2 - The production of visibility

Summary

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Realism's concern with vision is by now a kind of truism, and for no writer is it more true than for Stephen Crane, whose contemporaries frequently described his writing as a kind of “photography” and whose major works reveal an ambition to make visible not only certain things that did not seem suitable to be seen (for example, the slums) but also certain things that did not seem available to be seen (for example, mental states). Thus in Maggie: A Girl of the Streets (1893), dreams have colors (Jimmie's are “blood-red”) and “sounds” can be “seen”: one of the most striking of Maggie's realistic effects is its Bowery dialect – “Dat Johnson goil is a puty good looker.” Indeed, the prestige of dialect as a mark of Realism was so great in the 1890s that Abraham Cahan, making his novelistic breakthrough from Yiddish to English, at the same time sought to overcome the fact that the English he was now writing was being required to represent Yiddish by italicizing bits of dialogue that were to be understood as really sounding like what they looked like. Thus Yekl: A Tale of the New York Ghetto (1896), contains sentences like “But what will you say to baseball? All college boys and tony peoplesh play it,” in which, as a helpful footnote informs us, the standard English represents Yiddish and the “Italics” represent “English words incorporated in the Yiddish of the characters.” These italics mark Cahan’s ambition to transcend the novelistic conventions that substitute standard English for Yiddish and instead to present the reader with the real thing.