Realism’s Gender Wars: Masculinity Effects in Late Realist Fiction and Contemporary Reality TV

Abstract

Abstract Who owns The Real in realism, and what difference does gender make? Countering monolithic (and often dismissive) notions of realism, this article recognizes divergent signifiers of the real. Its particular concern is the war between realisms coded as feminine and those coded as masculine—between what Frank Norris belittled as “the drama of a broken teacup” and the drama of a man battling to survive in the wild. Juxtaposing Jack London’s Klondike fiction with today’s survival reality TV shows, I see these as similar efforts to put a masculine stamp on the real. In my reading of the History Channel’s Alone (2015–present), however, a Londonesque realism of moose-killing is challenged by a realism of the daily, non-dire, and domestic. Alone’s oscillation between these modes recalls that Ur-text of literary realism in which a violent, shipwrecked man sets about reinventing the household arts.“A realism of the nondire is just as authentic—its sociable, homemaking women and men just as credible and worthy—as a realism of men in mortal danger.”