Chapter 5 - New Realities, New Realisms: Chicago Literature against the Genteel Tradition

Summary

Chicago at the end of the nineteenth century epitomized the social transformation happening throughout the United States at the time: an industrial revolution; transformation of technology, architecture, and infrastructure; population growth fueled by immigration; and the rise of organized labor and the growth of socialism and anarchism. Novelists writing about Chicago responded to these changes. Breaking with the “genteel tradition” that persisted in William Dean Howells’s “teacup realism” and Henry James’s aestheticism, Chicago realists represented the city with fierce irony, bleak plotlines, and frank language. Realists such as Henry Blake Fuller employed a wealth of metonymy that would better represent the new social conditions; realists such as Frank Norris employed a coarse style and melodramatic subject-matter that rejected the refinement of East Coast fiction. However, although Chicago novelists hinted at the violence in the heart of the bourgeoisie as well as the poor, their realism remained genteel in its focus on a middle-class, male individual and its reluctance to narrate the social upheavals of immigration, organized labor, and political radicalism.