NOTES ON DRAMATIC REALISM

Though Realism in the theatre came to be trivialized as meaning only "realistic settings and costumes," it grew out of a number of important philosophical and aesthetic movements especially Positivism and Empiricism, each of which contributed to the triumph of so-called scientific approaches built on empiricism.

Dramatic Realism had a literary predecessor in Denis Diderot. Author of the Encyclopedie, Diderot is perhaps best known in theatre circles for his admonition to the actor to imagine the fourth wall and to "behave exactly as if the curtain had never risen." In 1758 he wrote:

Auguste Comte (1798-1857)

Educated as a mathematician, it would appear that early in life, Auguste Comte freed himself from all existing social and religious influences. A reforming zeal came to possess him. Between 1830-42, his Course in Positive Philosophy was published, a good deal of it in newspapers and popular journals. This was followed in 1854 with his System of Positive Philosophy. The intent of his "positive philosophy" was to displace theology and metaphysics as legitimate inquiries into reality. They would be replaced by a rigorous positive (i.e. empirical and scientific) method that should prevail in all sciences.

Positivism aims to organize our knowledge of the world, of man, of society, into a consistent whole. All human concepts are regarded as having passed through a theological, then a metaphysical and now into a positive or experiential stage. This is "historical change."

The abstract sciences form a hierarchy: mathematics at the top, sociology at the bottom. Sociology's task is to integrate the empirical method with all the other sciences.

The main task of any spiritual power is to strengthen the social tendencies of men at the expense of the person or individual. In the Positive religion (since you can't affirm or deny the existence of a Deity by empirical means), the object of love and reverence is Humanity. As a totality, men's lives must be devoted to the progress of the human race.

Charles Darwin

The famous discoverer of Natural Selection, Darwin was a biologist, that is to say, an empirical scientist about half-way down on Comte's hierarchical list. Between 1831 and 1836, he sailed around the South Atlantic and Pacific oceans in the good ship Beagle. This voyage led to his major work in life, the problem of the origin of the species. Finally in 1859, he published his Origin of the Species By Means of Natural Selection, the publication of which created a tremendous interest in Europe.

In 1871, his Descent of Man posited his theory that the human race was descended from a hairy, quadrumanous animal related to the progenitors of apes. Man had become an object of empirical study.

The essence of Darwin's argument was that:

With this outlook, the playwright came to emphasize the details of everyday life.

Hippolyte Taine (1828-93)

The Spirit of Positivism and, to a degree, Darwin's theories became manifest in the study of literature principally in the work of the great critic Hippolyte Taine. His key work was The History of English Literature (1864) in which Taine applied historicist and positivist thought to literary criticism.

Taine held that the character of a given work of art is determined by three factors which he called race, milieu and moment. He means:

Taken together, these three factors summarize what we might call the environmental conception of human nature. This is of major importance to realist drama.