The Gilded Age

The Gilded Age was the name given to the period around 1870 when considerable cynicism set in about politics and other aspects of society. Mark Twain used the term as the title for a book, an attack on the materialism, speculation, and corruption seen in the era after the Civil War (Howard 200). In literary terms, the period as marked by a growing sense of realism. The beginnings of Naturalism as a literary movement came in the 1890s and extended realism with a new emphasis. The realists had insisted on detailing the world in a realistic fashion and to do so by creating reality: "Art's task was not to record but to make life; reality was a constructed, not a recorded, thing" (Bradbury 8). Naturalism took a different view in its origins, and now the task of the novelist was to undertake a scientific study by recording facts, living conditions, and behavior:

Naturalism was thus realism scientized, systematized, taken finally beyond realist principles of fidelity to common experience or of humanistic exploring of individual lives within the social and moral web to an experiment in the laws of social and biological existence (Bradbury 9).

The Gilded Age was the era of novelists like Mark Twain Henry James. Twain's progression as a writer follows the progression from the mid-nineteenth century into the Gilded Age, and for Twain his work shows this in a shift from humor to satire (Parrington 91). Parrington says that the Glided Age was marked by a decay in aristocratic

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not. The character most representative of the inflexible nature of European society is Winterborne's aunt, Mrs. Costello, who refuses even to meet the girl because she has heard stories about her and thinks she is vulgar. No one in this social setting makes up their own mind. Rather, they listen to others and imitate the opinions of others. They look to see what the general group thinks before they try to think at all. Winterborne also lives by these rules, though he may chafe at them as most others in his social circle do not. He has the grace to admit his error, though it is too late. The innocent, Daisy, does not survive her journey through the decadent and stilted society of Europe. Daisy always knows that her actions are innocent, but she is disingenuous enough to believe that that is all that matters and to think that the opinions of others are not important. In this society, though, appearances are more important than reality. Winterborne is the knowledgeable European who is also a decent person, and he worries about Daisy's innocence as she encounters the more experienced society of Europe. The cities of Europe are old and sturdy, but it is the people who inhabit these cities that show the decay that does not

Category: History - T