This page was created by Nonah Cagney Palmer. The last update was by David Squires.
Historical Realism
Historical realism, as a term, requires a bit of unpacking. First, let’s look at each word separately.
Historical
- adjective of history. The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) denotes that historical, as a word, specifically belongs “to or of the nature of history as opposed to fiction or legend.” In general, the OED expounds, historical is simply “relating to history; concerned with past events.” History as a subject is concerned with verifiable, true events that explicitly have happened, and the context surrounding those events. Interestingly, however, the first usage of the word historia from Latin in Old English and then again in Middle English from the Old French istorie denote a wider idea of history: that is, a narrative account relative to a group of people or to a place (OED Online). There’s no coincidence that the word story is included in history, for they come from similar places. History has come to mean truthful narratives, while story has come to mean fiction, or at least something unverifiable and therefore not fact.
Realism
- noun of real. Realism has a number of philosophical, political and artistic contexts and connotations. What we are interested in this entry, however, is specifically in the artistic sphere: the OED defines it as a subject concerned with a “close resemblance to what is real; fidelity of representation, rendering the precise details of the real thing or scene” (OED Online). While a systematic interrogation of the real is the purview of philosophy, in literature, art, and film realism is about reproduction or representation of what a particular event would actually be like, were that event, thing, or person actually existing outside of the bounds of a fictive world.
The Autobiography of Jane Pittman as Historical Realism
Ernest Gaines’s The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman (1971) is widely regarded as realist historical fiction: one of the initial wave of contemporary slave narratives which challenged traditional historiography by recovering—as accurately as possible—the voices of those who had been enslaved. Its first-person narration was so convincing, in fact, that countless readers and even a few journalists regarded the book as genuine testimony of a living source, similar to the Works Progress Administration interviews of former slaves conducted in the 1930s. (664)
The novel also includes real events, such as the existence of roving bands of secessionists that would eventually form the Ku Klux Klan, the Great Flood of the Mississippi in 1927, and the assassination of Louisiana governor Huey P. Long. The use of these historical events lends the novel a sense of time and place, anchoring it in the real world, so to speak.
To the uninitiated, however, historical realism can have its confusing elements, because of its fidelity to actual history. Salius identifies a complicating element of Gaines’ use of autobiography in his novel’s title:Gaines himself was clear that Jane Pittman was a work of fiction. By injecting his story with actual history, he heightened the tone and timbre of his work so much that it, for some, crossed the line from mere storytelling into the real world. The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman felt and continues to feel real to so many people largely because of the historical aspects of its realistic story, of its realism.….not only does the title undermine the novel’s status as a work of fiction, but the text is also framed as an oral history, recorded and transcribed by a black historian who asked the subject (Jane) to tell “the story of her life” (vii). Indeed, Gaines has said that he drew heavily from the WPA interviews while writing Miss Jane Pittman, even calling them his “Bible,” and that he used these documents “to get the rhythm of speech and an idea of how ex-slaves would talk about themselves." (664)
