CALIFORNIA STATE UNIVERSITY, NORTHRIDGE FRANK NORRIS AND EUROPEAN NATURALISM A thesis submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in English by Robert Dean Speers January, 1984 The thesis of Robert Dean Speers is approved: '(Marvin Klotz) Chairman) California State University, Northridge ii I would like to extend my sincerest thanks to Dr. Richard Abcarian for being my advisor and for all of his assistance. My thanks also to Dr. Marvin Klotz and Dr. John Stafford for reading my thesis and for their helpful comments. iii TABLE OF CONTENTS Page ACKNOWLEDGEMENT • •••••••••••••••••••••••••••••• iii ABSTRACT. v Chapter I. ZOLA AND NATURALISM ••• 1 II. NORRIS AND NATURALISM. 8 III. L'ASSOMMOIR AND McTEAGUE. 20 IV. GERMINAL AND THE OCTOPUS. 31 CONCLUSION. 42 NOTES .••.•• 46 BIBLIOGRAPHY. • . • . • • . • . • • • • . • • . • . • • • • • 50 iv ABSTRACT FRANK NORRIS AND EUROPEAN NATURALISM by Robert Dean Speers Master of Arts in English According to conventional critical opinion, the American novelist Frank Norris can best be understood as a follower of the French novelist Emile Zola, who in his essays and novels was largely responsible for the creation of what came to be known as literary naturalism. While it is true that Norris's fiction can best be understood in the context of Zola's theory and practice {and of European naturalism generally), the facile assumption that Norris's works are merely an example of Zolaesque and European nat­ uralism obscures significant aspects of Norris's novels and his development as a writer. Indeed, as this study hopes v to show, Norris adapted and modified the ideas of European naturalism to reflect his own unique temperament and his understanding of the realities of American life and character. This study, then, will investigate first the theory and practice of Zola's naturalism and then seek to determine whether Norris followed Zola closely enough to justify the conventional view of Norris as merely an American exponent of European naturalism. The resulting information should allow us to arrive at some conclusions concerning the term "naturalism" and its place within the American literary framework. The first chapter examines Zola's "Le Roman Experi­ mental" and attempts to outline his principal tenets for the writing of the naturalistic novel. We discover that Zola's ideas promoted a "scientific" experiment within the novel. He wanted the novel to attain new status and emerge as a type of sociological exploration concerning the effects of environment and heredity on determined individuals. The second chapter discusses Norris's literary theories and finds that many of his ideas modified and criticized the sentimental works of the day, the realism of William Dean Howells, and, of course, Zola. The chapter then focuses on a comparison of Norris's Zola's literary theories and eventually recognizes several differences which set Norris apart from Zola's shadow. To better illustrate these differences, the third chap- vi ter of the thesis compares two examples of each author's fiction. Here, we see that while in their fictional practice both Zola and Norris were guided by theoretical formulations, Norris unlike Zola, tended sometimes to ignore and occasionally even contradict his abstract theories. The chapter compares Zola's L'Assommoir to Norris's McTeague and discovers that the Norris work, although at times reflects several of the author's literary tenets (and Zola's as well), for the most part rejects a Zola-type of formula for the writing of this particular novel. Finally, in Chapter Four, this notion is further con­ firmed by comparing Zola's Germinal to Norris's The Octopus. We find that Norris went beyond merely imitating zoia's deterministic novels and created works that covered a wider range of themes and plot possibilities. Moreover, in examining The Octopus we realize that Norris wrote an inconsistent and less-structured form of naturalism. This American naturalism reflected a new country of possibilities and signaled the emergence of a new fiction devoid of strict and inflexible rules. The thesis concludes, therefore, that simply characterizing the works of Norris as "naturalism" places the novels under the shadow of European naturalism and hinders their proper evaluation as the profoundly unique American works they are. vii Chapter I ZOLA AND NATURALISM According to conventional critical opinion, the American novelist Frank Norris can best be understood as a follower of Emile Zola, who in his essays and novels was largely responsible for the creation of what came to be known as literary naturalism. While it is true that Norris's fiction can best be understood in the context of Zola's theory and practice (and of European naturalism generally), the ·facile assumption that Norris's works are merely an American example of Zolaesque and European naturalism obscures significant aspects of Norris's novels and his development as a writer. Indeed, as this study hopes to show, Norris adapted and modified the ideas of European naturalism to reflect his own unique temperament and his understanding of the realities of American life and character. This study, then, will investigate first the theory and practice of Zola's naturalism and then seek to deter­ mine whether Norris followed Zola closely enough to justify the conventional view of Norris as merely an American exponent of European naturalism. The resulting information should allow us to arrive at some conclusions concerning the term 11 naturalism" and its place within the American 1 (l ' 2 literary framework. First we should examine Zola's theory on the novel. Directly and indirectly influenced by individuals such as Auguste Comte, Hippolyte Taine, Charles Darwin, and Claude Bernard, as well as Balzac and Flaubert, Zola wrote 1 "Le Roman Experimental .. in 1880. In this essay he wanted to go beyond his formulations previously outlined in the preface to the second edition of Therese Raquin. In that preface he expressed the wish that the novel study tempera­ 2 ment and not character. By character he presumably meant the people in a novel provided with unique qualities revealed to the reader through dialogue and behavior. Temperaments, on the other hand, were revealed to the reader through physical external descriptions of people and the surroundings. Zola's temperaments, unlike other novelists's characters, had no unique qualities which would individualize them. He placed the reader in a kind of "fourth wall" position (similar to an audience's point of view while watching a play) so that he or she seldom realized the temperaments' motivations and feelings. The depicted temperaments existed as unfortunate, instinctive people engulfed in determinism: "I chose people wholly dominated by their nerves and their blood, without free will, drawn into each act of their lives by the pre­ 3 destinations fatally imprinted in their flesh." Willard R. Trask suggests that Zola acquired the idea _of temperaments from certain medical people in the nine- 3 teenth century who, for their own purposes, adopted the doctrine of the "humors," or bodily fluids, which was 4 popular during the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Many of Zola's characters represented a certain humor, or temperament: sanguine, phlegmatic, choleric, or melan- cholic. Zola's characters, therefore, were "types" (as opposed to deep, rounded characters}, so that the reader could easily maintain objectivity and not become emotionally involved with individuals. This objectivity was important because Zola set up a "scientific" experiment within his novels. The reader objectively experienced the effects of environment and heredity on a particular temperament. Zola explained in detail the idea of a scientific experiment for the novel in "Le Roman Experimental." Dr. Claude Bernard's Introduction to the Study of Medicine (1865} convinced Zola that literature must become a science. That is, where Bernard wanted medicine aligned with experimental science, Zola wanted the same for the novel. The novel thus would possess new status and would emerge as a type of sociological experiment: I am going to try to prove for my part that if the experimental method leads to the knowledge of physical life, it should also lead to the knowledge of the passionate and intellectual life. It is but a question of degree in the same path which runs from chemistry to physiology, then from physiology to anthropology and to sociology.S 4 The novelist's experiment, carried out with the rigor and objectivity of a scientist in his laboratory, required a full investigation into the effects of environment and heredity on a temperament (or temperaments). But Zola insisted that the novelist should be more than observer (similar to the astronomer) and become an experimenter (similar to the chemist) who actively varied phenomena for his own purposes. He called this new novelist the 6 "experimental novelist." Zola wanted the experimental novelist to collect data from the environment. Like the scientific experimenter, the novelist would then arrange the data and set up conditions that would reveal a "disease" inflicted on a temperament, and ultimately inflicted on the depicted society. • • • the experimentalist appears and introduces an experiment, that is to say, sets his characters going in a certain story so as to show that the succession of facts will reveal such as the requirements of the determinism of the phenomena under examination call for.7 Zola hoped that the experimental novelist and the reader-- presumably, people not fully controlled by a rigid determinism--might react to the experiment and arrive at conclusions concerning a social sickness and then possibly formulate ideas to change the situation. With all of this completed, the writer now emerged, as Zola termed it, as an 5 "experimental moralist" ("searching out the determinism of 8 social phenomena" ) • Zola believed the experimental moralist to be the novelist who, through the scientific method, transcends the Romantic imagination--which insists on the primacy of the emotions and man's uniqueness--and strives for the high truths of social reform.