First published in Siting America/ Sighting Modernity: Essays in Honor of Sonja Bašić. Ed. Jelena Šesnić. Zagreb: FF press, 2010. 25-42. The essay has been slightly revised for this volume. Crossing the Threshold: Realism and the Expression of Emotions Winfried Fluck I. Like other key concepts in literary and cultural studies, realism is an extremely unstable term. When we have seen a movie, for example a Hollywood produc‐ tion, and criticize it afterwards for being “unrealistic,” we seem to be pretty sure of what we mean, namely that the movie does not tell us the truth about reality. Indeed, claims that the task of literature ought to be the truthful depiction of reality abounded in American realism of the 19 th century, the so-called Gilded Age, and a promise of truthful representation of reality became the central, most frequently used form of authorization for a new school of fiction later called realism. “Realism,” Howells writes in his essay collection Criticism and Fiction, “is nothing more and nothing less than the truthful treatment of material(…)” (38). Similarly, Henry James, in his programmatic essay “The Art of Fiction,” argues that the novelist must speak with the assurance of the historian, because, like the historian, he is looking for truth: The only reason for the existence of a novel is that it does attempt to represent life. (…) The only effectual way to lay it [apologies for fiction] to rest is to emphasise the (…) fact that as the picture is reality, so the novel is history. That is the only general description (which does it justice) that we may give of the novel. (…) The subjectmatter of fiction is stored up likewise in documents and records, and if it will not give itself away, as they say in California, it must speak with assurance, with the tone of the historian. (166-67) From his perspective, Trollope’s admission “that the events he narrates have not really happened” strikes James as “a terrible crime”: “(…)it shocks me every 1 Cf. Howells: “The art of fiction has, in fact, become a finer art in our day than it was with Dickens and Thackeray. We could not suffer the confidential attitude of the latter now, nor the mannerism of the former, any more than we could endure the prolixity of Richardson or the coarseness of Fielding. These great men are of the past - they and their methods and interests; even Trollope and Reade are not of the present. The new school derives from Hawthorne and George Eliot rather than any others; but it studies human nature much more in its wonted aspects, and finds its ethical and dramatic examples in the operation of lighter but not really less vital motives. The moving accident is certainly not its trade; and it prefers to avoid all manner of dire catastrophes. It is largely influenced by French fiction in form; but it is the realism of Daudet rather than the realism of Zola that prevails with it, and it has a soul of its own which is above the business or recording the rather brutish pursuit of woman by a man, which seems to be the chief end of the French novelist” (“Henry James, Jr.” 70). whit as much in Trollope as it would have shocked me in Gibbon or Macaulay. It implies that the novelist is less occupied in looking for the truth (…) than the historian (…)” (167). On the other hand, it has been one of the common convictions of intellectual life since the 19 th century that truth is relative and subject to interpretation, so that one person’s reality can be another person’s illusion about reality. Literary history has many instances where one generation criticized a prior generation for not being realist enough, only in turn to be criticized by the next generation for exactly the same reason. In Criticism and Fiction, William Dean Howells, the dean of American letters in the 19 th century and the leading American realist of his generation, did not hesitate to criticize a long list of writers and texts for their lack of realism. 1 Howells’ caustic remarks about what he later called “pernicious fiction” focused on the romance and started the so-called realism war in which the romance and realist writing were contrasted in stark terms: for Howells, realism embodied what literature should be and the romance what it shouldn’t be, while some of his opponents saw it exactly the other way round. Only a few years later, Frank Norris, one of the leading voices of a new generation of writers, asked: “Why should it be that so soon as the novelist addresses himself - seriously - to the consideration of temporary life he must abandon Romance and take up the harsh, loveless, colorless, blunt tool called Realism? ” (“A Plea” 279-80). Norris made fun of Howells’ realism and called his novels “teacup tragedies”: Realism is minute; it is the drama of a broken teacup, the tragedy of a walk down the block, the excitement of an afternoon call, the adventure of an invitation to dinner. It is the visit to my neighbor’s house, a formal visit, from which I may draw no conclusions. I see my neighbor - and that is all. Realism bows upon the doormat and goes away and says to me, as we link arms on the sidewalk: ‘That is life.’ And I say it is not. It 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0009 128 Winfried Fluck 2 See also Norris’s essay on “Zola as a Romantic Writer”: “Observe the methods employed by the novelists who profess and call themselves ‘realists’ - Mr. Howells, for instance. (…) It is the smaller details of every-day life, things that are likely to happen between lunch and supper, small passions, restricted emotions, dramas of the reception room, tragedies of an afternoon, crises involving cups of tea” (71-72). 3 On this view of realism as a discourse convention see also Jakobson, Hamon, Fowler, and Lodge. is not, as you would very well see if you took Romance with you to call upon your neighbor. (280) 2 Ironically enough, Norris voiced his criticism of an insufficient realism in the name of what he called romance which, he claimed, was closer to reality than any of Howells’ timid novels of manners: Let Realism do the entertainment with its meticulous presentation of teacups, rag carpets, wall-paper and haircloth sofas, stopping with these, going no deeper than it sees, choosing the ordinary, the untroubled, the commonplace. But to Romance belongs the wide world for range, and the unplumbed depths of the human heart, and the mystery of sex, and the problems of life, and the black, unsearched penetralia of the soul of man. (“A Plea” 282) Realism, we may conclude from this exchange, is an unstable and relative term, and that is why a definition by Jürgen Peper from his book Bewußtseinslagen des Erzählens, which departs from a normative definition, still provides the best access to the problem: “Wenn Realismus stets ein relativer Begriff bleiben muß, der sich mit des Autors Wirklichkeitssicht wandelt, dann gilt es eben, diese Wirklichkeitssicht zu erfassen” (65). Freely translated, one may quote Peper as saying: “If realism must always remain a relative term, reflecting changing views of reality, then the starting point for every discussion of literary realism must be to identify the view of reality on which a text or critical comment is based.” Consciously or unconsciously, implicitly or explicitly, we always already have a tacit assumption about what constitutes reality, and, thus, when we characterize a fictional text - literature, film, or television series - as realistic or unrealistic, we measure it against this underlying idea. What we call realistic at different times is thus really more fittingly called a reality effect (in the words of Roland Barthes), that is, the conviction that a text reflects reality as it is conceived at a particular time. 3 In order to demonstrate the semantic instability of the concept of realism, one could go through the history of literary criticism on realism and list the different, often contradictory definitions offered at various times. Instead, I propose to approach the issue in a more biographical manner. One of the first 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0009 Crossing the Threshold: Realism and the Expression of Emotions 129 novels that caught my imagination as a boy was Leo Tolstoi’s Anna Karenina, a story of adultery and melodramatic defeat that I found very exciting, and emotionally highly agitating. I must have consumed it like a Hollywood movie at the time and probably imagined Anna Karenina to look like Liz Taylor. Later, as a student of literature, I learned that this was one of the great realist novels of the 19 th century, but this happened at a time when views of realism changed. During the heyday of the student movement in the 1960s, Marxist perspectives had a renaissance in the West and, in an often trivializing reduction of a Marxist epistemology, realism was now (again) a truthful reflection of social conditions. This view of realism favored hard-hitting novels of social criticism like Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle, but could do little with the honorable tradition of 19 th century bourgeois realism, of which Anna Karenina was such a supreme example, or, in American literature, with the novels of Henry James, which usually focus on a small circle of privileged upper-class characters. If realism was supposed to be a reflection of economic and social conditions, how could a novel like James’s The Portrait of a Lady, the story of an American heiress in an Old World aristocratic milieu, containing no workers and no labor struggle, ever be considered a realist novel? This question provoked me to write my own interpretation of American realism, Inszenierte Wirklichkeit, which takes its point of departure from Peper’s epistemological perspective. If realism is a relative term, depending on changing views of what constitutes reality, then we have to look more closely at the underlying premises about reality on which American realism of the 19 th century was based. Peper defines theses premises as a post-metaphysical form of rationalism. It insists that because reality is constituted by causal laws that can be studied in quasi-empirical fashion, we can arrive at something like a correct and truthful interpretation of reality by observation and experience. In American literary realism of the Gilded Age, such premises explain the central role of experience. In the view of writers like Twain or Howells, we are trained to accept seemingly self-evident cultural traditions that are the source of all kinds of illusion about reality, and the only way in which we can liberate ourselves from the tenacious grasp of these illusions is by experiences which make us realize that things are really different from what we have been taught to think. Huck Finn provides a classic example: Only by the experience of living together with Jim on a raft can Huck liberate himself from the racist cultural prejudices that initially determine his views of his Black companion. From this point of view, the characteristic formal choices of 19 th century realism make good sense, because they all have the function of taking away the privileged guardianship of the narrator in order to allow the reader to make his or her own 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0009 130 Winfried Fluck 4 One of the best-known versions of this argument is by Leo Bersani in “Realism and the Fear of Desire.” experiences with the text. I am thinking specifically of characteristic features such as the so-called “dramatic method,” in which the third-person narrator retreats, sometimes to invisibility, or of aesthetic concepts such as verisimilitude, or of a commonplace, de-poeticized language. Taken together, these features combine to provide an impression of familiarity, called an “air of reality” by James. An air of reality, in turn, is a precondition for the reader to consider the novel as a possible source of experience. One might call this the “communicative” view of realism, in which a string of disillusionments, stemming from experience, provide the basis for an enhanced understanding of reality. This growth of knowledge results from a slow learning process modeled on the ideal of a dialogic exchange in which the nature of reality is constantly reassessed. Yet again, at about the time when this new view of literary realism had been formulated, another perspective was opened up by poststructuralism which described realism as a discourse that is not at all undermining illusions but creating the biggest illusion of all, namely the illusion that reality can be understood on experiential grounds. From the perspective of poststructuralism, such rationalist premises tacitly confirm the ideological assumption of a causally ordered, logocentric world in which rational control promises progress. Instead of drawing on the deconstructive potential of the play of signifiers, realist literature aims at closure: its main characters, such as Anna Karenina or Effi Briest or Isabel Archer, live in illusions, make a fatal mistake because of these illusions, eventually gain insight into reality through their disillusioning experiences, but only at the price of the defeat of their desire. 4 For poststructuralism, realism is hostile to desire, to the power of the imaginary, and to the subversive force of strong emotions - which, for poststruc‐ turalists, also explains why realist novels often follow a rather commonplace plot and can be experienced as boring by melodrama-nourished readers in search of, as Howells calls it in his essay on Henry James, “dire catastrophes” (70). Especially the early novels by Howells and James feature non-heroic characters, describe everyday events and contemporary settings, give priority to character analysis over plot, proudly emphasize the unspectacular eventlessness of the narrative, and even toy with the elimination of the traditional happy ending. Such bold reorientations led critics to dismiss the new realist school in fiction as a dreary literature of dissection, a critique also to be found in one of many hostile caricatures of the new American school of fiction showing Howells and James looking at the plot of the realist novel “in which nothing happens.” 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0009 Crossing the Threshold: Realism and the Expression of Emotions 131 5 For Howells, lack of emotional self-control means that a human being is still in the “barbarian” stage of human development. Thus, in his criticism of “Pernicious Fiction,” he says about the stock hero of the popular historical romances of the time that he “is really a painted barbarian, the prey of his passions, and his delusions, full of obsolete ideals, and the motives and ethics of a savage(…)” (19). Consequently, there exists a simple criterion for judging literature: “The tests are very plain and simple, and they are perfectly infallible. If a novel flatters the passions, and exalts them above the principles, it is poisonous” (19). To support his claim, Howells begins his essay with a letter from a worried reader of novels: “Whatever in my mental make-up is wild and visionary, whatever is untrue, whatever is injurious, I can trace to the perusal of some work of fiction. Worse than that, they beget such high-strung and supersensitive ideas of life that plain industry and plodding perseverance are despised, and matter-of-fact poverty, or everyday, commonplace distress, meets with no sympathy, if indeed noticed at all, by one who has wept over the impossibly accumulated sufferings of some gaudy hero or heroine” (18). In a way, the letter reads like a response to Norris: it is precisely the sensationalism of the romance that prevents somebody like Norris to see the drama in everyday life and consequently also undermines any basis for sympathy and support. Howells and James nourished such views. Usually, the major events in their novels are conversations because this is an exemplary moment in the processing of experience: characters make unexpected, often disturbing experiences, they feel a need to talk about them to others, others introduce a new and different perspective, so that differing interpretations have to be weighed against each other and have to be reconciled. In consequence, “reality” emerges as the result of an ongoing dialogue on the meaning of everyday experiences, in which experience is transformed into social experience. A dinner can thus be a favorite plot device for Howells and James. On the one hand, it provides a superb occasion for bringing different people together, on the other hand, it can produce so many new views and interpretations of experience that an ongoing dialogue about the nature of reality is kept going. Thus, often the dinner scene itself is followed by several chapters of after-dinner conversations in order to clarify what happened at the dinner. It is characteristic of such encounters that they are (or hold the ideal of being) “mannered” in the sense of being civilized, so that self-restraint and self-control become crucial for a liberation from illusions. 5 II. Is realism hostile, then, to the expression of strong emotions, which it appears to associate with the romance? One may think of the last scene in The Portrait of a Lady, where Isabel feels the strong attraction of Caspar Goodwood, like a flush of lightning, but then decides to fight against it and to go back to her unpleasant life with Osmond. One of Howells’s most explicit discussions of foolish emotions is 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0009 132 Winfried Fluck linked to the love story in The Rise of Silas Lapham, in which the Reverend Sewell develops his so-called economy of pain. “Economy of pain” in this case does not mean that one should not express and follow one’s own emotions but, on the contrary, that one should not sacrifice one’s own emotional fulfilment for others: “One suffer instead of three, if none is to blame? That’s sense and that’s justice. It’s the economy of pain which naturally suggests itself, and which would insist upon itself, if we were not all perverted by traditions which are the figment of the shallowest sentimentality” (222). Realist novels thus do not reject emotions or their open articulation. What they do reject is a particular mode of expression inspired by the cultural codes of sentimentality and sensationalism, in which characters become the prey of their feelings and passions. Indeed, if realist texts were unable to strongly stir the emotions, the attraction Anna Karenina had on me already at an early age could hardly be explained. What happens in realism, then, is not a repression of emotions but their reconfiguration. Indeed, one challenge for 19 th century realism was to develop new representational modes for the description and expression of emotions. My naïve, completely un-theoretical interest in Anna Karenina can provide us with a first clue here. Obviously, it was based on curiosity, a curiosity that, in turn, was stirred by the extraordinary dimension of the events described. Indeed, contrary to the image of a tame tea-hour world, 19 th century realism offers a world of extraordinary and often spectacular events: adultery, the rise and fall of businessmen, seduction, desertion and suicide, violent labor conflicts, painful divorce, the cunning manipulation of innocent people. To think only of James’s novels, there are fatal mistakes like Daisy Miller’s, tragic deaths like Milly Theale’s, or the cruel humiliation of the heroine of Washington Square by both her father and her lover. The basic narrative (and emotional drama) in realism remains that of rise and fall, success and defeat, of struggles against misrecognition or cruel contempt. Manipulation and deception remain crucial elements in this struggle, but, in contrast to earlier melodramas, they have now become more subtle and therefore emotionally perhaps even more agitating, because in contrast to the sensationalism of popular literature, they have an “air of reality.” What is of interest here is how these emotional dramas are actually repre‐ sented in the novel. In the well-known dinner scene of The Rise of Silas Lapham, Irene triumphantly registers Corey’s attention, whereas in reality Corey misses her sister Penelope. Howells faces the representational challenge of telling us something about the strong emotions of the characters, although, typical of the novel of manners and its code of civilized behavior, these cannot be openly expressed by the characters themselves. This is an excellent example of what 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0009 Crossing the Threshold: Realism and the Expression of Emotions 133 Norris dismissively calls “dramas of the reception room,” although one has to add that the drama consists precisely in what he thinks is absent in realism, namely “the unplumbed depths of the human heart” (“Plea” 280, 282). In principle, an omniscient third-person narrator could provide insight into the emotional life of his characters, but in 19 th century American realism adherence to the dramatic method prevents the narrator from doing so. Howells thus only faintly indicates what may be going on emotionally underneath the façade of polished manners. But precisely because his suggestions remain so scarce, the reader is challenged (in effect, she can do little else) to fill the gap with imaginary additions by drawing on her own emotional world. The goal of the realist text must be to strengthen the independence of the reader, for example, by taking back the authorial voice while at the same time keeping the main characters at a distance from the reader. Thus, although there is a lot going on inside the characters, it is not presented in a way in which we can easily empathize; and although the realist novel often tells heart-breaking, potentially melodramatic stories of individual pain, it presents these (melo)dramas in such a way that we always keep a certain distance and have to come up with our own judgments on the basis of a shared world. “Economy” of pain here also assumes the meaning of not being overwhelmed as a reader, of being economical and measured about one’s own emotional involvement. This observation can help us to arrive at two important conclusions about the expression of emotions in 19 th century American realism: 1) The representation of emotions is often moved from the overt conspicuousness of the sentimental and melodramatic mode, with its ostentatious hand-wringing, its cries of despairs and its frequent fainting spells, to the interiority of characters - where it is hidden from our sight so that we can only guess what is going on inside the characters on the basis of small hints and sometimes the faintest of suggestions. 2) However, this should not be seen as a denial or a repression of emotions but as a different strategy to express them. What realists were the first to realize was the stimulating power of what Wolfgang Iser has described as a blank (Leerstelle), which stimulates us to fill out the empty, indeterminate textual space. To be sure, this can only be done on cues provided by the text but, on the other hand, we have to draw on our own imagination in order to give these cues a concrete Gestalt and meaning. Neither is it incidental that Iser illustrates his theory in The Act of Reading by drawing on the work of Henry James “in place of an introduction,” nor that James wrote one of the most popular horror stories ever, The Turn of the Screw, because the horror genre crucially depends on the stimulation of our imagination. Because emotions are amorphous and diffuse by nature, they need to attach themselves to a sign of the real in order 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0009 134 Winfried Fluck 6 One of the essays that stirred my early interest in James was Sonja Bašić’s superb interpretation of The Wings of the Dove, in her essay “Henry James Between Old and New: An Interpretation of ‘The Wings of the Dove’.” Sonja Bašić’s interpretations of various writers of international modernism belong to the best that European Americanists have produced on that matter. to become representable. What James discovered, on the other hand, was that if the reference remains diffuse or “empty,” literary representation may be even more effective. A strategy of identification is thus replaced by the strategy of a discrete emotional transfer. 6 III. The work of James can provide us with a good example of this representational strategy of expressing emotions by not describing them explicitly. In James’s sadly underestimated novel Washington Square, a retelling of Balzac’s Eugénie Grandet, there is a scene in which the weak, and up to this point, painfully obedient daughter Catherine Sloper stages a first rebellion against her father. It is of special interest to see how James represents this process on the narrative level. In keeping with the dramatic method, the third-person narrator of Washington Square initially approaches Catherine from a neutral and distant outside view, which prevents us from getting to know her own thoughts and feelings. For a long time, she possesses no inner life for us. James’s narrative strategy creates the impression of an “empty mind” that hardly seems to have a consciousness worth describing. Such an authorial stance is well-suited to create the impression of a lack of personality. But it is ill-suited to present the inner turmoil of the heroine in a process of social apprenticeship in which the developing subject gradually acquires an identity of her own. James solves the problem by a skillful transition, from a melodramatic mode, manifesting itself in tears and a cry, to a forceful representation of interiority as blank, through which he forces the reader to imagine Catherine’s inner life. The scene of Catherine’s first real rebellion against an overpowering father provides a case in point. Both literally and metaphorically, James has his heroine cross the threshold from the domestic to the realist novel: This was more than the poor girl could bear; her tears overflowed, and she moved toward her grimly consistent parent with a pitiful cry. Her hands were raised in supplication, but he sternly evaded this appeal. Instead of letting her sob out her misery on his shoulder, he simply took her by the arm and directed her course across the threshold, closing the door gently but firmly behind her. After he had done so, 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0009 Crossing the Threshold: Realism and the Expression of Emotions 135 he remained listening. For a long time there was no sound; he knew that she was standing outside. He was sorry for her, as I have said; but he was so sure he was right. At last he heard her move away, and then her footstep creaked faintly upon the stairs. (126) In the following passage, the authorial perspective remains with the father, while Catherine’s pain and emotional agitation are only faintly echoed in the sound of her retreating steps. While, in the first part of the novel, the reader may not even be interested in her thoughts and feelings because they are supposedly trite, there exists at this point a great curiosity about her inner state. And precisely because we do not get any insight into Catherine’s feelings at this point, the strong impact of the scene depends on our imagining how terrible (but perhaps also how stubborn and proud) she must feel. More is broken here than a teacup! Washington Square provides an early example of James’s skillful use of blanks, which involves the reader actively in the process of meaning-making. In James’s enigmatic tales of the 1890s, such as The Turn of the Screw or The Figure in the Carpet, these blanks are instrumental in creating the text’s rich texture of ambiguity. They are the bait that lures the reader into ever new interpretations of the text and thus undermines any easy identification. In Washington Square, on the other hand, they provide the plain, unprepossessing Catherine, who, up to this point, could not be considered a real heroine, with a dimension of unexpected strength and emotional depth. This is the result not so much of her behavior but of a narrative strategy of representation in which her interiority retains an indeterminate dimension. Since her feelings are not represented explicitly, there is no danger that they are reduced to linguistic convention and considered inauthentic. On the contrary, James manages to reauthenticize her emotional response and her painful experiences, successfully working against the fact that these have a tendency to become inauthentic in textual representation because they are so much a part of the sentimental and melodramatic mode. Moreover, while an explicit representation of Catherine’s awakening strength would be in danger of straining credibility, a “gestural,” or performative expression can be much more effective. Although none of Catherine’s feelings and thoughts are described at the moment of her emotional separation, we nevertheless think that we understand what she must feel, because we supply our own experiences and emotions to give meaning to her gesture. Modernist realists, such as Ernest Hemingway and Edward Hopper, later brought this principle to perfection. This reminds us that realism is not the opposite of modernism but, as the avant-garde of its time, its logical predecessor. James’s narrative strategy has an ironic, but very welcome consequence. Far from functioning as a restraint or repression of emotions, this strategy 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0009 136 Winfried Fluck 7 In my essay “Declaration of Dependence,” I have traced the changing relationship between the guardian figure and the developing subject through the major stages of the work of James. actually functions as an effective form of stimulating them in the reader. Because Catherine’s inner life remains inaccessible, she can appear strong to us, for we cannot help but project our own wishes for defiance and resistance onto her. This strategy can only work, however, because the novel is still based on a common consensus about what constitutes positive or negative character traits. The model here is that of the inner-directed character, who derives her selfesteem from a capacity for self-discipline, which enables her to gain control over her own fate. This strength to stay true to one’s own inner compass even in moments of extreme adversity is called “character” in the 19th century. An individual acquires “character” when she is able to establish independence and self-control by means of psychic and emotional self-regulation, that is, by the ability not only to assert herself against unreasonable claims of others but also to protect herself against her own emotional weakness. In American realism this is seen as the true source of independence. In effect, the various stages of American women’s fiction in the 19 th century can be distinguished by the way in which the different genres deal with this issue of self-control. The vulnerability of the heroine of the sentimental novel derives from the fact that she is in constant danger of being overpowered by her feelings and incapable of exerting self-control because she cannot overcome her longing for fusion and her fear of separation. In the domestic novel of the mid-19 th century, the heroine’s capacity for self-control has notably increased. However, although she eventually learns to discipline herself and her own impulses in a long-drawn, often painful process of development, she disciplines herself only because such self-control pleases the guardian figure, whose recognition she seeks. She can no longer be easily manipulated by stimulating her desire for union. But she can be “guided” by stimulating her longing for recognition by a superior father figure. James’s Washington Square, which can be seen as a key text in the transition from domestic to realist novel, takes this “ur-scene” of the domestic novel as its point of departure, only to transform it effectively. The heroine of the realist novel Washington Square is “orphaned” like the typical heroine of the domestic novel, but in contrast to the genre out of which the realism of Howells and James emerged in the 1870s, she can no longer count on recognition from the outside. 7 In fact, in the scene quoted she learns to live with separation, the central threat (and fear) of both sentimental and domestic novel. In making Catherine cross the threshold, James highlights the moment of separation as crucial turning point. As a consequence, Catherine has to learn 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0009 Crossing the Threshold: Realism and the Expression of Emotions 137 to derive her sense of self from another source. This other source is her own inner strength of character. She no longer depends on her father for recognition and self-esteem. Instead, psychic self-regulation becomes the precondition for selfhood, because it helps Catherine to liberate herself from the reach of the two men who have been struggling to gain possession over her. At the end of the novel, when she rejects her suitor, despite the fact that Morris regrets what he has been trying to do, the chain of dependence typical of the domestic novel, in which the heroine moves from father to lover, has been broken, and the power relations between Cinderella and her prince have been inverted. The example of Washington Square can problematize the charge of emotional repression in realism also in another respect. The novel describes the cruel humiliation of the heroine Catherine first by her father and then by her suitor, who promises to rescue her from her father and to recognize her as a person in her own right - until she finds out that he has cold-bloodedly deceived and manipulated her in order to get at her money. As we have seen, James does not describe the emotional turmoil in Catherine that must result from this cruel disappointment. He only evokes it by arresting Catherine in a tableau undisturbed by movement and completely engulfed in silence: She said to herself that perhaps he would come back to tell her he had not meant what he said; and she listened for his ring at the door, trying to believe that this was probable. A long time passed, but Morris remained absent; the shadows gathered; the evening settled down on the meagre elegance of the light, clear-colored room; the fire went out. When it had grown dark, Catherine went to the window and looked out; she stood there for half an hour, on the mere chance that he would come up the steps. (185) She moved quickly away, and went to the other window, which stood open to the balcony; and here, in the embrasure concealed from her aunt by the white curtains, she remained a long time, looking out into the warm darkness. She had had a great shock; it was as if the gulf of the past had suddenly opened, and a spectral figure had risen out of it. (…) Then, suddenly, while she waited for a return of her calmness, she burst into tears. But her tears flowed very silently, so that Mrs. Penniman had no observation of them. (212-213) To be sure, Catherine cries, but her tears remain “invisible” to others, and thus remain self-contained. At first sight, this may confirm a suspicion of repression. But, at a closer look, her tears function differently: they do not remain invisible after all, because we see them. And yet, what we see no longer conforms to the sentimental mode. It retains a skillful balance between empathy and distance, 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0009 138 Winfried Fluck 8 See the major studies by Martha Banta, Imagining American Women, and David Lubin, Acts of Portrayal. because her tears remain an “empty” outward sign of an interiority that still is not accessible to us. Catherine here does not repress her emotions but for the first time looks at them and sees them for what they are. We are reminded of a similar scene in chapter 42 of a Lady. In both cases, emotions are seen to be a source of selfdeception. To manage them, then, is not an act of repression, but an act of protection against being manipulated by others. Realism’s approach towards emotions, including such feelings as desire, is inspired by the attempt to develop an inner strength that could become a source of independence for the individual - which, in turn, is a precondition for the ability to learn from one’s experience and to develop as a person. At first sight, this strategy seems to continue a tradition of internalization in which the individual transforms social control into self-control and thereby enforces her own subjection. Such a model of self-control has been given special prominence in American culture by the example of Benjamin Franklin. But whereas self-regulation in Franklin means to transform emotions into regular habits, so that one can control their unpredictability, gaining emotional control in realism means exactly the opposite, namely to gain inner independence in order not to be governed by, and trapped in, habitual responses. To follow the habitual responses instilled in her by her father would mean that Catherine would continue to be obedient. Self-control is thus not a sufficient end in itself. Catherine also has to learn to manage her behavior and emotional responses. Only then can she hope to be able to draw conclusions of her own from her experiences and observations. In Franklin, to acquire emotional control by regular habits means to give emotional response regularity and reliability. In the case of James, it means to gain freedom from the deception of, and manipulation by, others. IV. Let me push this point a bit further by moving on to an example taken from American painting, Thomas Eakins’s portrait, Miss Amelia Van Buren. I have chosen this particular painting in order to stick to the genre of individual portraits (in fact, there are two major studies focusing on the similarity of portraits in James and Eakins). 8 The portrait, in novels as well as in painting, aims at the representation of individuality, and in this function it could become 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0009 Crossing the Threshold: Realism and the Expression of Emotions 139 of interest for a realist painter like Eakins (while it was of no use for romanticism and its focus on grand historical or landscape panoramas). At the same time, the genre is also of interest for another reason, because, as depiction of an individual, it can illustrate the changing principles on which an individual is recognized as a person who deserves attention or respect. In early portraits of colonial America and the early republic, the main criterion is still that of social status and, corresponding to status and expressing it, the degree of how civilized the person is. The actual personality - and thus the individuality - of the person portrayed is thus hidden behind an official mask of distinction. Thomas Eakins, Miss Amelia Van Buren, 1886-1890 John Singer Sargent, Madame X, 1883-1884 Miss Amelia Van Buren is still linked to these traditional sources of recognition by intertextual reference, for example in the stately-looking chair. However, the whole point of the painting is to reveal that such elements do not determine per‐ 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0009 140 Winfried Fluck 9 See, for example, The Thinker (Portrait of Louis N. Kenton) (1900); Portrait of Henry Ossawa Tanner (1902); The Artist’s Wife with His Setter Dog; Portrait of Mrs. Edith Mahon (1904). sonality and therefore also cannot characterize the individual who is portrayed. On the contrary, the intense individuality of Miss Van Buren finds expression in those aspects and parts of the painting where the portrait convention is quoted but also subtly subverted - for example, in the negligent, almost sloppy posture of the sitter, her apron, her graying hair, her obvious reluctance of being portrayed, as well as her refusal to face the painter and through him, our gaze. Eakins’s portrait shows us the echoes of the classical genre convention, but it also reveals how an individual can find ways to withdraw from it with dignity and can assert herself against these conventions in subtle, but effective gestures of rebellion. Eakins leaves no doubt that the interest he has in Miss Van Buren is not her social standing, nor her elegance, but the individuality expressed by her rejection of conventional roles. Together with Winslow Homer and, to a lesser degree, his student Thomas Anschutz, Thomas Eakins is today considered the most important American realist painter of the 19 th century, strongly influenced by European painters like Courbet and Velasquez. Both Homer and Eakins had started out with pictures of outdoor life, filled with self-confident common people of quiet heroism, sometimes exhibiting the exuberance of a young nation on the go. These characters, for example the rowers in Eakins’s early paintings, are already individualized in appearance, but they do not yet interest us as individuals. One of these people is as good as another, and it doesn’t really matter which one we are going to see. The significant aspect about most of these figures is still what they are doing, namely taking possession of outdoor spaces and performing daring and unusual skills in public. If there is one common meaning in these paintings, it is the message that these common people do not have to - and should not - hide themselves, because they represent the energy, skills, and selfconfidence of a vigorous nation. But, then, for a number of personal reasons that need not concern us here, portraits of the Miss Amelia Van Buren-type became more important for Eakins, and with those portraits he becomes an interesting case study for my discussion of the expression of emotions in American realism. One aspect that stands out in these portraits in comparison with earlier paintings by Eakins, is the fact that the persons portrayed have become introspective and passive. 9 Outdoor activities have disappeared and so has the self-confident presentation of oneself and one’s own skills. Instead, the characters appear self-absorbed and brooding; the actual drama no longer takes place on the outside but inside the characters themselves. 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0009 Crossing the Threshold: Realism and the Expression of Emotions 141 Individuals are now of interest, not because of what they do, and also not, as in early paintings by Homer and Eakins, because of how they interact with others, but because they have developed a complex and highly interesting interiority. This leads us back to our guiding question, namely how such inner emotions can be expressed. If Eakins defines individuality by a complex, but submerged, perhaps even suppressed, interiority, how can he express that interiority without violating realist principles? On the one hand, the departure from type and the shift to the appearance of individuality, as for example, in the case of Miss Amelia Van Buren, marks his painting as typically realist. On the other hand, this individuality seems to have become even more elusive now. It is interesting to see how Eakins solves the problem. In an essay with the title “Africans, Indians, and Martyrs: Discourse of Defeat and Unmanliness in the Late Portraits of Thomas Eakins,” David Lubin provides a helpful suggestion when he points out that Eakins turned to “the visual discourse long employed for the depiction of defeated others - social outcasts, subalterns, history’s losers” (79) in an attempt to find a more expressive pictorial representation of interiority. Lubin telescopes his argument by considering a single work, the third-century Ludovisi Sarcophogus, in order to make his point. The Roman soldiers in the scenes of violent conflict “appear devoid of interiority. Whether stern or placid, their faces betray no emotion. As representatives of the imperial state, they embody abstract, impersonal, unemotional authority. The barbarians, however, are subject to the buffetings of private mood and individualized passion” (79). Because of their primitive stage of development and their ensuing lack of self-control, the barbarians openly express their despair - and thereby help to heighten the expressivity of the work of art. The persons Eakins depicted in his late portraits are realistic characters in the sense that they do not openly express their feelings, but they are nevertheless different in the sense that they are now represented in a “visual language of sadness, alienation and despair,” and, one should add, brooding inwardness (Lubin 95). This is the moment where hidden interiority is indeed approaching repression, but the important point here is that the realist painter Eakins is not hiding this under a realist surface but has found a way to express this inner state within realist conventions. In Miss Amelia van Buren, the realist Eakins does not show us the individual’s interiority, including her inner feelings. The only thing he can do within the realist code is to draw on an arsenal of signs that signals a certain condition of inner turmoil and increased sensitivity. On the one hand, he thus preserves the impression of an individuality that is self-reflexive and not carried away by inner feelings; on the other hand, Eakins also manages to give us an idea of the nature of these inner emotions. Moreover, Eakins gives us a fair measure, 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0009 142 Winfried Fluck pretty much like James in Washington Square, of what constitutes individuality in this particular case and in realism in general. In this respect, we have arrived at an interesting point of development: whereas in Silas Lapham or Washington Square, control of emotions obviously provides a source of inner strength, and while in the case of Eakins’s Miss Amelia Van Buren, a certain dimension of inaccessibility still expresses a very desirable inner independence, many of Eakins’s portraits of the period begin to make sensitivity, if not vulnerability, the mark of individuality. All of the persons portrayed seem to share experiences of (quiet) suffering. But it is precisely the suffering that distinguishes them from others and provides them with a sense of being “deeper” and hence “better” beings. V. However, at about the same time, American culture also began to go in an altogether different direction. The dramatic shift can be illustrated by a novel like Theodore Dreiser’s Sister Carrie. In chapter 7 of the book, Carrie has finally decided to leave her sister and her husband and to follow Drouet into a morally dubious future: After dinner she went into the bathroom, where they could not disturb her, and wrote a little note. ‘Good-bye, Minnie,’ it read. ‘I’m going to stay in Chicago a little while and look for work. Don’t worry. I’ll be all right.’ In the front room Hanson was reading his paper. As usual, she helped Minnie clear away the dishes and straightened up. Then she said: ‘I guess I’ll stand down at the door a little while.’ She could scarcely prevent her voice from trembling. Minnie remembered Hanson’s remonstrance. ‘Sven doesn’t think it looks good to stand down there,’ she said. ‘Doesn’t he? ’ said Carrie. ‘I wont do it any more after this.’ She put on her hat and fidgeted around the table in the little bedroom, wondering where to slip the note. Finally she put it under Minnie’s hairbrush. When she had closed the hall-door, she paused a moment and wondered what they would think. (69) Like James, Dreiser uses the metaphors of the threshold and of the closing door to highlight a moment of separation. And like James, he has his heroine pause behind the door to dramatize the extraordinariness of the moment. But in contrast to James, Dreiser does not leave us in the dark about Carrie’s thoughts and feelings: Some thought of the queerness of her deed affected her. She went slowly down the stairs. She looked back up the lighted step, and then affected to stroll up the street. When she reached the corner she quickened her pace. As she was hurrying away, 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0009 Crossing the Threshold: Realism and the Expression of Emotions 143 Hanson came back to his wife. ‘Is Carrie down at the door again? ’ he said. ‘Yes,’ said Minnie; ‘she said she wasn’t going to do it any more.’ He went over to the baby where it was playing on the floor and began to poke his finger at it: Drouet was on the corner waiting, in good spirits. ‘Hello, Carrie,’ he said, as a sprightly figure of a girl drew near him. ‘Got here safe, did you? Well, we’ll take a car.’ (69-70) The remarkable thing here is no longer that we cannot fathom the depth of the heroine’s feelings but that, quite on the contrary, there is no longer any depth to fathom. Momentarily, Carrie has a sense that something out of the ordinary is happening. But, then, the incessant movement of life carries her quickly away to new encounters (whereas Catherine Sloper remains standing behind the door “for a long time”). Since, as Dreiser puts it at the beginning of the next chapter, man is “a wisp in the wind, moved by every breath of passion, acting now by his will and now by his instincts, erring with one, only to retire by the other, falling by one, only to rise by the other” (70-71), “incalculable variability” is the rule, and not the exception. And since the unpredictable and the unexpected are the rule, waiting at any moment of life, emotional responses can no longer be (melo)dramatic and climactic. For Carrie, there is too much incalculable variability in her life to develop deep feelings. Similarly, Dreiser no longer has to think about the best ways to express such feelings in a nonformulaic, authentic manner. On the contrary, even though her sister implies in the following passage that Carrie has now entered a life of shame, there is not really much to say about the feelings that Carrie has at the same time: ‘Where do you suppose she’s gone to? ’ said Minnie, thoroughly aroused. ‘I don’t know,’ a touch of cynicism lightening his eye. ‘Now she has gone and done it.’ Minnie moved her head in a puzzled way. ‘Oh, oh,’ she said, ‘she doesn’t know what she has done.’ ‘Well,’ said Hanson, after a while, sticking his hands out before him, ‘what can you do? ’ Minnie’s womanly nature was higher than this. She figured the possibilities in such cases. ‘Oh,’ she said at last, ‘poor Sister Carrie! ’ At the time of this particular conversation, which occurred at 5 A.M., that little soldier of fortune was sleeping a rather troubled sleep in her new room, alone. (71) Today, in following Dreiser’s lead, the markers of individuality have moved from interiority to exteriority. John Singer Sargent’s painting Madame X is of special interest in that respect, because it highlights the fact that in this development feelings must also change their function: They are now no longer restrained in order to gain independence, but performed explicitly in almost exhibitionist fashion. Seeing no longer leads to knowing, but to an appreciation of the aesthetic qualities of the surface. What gains attention is the pose, not the person. In this context of externalization, the actual challenge (as far as 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0009 144 Winfried Fluck the expression of emotions is concerned) is no longer how emotions can be articulated but how they can be staged effectively. Human beings do not possess something like an inner core, and if there is no longer an inner core (where the person’s true character resides), then reality becomes a surface phenomenon and emotions become moods or stylized gestures embedded into these surfaces. Indeed, this is the direction realism took in the 20 th century, as, for example in the paintings by Edward Hopper or a photo-realist like Richard Estes. But that is an altogether different chapter in the tenuous relation between realism and the expression of emotions. Works Cited Banta, Martha. Imaging American Women: Idea and Ideals in Cultural History. New York: Columbia UP, 1987. Barthes, Roland. “L’Effet de Réel.” Communications 11 (1968): 84-89. Bašić, Sonja. “Henry James Between Old and New: An Interpretation of ‘The Wings of the Dove’.” Studia Romanica et Anglica Zagrabiensia 41.2 (1976): 333-75. Bersani, Leo. “Realism and the Fear of Desire.” A Future for Astyanax. Boston: Little, Brown, 1976. Dreiser, Theodore. Sister Carrie. Norton Critical Edition. New York: W.W. Norton, 1970. Fluck, Winfried. Inszenierte Wirklichkeit: Der amerikanische Realismus 1865-1900. 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