Realism In Daisy Miller And The Turn Of The Screw

Henry James confronted the Old World-New World huddle by writing directly about it. Although born in New York City, he spent most of his adult years in England. Many of his novels center on Americans who live in or travel to Europe. With its intricate, highly qualified sentences and dissection of emotional and psychological nuance, James's fiction can be daunting. Among his more accessible works are the novellas Daisy Miller, about an enchanting American girl in Europe, and The Turn of the Screw, an enigmatic ghost story.

Realism also influenced American drama of the period, in part through the works of Howells but also through the works of such Europeans as Ibsen and Zola. Although realism was the most influential in terms of set design and

Perhaps it was the romantic visionary in him that caused Clemens to recall his youth in Hannibal with such fondness. As he remembered it in Old Times on the Mississippi (1875), the village was a white town drowsing in the sunshine of a summer’s morning, until the arrival of a riverboat suddenly made it a hive of activity. The gamblers, stevedores, and pilots, the boisterous rafts men and elegant travelers, all bound for somewhere surely glamorous and exciting, would have impressed a young boy and stimulated his already active imagination. And the lives he might imagine for these living people could easily be embroidered by the romantic exploits he read in the works of James Fennimore Cooper, Sir Walter Scott, and others. Those same adventures could be reenacted with his companions as well, and Clemens and his friends did play at being pirates, Robin Hood, and other fabled adventurers. Among those companions was Tom Blankenship, an affable but impoverished boy whom twain later identified as the model for the character Huckleberry Finn. There were local diversions as well fishing, picnicking, and swimming. A boy might swim or canoe to and explore Glasscock’s Island, in the middle of the Mississippi River, or he might visit the labyrinthine McDowell’s Cave, about 2 miles (3 km) south of town. The first site evidently became Jackson’s Island in Adventures of Huckleberry Finn; the second became McDougal’s Cave in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. In the summers, Clemens visited his Uncle John Quarles’s farm, near Florida, where he played with his cousins and listened to stories told by the slave Uncle Daniel, who served, in part, as a model for Jim in Huckleberry