One need look no further than Henry James to discover how literary Realism transformed into Modernism. Unlike most writers of his era, the esteemed transitional novelist (1843-1916) moved from the United States to Europe, even going so far as becoming a British citizen in the last year of his life.
One of the most fascinating things about James is how many of his early influences and friends are household names from the world of Realism, including Louisa May Alcott, Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Matthew Arnold and John Ruskin, and yet he considered French author Honore de Balzac his greatest influence. Over time this led to a broadening and modernizing of his works, as he began to slip in class based emotional narratives ala Balzac (1799-1850).
James’ early works, including A Passionate Pilgrim and Madame de Mauves, owed much to Nathaniel Hawthorne. However, soon after their publication, James’s work began to reveal the influence of Balzac, who wrote The Human Comedy, a multi-volume series of interconnected stories far ahead of their 1829-1848 publication.
In his first transitional work, Daisy Miller, Henry James began to toy with the Modernist elements of psychology and sexuality that were a part of Balzac’s repertoire, particularly in the Frenchman’s story of Eugenie Grandet. For instance, consider the similarity of the characters. Daisy Miller’s supposed innocence is, in fact, nothing of the kind, prompting on critic to call it, "an outrage on American girlhood."
Three years later (1881) James published The Portrait of a Lady, which is widely considered his masterpiece. This work delved even deeper into the Modernist elements of not only psychology, but personal freedom, responsibility, the role of destiny, and the ways in which some people justify betraying others. For example, the titular character of Isobel spends the better part of Chapter 42 mulling over her decision to marry the wrong person. The book’s success opened the door to explorations of personal motivation and human consciousness to his American and British peers.
Other works followed, including classics like The Bostonians, The Ambassadors, The Golden Bowl, The Turn of the Screw, Washington Square and The Europeans. These volumes were influential to some, but incomprehensible to others. For instance, Virginia Woolf admired James’ increasingly deep explorations into the mind, while H. G. Wells (1866-1946) satirized James in “Boon,” the tale of a hippopotamus struggling to pick up a pea in the corner of its cage.
Other transitional Realists, such as Edith Wharton (1862-1937), employed similar themes of class and destiny. As the American critic Edmund Wilson (1895-1972) explained, writers like James and Wharton were “occupied simply with the presentation of conflicts of moral character, which they do not concern themselves about softening or averting. They do not indict society for these situations: they regard them as universal and inevitable. They do not even blame God for allowing them: they accept them as the conditions of life.”
The shift to being fully Modernist comes into play with the acceptance of personal responsibility and motivation. Unlike Realists, Modernists did not accept anything as “universal and inevitable.” One’s life could be shaped anew if one was willing to throw convention aside.
The character of Jay Gatsby in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby is a clear example of this. He knows he will never capture the heart of his beloved Daisy so long as he is poor, so he remakes himself. Now a millionaire, he can offer Daisy things even her successful husband Tom cannot. Yet his new identity does not save him in the end, when he is mistaken for the person (Daisy) responsible for running over Tom’s mistress, Myrtle. George Wilson, a brutish mechanic married to the deceased woman, shoots Gatsby as he lounges by the pool, a marker of his wealth and success. Unable to accept responsibility for his act—or perhaps thinking it the only means to do so— Wilson then turns the gun on himself.
When Ezra Pound proclaimed, “Make it new” he was not just talking about poetry. He was proclaiming that society itself needed to change. Sadly, this eventually led him to embrace of Fascism, which ironically reverted back to the idea that some of us are better than others.
In short, the Realist claims there is a shared reality and the Modernist proclaims that reality exists within the individual mind. Put another way, the Realist believes in group reality and the Modernist in subjective reality. While there are ways in which these versions of realism overlap, the key differences in each narrative style rest at the opposing edges.