NATURALISM

Brief Outlook on American Vistas

Naturalism – Theoretical Origins
• France: Claude Bernard. Introduction à
l’étude de la médicine expérimentale
(1865)

• Literary application: Emile Zola. Le roman

expérimental (1880)– literature governed
by science, use of experimental method
 Zola and Naturalism
“En somme, toute l’opération consiste à prendre
les faits dans la nature, puis à étudier le
mécanisme des faits, en agissant sur eux par les
modifications des circonstances et des milieux,
sans jamais s’écarter des lois de la nature. Au
bout, il y a la conaissance de l’homme, la
connaissance scientifique, dans son action
individuelle et sociale.” (Zola 60-61)
Study of heredity and milieu as shapers of human
destinies
 Hyppolite Taine
Zola’s naturalism based on Taine’s De
L’intelligence: nature (the inherent impulse
of human evolution) = a succession of
events in the parallel development of the
psychological (moral) and physical
elements in man
 Darwinism and Naturalism
• Charles Darwin. On the Origins of Species (1859)
– theories of biological evolution and natural
selection “struggle for life” – “modification” –
“natural selection” - The Descent of Man (1871)
application on humans
Material causes of phenomena over providential
design / emphasis on natural over supernatural
Key terms: biology, struggle, competition, natural
law
Input from Post-Darwinian Theories
Social Darwinism – “survival of the fittest” (Herbert Spencer
– Social Statistics 1850) – competition – social evolution
(prosperity); deterministic / fatalistic / progressive –
economic realm – laissez-faire (competition and self-
interest) / political conservatism / imperialism
Heredity studies – Francis Galton. Hereditary Genius (1869)
– biological inheritance dominant
Struggle school – Walter Bagehot. Physics and Politics
(1872) – “nations evolve principally by succeeding in
conflicts with other groups”
Reform Darwinism (1890s) – governmental role for social
policies for adapting to changing conditions
E.g. extreme eugenics movement (Galton, 1883) – superiority
of one group over others
 Defining Naturalism in the U.S.
• Realism infused with pessimistic determinism
• Realism with a “necessitarian ideology” (Chase)
• The philosophical position of pessimistic materialistic
determinism
• 2 tensions of naturalist novel (Donald Pizer):
• tension between subject matter and the concept of man
emerging from here (low class) – dull life but also the
heroic and adventurous (violence and passion) i.e. the
extraordinary and excessive in human nature out of the
common local / everyday
2. Tension between naturalist’s desire to represent the new
discomforting truths of life and his desire to find
meaning in experience that validates the human
enterprise – need of a new sense of man’s dignity and
importance
 Naturalism and Realism
Common point: mimetic approach, fidelity to truth
Realism Naturalism

Focus on the comfortable and well- Focus on social extremes

to-do
Out of touch with life’s raw
passions
Having effeminate manners (Shi)
Characters: responsible for their
lives; autonomous selves capable of
independent actions, rational
judgment, moral responsibility
Importance of causal forces like
heredity and environment in
determining behavior
Importance of economic forces /
non-rational impulses
Characters: no more than events in
the world (Darwin-based); with
choices determined by forces
beyond their rational control
(Zola’s character’s “completely
dominated by their nerves and
blood, without free will” (Shi 221)
 Frank Norris. The Responsibilities of the
Novelist (1903) or Naturalism = Realism and
Romance
Starting point: challenge Howells’ idea that realism and
romanticism are contending forces (also Dreiser –
Howells’ lack of experience with the misery and passions
of the poor and the suffering):
“Why should it be that so soon as the novelist addresses
himself – seriously – to the consideration of contemporary
life he must abandon Romance and take up that harsh,
loveless, colorless, blunt tool called Realism?” (Norris
214)
Place of naturalism: transcending synthesis
[Savage realism cf. Garland, 1903 / Ultra realism – exploring
sordid facts, primitive passions, social conflict, carnal
pleasures – Frank Norris, Stephen Crane, Jack London]
 Realism and Romance
“Realism is the kind of fiction that confines itself to
the type of normal life” (…) It “stultifies itself. It
notes only the surface of things”, “minutely” (215)
– limited / surface
Romance = “the kind of fiction that takes cognizance
of variations from the type of normal life” (215)
leading to a “revelation of my neighbor’s secretest
life” (217) implying feelings like hope, despair–
its themes: the sordid, the unlovely (e.g. Zola)
 Time and Place of Romance
“Romance does very well in the castles of the Middle Ages
and the Renaissance chateaux, and she has the entrée there
and is very well received. (…) But let us protest against
limiting her to such places and such times (…); you will
find her equally at home in the brownstone house on the
corner and in the office building downtown. And this very
day, in this very hour, she is sitting among the rags and
wretchedness, the dirt and despair of the tenements of East
Side New York.” (218)
Contemporary life / High, middle and low classes
Input of Realism and Romance in Naturalism
[the extraordinary out of the ordinary]
“Let Realism do the entertaining with its
meticulous presentation of teacups, rag carpets,
wall-paper and haircloth sofas, stopping with
these; going no deeper than it sees, choosing the
ordinary, the untroubled, the commonplace.
But to Romance belongs the wide world for rage,
and the unplumbed depth of the human heart, and
the mystery of sex, and the problems of life, and
the black, unsearched penetralia of the soul of
man.” (Norris 220)
 Characteristics of Naturalism
• Lower class life vs. realists’ bourgeoisie
• Survival orientation – elemental drives (hunger, fear) vs.
middle class concern with status and social behavior
• Sordid language, settings and events – animalistic
environment
• Deterministic philosophy – heredity and environment as
controlling forces
• Pessimistic, tragic view of life – exterior forces
• Move toward irrational man (prey to passions and
appetites beyond control) vs. realists’ man of reason
 Naturalism as Social Darwinism
Protagonist’s fall and elimination through suicide at different
social levels
Original pattern: Zola’s L’assommoir – protagonist Gervaise
Macquart decaying from low middle-class to vice
(promiscuity, alcohol) and squalid death
American examples: Maggie in Crane’s Maggie, a Girl of the
Streets [NY slums]
Hurstwood in Dreiser’s Sister Carrie – Chicago business
middle class to NY beggar dying for not adapting to a
more complex urban community
Dominant theme: the drama of desire (Shi 247) – relentless
aspiration for unattainable ideas often becoming a self-
destructive dream [romance input]
Crane’s Naturalism – Maggie (1893)

• Stress on circumstantial forces rather than

deterministic ones (people somehow
responsible for what they do)
• Social environmental determinism
• NY slums, sweatshops, prostitution,
brutality; immorality of slums (mock at
middle class ethics)
Dreiser’s Naturalism – Sister Carrie
(1900)
• Social determinism –urbanization and
industrialism – effects of mechanizing culture
(“rocking chair” – Ferris wheel)
• Impact and entrapment of self by money (Drouet,
Hurstwood), by the city (Chicago, New York), by
work conditions (Carrie’s sister and brother-in-
law), by middle class values
• “drifting” character – transition – context of
impersonal force / individuals less characterized
by their relation to one another than by their
relation to power forces (Nature, the City, Society)
 Jack London’s Naturalism – Call of
the Wild (1903)
• Importance of environment – 2 dimensions: symbolical
and historical (1890s gold rush)
• Atavism as key of Buck’s survival in the wild. Implication:
instincts don’t die in the civilized world but go in
hibernation.
• Nietzsche’s “blonde beast” = the animal in man “avidly in
search of spoil and victory” and “sheep” / “herd animals”
= victims (Thus Spake Zarathustra) serving his view of
society as divided between those who were naturally
masters and those who were naturally slaves / life – a
constant struggle to rule or be ruled / “will to power”
replacing morality and ethics
• “The Ghost Dog” (romance) at the side of the raw and
bloody brutality of nature (Darwin) – becoming one’s own
master