Realism’s Concealed Realities

Challenging hostile characterisations of realism, this article argues that nineteenth-century realist fiction achieves a double loyalty: loyal to the subject matter of ostensibly mundane reality but loyal also to how life might be in the truer reality of a world in better shape—a world often hidden distortedly within this one, confined inside people too small and compromised to help re-shape it. As a consequence, the article seeks to show that, in its hidden or apparently tiny subtleties, realism has been more radically experimental with reality than it has been given credit for. Its immanent realist metaphysic, established in place of a lost or unattainable primary reality, demanded new formal agility to reach or express the “really real” not otherwise accessible to ordinary human perception or available to characters themselves. Yet realism’s technical innovations were so undemonstratively faithful to their medium as to risk being obscured and unacknowledged within it.