Stendhal's The Red and the Black is a product of romanticism not realism

Pro has provided a definition of realism, but has provided no arguments that the novel excludes Romanticism and is purely realist. In the absence of an argument by Pro, I'm not sure where to go. The novel dramatizes Julien's emotional responses rather than the external world around him. In fact, the central dialogue of the novel is Julien's internal conversations with himself, in which Julien's external self (the one he presents to the world) is juxtaposed with his interior self. Much of the novel presents Julien, in is internal dialogue, trying to control, rearrange, and adapt his external appearance to fit the particular circumstances he finds himself in. What emerges, beneath this surface, is part heroic aspiration and part self-doubt, as Julien constantly wonders about the relationship of his inner state to his external appearance, questioning, doubting, resolving, and so on. What is preeminently clear in Stendhal's novel is that Julien's life takes pace primarily on the inside. The novel stages a contest between his inner life and outer life, in which the prize is a hold over his authentic self. Ultimately, Julien's inner life never stabilizes, but rather, ends engaged in constant unresolved dialogue with itself. This focus on the interior as opposed to the exterior demonstrates an explicit concern with Romantic themes. Furthermore, Julien's personality itself is that of a Romantic visionary, dreaming of a self-realized Napoleonic grandeur. But the key to understanding his Romantic heroism lies not only in these visions but in his internal doubt, in which Julien carves out a space for authentically affirming is Romantic vision while warding off a world that he suspects is out to deceive, embarass, and demote him. Julien's internal/external problem, that of resolving his Romantic external aspirations with his Romantic internal doubt, is compounded by the fact that the person he is talking to is often doing the same: concentrating on the most appropriate relationship between an inner self and an outer appearance. The novel also dramatizes the internal/external problematic of the characters Julien interacts with, which produces Romantic irony. Irony, if our readers will recall, is when the surface meaning of something is undercut by a contradictory implied meaning. The Romantic irony is produced by juxtaposing the internal lives of two people who are interacting externally. Expectations arise externally, but the reader is privy to the complex and lively internal life that both characters are undergoing. In this way, Stendhal establishes a Romantic irony, an irony that operates through the explicitly Romantic domination of the interior over the exterior. Literary critic Ian Johnston writes: "In all of this there is a constant sense of how pathetic Julien really is. His vision of himself as a conquering hero in the Napoleonic mode translates itself into complex but endlessly hesitant, self-reflecting and unsatisfying love affairs which he describes to himself in military language, a style which simply reminds us just how unheroic these achievements are by comparison. And no matter what success he enjoys, he is constantly plagued by self-reflection, self-doubts. Have I done the right thing in my campaign for advancement? Shall I hold her hand? Maybe I should not have done that. If I show my feelings, will I lose the campaign? And so on. This is a very far cry from the confident romantic assertiveness that we saw in Jane Eyre--psychologically much more interesting, of course, but also far less of an affirmation of the emotional rightness of that attitude." Notice Johnston explicitly relates the novel to the romanticism of Jane Eyre, but notes that Stendhal's novel offers a more interesting psychological portrait of the character, which is to say, internal portrait, but does so through Julien's self-doubt and self-reflection. I cannot think of anything more Romantic. The resolution is negated.