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American Literary Naturalism: Critical Perspectives Donna Campbell* Washington State University

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American Literary Naturalism: Critical Perspectives Donna Campbell* Washington State University Literature Compass 8/8 (2011): 499–513, 10.1111/j.1741-4113.2011.00819.x American Literary Naturalism: Critical Perspectives Donna Campbell* Washington State University Abstract This essay provides an overview and reinterpretation of American literary naturalism as practiced by classic naturalists Stephen Crane, Frank Norris, Theodore Dreiser, and Jack London, by later naturalists such as Phillips and Steinbeck, and by those whose contributions to naturalism deserve more recognition, among them women writers and writers of color such as Paul Laurence Dunbar and Ann Petry. The first section defines classic naturalism through four of its key features, each as exemplified by the fiction of one of the major turn-of-the-century naturalists: urban poverty, violence, and parody in Crane; theories of heredity and capitalism in Norris; Social Darwinism and determinism in Dreiser; and racial atavism and primitivism in London. The second section reviews the problems of definition that have formed the critical discourse over naturalism since its inception, including distinguishing naturalism from other literary forms and surveying the late 19th-century controversy over realism and the romance. The third section discusses critical trends in scholarship on naturalism, with particular attention to criticism published from 1980 to the present. To investigate the complex ideological and cultural work of naturalism during its classic phase and into the 20th century, the fourth section theorizes four thematic groupings: space and place, corporeality, mechanisms and technology, and lines and boundaries. When deployed as a series of interpretive lenses, these groupings not only expand the possibilities for reading classic naturalist authors but also provide a means of inclusion for those whose naturalistic writings have been little discussed. Naturalism thus emerges as less as an artifact of literary history to be recovered than as a vital means of interpreting texts across several decades. Understanding Naturalism When Frank Norris declared in 1896 that ‘[t]errible things must happen to the characters in the naturalistic tale. They must be twisted from the ordinary … and flung into the throes of a vast and terrible drama that works itself out in unleashed passions, in blood, and in sudden death’ (Norris 1107), he in effect threw down a gauntlet to genteel realism and announced that naturalism had superseded it as a form of literature. Set frequently in urban slums or a savage wilderness, naturalistic stories forced readers to confront the indifference of nature, and, closer to home, the indifference of human beings toward their fellow creatures. Unlike the benevolence novels of the mid-19th century or the local color slum stories that presented picturesque tales of the triumph of the human spirit, tales of naturalism permitted few happy endings. With characters whose fates were the product of their heredity, their environment, and chance circumstances that rarely worked in their favor, naturalism was suffused with a deterministic philosophy that questioned the very concept of free will. Like 17th-century Calvinism, in which human salvation was predestined by divine Providence without regard for an individual’s actions, naturalism posited a world in which individual effort could guarantee neither eternal salvation nor momentary happiness. In novels such as Stephen Crane’s Maggie: A Girl of the Streets (1893) and The Red Badge of Courage (1895), Frank Norris’s McTeague (1899), Theodore Dreiser’s Sister Carrie (1900), and Jack London’s The Call of the Wild (1903) ª 2011 The Author Literature Compass ª 2011 Blackwell Publishing Ltd 500 American Literary Naturalism and The Sea-Wolf (1904), readers were challenged with a picture of life at once more brutal, and, these authors assured them, closer to life as it is really lived by the multitudes than any they had previously seen in fiction. Classic turn-of-the-century naturalism was controversial for its affront to the standards of decorum demanded by the reading public, but by World War I, mainstream fiction had adopted naturalism’s less restrictive standards and eroded its dominance. Yet other forms of naturalism emerged throughout the 20th century, from reform novels of the Progressive Era such as Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle (1906) and David Graham Phillips’s Susan Lenox (1917), to the proletarian novels of the 1930s, including John Dos Passos’s USA (1930–36) and John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath (1939), through the dystopian city fiction of the 1960s through the 2000s ranging from Hubert Selby, Jr’s Last Exit to Brooklyn (1964) to Don DeLillo’s Libra (1988). To understand naturalism, then, it is nec- essary to rethink the boundaries of period and authorship that have defined it and build upon the multiple approaches of current scholarship. This essay provides an overview and reinterpretation of American literary naturalism as practiced by classic naturalists Stephen Crane, Frank Norris, Theodore Dreiser, and Jack London; by later naturalists such as Phillips and Steinbeck; and by those whose contribu- tions to naturalism deserve more recognition, among them women writers and writers of color such as Paul Laurence Dunbar and Ann Petry. The first section defines classic natu- ralism through four of its key features, each as exemplified by the fiction of one of the major turn-of-the-century naturalists: urban poverty, violence, and parody in Crane; the- ories of heredity and capitalism in Norris; Social Darwinism and determinism in Dreiser; and racial atavism and primitivism in London. The second section reviews the problems of definition that have formed the critical discourse over naturalism since its inception, including distinguishing naturalism from other literary forms and surveying the late 19th- century controversy over realism and the romance. The third section discusses critical trends in scholarship on naturalism, with particular attention to criticism published from 1980 to the present. These recent approaches incorporate theories of race and gender, economics, cultural critique, and postcolonialism in an effort to broaden the canon and to deepen current understandings of naturalism’s complex legacy. To further this investi- gation of the complex ideological and cultural work of naturalism during its classic phase and into the 20th century, the fourth section theorizes four thematic groupings: space and place, corporeality, mechanisms and technology, and lines and boundaries. When deployed as a series of interpretive lenses, these groupings not only expand the possibili- ties for reading classic naturalist authors but also provide a means of inclusion for those whose naturalistic writings have been little discussed. Naturalism thus emerges as less an artifact of literary history to be recovered than as a vital means of interpreting texts across several decades. Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Naturalism At its most basic level, naturalism was a state of mind put into words, a set of principles from which its practitioners drew in creating fiction that they believed truly represented reality. It was not a conscientiously formulated literary ideology promoted by an orga- nized group with personal connections, like the later Southern Agrarians. The four authors principally associated with naturalism – Stephen Crane, Frank Norris, Theodore Dreiser, and Jack London – had few personal connections, although Frank Norris helped to launch the career of Theodore Dreiser, when, as a reader for Doubleday, Page, he recommended that Sister Carrie be published. As Nancy Glazener points out, the term ª 2011 The Author Literature Compass 8/8 (2011): 499–513, 10.1111/j.1741-4113.2011.00819.x Literature Compass ª 2011 Blackwell Publishing Ltd American Literary Naturalism 501 ‘naturalism barely surfaced in influential journals except with reference to Zola, and … the authors we associate with naturalism were not grouped together by contemporary reviewers’ (6). Crane, Norris, Dreiser, and London all came to naturalism from different intellectual backgrounds, but their fiction shares certain characteristics, such as settings of urban poverty or an inhospitable wilderness, an interest in heredity and environment, a deterministic philosophy, and a deep sense that U.S. culture and the realist literature it had produced were wholly inadequate to respond to the social problems they saw. The naturalistic landscape of urban poverty and violence appears in Stephen Crane’s Bowery Tales,1 which provided an ironic twist on sentimental slum tales such as the ‘Chimmie Fadden’ stories (1895) of Edward Townsend or Brander Matthews’s ‘Vignettes of Manhattan’ series in Harper’s (1894).2 As David Baguley observes, ‘Naturalist texts con- stantly undermine parodically the myths, plots, idealized situations, and heroic character types of the romantic and the institutionalized literature to which they are opposed’ (Baguley 21), and tales like Maggie: A Girl of the Streets, George’s Mother (1896), ‘An Ominous Baby’ (1894), and ‘A Dark Brown Dog’ (1901) ironically invert the standard expectations of the slum story. For example, Maggie is a ‘girl who goes wrong’, yet she is not led astray from a loving family by a deceptive, lecherous lover but by someone she sees as a ‘knight’ who rescues her from a violent, chaotic home. Crane also satirizes the conventions of the temperance tract, in which a father’s drunken, violent behavior con- demns his innocent wife and family to poverty, by portraying a family in which Mrs Johnson, Maggie’s mother,
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