NATURALISM

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While many modern works contain naturalistic

elements, naturalism refers specifically to a literary
movement that took place in America, England,
and France during the late 1800s and early
1900s, which produced a unique type of realistic
fiction.

In order to understand naturalism,

we must first examine realism.
Realism portrays life realistically without sugarcoating.
Realists try to write reality
-- records "the smaller details of everyday life, things that are likely to
happen between lunch and supper."
-- portrays local color, attempting to accurately portray the customs,
speech, dress, and living conditions of their chosen locale.
-- rejects the idealized presentations, imaginative settings, the
supernatural, and the improbable plot twists of romanticism.

Naturalism is essentially realism with an additional facet:

Determinism

Determinism
Characters do not have free will; external and
internal forces control their behavior.
This belief is called determinism. All determinists
believe in the existence of the will, but the will is
enslaved due to a multitude of reasons.
Characters attempting to exercise free will are
hamstrung by forces beyond their control.
Life is an inescapable trap.

Characters as Marionettes
Naturalists view individuals as being at the mercy of
biological and socioeconomic forces, whereas realists
hold that humans have some degree of free will that
they can exercise to affect their situations.
Things happen to people, as if they were marionettes whose
movements are entirely determined by forces beyond their
control.

Forces Beyond the Characters

Control

Characters are dominated by external or internal forces:

Environmental
A storm, or a character lost at sea

Social conditions
A character born into poverty.

Chance (fate)
A characters child is suddenly stricken with typhoid fever.

Internal Passions
Lust, greed, or desire for dominance or pleasure overcome rational
behavior.

Survival of the Fittest

Heavily influenced by emergent
scientific theories of the time:
Darwins theory of evolution
Its corollary, survival of the fittest.

Fight for survival brings out the "brute

within" each individual.
conflict is often "man against nature" or "man
against himself"

The Indifferent and Omnipotent

Power of Nature
Nature/Fate is as an indifferent force acting upon
the lives of human beings.
Works often describe the futile attempts of human
beings to exercise free will in a universe that ironically
reveals that free will is an illusion.
Violence and tragedy is often the result.

Subject
Matter
Generally deals with raw and unpleasant
experiences which reduce characters to
"degrading" behavior as they struggle to
survive.
Characters are mostly from the lower-middle
or lower classes
Generally poor, uneducated, and unsophisticated.
drama of the people working itself out in blood
and [filth] (Norris).

 The characters are generally commonplace

and the unheroic
life is usually the dull struggle of daily existence.
But, the naturalist reveals qualities in their
characters that are usually associated with the
heroic or adventurous.
Often, acts of violence and passion lead to desperate
moments and violent death.
Life at its lowest levels is not so simple as it seems to be.

Panoramic, slice-of-life" drama

often a "chronicle of despair."

Naturalism: A Scientific Study

attempts to apply the scientific principles of objectivity and
detachment to its study of human beings
The characters are but higher-order animals fully
subject to the forces of heredity and the environment.
These human beasts studied impartially, without
moralizing about their natures
The story is told in third person,
The narrator is detached, objective, and
unsympathetic.
The narrator does not comment on the morality or
the fairness of the situations in which characters
find themselves
The reader, however, is meant to empathize with the
characters.

Maintaining Dignity in Adversity

Is conditioned and controlled by environment, social
conditions, heredity, chance (or fate), or instinct.
But, they have compensating humanistic values which affirm their
individuality and life
Their struggle for life becomes heroic and they maintain human
dignity despite degrading circumstances.

Is faced with overwhelming and oppressive material

forces that control their lives.
But, they maintain their self-worth.

A Few Practictioners:
Emile Zola, Le roman experimental (The Experimental
Novel) (1880)
Stephen Crane, The Open Boat (1898)
Jack London, To Build a Fire (1901)
Edith Wharton, The House of Mirth (1905)
Ellen Glasgow, Barren Ground (1925)
John Steinbeck, Of Mice and Men (1939)
Richard Wright, Native Son (1940), Black Boy (1945)
Norman Mailer, The Naked and the Dead (1948)
William Styron, Lie Down in Darkness (1951)
Saul Bellow, The Adventures of Augie March (1953)

From "The Open Boat" by Stephen

Crane:
When it occurs to a man
that nature does not
regard him as important,
and that she feels she
would not maim the
universe by 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.

Naturalistic Poem:
A man said to the
universe:
"Sir, I exist!"
"However," replied
the universe,
"The fact has not
created in me
A sense of
obligation."
--Stephen Crane (1899)