Discovering the humanities 3rd by henry m sayre 2016 chapter 13

Discovering the Humanities
THIRD EDITION

CHAPTER

13

The Working Class and
Bourgeoisie: The
Conditions of Modern
Life

Discovering the Humanities, Third Edition
Henry M. Sayre

Copyright © 2016, 2013, 2010
by Pearson Education, Inc. or its affiliates
All Rights Reserved


Learning Objectives
1. Describe how realism manifested itself
in nineteenth-century art and
literature.
2. Describe the various ways in which
French artists and writers attacked
bourgeois values in the 1850s and
1860s.


Learning Objectives

3. Define Impressionism and examine
how it transformed conventional
assumptions about style and content
in painting.
4. Outline the characteristics of the
American sense of self as it developed
in the nineteenth century.


Learning Objectives
5. Examine the impact of Western
imperial adventuring on the nonWestern world.


Eugène Delacroix. Scenes from the Massacres at Chios. 1824.
Oil on canvas. 165" ì 139-1/4".
Musộe du Louvre, Paris. â RMN-Grand Palais/Thierry Le Mage. [Fig. 13.1]


Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres. The Vow of Louis XIII. 1824.
Oil on canvas. 165-3/4" × 103-1/8".
Montauban Cathedral, France. Giraudon/Bridgeman Images. [Fig. 13.2]


Document: Jean-Auguste
-Dominique Ingres from "The
Doctrine of Ingres"

Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres. La Grande Odalisque. 1814.
Oil on canvas. 35-7/8" × 63".

Musée du Louvre, Paris. Inv. Rf1158. © RMN-Grand Palais
(musée du Louvre)/Thierry Le Mage. [Fig. 13.3]


Eugốne Delacroix. Odalisque. 184550.
Oil on canvas. 14-7/8" ì 18-1/4".
â Fitzwilliam Museum, Universtiy of Cambridge, England/Bridgeman Images. [Fig. 13.4]


Closer Look: Eugène Delacroix,
Liberty Leading the People

Eugène Delacroix. Liberty Leading the People. 1830.
Oil on canvas. 8'6" × 10'7".
Musée du Louvre, Paris. © RMN-Grand Palais/Hervé
Lewandowski. [Fig. 13.5]


Ernest Meissonier. Memory of Civil War (The Barricades). 1849 (Salon of 1850–51).
Oil on canvas. 11-1/2" × 8-1/4".
Inv. RF1942-31. Musée du Louvre, Paris © RMN-Grand Palais/Droits réservés.
[Fig. 13.6]


The New Realism
• As a result of industrialization, the
British workforce increasingly became
proletariat—a class of workers who
neither owned the means of production
(tools and equipment) nor controlled

their own work.


The New Realism
• As single women more and more
entered the workforce—sometimes
resorting to prostitution to support their
wages—married women were driven
out.


The New Realism
• Faced with the reality of working-class
life, reformist thinkers and writers
across Europe reacted by writing
polemical work that criticized industrial
society.


The New Realism
• The writers addressed the plight of the
working class in realistic terms,
describing in minute detail the material
conditions and psychological impact
wrought by unhealthy surroundings.


Marxism
• Karl Marx (1818–1883) and Friedrich
Engels (1820–1895) were two young

middle-class Germans, who believed
that capitalism must be eliminated
because of its inherent unfairness.
• Following the logic of Hegel's dialectic,
they believed that revolution was
inevitable.


Marxism
• According to Marx and Engels, the
resolution of the struggle between
bourgeoisie (thesis) and proletariat
(antithesis) lay in the synthesis of a
classless society.
• Their 1848 Communist Manifesto was a
call-to-arms: "WORKING MEN OF ALL
COUNTRIES, UNITE."


Literary Realism
• The thinking of Marx and Engels
actually reflects a widespread concern
among social-minded Europeans and
Americans for the plight of working
people.


Charles Dickens and the Industrial
City
• The English novelist Charles Dickens

(1812–1870) depicted the lives of the
English lower class with intense
sympathy and great attention to detail
• Dickens became a leading creator of a
new type of prose fiction, literary
realism.
• Dickens did not simply aim to entertain,
but to advocate reform.


French Literary Realism: Balzac
and Flaubert
• In France, realist writers such as Honoré
de Balzac (1799–1850) depicted the full
breadth of French society, from its poor
to its most wealthy.
• In the 92 novels that make up Balzac's
Human Comedy, some 2,000
characters come to life for the reader.


French Literary Realism: Balzac
and Flaubert
• The primary setting is Paris, with its old
aristocracy, new wealth, and the rising
culture of the bourgeoisie (middle-class
shopkeepers, merchants, and business
people, as distinct from laborers and
wage-earners).

French Literary Realism: Balzac
and Flaubert
• In the novel Madame Bovary, Gustave
Flaubert (1821–1880) attacked the
Romantic sensibilities.
• Flaubert felt he was proceeding like the
modern scientist, investigating the lives
of his characters through careful and
systematic observation.


Literary Realism in the United
States: The Issue of Slavery
• Abolitionist opposition to slavery only
gained momentum in the United States
when the American Anti-Slavery Society
was established in 1833.


Literary Realism in the United
States: The Issue of Slavery
• In 1845, the Anti-Slavery Society helped
the former slave Frederick William
Douglas (1817–1895) publish his
autobiography Narrative of the Life of
Frederick Douglass: An American Slave.
• More than 100 book-length slave
narratives were published in the 1850s
and 1860s.

Realist Art: The Worker as Subject
• A full-blown French realism found its
first expression in Honoré Daumier's
(1808–1879) cartoon work for the daily
and weekly newspaper.
• The development of the new medium of
lithography made Daumier's regular
appearance in the newspaper possible.


Honoré Daumier. Rue Transnonain, April 15, 1834. 1834.
Lithograph. 11-1/2" × 17-5/8".
Private collection. [Fig. 13.7]