZ, March of the Weavers, from “The Weavers Cycle,” 1897. Etching, 83⁄8 � 115⁄8 in. Kollwitz (1867–1945) was a German social realist, a pacifist, and a feminist. The series of prints known as “The Weavers” illustrates a play by Gerhart Hauptmann that dramatized the failed revolt of Silesian weavers in 1842. A sculptor as well as a printmaker, Kollwitz went on to create searing protest images of the two world wars.

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but, recognizing the disadvantages that might result from free competition, he argued that the state must protect its weaker members by acting to regulate the economy where private initiative failed to do so. Mill feared that the gener- al will—the will of unenlightened, propertyless masses— might itself prove tyrannical and oppressive. In his classic statement of the liberal creed, On Liberty (1859), he con- cluded that “as soon as any part of a person’s conduct affects prejudicially the interests of others, society has jurisdiction over it.” For Mill, as for most nineteenth-century liberals, government was obliged to intervene to safeguard and pro- tect the wider interests of society.

Such theories met with strenuous opposition from European socialists. For the latter, neither conservatism nor liberalism responded adequately to current social and eco- nomic inequities. Socialists attacked capitalism as unjust; they called for the common ownership and administration of the means of production and distribution in the interest of a public good. Society, according to the socialists, should operate entirely in the interest of the needs of the people, communally and cooperatively, rather than competitively. The utopian socialist Pierre Joseph Proudhon (1809–1865) envisioned a society free of state control, while the more extreme anarchists favored the complete dissolution of the state and the elimination of the force of law.

The Radical Views of Marx and Engels The German theorist Karl Marx (1818–1883) agreed with the socialists that bourgeois capitalism corrupted humanity, but his theory of social reform was even more radical, for it preached violent revolution that would both destroy the old order and usher in a new society. Marx began his career by studying law and philosophy at the university of Berlin. Moving to Paris, he became a lifelong friend of the social

scientist and journalist Friedrich Engels (1820–1895). Marx and Engels shared a similar critical attitude in respect of the effects of European industrial capitalism. By 1848 they completed the Communist Manifesto, a short treatise published as the platform of a workers’ association called the Communist League. The Manifesto, which still remains the “guidebook” of Marxist socialism, demanded the “forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions” and the liberation of the proletariat, or working class. Marx offered an even more detailed criticism of the free enter- prise system in Das Kapital, a work on which he toiled for thirty years.

The Communist Manifesto is a sweeping condemnation of the effects of capitalism on the individual and society at large. It opens with a dramatic claim: “The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.” It further contends that capitalism concentrates wealth in the hands of the few, providing great luxuries for some, while creating an oppressed and impoverished proletariat. The psychological effects of such circumstances, it holds, are devastating: bourgeois capitalism alienates workers from their own productive efforts and robs individuals of their basic humanity. Finally, the Manifesto calls for revolu- tion by which workers will seize the instruments of capital- istic production and abolish private ownership.

The social theories of Marx and Engels had enormous practical and theoretical influence. They not only supplied a justification for lower-class revolt, but they brought atten- tion to the role of economics in the larger life of a society. Marx perceived human history in exclusively materialistic terms, arguing that the conditions under which one earned a living determined all other aspects of life: social, political, and cultural. A student of Hegel (see chapter 27), he viewed history as a struggle between “haves” (thesis) and

In On Liberty, John Stuart Mill examined the nature of freedom, advocating individual rights over those of the state. He argued, however, that it was the legitimate duty of government to limit the exercise of any freedom that might harm other members of the community. Wrestling with key issues concerning limits to the authority of the state with regard to the individual, he asked, “What, then, is the rightful limit to the sovereignty of the individual over himself? Where does the authority of society begin? How much of human life should be assigned to individuality, and how much to society?”

Enlarging more generally on these questions, Mill’s American contemporary Abraham Lincoln (1809–1865) observed, “The legitimate object of government is to do for a community of people whatever they need to have done, but can not do at all, or can not

so well do for themselves in their separate and individual capacities.” Is providing for the needs of the community—much like providing protection for its citizens—the function of the government? Suppose the political process of providing for these needs (like the obligation to protect the individual) comes at the cost of limiting the absolute freedom of others?

To one degree or another, most of the great political divisions emerging from nineteenth-century social thought proceeded from these questions. They are still debated today, mainly in the opposing political ideologies of liberalism and conservatism. Contemporary liberals would incline toward a relatively greater use of government authority in serving the needs of society. Conservatives would incline toward a relatively lesser exercise of such control.

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“have-nots” (antithesis) that would resolve in the synthesis of a classless society. From Hegel, Marx also derived the utopian idea of the perfectibility of the state. The end prod- uct of dialectical change, argued Marx, was a society free of class antagonisms and the ultimate dissolution of the state itself.

Although Marx and Engels failed to anticipate capital- ism’s potential to spread rather than to limit wealth, their manifesto gave sharp focus to prevailing class differences and to the actual condition of the European economy of their time. Despite the fact that they provided no explana- tion of how their classless society might function, their apocalyptic call to revolution would be heeded in the decades to come. Oddly enough, communist revolutions would occur in some of the least industrialized countries of the world, such as Russia and China, rather than in the most industrialized countries, as Marx and Engels expect- ed. Elsewhere, communists would operate largely through nonrevolutionary vehicles, such as labor unions and politi- cal organizations, to initiate better working conditions, higher wages, and greater social equality. But the anticom- munist revolutions and the collapse of the communist gov- ernment in the Soviet Union in the late twentieth century reveal mounting frustration with the failure of most Communist regimes to raise economic standards among the masses. Although the Manifesto did not accurately predict the economic destiny of the modern world, the treatise remains a classic expression of nineteenth-century social consciousness.

From Marx’s and Engels’ Communist Manifesto (1848)

I Bourgeois and Proletarians1

The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class 1 struggles.

Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guild-master2 and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight, a fight that each time ended either in a revolutionary reconstitution of society at large or in the common ruin of the contending classes.

In the earlier epochs of history we find almost everywhere a complicated arrangement of society into various orders, a 10

manifold gradation of social rank. In ancient Rome we have patricians, knights, plebeians, slaves; in the Middle Ages, feudal lords, vassals, guild-masters, journeymen, apprentices, serfs; in almost all of these classes, again, subordinate gradations.

The modern bourgeois society that has sprouted from the ruins of feudal society has not done away with class antagonisms. It has but established new classes, new conditions of oppression, new forms of struggle in place of the old ones. 20

Our epoch, the epoch of the bourgeoisie, possesses, however, this distinctive feature: it has simplified the class antagonisms. Society as a whole is splitting up more and more into two great hostile camps, into two great classes directly facing each other: Bourgeoisie and Proletariat.

From the serfs of the Middle Ages sprang the chartered burghers of the earliest towns. From these burgesses the first elements of the bourgeoisie were developed.

The discovery of America, the rounding of the Cape, opened up fresh ground for the rising bourgeoisie. The East Indian and 30 Chinese markets, the colonization of America, trade with the colonies, the increase in the means of exchange and in commodities generally, gave to commerce, to navigation, to industry, an impulse never before known, and thereby, to the revolutionary element in the tottering feudal society, a rapid development.

The feudal system of industry, under which industrial production was monopolized by closed guilds, now no longer sufficed for the growing wants of the new markets. The manufacturing system took its place. The guild-masters were 40 pushed on one side by the manufacturing middle class; division of labor between the different corporate guilds vanished in the face of division of labor in each single workshop.

Meantime the markets kept ever growing, the demand ever rising. Even manufacture no longer sufficed. Thereupon, steam and machinery revolutionized industrial production. The place of manufacture was taken by the giant, Modern Industry, the place of the industrial middle class by industrial millionaires—the leaders of whole industrial armies, the modern bourgeois.

Modern industry has established the world market, for which 50 the discovery of America paved the way. This market has given an immense development to commerce, to navigation, to communication by land. This development has, in its turn, reacted on the extension of industry; and in proportion as industry, commerce, navigation, railways extended, in the same proportion the bourgeoisie developed, increased its capital, and pushed into the background every class handed down from the Middle Ages.

1839 Charles Goodyear (American) produces industrial- strength rubber

1846 Elias Howe (American) patents an interlocking-stitch sewing machine

1866 the first dynamo, capable of generating massive quantities of electricity, is produced

1876 Nikolaus Otto (German) produces a workable internal-combustion engine

1 By bourgeoisie is meant the class of modern capitalists, owners of the means of social production and employers of wage labor. By proletariat, the class of modern wage-laborers who, having no means of production of their own, are reduced to selling their labor power in order to live. [1888.]

2 Guild-master, that is, a full member of a guild, a master within, not a head of a guild. [1888.]

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We see, therefore, how the modern bourgeoisie is itself the product of a long course of development, of a series of 60 revolutions in the modes of production and of exchange.

Each step in the development of the bourgeoisie was accompanied by a corresponding political advance of that class. An oppressed class under the sway of the feudal nobility, an armed and self-governing association in the medieval commune,3 here independent urban republic (as in Italy and Germany), there taxable “third estate” of the monarchy (as in France), afterward, in the period of manufacture proper, serving either the semi-feudal or the absolute monarchy as a counterpoise against the nobility, and, in fact, cornerstone of 70

the great monarchies in general, the bourgeoisie has at last, since the establishment of Modern Industry and of the world market, conquered for itself, in the modern representative State, exclusive political sway. The executive of the modern State is but a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie.

The bourgeoisie, historically, has played a most revolutionary part.

The bourgeoisie, wherever it has got the upper hand, has put an end to all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations. It has 80 pitilessly torn asunder the motley feudal ties that bound man to his “natural superiors,” and has left remaining no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, than callous “cash payment.” It has drowned the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervor, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism, in the icy water of egotistical calculation. It has resolved personal worth into exchange value, and in place of the numberless indefeasible chartered freedoms has set up that single, unconscionable freedom— Free Trade. In one word, for exploitation, veiled by religious 90 and political illusions, it has substituted naked, shameless, direct, brutal exploitation.

The bourgeoisie has stripped of its halo every occupation hitherto honored and looked up to with reverent awe. It has converted the physician, the lawyer, the priest, the poet, the man of science, into its paid wage-laborers.

The bourgeoisie has torn away from the family its sentimental veil, and has reduced the family relation to a mere money relation. . . .

The bourgeoisie, by the rapid improvement of all instruments 100 of production, by the immensely facilitated means of communication, draws all, even the most barbarian, nations into civilization. The cheap prices of its commodities are the heavy artillery with which it batters down all Chinese walls, with which it forces the barbarians’ intensely obstinate hatred of foreigners to capitulate. It compels all nations, on pain of extinction, to adopt the bourgeois mode of production; it compels them to introduce what it calls civilization into their midst, i.e., to become bourgeois themselves. In a word, it

creates a world after its own image. 110 The bourgeoisie has subjected the country to the rule of the

towns. It has created enormous cities, has greatly increased the urban population as compared with the rural, and has thus rescued a considerable part of the population from the idiocy of rural life. Just as it has made the country dependent on the towns, so it has made barbarian and semi-barbarian countries dependent on the civilized ones, nations of peasants on nations of bourgeois, the East on the West.

The bourgeoisie keeps doing away more and more with the scattered state of the population, of the means of production, 120 and of property. It has agglomerated population, centralized means of production, and has concentrated property in a few hands. The necessary consequence of this was political centralization. Independent or but loosely connected provinces with separate interests, laws, governments and systems of taxation became lumped together into one nation, with one government, one code of laws, one national class interest, one frontier and one customs tariff.

The bourgeoisie during its rule of scarce one hundred years has created more massive and more colossal productive forces 130 than have all preceding generations together. Subjection of nature’s forces to man, machinery, application of chemistry to industry and agriculture, steam navigation, railways, electric telegraphs, clearing of whole continents for cultivation, canalization of rivers, whole populations conjured out of the ground—what earlier century had even a presentiment that such productive forces slumbered in the lap of social labor? . . .

But not only has the bourgeoisie forged the weapons that bring death to itself; it has also called into existence the men who are to wield those weapons—the modern working class, 140 the proletarians.

In proportion as the bourgeoisie, i.e., capital, is developed, in the same proportion is the proletariat, the modern working class, developed—a class of laborers who live only as long as they find work, and who find work only as long as their labor increases capital. These laborers, who must sell themselves piecemeal, are a commodity like every other article of commerce, and are consequently exposed to all the vicissitudes of competition, to all the fluctuations of the market.

Owing to the extensive use of machinery and to division of 150 labor, the work of the proletarians has lost all individual character and, consequently, all charm for the workman. He becomes an appendage of the machine, and it is only the most simple, most monotonous, and most easily acquired knack that is required of him. . . .

Modern industry has converted the little workshop of the patriarchal master into the great factory of the industrial capitalist. Masses of laborers, crowded into the factory, are organized like soldiers. As privates of the industrial army they are placed under the command of a perfect hierarchy of 160 officers and sergeants. Not only are they slaves of the bourgeois class and of the bourgeois State; they are daily and hourly enslaved by the machine, by the overseer and, above all, by the individual bourgeois manufacturer himself. The more openly this despotism proclaims gain to be its end and aim, the more petty, the more hateful and the more embittering it is.

The less the skill and exertion of strength implied in manual

3 “Commune” was the name taken in France by the nascent towns even before they had conquered from their feudal lords and masters local self-government and political rights as the “Third Estate.” Generally speaking, for the economic development of the bourgeoisie, England is here taken as the typical country; for its political development, France. [1888.]

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labor, in other words, the more modern industry becomes developed, the more is the labor of men superseded by that of women. Differences of age and sex no longer have any 170 distinctive social validity for the working class. All are instruments of labor, more or less expensive to use, according to their age and sex.

No sooner is the exploitation of the laborer by the manufacturer so far at an end that he receives his wages in cash, than he is set upon by the other portions of the bourgeoisie, the landlord, and shopkeeper, the pawnkeeper, etc. . .

II Proletarians and Communists . . . The Communist revolution is the most radical rupture with traditional property relations; no wonder that its development 180 involves the most radical rupture with traditional ideas.

But let us have done with the bourgeois objections to Communism.

We have seen above that the first step in the revolution by the working class is to raise the proletariat to the position of ruling class, to win the battle of democracy.

The proletariat will use its political supremacy to wrest, by degrees, all capital from the bourgeoisie, to centralize all instruments of production in the hands of the State, i.e., of the proletariat organized as the ruling class; and to increase the 190 total of productive forces as rapidly as possible. . . .

III Position of the Communists . . . The Communists disdain to conceal their views and aims. They openly declare that their ends can be attained only by the forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions. Let the ruling classes tremble at a Communistic revolution. The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win.

WORKING MEN OF ALL COUNTRIES, UNITE!

Mill and Women’s Rights While Marx and Engels criticized a society that made middle-class women “mere instrument[s] of production,” Mill described women of all classes as the unwilling subjects of more powerful males. In the treatise The Subjection of Women, Mill condemned the legal subordina- tion of one sex to the other as objectively “wrong in itself, and . . . one of the chief hindrances to human improve- ment.” Mill’s optimism concerning the unbounded poten- tial for social change—a hallmark of liberalism—may have been shortsighted, for women would not obtain voting rights in Britain until 1928.

In the United States, the first women’s college—Mount Holyoke—was founded at South Hadley, Massachusetts, in 1836; and in 1848, at Seneca Falls in upstate New York, American feminists, led by Elizabeth Cady Stanton (1815– 1902) and Susan B. Anthony (1820–1906), issued the first of many declarations that demanded female equality in all areas of life.

The rights of women had been an issue addressed in the literature of feminists from Christine de Pisan to Condorcet and Mary Wollstonecraft (see chapter 24), but nowhere was the plight of women more eloquently treated than in Mill’s essay. Mill compared the subjection of women to that of other subject classes in the history of culture. But his most original contribution was his analysis of the male/female relationship and his explanation of how that relationship differed from that of master and slave.

From Mill’s The Subjection of Women (1869)

All causes, social and natural, combine to make it unlikely that 1 women should be collectively rebellious to the power of men. They are so far in a position different from all other subject classes that their masters require something more from them than actual service. Men do not want solely the obedience of women, they want their sentiments. All men, except the most brutish, desire to have, in the woman most nearly connected with them, not a forced slave but a willing one, not a slave merely, but a favorite. They have therefore put everything in

practice to enslave their minds. The masters of all other slaves 10 rely, for maintaining obedience, on fear, either fear of themselves, or religious fears. The masters of women wanted more than simple obedience, and they turned the whole force of education to effect their purpose. All women are brought up from the very earliest years in the belief that their ideal of character is the very opposite to that of men; not self-will and government by self-control, but submission and yielding to the control of others. All the moralities tell them that it is the duty of women and all the current sentimentalities that it is their nature to live for others, to make complete abnegation of 20 themselves, and to have no life but in their affections. And by their affections are meant the only ones they are allowed to have—those to the men with whom they are connected, or to the children who constitute an additional and indefeasible tie between them and a man. When we put together three things—first, the natural attraction between opposite sexes; secondly, the wife’s entire dependence on the husband, every privilege or pleasure she has being either his gift, or depending entirely on his will; and lastly, that the principal object of human pursuit, consideration, and all objects of social ambition 30

can in general be sought or obtained by her only through him, it would be a miracle if the object of being attractive to men had not become the polar star of feminine education and formation of character. And this great means of influence over the minds of women having been acquired, an instinct of selfishness made men avail themselves of it to the utmost as a means of holding women in subjection, by representing to them meekness, submissiveness, and resignation of all individual will into the hands of a man, as an essential part of sexual attractiveness. . . . 40

The preceding considerations are amply sufficient to show that custom, however universal it may be, affords in this case no presumption and ought not to create any prejudice in favor of the arrangements which place women in social and political subjection to men. But I may go further, and maintain that the

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between male and female differ from that of master and slave?

Q What does Mill consider to be the “peculiar character” of modernism?

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course of history, and the tendencies of progressive human society afford not only no presumption in favor of this system of inequality of rights, but a strong one against it; and that, so far as the whole course of human improvement up to this time, the whole stream of modern tendencies warrants any 50 inference on the subject, it is that this relic of the past is discordant with the future and must necessarily disappear.

For, what is the peculiar character of the modern world—the difference which chiefly distinguishes modern institutions, modern social ideas, modern life itself, from those of times long past? It is, that human beings are no longer born to their place in life and chained down by an inexorable bond to the place they are born to, but are free to employ their faculties and such favorable chances as offer, to achieve the lot which may appear to them most desirable. Human society of old was 60 constituted on a very different principle. All were born to a fixed social position and were mostly kept in it by law or interdicted from any means by which they could emerge from it. As some men are born white and others black, so some were born slaves and others freemen and citizens; some were born patricians, others plebeians; some were born feudal nobles, others commoners. . . .

The old theory was that the least possible should be left to the choice of the individual agent; that all he had to do should, as far as practicable, be laid down for him by superior wisdom. 70 Left to himself he was sure to go wrong. The modern conviction, the fruit of a thousand years of experience, is that things in which the individual is the person directly interested never go right but as they are left to his own discretion; and that any regulation of them by authority, except to protect the rights of others, is sure to be mischievous. . . .

The New Historicism While issues of class and gender preoccupied some of the finest minds of the nineteenth century, so too did matters surrounding the interpretation of the historical past. For many centuries, history was regarded as a branch of literature rather than a social science. The Romantic his- tories, such as those of Thomas Carlyle (see chapter 28), served to emphasize the role of great men in shaping the destinies of nations. At the same time, the spirit of high patriotism inspired nineteenth-century historians such as Thomas Babington Macaulay (1800–1859) in Britain and Fustel de Coulanges (1830–1889) in France to write nationalistic histories that brought attention to the great- ness of their own people and culture.

Patriotism, however, also led historians to renew their efforts to retrieve the evidence of the past. Scholars com- piled vast collections of primary source materials; and, enamored of the new, positivist zeal for objective measure- ment and recording, they applied scientific methods to the

writing of history. The result was an effort to recreate his- tory “as it actually was,” a movement later called histori- cism. Led by the German historian Leopold von Ranke (1795–1886), historians produced historical works that depended on the objective interpretation of eyewitness reports and authentic documents. Von Ranke himself wrote sixty volumes on modern European history that rest- ed on the critical study of sources that he had gleaned from numerous archives. This method of writing history came to dominate modern-day historiography.

The new historicism that scholars brought to the critical study of religious history stirred great controversy. Rejecting all forms of supernaturalism, some nineteenth- century scholars disputed the literal interpretation of the Bible, especially where its contents conflicted with scien- tific evidence (as in the case of the Virgin Birth). Since the facts of Jesus’ life are so few, some also questioned the his- toricity of Jesus (that is, whether or not he had ever actu- ally lived), while still others—such as the eminent French scholar Ernest Renan, author of the Life of Jesus (1863)— questioned his divinity. Renan and his followers offered a rationalist reconstruction of religious history that worked to separate personal belief and moral conduct from con- ventional religious history and dogma. As universal educa- tion spread throughout the literate world, Church and state moved further apart, and education became increas- ingly secularized.

The Novels of Dickens and Twain Inequities of class and gender had existed throughout the course of history, but in an age that pitted the progressive effects of industrial capitalism against the realities of poverty and inequality, social criticism was inevitable. Many writers pointed to these conditions and described them with unembellished objectivity. This unblinking attention to contemporary life and experience was the basis for the style known as literary realism.

More than any other genre, the nineteenth-century novel—by its capacity to detail characters and condi- tions—fulfilled the Realist credo of depicting life with complete candor. In place of heroic and exotic subjects, the Realist novel portrayed men and women in actual, every- day, and often demoralizing situations. It examined the social consequences of middle-class materialism, the plight of the working class, and the subjugation of women, among other matters.

While Realism did not totally displace Romanticism as the dominant literary mode of the nineteenth century, it often appeared alongside the Romantic—indeed, Romantic and sentimental elements can be found in gen- erally realistic narratives. Such is the case in the novels of Charles Dickens (1812–1870) in England and Mark Twain, the pseudonym of Samuel Langhorne Clemens (1835–1910), in America. Twain’s writings, including his greatest achievement, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, reveal a blend of humor and irony that is not generally

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characteristic of Dickens. But both writers employ a masterful use of dialect, sensitivity to pictorial detail, and a humanitarian sympathy in their descriptions of nineteenth-century life in specific locales—for Twain, the rural farm- lands along the Mississippi River, and for Dickens, the streets of England’s industrial cities.

The most popular English novelist of his time, Dickens came from a poor family who provided him with little formal education. His early experiences supplied some of the themes for his most famous novels: Oliver Twist (1838) vividly portrays the slums, orphanages, and boarding schools of London; Nicholas Nickleby (1839) is a bitter indictment of England’s bru- tal rural schools; and David Copperfield (1850) condemns debtors’ prisons and the conditions that produced them.

Dickens’ novels are frequently theatrical, his characters may be drawn to the point of caricature, and his themes often suggest a sen- timental faith in kindness and good cheer as the best antidotes to the bitterness of contem- porary life. But, as the following excerpt illus- trates, Dickens’ evocation of realistic detail was acute, and his portrayal of physical ugliness was unflinching. In this passage from The Old Curiosity Shop, he painted an unforgettable pic- ture of the horrifying urban conditions that gave rise to the despair of the laboring classes and inspired their cries for social reform (Figure 30.5). His description of the English mill town of Birmingham, as first viewed by the novel’s heroine, little Nell, and her grandfather, finds striking parallels in nineteenth-century visual representations of Europe’s laboring poor; it also calls to mind the popular conceptions of Hell found in medieval art and literature (see chapter 12).

From Dickens’ The Old Curiosity Shop (1841)

. . . A long suburb of red-brick houses—some with patches of 1 garden-ground, where coal-dust and factory smoke darkened the shrinking leaves and coarse, rank flowers; and where the struggling vegetation sickened and sank under the hot breath of kiln and furnace, making them by its presence seem yet more blighting and unwholesome than in the town itself—a long, flat, straggling suburb passed, they came by slow degrees upon a cheerless region, where not a blade of grass was seen to grow; where not a bud put forth its promise in the spring; where nothing green could live but on the surface of 10 the stagnant pools, which here and there lay idly sweltering by the black roadside.

Advancing more and more into the shadow of this mournful place, its dark depressing influence stole upon their spirits, and filled them with a dismal gloom. On every side, as far as the eye could see into the heavy distance, tall chimneys, crowding on

each other, and presenting that endless repetition of the same dull, ugly form, which is the horror of oppressive dreams, poured out their plague of smoke, obscured the light, and made foul the melancholy air. On mounds of ashes by the wayside, 20 sheltered only by a few rough boards, or rotten pent-house roofs, strange engines spun and writhed like tortured creatures; clanking their iron chains, shrieking in their rapid whirl from time to time as though in torment unendurable, and making the ground tremble with their agonies. Dismantled houses here and there appeared, tottering to the earth, propped up by fragments of others that had fallen down, unroofed, windowless, blackened, desolate, but yet inhabited. Men, women, children, wan in their looks and ragged in attire, tended the engines, fed their tributary fires, begged upon the road, or scowled half 30 naked from the doorless houses. Then came more of the wrathful monsters, whose like they almost seemed to be in their wildness and their untamed air, screeching and turning round and round again; and still, before, behind, and to the right and left, was the same interminable perspective of brick towers, never ceasing in their black vomit, blasting all things living or inanimate, shutting out the face of day, and closing in on all these horrors with a dense dark cloud.

But night-time in this dreadful spot!—night, when the smoke was changed to fire; when every chimney spirited up its flame; 40

Figure 30.5 THOMAS ANNAN, Close No. 193 High Street, 1868–1877, print ca. 1877. Carbon print, 27.3 � 23 cm. While Annan spent most of his life in Glasgow, Scotland, his photographs of disease-ridden slums are representative of similar circumstances in late nineteenth-century industrial centers. Annan’s photographs were instrumental in the eventual demolition of Glasgow’s slum areas.

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and places, that had been dark vaults all day, now shone red- hot, with figures moving to and fro within their blazing jaws, and calling to one another with hoarse cries—night, when the noise of every strange machine was aggravated by the darkness; when the people near them looked wilder and more savage; when bands of unemployed laborers paraded in the roads, or clustered by torch-light round their leaders, who told them in stern language of their wrongs, and urged them on to frightful cries and threats; when maddened men, armed with sword and firebrand, spurning the tears and prayers of women 50

who would restrain them, rushed forth on errands of terror and destruction, to work no ruin half so surely as their own—night, when carts came rumbling by, filled with rude coffins (for contagious disease and death had been busy with the living crops); when orphans cried, and distracted women shrieked and followed in their wake—night, when some called for bread, and some for drink to drown their cares; and some with tears, and some with staggering feet, and some with bloodshot eyes, went brooding home—night, which, unlike the night that Heaven sends on earth, brought with it no peace, nor quiet, nor signs of 60

blessed sleep—who shall tell the terrors of the night to that young wandering child!

Mark Twain’s literary classic, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, is the most widely taught book in American literature. Published as a sequel to the popular “boys’ book” The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876), which, like Dickens’ novels, appeared in serial format, the book recounts the exploits of the young narrator, Huck Finn, and the runaway slave, Jim, as the two make their way down the Mississippi River on a ramshackle raft. As humorist, journalist, and social critic, Twain offered his contemporaries a blend of entertainment and vivid insight into the dynamics of a unique time and place: the American South just prior to the Civil War. More general- ly, he conveys the innocence of youthful boyhood as it wrestles with the realities of greed, hypocrisy, and the moral issues arising from the troubled relations between black and white Americans in the mid nineteenth century. These he captures in an exotic blend of dialects—the ver- nacular rhythms and idioms of local, untutored speech.

In the excerpt that follows, Huck, a poor, ignorant, but good-hearted Southern boy, experiences a crisis of con- science when he must choose between aiding and abetting a fugitive slave—a felony offense in the slave states of the South—and obeying the law, by turning over his older companion and friend to the local authorities. Huck’s moral dilemma, the theme of this excerpt, was central to the whole system of chattel slavery. Historically, slaves were considered property (chattel), that is, goods that could be bought, sold, or stolen. Clearly, however, they were also human beings. In opting to help Jim escape, Huck is, in effect, an accomplice to a crime. Nevertheless, Huck chooses to aid Jim the man, even as he violates the law in harboring Jim the slave.

From Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884)

Chapter 16

We slept most all day, and started out at night, a little ways 1 behind a monstrous long raft that was as long going by as a procession. She had four long sweeps1 at each end, so we judged she carried as many as thirty men, likely. She had five big wigwams aboard, wide apart, and an open camp fire in the middle, and a tall flag-pole at each end. There was a power of style about her. It amounted to something being a raftsman on such a craft as that.

We went drifting down into a big bend, and the night clouded up and got hot. The river was very wide, and was walled with 10 solid timber on both sides; you couldn’t see a break in it hardly ever, or a light. We talked about Cairo,2 and wondered whether we would know it when we got to it. I said likely we wouldn’t, because I had heard say there warn’t but about a dozen houses there, and if they didn’t happen to have them lit up, how was we going to know we was passing a town? Jim said if the two big rivers joined together there, that would show. But I said maybe we might think we was passing the foot of an island and coming into the same old river again. That disturbed Jim—and me too. So the question was, what to do? I said, paddle ashore 20

the first time a light showed, and tell them pap was behind, coming along with a trading-scow, and was a green hand at the business, and wanted to know how far it was to Cairo. Jim thought it was a good idea, so we took a smoke on it and waited.

There warn’t nothing to do, now, but to look out sharp for the town, and not pass it without seeing it. He said he’d be mighty sure to see it, because he’d be a free man the minute he seen it, but if he missed it he’d be in the slave country again and no more show for freedom. Every little while he jumps up and says: 30

“Dah she is!” But it warn’t. It was Jack-o-lanterns, or lightning-bugs;3 so

he set down again, and went to watching, same as before. Jim said it made him all over trembly and feverish to be so close to freedom. Well, I can tell you it made me all over trembly and feverish, too, to hear him, because I begun to get it through my head that he was most free—and who was to blame for it? Why, me. I couldn’t get that out of my conscience, no how nor no way. It got to troubling me so I couldn’t rest; I couldn’t stay still in one place. It hadn’t ever come home to me before, what 40 this thing was that I was doing. But now it did; and it staid with me, and scorched me more and more. I tried to make out to myself that I warn’t to blame, because I didn’t run Jim off from his rightful owner; but it warn’t no use, conscience up and says, every time, “But you knowed he was running for his freedom, and you could a paddled ashore and told somebody.” That was so—I couldn’t get around that, noway. That was where it pinched. Conscience says to me, “What had poor Miss Watson done to you, that you could see her nigger go off right under your eyes and never say one single word? What did 50

1 Long oars. 2 A city in Illinois. 3 Fireflies.

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that poor old woman do to you, that you could treat her so mean? Why, she tried to learn you your book, she tried to learn you your manners, she tried to be good to you every way she knowed how. That’s what she done.”

I got to feeling so mean and so miserable I most wished I was dead. I fidgeted up and down the raft, abusing myself to myself, and Jim was fidgeting up and down past me. We neither of us could keep still. Every time he danced around and says, “Dah’s Cairo!” it went through me like a shot, and I thought if it was Cairo I reckoned I would die of miserableness. 60

Jim talked out loud all the time while I was talking to myself. He was saying how the first thing he would do when he got to a free State he would go to saving up money and never spend a single cent, and when he got enough he would buy his wife, which was owned on a farm close to where Miss Watson lived; and then they would both work to buy the two children, and if their master wouldn’t sell them, they’d get an Ab’litionist to go and steal them.

It most froze me to hear such talk. He wouldn’t ever dared to talk such talk in his life before. Just see what a difference it 70 made in him the minute he judged he was about free. It was according to the old saying, “give a nigger and inch and he’ll take an ell.”4 Thinks I, this is what comes of my not thinking. Here was this nigger which I had as good as helped to run away, coming right out flat-footed and saying he would steal his children—children that belonged to a man I didn’t even know; a man that hadn’t ever done me no harm.

I was sorry to hear Jim say that, it was such a lowering of him. My conscience got to stirring me up hotter than ever, until at last I says to it, “Let up on me—it ain’t too late, yet—I’ll 80 paddle ashore at the first light, and tell.” I felt easy, and happy, and light as a feather, right off. All my troubles was gone. I went to looking out sharp for a light, and sort of singing to myself. By-and-by one showed. Jim sings out:

“We’s safe, Huck, we’s safe! Jump up and crack yo’ heels, dat’s de good ole Cairo at las’, I jis knows it!”

I says: “I’ll take the canoe and go see, Jim. It mightn’t be, you

know.” He jumped and got the canoe ready, and put his old coat in 90

the bottom for me to set on, and give me the paddle; and as I shoved off, he says:

“Pooty soon I’ll be a-shout’n for joy, en I’ll say, it’s all on accounts o’ Huck; I’s a free man, en I couldn’t ever ben free ef it hadn’ ben for Huck; Huck done it. Jim won’t ever forgit you, Huck; you’s de bes’ fren’ Jim’s ever had; en you’s de only fren’ ole Jim’s got now.”

I was paddling off, all in a sweat to tell on him; but when he says this, it seemed to kind of take the tuck all out of me. I went along slow then, and I warn’t right down certain whether 100 I was glad I started or whether I warn’t. When I was fifty yards off, Jim says:

“Dah you goes, de ole true Huck; de on’y white genlman dat ever kep’ his promise to old Jim.”

Well, I just felt sick. But I says, I got to do it—I can’t get out of it. Right then, along comes a skiff with two men in it, with

guns, and they stopped and I stopped. One of them says: “What’s that, yonder?” “A piece of a raft,” I says. “Do you belong on it?” 110 “Yes, sir.” “Any men on it?” “Only one, sir.” “Well, there’s five niggers run off to-night, up yonder above

the head of the bend. Is you man white or black?” I didn’t answer up prompt. I tried to, but the words wouldn’t

come. I tried, for a second or two, to brace up and out with it, but I warn’t man enough—hadn’t the spunk of a rabbit. I see I was weakening; so I just give up trying, and up and says—

“He’s white.” 120 “I reckon we’ll go and see for ourselves.” “I wish you would,” says I, “because it’s pap that’s there,

and maybe you’d help me tow the raft ashore where the light is. He’s sick—and so is mam and Mary Ann.”

“Oh, the devil! we’re in a hurry, boy. But I s’pose we’ve got to. Come—buckle to your paddle, and let’s get along.”

I buckled to my paddle and they laid to their oars. When we had made a stroke or two, I says:

“Pap’ll be mighty much obleeged to you, I can tell you. Everybody goes away when I want them to help me tow the 130 raft ashore, and I can’t do it by myself.”

“Well, that’s infernal mean. Odd, too. Say, boy, what’s the matter with your father?“

“It’s the—a—the—well, it ain’t anything, much.” They stopped pulling. It warn’t but a mighty little ways to the

raft, now. One says: “Boy, that’s a lie. What is the matter with your pap? Answer

up square, now, and it’ll be the better for you.” “I will, sir, I will, honest—but don’t leave us, please. It’s

the—the—gentlemen, if you’ll only pull ahead, and let me 140 heave you the head-line, you won’t have to come a-near the raft—please do.”

“Set her back, John, set her back!” says one. They backed water. “Keep away, boy—keep to looard.5 Confound it, I just expect the wind has blowed it to us. Your pap’s got the smallpox, and you know it precious well. Why didn’t you come out and say so? Do you want to spread it all over?”

“Well,” says I, a-blubbering, “I’ve told everybody before, and then they just went away and left us.”

“Poor devil, there’s something in that. We are right down 150 sorry for you, but we—well, hang it, we don’t want the smallpox, you see. Look here, I’ll tell you what to do. Don’t you try to land by yourself, or you’ll smash everything to pieces. You float along down about twenty miles and you’ll come to a town on the left-hand side of the river. It will be long after sun-up, then, and when you ask for help, you tell them your folks are all down with chills and fever. Don’t be a fool again, and let people guess what is the matter. Now we’re trying to do you a kindness; so you just put twenty miles between us, that’s a good boy. It wouldn’t do any good to land yonder where the 160 light is—it’s only a wood-yard. Say—I reckon your father’s poor, and I’m bound to say he’s in pretty hard luck. Here—I’ll

4 An English measure equal to 45 inches. 5 Leeward; away from the wind.

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Q How does Huck resolve his moral dilemma?

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put a twenty dollar gold piece on this board, and you get it when it floats by. I feel mighty mean to leave you, but my kingdom! it won’t do to fool with small-pox, don’t you see?”

“Hold on, Parker,” says the other man, “here’s a twenty to put on the board for me. Good-bye, boy, you do as Mr. Parker told you, and you’ll be all right.”

“That’s so, my boy—good-bye, good-bye. If you see any runaway niggers, you get help and nab them, and you can 170 make some money by it.”

“Good-bye, sir,” says I, “I won’t let no runaway niggers get by me if I can help it.”

They went off, and I got aboard the raft, feeling bad and low, because I knowed very well I had done wrong, and I see it warn’t no use for me to try to learn to do right; a body that don’t get started right when he’s little, ain’t got no show6—when the pinch comes there ain’t nothing to back him up and keep him to his work, and so he gets beat. Then I thought a minute, and says to myself, hold on,—s’pose you’d a done right and give 180 Jim up; would you felt better than what you do now? No, says I, I’d feel bad—I’d feel just the same way I do now. Well, then, says I, what’s the use you learning to do right, when it’s troublesome to do right and ain’t no trouble to do wrong, and the wages is just the same? I was stuck. I couldn’t answer that. So I reckoned I wouldn’t bother no more about it, but after this always do whichever come handiest at the time. . . .

Russian Realism: Dostoevsky and Tolstoy More pessimistic than Dickens or Twain, and more pro- foundly analytic of the universal human condition, were the Russian novelists Fyodor Dostoevsky (1821–1881) and Leo Tolstoy (1828–1910). Both men were born and bred in wealth, but both turned against upper-class Russian socie- ty and sympathized with the plight of the lower classes.

Tolstoy ultimately renounced his wealth and property and went to live and work among the peasants. His histor- ical novel War and Peace (1869), often hailed as the great- est example of realistic Russian fiction, traces the progress of five families whose destinies unroll against the back- ground of Napoleon’s invasion of Russia in 1812. In this sprawling narrative, as in many of his other novels, Tolstoy exposes the privileged position of the nobility and the cruel exploitation of the great masses of Russian people. This task, along with sympathy for the cause of Russian nationalism in general, was shared by Tolstoy’s friend and admirer, Ilya Repin (1844–1930), whose portrait of Tolstoy brings the writer to life with skillful candor (Figure 30.6). Russia’s preeminent Realist painter, Repin rendered with detailed accuracy the miserable lives of ordinary Russians—peasants, laborers, and beggars—in genre paint- ings that might well serve as illustrations for the novels of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky.

Dostoevsky paid greater attention than Tolstoy to philosophical and psychological issues. His characters are often victims of a dual plight: poverty and conscience. Their energies are foiled by bitter efforts to resolve their own contradictory passions. Dostoesvsky’s personal life contributed to his bleak outlook: associated with a group of proletarian revolutionaries, he was arrested and deported to Siberia, where he spent five years at hard labor. The neces- sity of suffering is a central theme in his writing, as is the hope of salvation through suffering.

The novels Crime and Punishment (1866), The Possessed (1871), and The Brothers Karamazov (1880) feature protag- onists whose irrational behavior and its psychological con- sequences form the central theme of the novel. In Crime and Punishment, Raskolnikov, a young, poor student, murders an old woman and her younger sister; his crime goes undetected. Thereafter, he struggles with guilt—the self-punishment for his criminal act. He also explores the problems arising from one’s freedom to commit evil. In the following excerpt, the protagonist addresses the moral question of whether extraordinary individuals, by dint of their uniqueness, have the right to commit immoral acts. The conversation, which takes place between Raskolnikov and his friends, is spurred by an article on crime that Raskolnikov had published in a journal shortly after drop- ping out of university. This excerpt is typical of Dostoevsky’s fondness for developing character through monologue and dialogue, rather than through descriptive detail.

Figure 30.6 ILYA REPIN, Portrait of Leo Tolstoy, 1887. Oil on canvas. Repin was celebrated for his realistic depictions of contemporary Russian life and for the psychological insight he brought to his portraits of notable Russian writers and composers.

6 Has no chance.

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Dostoevsky’s Realism (and his genius) lie in the way in which he forces the reader to understand the character as that character tries to understand himself.

From Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment (1866)

“. . . the ‘extraordinary’ man has the right . . . I don’t mean a 1 formal, official right, but he has the right in himself, to permit his conscience to overstep . . . certain obstacles, but only in the event that his ideas (which may sometimes be salutary for all mankind) require it for their fulfilment. You are pleased to say that my article is not clear; I am ready to elucidate it for you, as far as possible. Perhaps I am not mistaken in supposing that is what you want. Well, then. In my opinion, if the discoveries of Kepler and Newton, by some combination of circumstances, could not have become known to the world in any other way than by sacrificing the lives of one, or ten, 10 or more people, who might have hampered or in some way been obstacles in the path of those discoveries, then Newton would have had the right, or might even have been under an obligation . . . to remove those ten or a hundred people, so that his discoveries might be revealed to all mankind. It does not follow from this, of course, that Newton had the right to kill any Tom, Dick, or Harry he fancied, or go out stealing from market-stalls every day. I remember further that in my article I developed the idea that all the . . . well, for example, the law-givers and 20 regulators of human society, beginning with the most ancient, and going on to Lycurgus, Solon, Mahomet, Napoleon and so on, were without exception transgressors,1 by the very fact that in making a new law they ipso facto broke an old one, handed down from their fathers and held sacred by society; and, of course, they did not stop short of shedding blood, provided only that the blood (however innocent and however heroically shed in defence of the ancient law) was shed to their advantage. It is remarkable that the greater part of these benefactors and law- givers of humanity were particularly blood-thirsty. In a word, I 30

deduce that all of them, not only the great ones, but also those who diverge ever so slightly from the beaten track, those, that is, who are just barely capable of saying something new, must, by their nature, inevitably be criminals—in a greater or less degree, naturally. Otherwise they would find it too hard to leave their rut, and they cannot, of course, consent to remain in the rut, again by the very fact of their nature; and in my opinion they ought not to consent. In short, you see that up to this point there is nothing specially new here. It has all been printed, and read, a thousand times before. As for my division of people into 40

ordinary and extraordinary, that I agree was a little arbitrary, but I do not insist on exact figures. Only I do believe in the main principle of my idea. That consists in people being, by the law of nature, divided in general into two categories: into a lower (of ordinary people), that is, into material serving only for the reproduction of its own kind, and into people properly speaking, that is, those who have the gift or talent of saying something new in their sphere. There are endless subdivisions, of course, but the distinctive characteristics of the two categories are fairly well marked: the first group, that is the material, are, 50 generally speaking, by nature staid and conservative, they live in obedience and like it. In my opinion they ought to obey because that is their destiny, and there is nothing at all degrading to them in it. The second group are all law-breakers and transgressors, or are inclined that way, in the measure of their capacities. The aims of these people are, of course, relative and very diverse; for the most part they require, in widely different contexts, the destruction of what exists in the name of better things. But if it is necessary for one of them, for the fulfilment of his ideas, to march over corpses, or wade 60 through blood, then in my opinion he may in all conscience authorize himself to wade through blood—in proportion, however, to his idea and the degree of its importance—mark that. It is in that sense only that I speak in my article of their right to commit crime. (You will remember that we really began with the question of legality.) There is, however, not much cause for alarm: the masses hardly ever recognize this right of theirs, and behead or hang them (more or less), and in this way, quite properly, fulfil their conservative function, although in following generations these same masses put their former 70 victims on a pedestal and worship them (more or less). The first category are always the masters of the present, but the second are the lords of the future. The first preserve the world and increase and multiply; the second move the world and guide it to its goal. Both have an absolutely equal right to exist. In short, for me all men have completely equivalent rights, and—vive la guerre éternelle—until we have built the New Jerusalem, of course!”2

“You do believe in the New Jerusalem, then?” “Yes, I do,” answered Raskolnikov firmly; he said this with 80

his eyes fixed on one spot on the carpet, as they had been all through his long tirade.

“A-and you believe in God? Forgive me for being so inquisitive.”

“Yes, I do,” repeated Raskolnikov, raising his eyes to Porfiry. “A-a-and do you believe in the raising of Lazarus?” “Y-yes. Why are you asking all this?” “You believe in it literally?” “Yes.” “Ah . . . I was curious to know. Forgive me. But, returning to 90

the previous subject—they are not always put to death. Some, on the contrary . . .”

1 Raskolnikov’s views are similar to those expressed by Napoleon III in his book Life of Julius Caesar. The newspaper Golos (Voice) had recently summarized the English Saturday Review’s analysis of Napoleon’s ideas about the right of exceptional individuals (such as Lycurgus, Mahomet, and Napoleon I) to transgress laws and even to shed blood. The book appeared in Paris in March 1865; the Russian translation in April! [Lycurgus: the founder of the military regime of ancient Sparta; Mahomet: Muhammad, the prophet of Allah and founder of the religion Islam; Solon: statesman and reformer in sixth-century B.C.E. Athens.]

2 New Jerusalem, symbolic of the ideal order, after the end of time, is a Heaven on Earth, a new paradise. See the description in Revelation 21 (the Apocalypse). The French phrase means, “Long live perpetual war.”

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Q How does he justify the transgressions of the “lords of the future”?

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“Triumph during their lifetime? Oh, yes, some achieve their ends while they still live, and then . . .”

“They begin to mete out capital punishment themselves?” “If necessary, and, you know, it is most usually so. Your

observation is very keen-witted.” “Thank you. But tell me: how do you distinguish these

extraordinary people from the ordinary? Do signs and portents appear when they are born? I mean to say that we could do 100 with rather greater accuracy here, with, so to speak, rather more outward signs: please excuse the natural anxiety of a practical and well-meaning man, but couldn’t there be, for example, some special clothing, couldn’t they carry some kind of brand or something? . . . Because, you will agree, if there should be some sort of mix-up, and somebody from one category imagined that he belonged to the other and began ‘to remove all obstacles,’ as you so happily put it, then really . . .”

“Oh, that very frequently happens! This observation of yours is even more penetrating than the last.” 110

“Thank you.” “Not at all. But you must please realize that the mistake is

possible only among the first group, that is, the ‘ordinary’ people (as I have called them, perhaps not altogether happily). In spite of their inborn inclination to obey, quite a number of them, by some freak of nature such as is not impossible even among cows, like to fancy that they are progressives, ‘destroyers,’ and propagators of the ‘new world,’ and all this quite sincerely. At the same time, they really take no heed of new people; they even despise them, as reactionary and 120 incapable of elevated thinking. But, in my opinion, they cannot constitute a real danger, and you really have nothing to worry about, because they never go far. They might sometimes be scourged for their zealotry, to remind them of their place; there is no need even for anyone to carry out the punishment: they will do it themselves, because they are very well conducted: some of them do one another this service, and others do it for themselves with their own hands . . . And they impose on themselves various public penances besides—the result is beautifully edifying, and in short, you have nothing to worry 130 about . . . This is a law of nature.”

“Well, at least you have allayed my anxieties on that score a little; but here is another worry: please tell me, are there many of these people who have the right to destroy others, of these ‘extraordinary’ people? I am, of course, prepared to bow down before them, but all the same you will agree that it would be terrible if there were very many of them, eh?”

“Oh, don’t let that trouble you either,” went on Raskolnikov in the same tone. “Generally speaking, there are extremely few people, strangely few, born, who have a new idea, or are even 140 capable of saying anything at all new. One thing only is clear, that the ordering of human births, all these categories and subdivisions, must be very carefully and exactly regulated by some law of nature. This law is, of course, unknown at present, but I believe that it exists, and consequently that it may be known. The great mass of men, the common stuff of humanity, exist on the earth only in order that at last, by some endeavour, some process, that remains as yet mysterious, some happy conjunction of race and breeding, there should struggle into life a being, one in a thousand, capable, in 150

however small a degree, of standing on his own feet. Perhaps one in ten thousand (I am speaking approximately, by way of illustration) is born with a slightly greater degree of independence, and one in a hundred thousand with even more. One genius may emerge among millions, and a really great genius, perhaps, as the crowning point of many thousands of millions of men. In short, I have not been able to look into the retort whence all this proceeds. But a definite law there must be, and is; it cannot be a matter of chance. . . .”

The Literary Heroines of Flaubert and Chopin Nineteenth-century novelists shared a special interest in examining conflicts between social conventions and per- sonal values, especially as they affected the everyday lives of women. Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary (1857), Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina (1877), and Kate Chopin’s The Awakening (1899) are representative of the writer’s concern with the tragic consequences following from the defiance of established social and moral codes by passionate female fig- ures. The heroines in these novels do not create the world in their own image; rather, the world—or more specifically, the social and economic environment—molds them and governs their destinies.

Flaubert (1821–1880), whom critics have called “the inventor of the modern novel,” stripped his novels of senti- mentality and of all preconceived notions of behavior. He aimed at a precise description of not only the stuff of the physical world but also the motivations of his characters. A meticulous observer, he sought le mot juste (“the exact word”) to describe each concrete object and each psycho- logical state—a practice that often prevented him from writing more than one or two pages of prose per week. One contemporary critic wittily claimed that Flaubert, the son of a surgeon, wielded his pen like a scalpel.

Flaubert’s landmark novel, Madame Bovary, tells the story of a middle-class woman who desperately seeks to escape the boredom of her mundane existence. Educated in a convent and married to a dull, small-town physician, Emma Bovary tries to live out the fantasies that fill the pages of her favorite romance novels, but her efforts to do so prove disastrous and lead to her ultimate destruction. With a minimum of interpretation, Flaubert reconstructs the particulars of Emma’s provincial surroundings and her bleak marriage. Since the novel achieves its full effect through the gradual development of plot and character, no brief excerpt can possibly do it justice. Nevertheless, the following excerpt, which describes the deterioration of the adulterous affair between Emma Bovary and the young clerk Léon, illustrates Flaubert’s ability to characterize places and persons by means of the fastidious selection and accumulation of descriptive details.

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From Flaubert’s Madame Bovary (1857)

In the end Léon had promised never to see Emma again; and he 1 reproached himself for not having kept his word, especially considering all the trouble and reproaches she still probably held in store for him—not to mention the jokes his fellow clerks cracked every morning around the stove. Besides, he was about to be promoted to head clerk: this was the time to turn over a new leaf. So he gave up playing the flute and said good-bye to exalted sentiments and romantic dreams. There isn’t a bourgeois alive who in the ferment of his youth, if only for a day or for a minute, hasn’t thought himself capable of 10 boundless passions and noble exploits. The sorriest little woman-chaser has dreamed of Oriental queens; in a corner of every notary’s heart lie the moldy remains of a poet.

These days it only bored him when Emma suddenly burst out sobbing on his breast: like people who can stand only a certain amount of music, he was drowsy and apathetic amidst the shrillness of her love; his heart had grown deaf to its subtler overtones.

By now they knew each other too well: no longer did they experience, in their mutual possession, that wonder that 20 multiplies the joy a hundredfold. She was as surfeited with him as he was tired of her. Adultery, Emma was discovering, could be as banal as marriage.

But what way out was there? She felt humiliated by the degradation of such pleasures; but to no avail: she continued to cling to them, out of habit or out of depravity; and every day she pursued them more desperately, destroying all possible happiness by her excessive demands. She blamed Léon for her disappointed hopes, as though he had betrayed her; and she even longed for a catastrophe that would bring about their 30 separation, since she hadn’t the courage to bring it about herself.

Still, she continued to write him loving letters, faithful to the idea that a woman must always write to her lover.

But as her pen flew over the paper she was aware of the presence of another man, a phantom embodying her most ardent memories, the most beautiful things she had read and her strongest desires. In the end he became so real and accessible that she tingled with excitement, unable though she was to picture him clearly, so hidden was he, godlike, under his 40 manifold attributes. He dwelt in that enchanted realm where silken ladders swing from balconies moon-bright and flower- scented. She felt him near her: he was coming—coming to ravish her entirely in a kiss. And the next moment she would drop back to earth, shattered; for these rapturous love-dreams drained her more than the greatest orgies.

Almost immediately after Madame Bovary appeared (in the form of six installments in the Revue de Paris), the novel was denounced as an offense against public and religious morals, and Flaubert, as well as the publisher and the printer of the Revue, was brought to trial before a crim- inal court. All three men were ultimately acquitted, but

not before an eloquent lawyer had defended all the pas- sages (including those in Reading 30.8) that had been con- demned as wanton and immoral.

A similar situation befell the American writer Kate Chopin (1851–1904), whose novel The Awakening was banned in her native city of St. Louis shortly after its publication in 1899. The novel, a frank examination of female sexual passion and marital infidelity, violated the norms of the society in which Chopin had been reared. Unlike Flaubert, whose novels convey the staleness and inescapability of French provincial life, many of Chopin’s stories deliberately ignore the specifics of time and place. Some are set in Louisiana, where Chopin lived for twelve years with her husband and six children. Chopin was suc- cessful in selling her Louisiana dialect stories, many of which explore matters of class, race, and gender within the world of Creole society, but her novels fell into obscurity soon after her death. The Awakening, whose heroine defies convention by committing adultery, did not receive posi- tive critical attention until the 1950s.

While Chopin absorbed the Realist strategies and social concerns of Flaubert, she brought to her prose a sensitivity to the nuances of human (and especially female) behavior that challenged popular Romantic stereotypes (see chapter 28). Her work also reveals a remarkable talent for narrat- ing a story with jewel-like precision. Her taut descriptive style reaches unparalleled heights in the short prose piece known as “The Story of an Hour.” Here, the protagonist’s brief taste of liberation takes on an ironic fatal turn.

Kate Chopin’s “The Story of an Hour” (“The Dream of an Hour”) (1894)

Knowing that Mrs. Mallard was afflicted with a heart trouble, 1 great care was taken to break to her as gently as possible the news of her husband’s death.

It was her sister Josephine who told her, in broken sentences: veiled hints that revealed in half concealing. Her husband’s friend Richards was there, too, near her. It was he who had been in the newspaper office when intelligence of the railroad disaster was received, with Brently Mallard’s name leading the list of “killed.” He had only taken time to assure himself of its truth by a second telegram, and had hastened 10 to forestall any less careful, less tender friend in bearing the sad message.

She did not hear the story as many women have heard the same, with a paralysed inability to accept its significance. She wept at once, with a sudden, wild abandonment, in her sister’s arms. When the storm of grief had spent itself she went away to her room alone. She would have no one follow her.

There stood, facing the open window, a comfortable, roomy armchair. Into this she sank, pressed down by a physical exhaustion that haunted her body and seemed to reach into 20 her soul.

She could see in the open square before her house the tops of trees that were all aquiver with the new spring life. The delicious breath of rain was in the air. In the street below a

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Q Would the story be equally effective if the roles of Louise and Brently Mallard were reversed?

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peddler was crying his wares. The notes of a distant song which some one was singing reached her faintly, and countless sparrows were twittering in the eaves.

There were patches of blue sky showing here and there through the clouds that had met and piled one above the other in the west facing her window. 30

She sat with her head thrown back upon the cushion of the chair, quite motionless, except when a sob came into her throat and shook her, as a child who has cried itself to sleep continues to sob in its dreams.

She was young, with a fair, calm face, whose lines bespoke repression and even a certain strength. But now there was a dull stare in her eyes, whose gaze was fixed away off yonder on one of those patches of blue sky. It was not a glance of reflection, but rather a suspension of intelligent thought.

There was something coming to her and she was waiting for 40 it, fearfully. What was it? She did not know; it was too subtle and elusive to name. But she felt it, creeping out of the sky, reaching toward her through the sounds, the scents, the color that filled the air.

Now her bosom rose and fell tumultuously. She was beginning to recognize this thing that was approaching to possess her, and she was striving to beat it back with her will—as powerless as her white slender hands would have been.

When she abandoned herself a little whispered word 50 escaped her slight parted lips. She said it over and over under her breath: “free, free, free!” The vacant stare and the look of terror that had followed it went from her eyes. They stayed keen and bright. Her pulses beat fast, and the coursing blood warmed and relaxed every inch of her body.

She did not stop to ask if it were not a monstrous joy that held her. A clear and exalted perception enabled her to dismiss the suggestion as trivial.

She knew that she would weep again when she saw the kind, tender hands folded in death: fixed and grey and dead. 60 But she saw beyond that bitter moment a long procession of years to come that would belong to her absolutely. And she opened and spread her arms out to them in welcome.

There would be no one to live for her during those coming years; she would live for herself. There would be no powerful will bending hers in that blind persistence with which men and women believe they have a right to impose a private will upon a fellow-creature. A kind intention or a cruel intention made the act seem no less a crime as she looked upon it in that brief moment of illumination. 70

And yet she loved him—sometimes. Often she had not. What did it matter! What could love, the unsolved mystery, count for in the face of this possession of self-assertion which she suddenly recognized as the strongest impulse of her being!

“Free! Body and soul free!” she kept whispering. Josephine was kneeling before the keyhole, imploring for

admission. “Louise, open the door! I beg: open the door—you will make yourself ill. What are you doing, Louise? For heaven’s sake open the door.”

“Go away. I’m not making myself ill.” No: she was drinking 80 in a very elixir of life through that open window.

Her fancy was running riot along those days ahead of her.

Spring days, and summer days, and all sorts of days that would be her own. She breathed a quick prayer that life might be long. It was only yesterday she had thought with a shudder that life might be long.

She arose at length and opened the door to her sister’s importunities. There was a feverish triumph in her eyes, and she carried herself unwittingly like a goddess of Victory. She clasped her sister’s wrist, and together they descended the 90 stairs. Richards stood waiting for them at the bottom.

Some one was opening the front door with a latchkey. It was Brently Mallard who entered, a little travel-stained, composedly carrying his grip-sack and umbrella. He had been far from the scene of accident, and did not even know there had been one. He stood amazed at Josephine’s piercing cry; at Richards’ quick motion to screen him from the view of his wife.

But Richards was too late. When the doctors came they said she had died of heart 100

disease—of joy that kills.

Zola and the Naturalistic Novel Kate Chopin’s contemporary Emile Zola (1840–1902) initiated a variant form of literary Realism known as naturalism. Naturalist fiction was based on the premise that everyday life should be represented with scientific objectivity: faithfully and with detailed accuracy. Contrary to Romantic writers, naturalists refused to embellish or idealize experience. They went beyond the Realism of Flaubert and Dickens by conceiving their characters in accordance with psychological and sociological factors, and as products of the laws of heredity. This deterministic approach showed human beings as products of environ- mental or hereditary factors over which they had little or no control. Just as Marx held that economic life shaped all aspects of culture, so naturalists believed that material and social elements determined human conduct and behavior.

Zola (Figure 30.7) treated the novel as a carefully researched study of commonplace, material existence. In his passion to describe his time and place with absolute fidelity, he studied labor problems, police records, and industrial history, amassing notebooks of information on a wide variety of subjects, including coal mining, the rail- roads, the stock market, and the science of surgery. He pre- sented a slice of life that showed how social and material circumstances shaped the society of late nineteenth-centu- ry France. His twenty novels (known as the Rougon- Macquart series) exploring the lives of French farmers, miners, statesmen, prostitutes, scholars, and artists consti- tutes a psycho-socio-biological history of his time. The Grog Shop (1877) offers a terrifying picture of the effects of alcoholism on industrial workers. Nana (1880) is a

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their stomachs and thighs. When these pieces, caught by the planks, had heaped up beneath them, the cutters disappeared, walled up in the narrow crevice.

Maheu was the one who suffered most. The temperature at the top climbed as high as ninety-five degrees; the air did not circulate, and the suffocating heat eventually became unbearable. In order to see clearly, he had had to hang his lamp on a nail right next to his head, and this additional heat beating down on his skull made his blood sing in his ears. But the worst was the dampness. Water was continually dripping down from the rock only a few inches above his face, and there was a never-ending stream of drops falling, with a maddening rhythm, always on the same spot. It was no use twisting his neck or turning his head: the drops kept beating against his face, splattering and spreading without stop. At the end of a quarter of an hour he was soaked through, coated with his own sweat, and steaming like a tub of laundry. That morning a drop ceaselessly trickling into his eye made him swear, but he wouldn’t stop cutting, and his mighty blows jolted him so violently between the two layers of rock that he was like a plant-louse caught between two pages of a book—in constant danger of being completely crushed.

Not a word was said. They were all hammering away, and nothing could be heard except these irregular blows, muffled and seemingly far away. The sounds were harsh in the echoless, dead air, and it seemed as though the shadows had a strange blackness, thickened by the flying coal dust and made heavier by the gases that weighed down on their eyes. Behind metal screens, the wicks of their lamps gave off only reddish points of light, and it was hard to see anything. The stall opened out like a large, flat, oblique chimney in which the soot of ten winters had built up an unrelieved darkness. Phantom forms moved about, dull beams of light giving glimpses of a rounded haunch, a brawny arm, a distorted face blackened as if in preparation for a crime. Occasionally, as blocks of coal came loose, they would catch the light and shoot off crystal- like glitters from their suddenly illuminated facets. Then it would be dark again, the picks would beat out heavy dull blows, and there was nothing but the sound of panting breaths, grunts of discomfort and fatigue in the stifling air, and the dripping water from the underground streams.

scathing portrayal of a beautiful but unscrupulous prosti- tute. The most scandalous of his novels, it inspired charges of pornography and “gutter-sweeping.”

A later novel in the Rougon-Macquart series, Germinal (1885), exposes the bitter lives of coal miners in northern France. The excerpt that follows, which relates the hellish experience of the miner Maheu, reflects Zola’s talent for detailed description that transforms his writing from mere social history to powerful fiction.

From Zola’s Germinal (1885)

The four cutters [miners] had stretched themselves out, head to toe, over the whole surface of the sloping face. Separated by hooked planks that caught the loosened coal, each of them occupied about fifteen feet of the vein, which was so narrow— scarcely twenty inches at this point—that they were squashed in between the roof and the wall. They had to drag themselves along on their knees and elbows, and were unable to turn without bruising their shoulders. To get at the coal, they had to lie sideways, their necks twisted and their raised arms wielding the short- handled picks at an angle.

Zacharie was at the bottom. Levaque and Chaval above him, and Maheu at the very top. Each one was hacking away at the bed of shale with his pick, cutting two vertical grooves in the vein, then driving an iron wedge into the top of the block and freeing it. The coal was soft, and the block crumbled into pieces and rolled down

Figure 30.7 EDOUARD MANET, Zola, exhibited 1868. Oil on canvas, 57 � 45 in. Manet’s portrait has the quality of a snapshot. The writer is seen at his desk, which holds a copy of his short biography of the artist. Above the desk, he has posted a black-and-white reproduction of Manet’s Olympia, a Japanese print of a sumo wrestler, and Goya’s etching of a painting by Velázquez, favorite artists of both Manet and Zola.

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Elements of naturalism are found in the novels of many late nineteenth-century writers in both Europe and America. Thomas Hardy (1840–1928) in England, and Stephen Crane (1871–1900), Jack London (1876–1916) and Theodore Dreiser (1871–1945) in America are the most notable of the English-language literary naturalists.

Realist Drama: Ibsen The Norwegian dramatist Henrik Ibsen (1828–1906) brought to the late nineteenth-century stage concerns sim- ilar to those in the novels of the Realists. A moralist and a critic of human behavior, he attacked the artificial social conventions that led people to pursue self-deluding and hypocritical lives. Ibsen was deeply concerned with con- temporary issues and social problems. He shocked the pub- lic with prose dramas that addressed such controversial subjects as insanity, incest, and venereal disease. At the same time, he explored universal themes of conflict between the individual and society, between love and duty, and between husband and wife.

In 1879, Ibsen wrote the classic drama of female libera- tion, A Doll’s House. Threatened with blackmail over a debt she had incurred years earlier, Nora Helmer looks to her priggish husband Torvald for protection. But Torvald is a victim of the small-mindedness and middle-class social restraints of his time and place. When he fails to rally to his wife’s defense, Nora realizes the frailty of her dependent lifestyle. Awakened to the meaninglessness of her life as “a doll-wife” in “a doll’s house,” she comes to recognize that her first obligation is to herself and to her dignity as a human being.

Nora’s revelation brings to life, in the forceful language of everyday speech, the psychological tensions between male and female that Mill had analyzed only ten years ear- lier in his treatise on the subjection of women. Ibsen does not resolve the question of whether a woman’s duties to husband and children come before her duty to herself; yet, as is suggested in the following exchange between Nora and Torvald (excerpted from the last scene of A Doll’s House), Nora’s self-discovery precipitates the end of her marriage. She shuts the door on the illusions of the past as emphatically as Ibsen shut out the world of Romantic idealism.

From Ibsen’s A Doll’s House (1879)

Act III, Final Scene

[Late at night in the Helmers’ living room. Instead of retiring, Nora suddenly appears in street clothes.]

Helmer: . . . What’s all this? I thought you were going to 1 bed. You’ve changed your dress?

Nora: Yes, Torvald; I’ve changed my dress. Helmer: But what for? At this hour? Nora: I shan’t sleep tonight. Helmer: But, Nora dear— Nora [looking at her watch]: It’s not so very late—Sit down,

Torvald; we have a lot to talk about. [She sits at one side of the table.]

Helmer: Nora—what does this mean? Why that stern 10 expression?

Nora: Sit down. It’ll take some time. I have a lot to say to you. [Helmer sits at the other side of the table.]

Helmer: You frighten me, Nora. I don’t understand you. Nora: No, that’s just it. You don’t understand me; and I have

never understood you either—until tonight. No, don’t interrupt me. Just listen to what I have to say. This is to be a final settlement, Torvald.

Helmer: How do you mean? 20 Nora [after a short silence]: Doesn’t anything special strike

you as we sit here like this? Helmer: I don’t think so—why? Nora: It doesn’t occur to you, does it, that though we’ve

been married for eight years, this is the first time that we two—man and wife—have sat down for a serious talk?

Helmer: What do you mean by serious? Nora: During eight whole years, no—more than that—ever

since the first day we met—we have never exchanged so much as one serious word about serious things. 30

Helmer: Why should I perpetually burden you with all my cares and problems? How could you possibly help me to solve them?

Nora: I’m not talking about cares and problems. I’m simply saying we’ve never once sat down seriously and tried to get to the bottom of anything.

Helmer: But, Nora, darling—why should you be concerned with serious thoughts?

Nora: That’s the whole point! You’ve never understood me—A great injustice has been done me, Torvald; first by 40 Father, and then by you.

Helmer: What a thing to say! No two people on earth could ever have loved you more than we have!

Nora [shaking her head]: You never loved me. You just thought it was fun to be in love with me.

Helmer: This is fantastic! Nora: Perhaps. But it’s true all the same. While I was still at

home I used to hear Father airing his opinions and they became my opinions; or if I didn’t happen to agree, I kept it to myself—

his doll-baby, and played with me as I played with my dolls. Then I came to live in your house—

Helmer: What an expression to use about our marriage! Nora [undisturbed]: I mean—from Father’s hands I passed

into yours. You arranged everything according to your tastes, and I acquired the same tastes, or I pretended to—I’m not sure which—a little of both, perhaps. Looking back on it all, it seems to me I’ve lived here like a beggar, from hand to mouth. I’ve lived by performing tricks for you, Torvald. But that’s the way you wanted it. You and Father have done me a great 60 wrong. You’ve prevented me from becoming a real person.

Helmer: Nora, how can you be so ungrateful and unreasonable! Haven’t you been happy here?

Nora: No, never. I thought I was; but I wasn’t really. Helmer: Not—not happy!

he would have been displeased otherwise. He used to call me 50

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Q What is Helmer’s perception of Nora?

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Nora: No, only merry. You’ve always been so kind to me. But our home has never been anything but a play-room. I’ve been your doll-wife, just as at home I was Papa’s doll-child. And the children, in turn, have been my dolls. I thought it fun when you played games with me, just as they thought it fun when I 70 played games with them. And that’s been our marriage, Torvald.

Helmer: There may be a grain of truth in what you say, even though it is distorted and exaggerated. From now on things will be different. Play-time is over now; tomorrow lessons begin!

Nora: Whose lessons? Mine, or the children’s? Helmer: Both, if you wish it, Nora, dear. Nora: Torvald, I’m afraid you’re not the man to teach me to

be a real wife to you. 80 Helmer: How can you say that? Nora: And I’m certainly not fit to teach the children. Helmer: Nora! Nora: Didn’t you just say, a moment ago, you didn’t dare

trust them to me? Helmer: That was in the excitement of the moment! You

mustn’t take it so seriously! Nora: But you were quite right, Torvald. That job is beyond

me; there’s another job I must do first: I must try and educate myself. You could never help me to do that; I must do it quite 90 alone. So, you see—that’s why I’m going to leave you.

Helmer: [jumping up]: What did you say—? Nora: I shall never get to know myself—I shall never learn

to face reality—unless I stand alone. So I can’t stay with you any longer.

Helmer: Nora! Nora! Nora: I am going at once. I’m sure Kristine will let me stay

with her tonight— Helmer: But, Nora—this is madness! I shan’t allow you to

do this. I shall forbid it! 100 Nora: You no longer have the power to forbid me anything.

I’ll only take a few things with me—those that belong to me. I shall never again accept anything from you.

Helmer: Have you lost your senses? Nora: Tomorrow I’ll go home—to what was my home, I

mean. It might be easier for me there, to find something to do. Helmer: You talk like an ignorant child, Nora—! Nora: Yes. That’s just why I must educate myself. Helmer: To leave your home—to leave your husband, and

your children! What do you suppose people would say to that? 110 Nora: It makes no difference. This is something I must do. Helmer: It’s inconceivable! Don’t you realize you’d be

betraying your most sacred duty? Nora: What do you consider that to be? Helmer: Your duty towards your husband and your

children—I surely don’t have to tell you that! Nora: I’ve another duty just as sacred. Helmer: Nonsense! What duty do you mean? Nora: My duty towards myself. Helmer: Remember—before all else you are a wife and 120

mother. Nora: I don’t believe that any more. I believe that before all

else I am a human being, just as you are—or at least that I

should try and become one. I know that most people would agree with you, Torvald—and that’s what they say in books. But I can no longer be satisfied with what most people say— or what they write in books. I must think things out for myself—get clear about them.

Helmer: Surely your position in your home is clear enough? Have you no sense of religion? Isn’t that an infallible guide to 130 you?

Nora: But don’t you see, Torvald—I don’t really know what religion is.

Helmer: Nora! How can you! Nora: All I know about it is what Pastor Hansen told me

when I was confirmed. He taught me what he thought religion was—said it was this and that. As soon as I get away by myself, I shall have to look into that matter too, try and decide whether what he taught me was right—or whether it’s right for me, at least. 140

Helmer: A nice way for a young woman to talk! It’s unheard of! If religion means nothing to you, I’ll appeal to your conscience; you must have some sense of ethics, I suppose? Answer me! Or have you none?

Nora: It’s hard for me to answer you, Torvald. I don’t think I know—all these things bewilder me. But I do know that I think quite differently from you about them. I’ve discovered that the law, for instance, is quite different from what I had imagined; but I find it hard to believe it can be right. It seems it’s criminal for a woman to try and spare her old, sick, father, or save her 150 husband’s life! I can’t agree with that.

Helmer: You talk like a child. You have no understanding of the society we live in.

Nora: No, I haven’t. But I’m going to try and learn. I want to find out which of us is right—society or I.

Helmer: You are ill, Nora; you have a touch of fever; you’re quite beside yourself.

Nora: I’ve never felt so sure—so clear-headed—as I do tonight.

Helmer: “Sure and clear-headed” enough to leave your 160 husband and your children?

Nora: Yes. Helmer: Then there is only one explanation possible. Nora: What? Helmer: You don’t love me any more. Nora: No; that is just it. Helmer: Nora!—What are you saying! Nora: It makes me so unhappy, Torvald; for you’ve always

been so kind to me. But I can’t help it. I don’t love you any more. 170

Helmer [mastering himself with difficulty]: You feel “sure and clear-headed” about this too?

Nora: Yes, utterly sure. That’s why I can’t stay here any longer. . . .

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CHAPTER 30 Industry, Empire, and the Realist Style 301

301Volume2

The Birth of Photography One of the most significant factors in the development of the materialist mentality was the birth of photography. While a painting or an engraving might bring to life the content of the artist’s imagination, a photograph offered an authentic record of a moment vanished in time. Unlike the camera obscura, which only captured an image briefly (see chapter 23), the photograph fixed and pre- served reality.

Photography—literally “writing with light”—had its beginnings in 1835, when William Henry Fox Talbot (1800–1877) fixed negative images on paper coated with light-sensitive chemicals, a process by which multiple prints might be produced from a single exposure. Slightly earlier, Talbot’s French contemporary, Louis J. M. Daguerre (1787–1851), had developed a similar process that fixed the image on a polished metal plate. Unlike Talbot’s prints (produced from paper negatives), however, Daguerre’s images could not be reproduced—each was a one-of-a-kind object. Nevertheless, in the next decades, his more widely publicized and technically improved product, known as a daguerreotype, came into vogue throughout Europe and America, where it fulfilled a growing demand for portraits. Gradual improvements in camera lenses and in the chem- icals used to develop the visible image hastened the rise of photography as a popular way of recording the physical world with unprecedented accuracy.

Photography presented an obvious challenge to the authority of the artist, who, throughout history, had assumed the role of nature’s imitator. But artists were slow to realize the long-range impact of photography—that is, the camera’s potential to liberate artists from repro- ducing the physical “look” of nature. Critics proclaimed that photographs, as authentic facsimiles of the physical world, should serve artists as aids to achieving greater Realism in canvas painting; and many artists did indeed use photographs as factual resources for their compositions. Nevertheless, by mid-century, both Europeans and Americans were using the camera for a wide variety of other purposes: they made topographical studies of exotic geo- graphic sites, recorded architectural monuments, and produced thousands of portraits. Photography provided ordinary people with portrait images that had previously only been available to those who could afford painted like- nesses. In the production of portraits the daguerreotype proved most popular; by 1850, some 100,000 were sold each year in Paris. Such photographs were used as calling cards and to immortalize the faces of notable individuals (see Figure 28.4), as well as those of criminals, whose “mug shots” became a useful tool for the young science of crimi- nology.

Some photographers, such as the British pioneer Julia Margaret Cameron (1815–1879), used the camera to recre- ate the style of Romantic painting. Imitating the effects of the artist’s paintbrush, Cameron’s soft-focus portraits are Romantic in spirit and sentiment (Figure 30.8). Others

used the camera to document the factual realities of their time and place. The French photographer Gaspart-Félix Tournachon, known as Nadar (1820–1910), made vivid portrait studies of such celebrities as George Sand, Berlioz, and Sarah Bernhardt. Nadar was the first to experiment with aerial photography (see Figure 30.14). He also intro- duced the use of electric light for a series of extraordinary photographs that examined the sewers and catacombs beneath the city of Paris.

Inevitably, nineteenth-century photographs served as social documents: the black-and-white images of poverty- stricken families and ramshackle tenements (see Figure 30.5) produced by Thomas Annan (1829–1887), for

1835 William H. F. Talbot (English) invents the negative–positive photographic process

1837 Louis J. M. Daguerre (French) uses a copper plate coated with silver to produce the first daguerreotype

1860 production begins on the first Winchester repeating rifle (in America)

1866 explosive dynamite is first produced in Sweden 1888 George Eastman (American) perfects the “Kodak”

box camera

Figure 30.8 JULIA MARGARET CAMERON, Whisper of the Muse (G. F. Watts and Children), ca. 1865. Photograph.

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302 CHAPTER 30 Industry, Empire, and the Realist Style

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instance, record with gritty Realism the notorious slums of nineteenth-century Glasgow, Scotland. Such photographs could easily illustrate the novels of Charles Dickens. In a similar vein, the eyewitness photographs of the American Civil War (1861–1865) produced by Mathew B. Brady (1823–1896) and his staff testify to the importance of the professional photographer as a chronicler of human life. Brady’s 3500 Civil War photographs include mundane scenes of barracks and munitions as well as unflinching views of human carnage (Figure 30.9). By the end of the century, the Kodak “point and shoot” handheld camera gave vast numbers of ordinary people the freedom to take their own photographic images.

Courbet and French Realist Painting In painting no less than in literature and photography, Realism came to challenge the Romantic style. The Realist preference for concrete, matter-of-fact depictions of every- day life provided a sober alternative to both the remote, exotic, and heroic imagery of the Romantics and the noble and elevated themes of the Neoclassicists. Obedient to the credo that artists must confront the experiences and appearances of their own time, Realist painters abandoned the nostalgic landscapes and heroic themes of Romantic art in favor of compositions depicting the consequences of industrialization (see Figure 30.3) and the lives of ordinary men and women.

The leading Realist of nineteenth-century French painting was Gustave Courbet (1819–1877). A farmer’s son, he was a self-taught artist, an outspoken socialist, and a staunch defender of the Realist cause. “A painter,” he

protested, “should paint only what he can see.” Indeed, most of Courbet’s works—portraits, landscapes, and con- temporary scenes—remain true to the tangible facts of his immediate vision. With the challenge “Show me an angel and I’ll paint one,” he taunted both the Romantics and the Neoclassicists. Not angels but ordinary individuals in their actual settings and circumstances interested Courbet.

In The Stone-Breakers, Courbet depicted two rural labor- ers performing the most menial of physical tasks (Figure 30.10). The painting, which Courbet’s friend Proudhon called “the first socialist picture,” outraged the critics because its subject matter is mundane and its figures are crude, ragged, and totally unidealized. Moreover, the figures were positioned with their backs turned toward the viewer, thus violating, by nineteenth-century standards, the rules of propriety and decorum enshrined in French academic art (see chapter 21). But despite such “violations” Courbet’s painting appealed to the masses. In a country whose popu- lation was still two-thirds rural and largely poor, the stolid dignity of hard labor was a popular subject.

Courbet’s contemporary Jean-François Millet (1814– 1875) did not share his reformist zeal; he nevertheless devoted his career to painting the everyday lives of the rural proletariat. His depictions of hard-working farm laborers earned him the title “the peasant painter.” In Gleaners (Figure 30.11), three ordinary peasant women pursue the menial task of gathering the bits of grain left over after the harvest. Delineated with ennobling simplic- ity, these stoop-laborers are as ordinary and anonymous as Courbet’s stone-breakers, but, set against a broad and ennobling landscape, they appear dignified and graceful.

Figure 30.9 MATHEW B. BRADY or staff, Dead Confederate Soldier with Gun, Petersburg, Virginia, 1865. Photograph. The four-year-long American Civil War produced the largest number of casualties of any war in American history. Brady hired staff photographers to assist him in photographing the military campaigns and battles, a project that produced some 3500 photographs but left him bankrupt.

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