Chapter 14 - Color

Summary

Most of us experience the real world as colorful. Apples are red or green; the sky is blue or grey; your shirt is white or striped. The mundane objects of our lives come to us with and through their colors. It comes as a surprise, then, that realism – the literary style credited with having a fidelity to the real world – should be so lacking in colors, at least compared to its counterparts at the turn of the twentieth century. Scan the works of Henry James and Edith Wharton for color terms, and you’ll get the occasional description of an outfit, a room, a landscape. But these won’t be dwelt upon. This is due in part to the fact that the reality that realism commits itself to describing is, at heart, social reality rather than physical or even perceptual reality. If you search James and Wharton for “color” itself, you’ll mostly turn up instances of that preeminently social use of the term: Winterbourne “colors” when Daisy Miller bluntly invokes her “reputation”; Lily Bart’s “color deepens” when Selden suggests she come up to his room at The Bendick. And so on.