Essay Example on Social Realism in Literature: Common People, Stories, and Places

In literature, social realism involves a literary movement that represents reality by portraying mundane and daily experiences within real life. It reveals the common people, stories, and places and mainly about the middle and lower classes in society. Social realism n literature seeks to show a story with much truth as possible instead of romanticizing and dramatizing. In particular, social realism relates to the lives as well as the living conditions of the poor and the working class. In this paper, the aspect of social realism will be considered in relation to the story of Charlotte Perkins Gilman, "The Yellow Wallpaper."

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From the story "The Yellow Wallpaper," the problems of canons, as well as the audience of the American literature, have been illustrated. The story is read as the brilliant and artistically innovative exploration of the role of the women where Gilman herself chose to defend (Crewe, 2009). Gilman always saw herself as a reformer who was dedicated to improving society by depicting how the forced dependence of the women had threatened not only the women but the whole society (Nunez-Puente, 2012). The "The Yellow Wallpaper" did not attain the audience regardless of its rumored effect on the treatment of the nervous women by Mitchells. Gilman argues in women and economics that the characteristics that women share are far more numerous and also important than the differences between the sexes. The story seems to be a fictional complement to a woman and presents a powerful haunting picture of a woman who has been denied a chance to prove her capability to work. In terms that have been used by William Howells to argue the aspect of social realism, the narrator is a character and hence not just a simple creature that has been used to illustrate an idea imposed by the author. She is a human being who is capable of reacting to her situations in interesting and believable ways.

In terms of the social realism, the wallpaper pattern features an interminable grotesque which seem to form a common center as well as rush off within the headlong plunges of equal distraction. The main character is determined to analyze the pointless pattern to a purely realistic approach. A number of tensions arise through critical analysis of what Howells says in the story concerning realism. First, the difference between the characters who are the humans and the 'types' breaks down quickly. In his bid to reveal the violations of Balzac, of the realist aesthetic, Howells argues in fiction and criticism that Balzac as a human being was a character and hence not necessarily a type. Later he approvingly quotes another writer's criticism of "effectism" in the works of the writers such as Dickens and Bulwer.

Conclusion

The writers deliberately falsify the human's feelings giving them a more paradoxical appearance (Schopp-Schilling, 2007). What Howells seemed to be suggesting when he quoted the works of the other writers was that the writers need to extract from experience in handling other human beings of certain principles that govern the portrayal of the human fiction. If the characters are too singular or too vicissitude, they will fail to accord with a generalized picture of a "woman" or "man," which has been derived by the reader from his experience. Therefore, the elements of social realism have been revealed in the story of Charlotte Perkins Gilman, "The Yellow Wallpaper."

References

Schopp-Schilling, B. (2007). " The Yellow Wallpaper": A Rediscovered" Realistic" Story. American Literary Realism, 1870-1910, 284-286.

Nunez-Puente, C. (2012). THE YELLOW HYBRIDS: GENDER AND GENRE IN GILMAN'SWALLPAPER. In Short Story Theories (pp. 139-153). Brill Rodopi. https://muse.jhu.edu/article/445221/pdf

Crewe, J. (2009). Queering the yellow wallpaper? Charlotte Perkins Gilman and the politics of form. Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature, 14(2), 273-293. https://www.jstor.org/stable/463900