VIII-American Naturalism

1. 1.Concepts and Features of Naturalism

      Naturalism is a literary movement that was born in France in the second half of ‘nineteenth century as a direct application of the thought positivist and that aims to describe the reality of psychological and social with the same methods used in the natural sciences. It reflects in literature the influence of the general spread of scientific thought, which bases knowledge on observation, experimentation and verification. It is a type of extreme realism. In literature, it extended the tradition of realism, aiming at an even more faithful, unselective representation of reality, a veritable “slice of life,” presented without moral judgment. Naturalism differed from realism in its assumption of scientific determinism, which led naturalistic authors to emphasize man’s accidental, physiological nature rather than his moral or rational qualities. Individual characters were seen as helpless products of heredity and environment, motivated by strong instinctual drives from within and harassed by social and economic pressures from without. As such, they had little will or responsibility for their fates, and the prognosis for their “cases” was pessimistic at the outset. This movement suggested the roles of family, social conditions, and environment in shaping human character. Thus, naturalistic writers write stories based on the idea that environment determines and governs human character. We also see use of some of the scientific principles in naturalistic works, and humans struggling for survival in hostile and alien society. In fact, naturalism took its cue from Darwin’s theory of evolution, which holds that life is like a struggle and only the fittest survive. ("Naturalism")

     In naturalist works, writers concentrate on the filth of society and the travails of the lower classes as the focal point of their writing. Naturalism was heavily influenced by both Marxism and evolutionary theory. It attempted to apply what they saw as the scientific rigor and insights of those two theories to artistic representation of society, as a means of criticizing late nineteenth century social organization. The writer tries to express reality in the most objective and impersonal way possible, leaving to the things and facts themselves narrated, the description of the task of denouncing the state of the social situation, highlighting the degradation and injustices of society. Naturalist writers abandon the narrative choice of the omniscient narrator, who knows all about the characters and who tells the story in the third person, common in the realist novel, replacing it with a narrative voice that witnesses the phenomena described, as they happen.

The term is first used by the positivist criticism of the literary phenomena of Charles-Augustin Sainte-Beuve and Hippolyte Taine. Taine argues that race, the environment, social and political aspects govern literature specific traits and evolution. ("Naturalism")

      Naturalism originated in France and had its direct theoretical basis in the critical approach of Hippolyte Taine, who announced in his introduction to Histoire de la littérature anglaise (1863–64; History of English Literature) that “there is a cause for ambition, for courage, for truth, as there is for digestion, for muscular movement, for animal heat. Vice and virtue are products, like vitriol and sugar.”

      Then, naturalism is claimed by Émile Zola, who gives it its true literary meaning and makes it a romantic school aimed at bringing together the writers of his time. His essay “Le Roman expérimental” (1880; “The Experimental Novel”) became the literary manifesto of the school. According to Zola, the novelist was a detached experimenter who subjects his characters and their passions to a series of tests and who works with emotional and social facts as a chemist works with matter. As he explains in the preface to the second edition of Thérèse Raquin (1868) and especially in The Experimental Roman, it is the duty of literature to become scientific:

“So I came to this point: the experimental novel is a consequence of the scientific evolution of the century; it continues and completes physiology, which itself is based on chemistry and physics; it replaces the study of abstract man, of metaphysical man, the study of natural man, subject to physico-chemical laws and determined by the influences of the environment; in a word, it is the literature of our scientific age, as classical and romantic literature corresponded to an age of scholasticism and theology. ” (Zola)

For this, the literature must apply the method used in the natural sciences. Inspired by the Introduction to the Study of Experimental Medicine, 1865 to Claude Bernard, Zola believes that “the novelist is that of an observer and experimenter” (Zola)

“The observer and the experimenter are the only ones who work for the power and happiness of man, gradually making him the master of nature. There is no nobility, no dignity, no beauty, no morality, not to know, to lie, to pretend that one is all the greater the more one grows higher in error and in confusion. The only great and moral works are the works of truth. ” (Zola)

The observer chooses his subject (alcoholism, for example) and makes a hypothesis (alcoholism is hereditary or is due to the influence of the environment). The experimental method is based on the fact that the novelist “intervenes in a direct way to place his character in conditions” which will reveal the mechanism of his passion and verify the initial hypothesis. “At the end, there is the knowledge of Man, scientific knowledge, in his individual and social action” (Zola). 

      Upon Zola’s example the naturalistic style became widespread and affected to varying degrees most of the major writers of the period. Guy de Maupassant’s popular story “The Necklace” heralds the introduction of a character who is to be treated like a specimen under a microscope.

      Already in the 18th century, the motto “Back to nature”, which was often wrongly attributed to Jean-Jacques Rousseau, was called naturalism. The naturalism of the 18th century challenges the unsophisticated artist, while the naturalism of the later 19th century requires the experts to observe nature. Common to both older and newer naturalism is the effort to give the unpolished, underprivileged, “ugly” a place in art.

      At the end of the 19th century, major social changes shaped Europe: the industrial revolution, imperialism, urbanization, whereby poverty and misery had to be observed in a concentrated form. Naturalism emerged on this ground as a countermovement. Naturalistic artists claim to represent reality as precisely as possible and work with exact, as it were scientific methods. This scientific nature entitles and obliges them to depict what is ugly and repressed.

     In the United States, the genre is associated principally with writers such as Abraham Cahan, Ellen Glasgow, David Graham Phillips, Jack London, and most prominently Stephen Crane, Frank Norris, and Theodore Dreiser. The term naturalism operates primarily in counter distinction to realism, particularly the mode of realism codified in the 1870s and 1880s, and associated with William Dean Howells and Henry James. (“Naturalism: Literature”)

      Naturalism in American literature traces to Frank Norris, whose theories were markedly different from Zola’s, particularly to the status of naturalism within the loci of realism and Romanticism; Norris thought of naturalism as being Romantic, and thought Zola as being “a realist of realists”. To Link, while American naturalism had trends, its definition had no unified critical consensus. Link’s examples include Stephen Crane, Jack London, Theodore Dreiser, and Frank Norris, with William Dean Howells and Henry James being clear markers on the other side of the naturalist/realist divide.    

      It is important to clarify the relationship between American literary naturalism, with which this entry is primarily concerned, from the genre also known as naturalism that flourished in France from the 1850s to the 1880s. French naturalism, as exemplified by Gustave Flaubert, and especially Emile Zola, can be regarded as a programmatic, well-defined and coherent theory of fiction that self-consciously rejected the notion of free will, and dedicated itself to the documentary and "scientific" exposition of human behavior as being determined by, as Zola put it, "nerves and blood." ("Naturalism")

     Many of the American naturalists, especially Norris and London, were heavily influenced by Zola. They sought explanations for human behavior in natural science, and were skeptical, at least, of organized religion and beliefs in human free will. However, the Americans did not form a coherent literary movement, and their occasional critical and theoretical reflections do not present a uniform philosophy. Although Zola was a touchstone of contemporary debates over genre, Dreiser, perhaps the most important of the naturalist writers, regarded Honore de Balzac, one of the founders of Realism, as a greater influence. In philosophical and generic terms, American naturalism must be defined rather more loosely, as a reaction against the realist fiction of the 1870s and 1880s, whose scope was limited to middle-class or "local color" topics, with taboos on sexuality and violence.

      Naturalist fiction often concentrated on the non-Anglo, ethnically marked inhabitants of the growing American cities, many of them immigrants and most belonging to a class-spectrum ranging from the destitute to the lower middle-class. The naturalists were not the first to concentrate on the industrialized American city, but they were significant in that they believed that the realist tools refined in the 1870s and 1880s were inadequate to represent it. Abraham Cahan, for example, sought both to represent and to address the Jewish community of New York's East Side, of which he was a member. Frank Norris and Stephen Crane, themselves from established middle-class Anglophone families also registered the ethnic mix of the metropolis, though for the most part via reductive and offensive stereotypes. ("Naturalism in American Literature")

      Allied to this, naturalist writers were skeptical towards, or downright hostile to, the notions of bourgeois individualism that characterized realist novels about middle-class life. Most naturalists demonstrated a concern with the animal or the irrational motivations for human behavior, sometimes manifested in connection with sexuality and violence. Here they differed strikingly from their French counterparts.

     The naturalist often describes his characters as though they are conditioned and controlled by environment, heredity, instinct, or chance. But he also suggests a compensating humanistic value in his characters or their fates which affirms the significance of the individual and of his life. The tension here is that between the naturalist's desire to represent in fiction the new, discomfiting truths which he has found in the ideas and life of his late nineteenth-century world, and also his desire to find some meaning in experience which reasserts the validity of the human enterprise. ("Naturalism in Literature")

In sum, the defining features of Naturalism are reduced to the following:

•  The existence of the human being is determined by natural forces that humanity cannot control.
•  It is based on the philosophy of Determinism, for which man is controlled by his instincts, his passions and his social and economic environment.
•  The objective of Naturalism is to reproduce reality with complete impartiality and truth in a rigorous, documented and scientific way. Literature is considered a social document.
•  The ethic of Naturalism, unlike that of Realism, incorporates an amoral attitude in the objective representation of life: it disregards bourgeois moral values to be more objective.
•  Naturalistic writers consider that instinct, emotion, or social or economic conditions govern human behavior.
•  In Naturalism the dependence of the human being on environmental conditions stands out.
•  The aesthetic of naturalism is contrary to the traditional one and proposes a revolutionary indifference between the “beautiful” and the “ugly” that does not judge one over the other if it really is true.

- Themes:

The favorite themes of the naturalist narrative were anti- idealistic and anti- romantic, so that the narrative brought with it a strong charge of social denunciation that had to result from the scientific and objective description of the facts.

Among the main themes there were therefore:

•     Daily life with its banality, its meanness and its hypocrisy;
•  The morbid passions that had to border on the limits of psychiatric pathology, such as madness and crime;
• The living conditions of the subordinate classes, especially of the urban proletariat which, with its misery (prostitution, alcoholism, juvenile delinquency) could give a clear example of social pathology. ("Naturalism")

Walcutt identifies survival, determinism, violence, and taboo as key themes.

• The "brute within" each individual, composed of strong and often warring emotions: passions, such as lust, greed, or the desire for dominance or pleasure; and the fight for survival in an amoral, indifferent universe. The conflict in naturalistic novels is often "man against nature" or "man against himself" as characters struggle to retain a "veneer of civilization" despite external pressures that threaten to release the "brute within."
• Nature as an indifferent force acting on the lives of human beings. The romantic vision of Wordsworth--that "nature never did betray the heart that loved her"--here becomes Stephen Crane's view in "The Open Boat": "This tower was a giant, standing with its back to the plight of the ants. It represented in a degree, to the correspondent, the serenity of nature amid the struggles of the individual--nature in the wind, and nature in the vision of men. She did not seem cruel to him then, nor beneficent, nor treacherous, nor wise. But she was indifferent, flatly indifferent."
• The forces of heredity and environment as they affect--and afflict--individual lives.
•  An indifferent, deterministic universe. Naturalistic texts often describe the futile attempts of human beings to exercise free will, often ironically presented, in this universe that reveals free will as an illusion.

- Novels:

     Through this objective study of human beings, naturalistic writers believed that the laws behind the forces that govern human lives might be studied and understood. Naturalistic writers thus used a version of the scientific method to write their novels; they studied human beings governed by their instincts and passions as well as the ways in which the characters' lives were governed by forces of heredity and environment. Although they used the techniques of accumulating detail pioneered by the realists, the naturalists thus had a specific object in mind when they chose the segment of reality that they wished to convey. ("Naturalism in American Literature")

     In George Becker's famous and much-annotated and contested phrase, naturalism's philosophical framework can be simply described as "pessimistic materialistic determinism." Another such concise definition appears in the introduction to American Realism: New Essays. In that piece,"The Country of the Blue," Eric Sundquist comments, "Revelling in the extraordinary, the excessive, and the grotesque in order to reveal the immutable bestiality of Man in Nature, naturalism dramatizes the loss of individuality at a physiological level by making a Calvinism without God its determining order and violent death its utopia" (13).

 [T]he naturalistic novel usually contains two tensions or contradictions, and . . . the two in conjunction comprise both an interpretation of experience and a particular aesthetic recreation of experience. In other words, the two constitute the theme and form of the naturalistic novel. The first tension is that between the subject matter of the naturalistic novel and the concept of man which emerges from this subject matter. The naturalist populates his novel primarily from the lower middle class or the lower class. . . . His fictional world is that of the commonplace and unheroic in which life would seem to be chiefly the dull round of daily existence, as we ourselves usually conceive of our lives. But the naturalist discovers in this world those qualities of man usually associated with the heroic or adventurous, such as acts of violence and passion which involve sexual adventure or bodily strength and which culminate in desperate moments and violent death. A naturalistic novel is thus an extension of realism only in the sense that both modes often deal with the local and contemporary. The naturalist, however, discovers in this material the extraordinary and excessive in human nature.

The second tension involves the theme of the naturalistic novel. The naturalist often describes his characters as though they are conditioned and controlled by environment, heredity, instinct, or chance. But he also suggests a compensating humanistic value in his characters or their fates which affirms the significance of the individual and of his life. The tension here is that between the naturalist's desire to represent in fiction the new, discomfiting truths which he has found in the ideas and life of his late nineteenth-century world, and also his desire to find some meaning in experience which reasserts the validity of the human enterprise. (10-11)

-Characteristics        

• Characters: Frequently but not invariably ill-educated or lower-class characters whose lives are governed by the forces of heredity, instinct, and passion. Their attempts at exercising free will or choice are hamstrung by forces beyond their control; social Darwinism and other theories help to explain their fates to the reader.
• Setting: Frequently an urban setting.
• Techniques and plots: Walcutt says that the naturalistic novel offers "clinical, panoramic, slice-of-life" drama that is often a "chronicle of despair" (21). The novel of degeneration--Zola's L'Assommoir and Norris's Vandover and the Brute, for example--is also a common type. (Naturalism)

-Poetry:

     The scientifically exact design of empirical reality is considered an ideal. The world is examined and reproduced true to nature, scientifically exact. The art is the rationality, causality, the determinism and objectivity committed while it is important to dispense with subjectivity and individuality of the poet.

The “Revolution in Poetry” (Arno Holz) turns against all conventions of verse and stanza, against tradition and epigonism in subject matter and in form, and instead focuses on a prose analysis that obeys a natural rhythm.  ("Naturalism: Literature")

-Theatre:

     In theater, the naturalism movement developed in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Naturalism in theater was an attempt to create a perfect illusion of reality through detailed sets, an unpoetic literary style that reflects the way ordinary people speak, and a style of acting that tries to recreate reality (often by seeking complete identification with the role). As founder of the first acting "System," co-founder of the Moscow Art Theater (1897 - ), and an eminent practitioner of the naturalist school of theater, Konstantin Stanislavski unequivocally challenged traditional notions of the dramatic process, establishing himself as one of the most pioneering thinkers in modern theater. Stanislavski coined phrases such as "stage direction," laid the foundations of modern opera and instantly brought fame to the works of such talented writers and playwrights as Maxim Gorky and Anton Chekhov. His process of character development, the "Stanislavski Method," was the catalyst for method acting–arguably the most influential acting system on the modern stage and screen. Such renowned schools of acting and directing as the Group Theater (1931 – 1941) and The Actors Studio (1947 - ) are a legacy of Stanislavski's pioneering vision and naturalist thought.

     Naturalism was criticized in the mid-twentieth century by Bertolt Brecht and others who argued instead for breaking the illusion of reality in order to encourage detached consideration of the issues the play raises. Though it retains a sizable following, most Western theater today follows a semi-naturalistic approach, with naturalistic acting but less realistic design elements (especially set pieces).

     Naturalistic performance is often unsuitable when performing other styles of theater, particularly older styles. For example, Shakespearean verse often requires an artificial acting style and scenography; naturalistic actors try to speak the lines as if they are normal, everyday speech, which often sounds awkward in context. ("Naturalism: Literature")

-Key Figures of Literary Naturalism:

Stephen Crane

The works of Stephen Crane played a fundamental role in the development of Literary Naturalism. While supporting himself by his writings, he lived among the poor in the Bowery slums to research his first novel: Maggie: A Girl Of The Streets (1893). Crane's first novel is the tale of a pretty young slum girl driven to brutal excesses by poverty and loneliness. It was considered so sexually frank and realistic, that the book had to be privately printed at first. It was eventually hailed as the first genuine expression of Naturalism in American letters and established its creator as the American apostle of an artistic revolution which was to alter the shape and destiny of civilization itself.

Much of Crane's work is narrated from an ordinary point of view, who is in an extraordinary circumstance. For example, The Red Badge of Courage depicted the American Civil War from the point of view of an ordinary soldier. It has been called the first modern war novel.

Frank Norris

Benjamin Franklin Norris (March 5, 1870 – October 25, 1902) was an American novelist during the Progressive Era, writing predominantly in the naturalist genre. His notable works include McTeague (1899), The Octopus: A California Story (1901), and The Pit (1903). Although he did not support socialism as a political system, his work nevertheless evinces a socialist mentality and influenced socialist/progressive writers such as Upton Sinclair. Like many of his contemporaries, he was profoundly influenced by the advent of Darwinism. Through many of his novels, notably McTeague, runs a preoccupation with the notion of the civilized man overcoming the inner "brute," his animalistic tendencies.

Theodore Dreiser

Considered by many as the leader of Naturalism in American writing, Dreiser is also remembered for his stinging criticism of the genteel tradition and of what William Dean Howells described as the "smiling aspects of life" typifying America. In his fiction, Dreiser deals with social problems and with characters who struggle to survive. His sympathetic treatment of a "morally loose" woman in Sister Carrie was called immoral and he suffered at the hands of publishers. One of Dreiser's favorite fictional devices was the use of contrast between the rich and the poor, the urbane and the unsophisticated, and the power brokers and the helpless. While he wrote about "raw" experiences of life in his earlier works, in his later writing he considered the impact of economic society on the lives of people in the remarkable trilogy—The Financier, The Titan, and The Stoic. His best known work is An American Tragedy which shows a young man trying to succeed in a materialistic society. ("Naturalism in American Literature")

 

2. 2-Realism Vs. Naturalism

Both naturalism and realism are literary genres and interlinked. However, there are some differences between them. It should be noted that, although Realism and Naturalism are very similar in the sense of reflecting reality as it is (contrary to romantic idealism), the difference is that Realism is more descriptive, while Naturalism extends its description to the most disadvantaged classes, tries to explain in a materialistic and almost mechanistic way the root of social problems and manages to make a deep social criticism; furthermore, if bourgeois individualism is always free and optimistic in its liberal faith that it is possible to progress without counterbalance and to shape one’s destiny, naturalism is pessimistic and Atheist thanks to determinism, which affirms that it is impossible to escape from the social conditions that guide our path in life without doing anything to prevent it. ("Naturalism")

     Naturalism is similar to literary realism in its rejection of Romanticism, but distinct in its embrace of determinism, detachment, scientific objectivism, and social commentary. It is the logical continuation of realism: the latter intended to describe or portray reality in the most precise way possible, including in its immoral or vulgar aspects. Naturalism continues on this path, but adding a physiological context and showing that the environment in which the protagonist lives is one of the reasons for his behavior. Taking itself for a reflection of reality, naturalism is particularly interested in the disadvantaged social classes – peasants, workers or prostitutes.

•  Naturalism suggests a philosophical pessimism in which writers use scientific techniques to depict human beings as objective and impartial characters; whereas realism focuses on literary technique.
• Realism depicts things as they appear, while naturalism portrays a deterministic view of a character’s actions and life.
• Naturalism concludes that natural forces predetermine a character’s decisions, making him/her act in a particular way. Realism poses that a decision of a character comes from his response to a certain situation.
• Naturalism is considered to be an evolution of Realism. In fact, most of the realistic authors evolved towards this materialistic current, although others oriented their description of reality towards the interior of the character, arriving at the psychological novel.
•   Naturalism, like Realism, refutes Romanticism by rejecting evasion and turning its gaze to the closest, material and daily reality, but, far from being satisfied with the description of the bourgeois mesocracy and its individualistic and materialistic mentality, it extends its look at the most disadvantaged classes of society and tries to explain the evils they suffer in a deterministic way.
• Naturalism aimed to explain human behavior and its narrators tried to interpret life by describing the social environment to discover the laws that govern human behavior.
•  Realism shows an ideal anthropological picture of objective autonomy, on the other hand, naturalism is based on the milieu belonging to every human being and the recognizability / predictability of human behavior by means of science. ("Naturalism in Literature")

     The impact that naturalism has left on literary writers is colossal, leading to the evolution of the modern movement. Generally, naturalistic works expose dark sides of life such as prejudice, racism, poverty, prostitution, filth, and disease. Since these works are often pessimistic and blunt, they receive heavy criticism. Despite the echoing pessimism in this literary output, naturalists are generally concerned with improving the human condition around the world.

     It is not so easy to answer whether naturalism marks the beginning of literary modernism. On the one hand, it is groundbreaking for the thematic treatment of social problems in the modern city and also breaks with all the poetics according to which people are thought of as autonomous beings. On the other hand, naturalism is based on the idea of the recognizability of the world through the materialistic- positivistic sciences of its time, so it belongs to science.

     At the end, despite their claim to complete objectivity, the literary naturalists were handicapped by certain biases inherent in their deterministic theories. Though they faithfully reflected nature, it was always a nature “red in tooth and claw.” Their views on heredity gave them a predilection for simple characters dominated by strong, elemental passions. Their views on the overpowering effects of environment led them to select for subjects the most oppressive environments—the slums or the underworld—and they documented these milieus, often in dreary and sordid detail. The drab palette of Vincent van Gogh’s naturalistic painting “The Potato Eaters” (1885; Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam) was the palette of literary naturalism. Finally, they were unable to suppress an element of romantic protest against the social conditions they described. ("Naturalism")

     As a historical movement, naturalism per se was short-lived; but it contributed to art an enrichment of realism, new areas of subject matter, and a largeness and formlessness that was indeed closer to life than to art. Its multiplicity of impressions conveyed the sense of a world in constant flux, inevitably jungle-like, because it teemed with interdependent lives.