For a much more extensive description than appearson this brief page, see the works listed in the naturalismbibliography and the bibliographies on FrankNorris and StephenCrane.
| Definitions | The term naturalism describes a type of literature that attempts to apply scientific principles of objectivity and detachment to its study of human beings. Unlike realism, which focuses on literary technique, naturalism implies a philosophical position: for naturalistic writers, since human beings are, in Emile Zola's phrase, "human beasts," characters can be studied through their relationships to their surroundings. Zola's 1880 description of this method in Le roman experimental (The Experimental Novel, 1880) follows Claude Bernard's medical model and the historian Hippolyte Taine's observation that "virtue and vice are products like vitriol and sugar"--that is, that human beings as"products" should be studied impartially, without moralizing about their natures. Other influences on American naturalists include Herbert Spencer and Joseph LeConte. Through this objective study of human beings,naturalistic writers believed that the laws behind the forces that governhuman lives might be studied and understood. Naturalistic writers thusused a version of the scientific method to write their novels; they studiedhuman beings governed by their instincts and passions as well as the waysin which the characters' lives were governed by forces of heredity andenvironment. Although they used the techniques of accumulating detail pioneeredby the realists,the naturalists thus had a specific object in mind when they chose thesegment of reality that they wished to convey. 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). A modified definition appears in Donald Pizer's Realism and Naturalism in Nineteenth-Century American Fiction, Revised Edition (1984):
The second tension involves the theme of the naturalisticnovel. The naturalist often describes his characters as though they areconditioned and controlled by environment, heredity, instinct, or chance.But he also suggests a compensating humanistic value in his charactersor their fates which affirms the significance of the individual and ofhis life. The tension here is that between the naturalist's desire to representin fiction the new, discomfiting truths which he has found in the ideasand life of his late nineteenth-century world, and also his desire to findsome meaning in experience which reasserts the validity of the human enterprise.(10-11) |
| Characteristics | Characters. Frequently but not invariably ill-educatedor lower-class characters whose lives are governed by the forces of heredity,instinct, and passion. Their attempts at exercising free will or choiceare hamstrung by forces beyond their control; social Darwinism and othertheories help to explain their fates to the reader. See June Howard's Formand History for information on the spectator in naturalism. Setting. Frequently an urban setting, as inNorris'sMcTeague.See Lee Clark Mitchell's Determined Fictions, Philip Fisher'sHard Facts, and James R. Giles's The Naturalistic Inner-City Novelin America. Techniques and plots. Walcutt says that the naturalisticnovel offers "clinical, panoramic, slice-of-life" drama that is often a"chronicle of despair" (21). The novel of degeneration--Zola'sL'AssommoirandNorris's Vandover and the Brute, for example--is also a common type. |
| Themes | 1.Walcutt identifies survival, determinism, violence,and taboo as key themes. 2. The "brute within" each individual, composedof strong and often warring emotions: passions, such as lust, greed, orthe desire for dominance or pleasure; and the fight for survival in anamoral, indifferent universe. The conflict in naturalistic novels is often"man against nature" or "man against himself" as characters struggle toretain a "veneer of civilization" despite external pressures that threatento release the "brute within." 3. Nature as an indifferent force acting on thelives of human beings. The romantic vision of Wordsworth--that "naturenever did betray the heart that loved her"--here becomes Stephen Crane'sview in "The Open Boat": "This tower was a giant, standing with its backto the plight of the ants. It represented in a degree, to the correspondent,the serenity of nature amid the struggles of the individual--nature inthe wind, and nature in the vision of men. She did not seem cruel to himthen, nor beneficent, nor treacherous, nor wise. But she was indifferent,flatly indifferent." 4. The forces of heredity and environment as theyaffect--and afflict--individual lives. 5. An indifferent, deterministic universe. Naturalistictexts often describe the futile attempts of human beings to exercise freewill, often ironically presented, in this universe that reveals free willas an illusion. |
| Practitioners | FrankNorris TheodoreDreiser JackLondon StephenCrane EdithWharton, The House of Mirth (1905) EllenGlasgow,Barren Ground (1925) ( John Dos Passos (1896-1970), U.S.A. trilogy (1938):The42nd Parallel(1930), 1919 (1932), andThe Big Money(1936) Other writers sometimes identified as naturalists: Nelson Algren, The Man with the Golden Arm |
| Stephen Crane on Nature and the Universe | When it occurs to a man that nature does notregard him as important, and that she feels she would not maim the universeby disposing of him, he at first wishes to throw bricks at the temple,and he hates deeply the fact that there are no bricks and no temples. --Stephen Crane, "The Open Boat"
"Sir, I exist!" "However," replied the universe, "The fact has not created in me A sense of obligation." --Stephen Crane (1894,1899) |
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