AMERICAN NATURALISM

Sources
• Development of science:
• Charles Darwin’ s theory of evolution
• The first public announcement of natural
selection: Charles Darwin, and Alfred
Russel Wallace, 1823-1913."On the
tendency of species to form varieties: and
on the perpetuation of varieties and
species by natural means of selection.”
Journal of the Proceedings of the Linnean
Society: Zoology, 3 (1858) When Charles Darwin published The
Descent of Man in 1871, he challenged
the fundamental beliefs of most people by
asserting that humans and apes had
evolved from a common ancestor. Many
critics of Darwin misunderstood his
theory to mean that people had descended
directly from apes. This caricature of
2 in the
Charles Darwin as an ape appeared
London Sketch Book in 1874.
 Charles Darwin
• On the Origin of Species by
means of Natural Selection,
or, The Preservation of
Favoured Races in the
Struggle for life.
London: John Murray,
1859.
• Revealed the animalistic
struggle underlying all
human behaviour

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 Progress and Poverty
• Henry George: Progress
and Poverty, 1879
• “This association of
poverty with progress is the
great enigma of our times.
It is the central fact from
which spring industrial,
social, and political
difficulties that perplex the
world, and with which This image (from a Henry George Cigar box)
statesmanship and reflects George's fame at the time of his run for the
Mayoralty of New York in 1886 (and later in 1897).
philanthropy and education George outpolled a young Theodore Roosevelt, but
grapple in vain.” lost to machine Democrat Abraham Hewitt. The
rooster was George's campaign icon, and his slogan
was "The democracy of Thomas Jefferson. And
although the cigars were advertised "for men",
George was in fact an outspoken advocate for4
women's suffrage.
 “Muckraking” journalism
• A period of grim social struggle
• Issues of poverty and political
abuse
• Blended into the reportages of
the muckraking journalists
• Both Crane and Dreiser -
journalists exploring the life of
the slum long before they were
novelists

Photo of correspondents
Richard Harding Davis (left) and
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Stephen Crane during the Spanish
 Emil Zola
• Showed how this 'scientific'
vision might be expressed
in fiction
• "I chose characters
completely dominated by
their nerves and their
blood, deprived of free
will, pushed to each action
of their lives by the fatality
of their flesh."

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 Absolute determinism
• In determinism, individuals no longer
appeared as morally independent actors in a
Christian Universe
• Filings aligned by magnets
• Succumb to the logic of heredity and
environment
• Thus behaviour - a problem for science, not a
mystery of life
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 Naturalist Characters
• A thoroughly different sense of character
emerges:
• dehumanized
• determined
• moved by inner and outer forces beyond
conscious moral control

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Naturalist Vs. Realist Characters
• Any sure evidence of effective choice, of free
will, or autonomous action, makes a novel
something other than naturalist
• In realism - a wide variety of individuals , but
each one has the ability to choose and
characteristically does so through scenes that
enact a process of deliberation
• Weighing of alternative actions through
consideration of consequences
• The possibilities for the self are conceived in
terms of responsible choice
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 Naturalist Vs. Realist Characters
• Naturalist characters act out of a similar set of motives
and desires
• Differ only in being unable to resist the conditions that
press upon them
• The self may be no more than an illusion
• The dynamic forces that constrain one's actions from
within as well as without not only overwhelm an
otherwise integrated self but rather are that self in a
fragmented state
• No disjunction between outer events and inner
disposition

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 Naturalist Vs Realist Characters
• Circumstances are the source of character in
naturalism
• The realist heroes might always act differently in
circumstances that destroy them
• They can attain a tragic stature
• Not so with the naturalist characters
• All the major American realists succumbed to
certain determinist possibilities
• Sinclair Lewis: fictionalized circumstances that
deprive their characters of autonomy

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 Absolute Determinism
• How could such a philosophy thrive in a
country so committed to personal liberty
and individualism?
• Partly explained by
- rapid industrialization
- unprecedented influx of immigrants

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 American Naturalists
• Lacked any sense of common purpose
• No self-conscious 'school’
• Shared in common an attraction to the
philosophical determinism
• This concept that inspired the new narrative
conceptions of setting and character was
fully incorporated in the works of four
American writers - Frank Norris, Stephen
Crane, Theodore Dreiser and Jack London a
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 Frank Norris
1870 - 1902
• The representative American
naturalist
• A cultural seismograph
• Registering the wide variety of
ideological formations and
cultural practices
• The most conspicuous and overt
proponent of literary naturalism
• The most incompetent
practitioner of the craft - labored
and lugubrious style
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 Norris’ Art
• The literary value of his work - revolt
against style:
• “I detest ‘fine writing’, ‘rhetoric’, ‘elegant
English’ - tommyrot. Who cares for fine
style! Tell your yarn and let your style go to
hell. We don’t want literature, we want
life.”

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 Norris’s Works
• Yvernele, A Tale of Feudal France, a romantic poem, 1891
• Moran and the Lady Letty, 1898, a wild tale of pirate adventure
• McTeague, 1899 - sensational treatment of greed and
degeneracy
• The Octopus, 1901
• The Pit, 1903
• The Wolf
• Vandover and the Brute, 1914

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 Norris’ Contribution
• Definition of naturalism as a synthesis of
‘romance’ and ‘’realism’
• Understands naturalism entirely in terms of
the writer’s material
• Many have shared his assumptions and have
tried to suppress the ‘literary’ insisting on
the primacy of a fantasy of masculine
‘reality’.
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 Stephen Crane
1871 - 1900
• The most bleakly nihilistic of
the group
• Created the most clearly self-
conscious body of work
• His career spanned little more
than half a dozen years before
he died of tuberculosis at
twenty-eight

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 Crane’s Works
• Maggie: A Girl of the Streets
1893
• The Red Badge of Courage 1894
• George's Mother 1895
• The Open Boat and Other Tales
of Adventure 1898
• The Monster and Other Stories
1899
• War is Kind 1899
• Active Service 1899
• Whilomville Stories 1900
• Wounds in the Rain 1900
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 Crane’s Art
• The perspective he offers is of a fundamentally
indifferent universe
• Directly contradicting those realists who felt that
moral claims redeemed the starkness of
experience, Crane depicted the world as
inherently amoral and irredeemable
• Nature provides no haven in his fiction, nor are its
processes altered by desire
• Dramatizes the emptiness of deliberation and
choice intensifying this vision of a thoroughly
unaccommodating universe
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 Crane’s Art
• Settings of war, shipwreck and blizzard
precluding quiet contemplation
• Characters who seem in the end enslaved no less
by conventions than by circumstances
• Part of his characters' inability to take
responsibility for experience results from the
unusual form of his representation: his 'nervous'
style contributes to a radical questioning of the
very concept of the self

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 Crane’s Art
• The absence of strong plots
• Characters often lack names
• A tacit repudiation of conventional labels and
predictable judgements
• His narratives call into question all casual
assumptions
• They compel us to recognize how any conclusion
can only emerge from predetermining
expectations

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Theodore Dreiser
1871 - 1945

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 Theodore Dreiser
1871 - 1945
• No less a hybrid practitioner than other major
American naturalists
• Eludes clear classification as 'pessimistic',
'optimistic' or 'reform’
• The first Catholic
• The first to hear a foreign language at home
• The first whose family was impoverished and
disreputable
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 Dreiser’s Art
• In his novels impersonal energies always
engulf desire, which becomes cause for
neither nihilism, nor optimism
• Settings no longer constrain desire, but now
express it fully, if only to confirm in the end
that desire itself can never be satisfied
• Identifying desire with urban settings,
described in unprecedented detail
• The greatest chronicler of American cities
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 Dreiser’s Works
• Sister Carrie 1900, 1907, 1912
• Jennie Gerhardt, 1911
• The Financier, 1912
• A Traveller at Forty, 1913
• The Titan 1914
• Free, and Other stories, 1918
• The Hand of the Potter (a play), 1918
• Twelve Men (sketches), 1918
• Hey, Rub-A-Dub-Dub (essays) 1920
• A Book About Myself 1922

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 Dreiser’s Works
• An American Tragedy 1925
• Chains (stories) 1927
• Moods, Cadenced and Declaimed (poems) 1928
• Dreiser Looks at Russia 1928
• A Gallery of Women 1929
• America is Worth Saving 1941
• The Bulwark 1946
• The Stoic 1947

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 Dreiser’s Art
• Recurrence of chance alignment of desire
and environment
• Characters drift from place to place, and
from person to person
• More than any other naturalist, Dreiser
dramatized chance as a means of
compelling characters to pay or gain for
actions not their own
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 Dreiser’s Significance
• Subsequent writers have borrowed
from the fiction of Crane, Norris,
and London
• The adaptations from Dreiser have
made the tradition seem to continue
• John Dos Passos, John Steinbeck
and Norman Mailer, even William
Faulkner and Ernest Hemingway
have seemed to resemble Dreiser in
technique or material

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 American Naturalism
• Naturalism is distinguished by no particular attitude
or assumption, no specific technique or style
• Crane's 'impressionistic' vignettes hardly call to
mind Dreiser's lumbering prose
• American literary naturalists are bound together by
historical context and philosophical determinism

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 American Naturalism
Basic Bibliography
• Vernon L. Parrington, Main Currents in American
Thought,:The Beginnings of Critical Realism in
America, 1930, v.III;
• Charles Child Walcutt, American Literary Naturalism: A
Divided Stream 1956;
• Lars Ahnebrink, The Beginnings of Naturalism in
American Fiction 1891-1903, 1961;
• Donald Pizer, Realism and Naturalism in Nineteenth-
Century Literature, 1966

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 Bibliography
• John J. Conder, Naturalism in American Fiction: The Classic
Phase, 1984;
• June Howard, Form and History in American Literary
Naturalism, 1985;
• Mark Seltzer, "The Naturalist Machine, in Sex, Politics, and
Science in the Nineteenth-Century Novel, ed. Ruth Bernard
Yeazell, 1986;
• Walter Benn Michaels, The Gold Standard and the Logic of
Naturalism, 1987;
• Lee Clark Mitchell, Determined Fictions: American Literary
Naturalism, 1989;
• Michael Davitt Bell, The Problem of American Realism, 1993

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