life as art
One can almost imagine a placard showing "Down with those long-haired, drug popping, self-absorbed, escapist, bleeding heart Romantics" (perhaps with a picture of a flower overlaid with a red circle with a slash through it) leading into the 19th century. Darwin's voyage of the HMS Beagle, Nietzsche's pronouncement that "God is dead," the new objectivity of impressionist painting were all cornerstones of both the Realist and Naturalist movements.
Following two bloody revolutions (in America and France), the Western world was witnessing the decline in the power of the aristocracy and the rise in the middle class. As the rapidly-increasing population found itself in the industrial revolution, the cavalcade of science (especially Darwinism) was again center stage. This revival in faith in science was not like the Age of Reason where it was believed that science and the scientific method would eventually allow humans to understand God's elaborate cosmic plan; now scientific models were not designed to prove God and morality; in many cases, they reshaped and even replaced God in the universe.
The philosophy of the time was more material, pessimistic. Recognition of social ills (brutality, hunger, dehumanization of labor, the spread of venereal disease, etc.) did not generate moral outrage as much as a pragmatic view that the fittest survive and the weak are winowed out.
In the arts impressionist painters experimented with the physics of light and color, and they applied their skills to common, rather than sacred or aristocratic subjects.
In literature Gustave Flaubert and Emile Zola were two leading proponents of "exit author"--an attempt to view material objectively, without editorializing or over-sentimentalizing. This is not to say they wrote plotless, characterless stories (the equivalent of Andy Warhol's "Statue of Liberty" or Yoko Ono's "Fly on Flesh"); they used the techniques of fiction to try to create
...a truthful representation in literature of reality--that is, of contemporary life and manners. They thought of their method as inductive, observational, and hence "objective." The personality of the author was suppressed, or was at least to recede into the background, since reality was to be seen "as it is." (Mack, et al 1812)
Increasingly the focus was on the common, the middle and lower classes. Though the term was not to be coined for more than another century, the hero was replaced by the anti-hero, a figure drawn from the struggling masses, not from the nobility. The quest was often for physical or financial survival rather than the saving of a city, and the characters, as often as not, failed. Although the literature now spoke of middle-class issues, the authors were not necessarily champions of the downtrodden. The introductory material in our text notes
Flaubert despised the middle-class society of the Third Empire with an intense hatred and the pride of a self-conscious artist. Dickens became increasingly critical of the middle classes and the assumptions of industrial civilization. Dostoevsky, though he took part in a conspiracy against the Russian government early in his life and spent ten years in exile in Siberia, became the propounder of an extremely conservative nationalistic and religious creed which was definitely directed against the revolutionary forces in Russia. Tolstoy, himself a count and a landowner, was violent in his criticism of the czarist regime, especially later in his life, but he cannot be described as friendly to the middle classes, to the aims of the democratic movements in Western Europe, or to the science of the time. Ibsen's political attitude is that of a proud individualist who condemns the "compact majority" and its tyranny. Possibly all art is critical of its society, but in the nineteenth century this criticism became much more explicit, as social and political issues became much more urgent or, at least, were regarded as more urgent by the writing groups. (1813)
With "A Simple Heart" Flaubert's style seems more reportorial than literary. He sets each scene with meticulous detail so that we sense we are on a real street in a real city rather than on a stage set. His presentation of misfortune (and a lot of it) is deadpan; his description of Felicite's early life is a summary of misery:
Her father, a mason, had been killed by falling off some scaffolding. Then her mother died, her sisters scattered, and a farmer took her in and employed her, while she was still quite little, to herd the cows at pasture. She shivered in rags and would lie flat on the ground to drink water from the ponds; she was beaten for nothing, and finally turned out for the theft of thirty sous which she did not steal. She went to another farm, where she became dairy-maid; and as she was liked by her employers her companions were jealous of her. (1821)
And he looks closely, unblinkingly at painful realities. Here Flaubert describes Felicete's caring for father Colmiche:
...he lay constantly shaken by a catarrh; his hair was very long, his eyes inflamed, and there was a tumour on his arm bigger than his head. She got him some linen and tried to clean up his miserable hole; her dream was to establish him in the bake-house without letting him annoy Madame. When the tumour burst she dressed it every day; sometimes she brought him cake, and would put him in the sunshine on a truss of straw. The poor old man, slobbering and trembling, thanked her in his worn-out voice, was terrified that he might lose her, and stretched out his hands when he saw her go away. He died; and she had a mass said for the repose of his soul. (1837)
But as much as Emile Zola liked to think that the literature of Realism and Naturalism was an extension of science, of completely dispassionate observation, literature is artifice, invention. On occasion Flaubert's style is laced with Romantic elements. The scene of Virginie lying dead is very evocative with its exotic mist and color imagery:
The mother superior stood on the right. Three candlesticks on the chest of drawers made spots of red, and the mist came whitely through the windows. Nuns came and took Mme. Aubain away.
For two nights Felicite never left the dead child. She repeated the same prayers, sprinkled holy water over the sheets, came and sat down again, and watched her. At the end of the first vigil she noticed that the face had grown yellow, the lips turned blue, (1834)
Finally, the brilliant imagery of the shrine at the story's end, the parrot as Holy Spirit at Felicete's death, signal a moment that tinged with irony but which feels every bit as transcendent and colored with Romanticism as the Little Match Girl's entry into the heaven of light and of her Grandmother's love.