Convention and Realism in Henry James’ Washington Square Essay

Convention and world in Henry James capital of the United States SquareRealism, as expound by William Dean Howells in the late nineteenth century, replaces the high imposture and style of the literature of the preceding decades by permitting such characters as Howells Silas Lapham to admit a distinct place in the pantheon of American literary characters. Fervently, Howells invoked the fair play of the realist genre, writing, Let it portray men and women as they are, actuated by the motives and the passions in the measure we all know...let it speak the dialect, the language, that most Americans know - the language of unmoved(p) people everywhere (Fictions of the Real, 188). This impassioned phrase, apparently invoking the importance of characters such as Silas Lapham, indicates the appendage of a gritty language, an unaffected dialect. Such a marker for naturalism connotes not the stories of Howell or James, but rather the coarse, common language of the masses as found in the pages of Twains Huckleberry Finn. Howells call for realism encompasses such literary giants as Henry James, but does not necessarily describe them. two Howells and James, though utterly invested in the motives and passions of the human race, still rely and stylistic and social conventions in their novels. James, most especially, combines high art and society with a new conception of realism - one that removes the mask from the self-proclaimed moralism of the upper classes and demonstrates their hopes and failures in the very light of truth-telling fiction. While Howells realism was romantic in that he permitted respectability to censor his observations and insights (Trachtenberg, 191) and allowed his characters to fall into the miasma of what he believed to ... ...mes, 39). James, rather than resorting to the later bitter, gritty realist tactics of Drieser, stays enmeshed in the conventions of society succession experimenting with realist conceptions of character. Though the no vel caters to the good taste of the gentlefolk (Trachtenberg, 182) through its nod to social norms and customs, James characters, most especially Catherine Sloper, indicate the emergence of a new ingenuousness of an authentic and original being (Bell, 38) - a being of lost hopes with the harry edges of truth uncompromisingly told. Works Cited Millicent Bell, Style as Subject Washington Square, in Sewanee Review (vol. 83, 1985). Henry James, Washington Square (London Penguin Classics, 1986). Alan Trachtenberg, Fictions of the Real, in The internalisation of America Culture & Society in the Gilded Age (New York heap and Wang, 1982).