Satire in an Age of Realism

Abstract

As nineteenth-century realism became more and more intrepid in its pursuit of describing and depicting everyday life, it blurred irrevocably into the caustic and severe mode of literature better named satire. Realism's task of portraying the human became indistinguishable from satire's directive to castigate the human. Introducing an entirely new way of thinking about realism and the Victorian novel, Aaron Matz refers to the fusion of realism and satire as 'satirical realism': it is a mode in which our shared folly and error are so entrenched in everyday life, and so unchanging, that they need no embellishment when rendered in fiction. Focusing on the novels of Eliot, Hardy, Gissing, and Conrad, and the theater of Ibsen, Matz argues that it was the transformation of Victorian realism into satire that granted it immense moral authority, but that led ultimately to its demise.

Satire

“…Such claims certainly ignore the contributions of many satirists, such as Oscar Wilde, and more recent scholarship by Aaron Matz has examined the close relationship between Victorian realism and modal satire. 20 criticism does make a series of novel claims about satire, even though these arguments often occurred on the periphery of larger literary debates. As Brian Connery and Kirk Combe have argued, the New Critics can be accused of a "malign neglect of satire" in their work; they list five reasons for this omission: (1) satire's specific historical frames of reference undermined New Critical claims for the "self-containment of literary texts," (2) satiric critique suggests an explicit intentionality at odds with the New Critical notion of the intentional fallacy, (3) satire "tends toward open-endedness, irresolution, and thus chaos," which conflicts with New Critical ideas of aesthetic closure, (4) satire's relentless inhabitation of other forms makes it resistant to easy analysis within a formalist mode, and (5) satire's aesthetic procedures, rather than unifying disparate elements, tends to multiply the disorder within a text, revealing an "imminent incoherence" not suitable to New Critical aesthetics.…”