Literary realism vs. internal logic

I've been teaching Eliza Haywood's Fantomina, Or, Love in a Maze recently and some students can't get past the fact that the story's eponymous heroine manages, four different times, to seduce a man while she is in four different disguises. Yes, she is an excellent actress and yes he's probably a little dense. I would also argue that Fantomina picks her "personas" carefully, selecting roles that most eighteenth-century men would already associate with female sexuality (prostitute, maid, widow).

But my students' inability to let this point go speaks to a larger issue about any kind of narrative art form—the question of whether or not it's "realistic" and the odd moments in a text/movie/story that disrupt the sometimes-necessary suspension of disbelief involved in consuming narrative. In other words, it's not the larger conceits that we have issues with, but the smaller inconsistencies. For example, when watching the time-travelling movie Run Lola Run, in which the same story is played out three different times with the heroine learning from the previous rendition, my friend Natalie was bothered by how the protagonist and her boyfriend seemed to be talking to each other while separated by a sliding glass door. Though she wondered how they could have heard each other, she didn't question the movie's overall concept that Lola somehow managed to travel back in time twice (do-over!) in an attempt to save said boyfriend.

I have realized, however, that the issue I'm describing is not a question of realism but rather of logic. We expect a work of art to have its own internal logic and at least be consistent in its own world: If all the animals talk, that's fine; if only one animal talks, it's weird. And as readers we somehow still expect an internal logic, things to "make sense" in the world of the movie. The need for unity is strong indeed.