Realism and Naturalism
Realism and Naturalism were movments that occured in the ninteenth century as a response to Romanticism. The reasoning behind the movements themselves originates in France in the typical rational mind vs. emotional mind comes into play. Romaticism played upon emotions more than it did any sort of real experiences and there tended to be magic in the air with the plots. The French commonly viewed themselves as rationalists, even as far back as the eighteenth century so the idea of Romanticism (even when it was associated with the revolutions that were frequent in France at the time) did not necessarily sit well with the French intellectuals.
The first “major player” of the realists was a man by the name of Honoré de Balzac. He wrote several novels he titled “La Comédie humaine (The Human Comedy)” Which was his attempt to systematically write about every walk of life from the lowly theif to the highest aristocrat. He had a great obsession to detail which could be related to the great obsession to detail that the animators for The Incredibles took in order to make that movie look so darn fantastic. His title was a parody to Dante’s Divine Comedy which was popular at the time.
The realists tended toward the philosophy that writing about real human events is far more interesting then writing about the fantastical side of things. While I tend to agree with that to a point I think that having a few fantastical elements in a story really makes it more powerful to the reader. Human ideas and foibles should always be present, something that the Romantics tended to ignore. Anyway:
The second major player (also French) was Gustave Flaubert. This man was MORE realistic than Balzac because he wrote about the events of a adutlerous named Madame Bolvary he wrote about her in such a way as to not make her adultery justifiable at all. The novel is described in the article Realism and Naturalism as “almost an anti-romantic tract.” Whether true or not, the fact remains that the novel probably influenced future realistic writers.
Naturalism is not truly a break from Realism, in fact one can be a Naturalist and a Realist without being attacked by either party. According to the Realism and Naturalism article “The term was invented by Émile Zola partly because he was seeking for a striking platform from which to convince the reading public that it was getting something new and modern in his fiction.” As a “Naturalist” he argued that he was writing a novel from a new perspective: with the scientific method. Personally, I think that Realism was the same way and it can be interchanged.
The philosophy behind Realism is valid, though extreme, however the philosophy behind Naturalism is little more then splitting hairs. It’s the same thing when people argue about which 80’s Hair-Metal band they like better. There is a difference, but its a semantic difference based upon the way things are described. Realism uses exhaustive descriptions, and Naturalism uses mostly dialogue. Anyway, this is Cyril signing out. I feel like I ranted on too much on this already. Enjoy!
