History of Writing: Realist Writers vs. Modern Writers

At about the time of the French Revolution, England was going through an industrial revolution. This occurred during the Victorian Age, the time when Queen Victoria ruled England. As the text points out, William Thackeray was one of three novelists who "addressed important social and moral issues of the age" (238). Vanity Affair (publishing date of 1848) and The Book of Snobs is just a couple of the works that he used to satirize "high society, military prowess, the institution of marriage, and hypocrisy" (Wikipedia).

Thackeray's works were written during the time when Karl Marx's views came into fruition. Connected with Marx is the term dialectical materialism. As the text says, "The clash of classes, which represented conflicting economic interests, accounted for historical change and progress" (233). Thackeray's Vanity Affair goes along with Marx's view that "the driving forces in history are the ways in which goods are produced and wealth distributed" (233). Also, they are the core of culture. That includes politics, law, religion, morals, and philosophy. In Vanity Affair, Thackeray makes clear the bitterness that existed between the classes, particularly between the bourgeois and the "snobbish" aristocrats. In the book, there is a character named Becky Sharp. According to the text, she represents the bourgeois class. She is tired of being at the bottom and desires to move up in the classes through marriage (Thackeray satirizes marriage). Unfortunately for Becky, she never realizes that money and position in society are not all there is to life and in the end, her husband dies and she's left with nothing (238). Vanity Affair signifies realism. Thackeray was a realist and being so, he concentrated on the "real" world and wrote about things like social abuses, class divisions, and the behavior of humans. This is different from the Romantics who used their imaginations to take them "to a presumed idyllic medieval past" (235). As Thackeray said it was important for the novelist to "represent Nature: to convey as strongly as possible the sentiment of reality" (238).

In another one of Thackeray's works called Catherine (1839), Thackeray himself says that the characters are immoral (Books and Writers). This work, along with Vanity Affair, seems to go along with the idea that the Industrial Revolution brought about a lot of immorality. The works also go along with the idea that the way goods are produced and wealth is distributed is the basis of culture, morals included (dialectical materialism).

Modernist writers like Joseph Conrad were different from realist and naturalist writers (William Thackeray) in that they "were fascinated by the bizarre, the mysterious, the unpredictable, the primitive, the irrational, and the formless" (288). They, unlike the realists, "attempted to represent ideas, emotions, and sensations in a uniquely personal way, free of rules and customary conventions" (238). They tried to find ways to portray or unveil irrationality of human behavior as well as "the intense struggle between the conscious and the unconscious" (288).

Conrad's most compelling work was Heart of Darkness. In this story, there is a company agent named Kurtz. He runs an ivory trading post in the Congo of Africa. Another main character is Marlow, a riverboat pilot. Marlow is upset because of the fact that the Africans are treated so badly by the people who work for Kurtz's company. He goes up the river to Kurtz's post and finds out from an agent that Kurtz's came there with the intention of enlightening the Africans. He was kind of like a humanitarian. However, the African jungle brings out the bad in Kurtz, something that was repressed by European values. He's able to make the villagers believe he is a God and he's able to convince them to destroy other villages in order to get ivory. Kurtz decides to return with Marlow but as they go down the river, he senses he's going to die. He yells "The horror! The horror!" and he dies later on (293).

According to the text, one interpretation of Conrad's story is his disdain of European imperialists who brought a lot of pain and suffering to the Africans in search of riches. From this one can see that "reason exercised a very limited influence over human conduct and that impulses, drives, and instincts- all forces below the surface- determined behavior much more that did logical consciousness" (284). This story seeks to explain the irrationalism that exists in the human world.

In another one of Conrad's stories called The Lagoon, a guy named Arsat kidnaps a sick woman named Diamelen with the help of his brother. Well, they get caught by the people who want Diamelen back and they travel in their small canoe up the river. They left the canoe and they stopped in a small forest where they could go to a fisherman's house where they could get another boat. Arsat was instructed to wait for his brother while he fought off the pursuers but Arsat didn't wait for his brother and he left with the woman and let his brother die. He had betrayed his brother. This story follows along the same lines of the other story in that it is an example of irrationalism (Wikipedia).

Things changed from the time of Thackeray to the time of Conrad. Writers during Thackeray's time concentrated on the external world while writers of Conrad's time examined "the inner world of consciousness" (288). Essentially, Realists "empirically investigated the world" and "analyzed how people looked, worked, and behaved" (235). Modernist writers sought to look deeper into the human soul. Also, modernist writers were free from rules when representing feelings and ideas. As the text says, modernist writers recoiled "from a middle-class, industrial civilization which prized rationalism, organization, clarity, stability, and definite norms and values" (288). They wanted to explore the irrationality of human behavior. Essentially, they drifted way from the Enlightenment idea of human rationality.

Sources:

Books and Writers. 2002. Amazon.com. 2 March 2007 . < http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/wmthacke.htm>.

Perry, Marvin, J. Wayne Baker, and Pamela P. Hollinger. The Humanities in the WesternTradition. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2003.

Wikipedia The Free Encyclopedia. 26 Feb. 2007. Wikimedia Foundation, Inc. 2 March 2007 < http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Makepeace_Thackeray>.

Wikipedia The Free Encyclopedia. 1 Feb. 2007. Wikimedia Foundation, Inc. 2 March 2007 < http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lagoon>.