A fiction subgenre of a realistic nature that focuses on the home scene, domestic realism evolved from the reaction against Romanticism that occurred in the mid-19th century. Following the preoccupation of the Romantic writers (1789–1837) with the superiority of intuition and passion over intellect, the value of nature as a mirror for literature, and the prioritization of the individual’s needs over that of the group, Victorian Age (1837–1901) writers moved from a focus on mysticism and spirituality to dwell on the particulars of everyday life, or the quotidian.

The rise of a preoccupation with materialism that grew from the appearance of a new working middle class, the problem of educating that class, and the challenge to religion by science gave realism momentum. Written generally by middle-class women for middle-class women, like all realism, domestic realism dwelled on the immediate, the “here and now,” and represented concerns of the middle class, especially its members’ failure to obtain fulfillment within a strict social class structure. Character always remained more important than plot.

Domestic realism should not be confused with domestic fiction, or women’s fiction/sentimental fiction, also popular during the mid-19th century. Jane Austen provided forerunners to domestic realism through her novels of minute observation of social and familial transactions on the home scene. Charles Dickens and William Makepeace Thackeray further advanced realism with their focus on the family unit as a reflection of society. Ironically, Thackeray refused to publish Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s ballad Lord Walter’s Wife in Cornhill Magazine in 1861, as he felt its stark realism might dismay his middle-class readers, who would find it insulting to their moral code. Browning reacted by declaring that issues such as the abuse of women needed to be acknowledged by the very audience Thackeray sought to protect.

George Eliot

When George Eliot, probably the best-known writer of domestic realism, arrived on the scene, she advanced the subgenre through novels that included Adam Bede (1859), which received critical praise for its presentation of rural life and focus on the responsibility of the individual to conform to mores of his or her community. The Mill on the Floss (1860) offered another example of Eliot’s skill in the evocation of rural domesticity, and Middlemarch (1871–72), subtitled A Study of Provincial Life, gave birth to a large cast of characters who represented the economic, social, and religious scene in England at a time when the individual was devalued apart from his/her place in a hierarchical social order.

Notable contemporaries of Eliot who also wrote domestic realism included Charlotte Yonge, whose numerous novels for adults and juveniles excelled in the presentation of authentic Victorian middle-class life, and Maria Edgeworth, whose Castle Rackrent (1800) is acknowledged as the first regional novel in English and a forerunner of domestic realism.

Bibliography
Barrett, Dorothea. Vocation and Desire: George Eliot’s Heroines. London: Routledge, 1989.
Colby, Vineta. Yesterday’s Woman: Domestic Realism in the English Novel. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1974.
Pollack, Mary S. “The Anti-canonical Realism of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s ‘Lord Walter’s Wife.’” Studies in the Literary Imagination 29, no. 1 (Spring 1996): 43–54.

Categories: British Literature, Literature, Novel Analysis

Tags: 19th century fiction, Charles Dickens, Charlotte Yonge, domestic fiction, domestic realism, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, English domestic realism, everyday life in literature, feminist literary history, George Eliot, Historical Fiction, Jane Austen, literary realism, literature and social order, maria edgeworth, middle-class literature, provincial life, realism and materialism, realism in literature, realism vs romanticism, realistic fiction women writers, rural domesticity, sentimental fiction, social class in fiction, Victorian domestic fiction, Victorian Literature, William Makepeace Thackeray, women's literature