The naturalism movement (the 1870s-1880s) was a reaction against realist literature. The main writers belonging to this movement are Abraham Cahan and Jack London, Stephen Crane, and Theodore Dreiser. Within this literary movement, a man can be explained in terms of the forces, usually heredity and environment, which operate upon him. American naturalism is a genre and not simply the reflection of a philosophical position as elements of the novels. Critics consistently assert that novels, in one way or another, fall short of, or from another perspective, fortunately, escape — the rigorous application of determinist principles.
The themes of naturalism include a characteristic opposition between human will and hereditary and environmental determinisms that both shape human beings and frustrate their desires. That opposition is also implicit in naturalism’s aesthetic and philosophical premises. However, this formulation is considerably more adequate than the idea that because of those premises, naturalism is or should be deterministic. Following Pizer (23), it is not the sheer content of a novel but the organization of its semantic field that establishes its possibilities for meaning. The idea of “fate,” for example, is operative both in Greek tragedy and in American naturalism, but it takes on a distinctive significance in each because it operates in different conceptual structures because it is opposed to different terms.
To put it another way: critics distinguish naturalism as a genre, not by the answers texts give to questions, not even by the questions they ask, but by the terms in which they ask those questions and the very kinds of questions that they can formulate. Human desire is one of those inscrutable forces, but it is also a response to beauty, a form of the passionate awe and longing that Dreiser depicts as the sensitive individual’s response to this universe. In a sense, Carrie (from Sister Carrie by Dreiser) is the victim of her desires, as she is drawn after first one object, then another. Yet, the peculiarly passive and dedicated pursuit of her dreams is also an exercise of will that draws her from one level of understanding to another and thus draws her closer to the realm of freedom. Carrie’s desiring disposition is the dominant attribute of her character, and it is constantly conveyed to the reader in descriptions of Carrie and in reports of her thoughts and actions (Walcutt 92).
The unique naturalist strategy consists of a group of devices for arranging essentially static material according to documentary logic. The strategy, decline or fatality, structures a narrative as the anatomy of progressive deterioration, also enables the construction of an intelligible series and, above all, catastrophic closure. These strategies for generating a narrative syntax complement the immanent ideology. There are other strategies as well (Pizer 65). When cast in narrative form, that gesture of control not only inscribes its own disruption but must coexist with heterogeneous and even contradictory materials derived from other genres. One principle of genre criticism is the inevitable articulation of different generic discourses in a specific text, and such generic discontinuities are particularly marked in this form. Naturalist novels frequently incorporate conventional elements from popular literary genres like the adventure story and the domestic novel and, in general, have a complex relation to mass culture.
Naturalism exists in constant dialogue with realism (Walcutt 94). Very often, plot and theme must be constructed from the separable units of the text; they still aspire toward a coherent, unified figure of action and significance. The profound yet partial, painful empathy that constantly distinguishes London’s stories itself manifests the characteristical naturalist tension between spectatorship and participation. Although this protean vulnerability emerges with particular force, ambivalent relations to some characters are already implied by the specter of proletarianization and the plot of decline (Pizer 51). This narrative strategy is based on biographical sequence — one of the most fundamental and powerful categories of storytelling –, and through the inexorable progress of deterioration and the inevitable disaster that closes, it quite successfully generates a consequent and coherent narrative. The tale of decline at once risks and rescues the reader, for it figures the fascinating, repellent possibility of a privileged character being swallowed up by brutality; yet the very fatality of the procedure always suggests that the character somehow inevitably belonged to the realm of forces and not the realm of freedom (Walcutt 98).
In naturalist novels, characters face both external and internal forces. They are thwarted by nature and by the man-made “second nature” of social forces. The typical characters are found in Sister Carrie, An American Tragedy and trilogy of Desire by Dreiser, the Red Badge of Courage and war in Kind by Crane, the Call of the Wild by Jack London. They find themselves struggling with their own natures, with the forces of instinct and heredity that embody nature within the very boundaries of the self (Perkins and Perkins 104). The social to invades the self is more properly a self-image and is the creature of the social. The characters’ freedom is assaulted by both nature and society, by both internal and external determining forces. Since the integrity of the self is so often precisely what is at stake, critics find that these categories are not finally separable (Pizer 92). Omniscience, after all, is not necessarily omnipotence; holding the personality intact does not ensure control over external as well as internal forces.
The inscrutable, overwhelming forces that “sweep through the universe” are manifested in physical and social obstacles. The protagonist’s pedigree qualifies him to represent both nature and culture. It enables us to see this collection of observations as elements of a coherent pattern of oppositions. The naturalist characters of the brute and the spectator follow from this characteristic conceptual register and provide us with categories for further exploration — moving past, but not abandoning, the notion of naturalism as pessimistic determinism (Walcutt 99). The characteristic conceptual opposition of novels — of the novels of this moment of naturalism — is an antinomy between human effort and determining forces, or, to put it another way, between the human and the brutal. The forces that press on them and the nature of their submission or resistance take different forms, but the choices characters make, and the chances that befall them assume meaning in these terms; the meaning and relations of these concepts are negotiated in terms of the stories it proves possible to tell about the paths characters. Naturalism distances readers from characters, its separation of free will and self-awareness from effective action, indeed prohibit the “direct involvement of characters in events” and “general social significance emerging in the unfolding of characters’ lives” that critics associates with realism (Pizer 77).
In sum, naturalism constantly strives for the plot. Indeed, it may achieve the correlation of plot and theme; “unity” is a vague enough term that in realism and naturalism alike, it can always be a matter for argument. Critics who claim that this or that novel by an author commonly considered a naturalist is actually realistic usually demonstrate only the novel’s congruence with their own norms and their ingenuity at selecting evidence and weaving an argument for a work’s unity; their claims are made at the expense of the distinctive formal qualities.
Works Cited
Perkins, G. Perkins, B. eds. The American Tradition in Literature, Volume 2. 11th Edition. Boston: McGraw Hill 2007.
Pizer, D. 7wentieth-Century American Literary Naturalism: An Interpretation. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1982.
Walcutt, Ch.CH. AmericanLiterary Naturalism, A Divided Stream Greenwood Press, 1973.