Naturalism

The beginnings of literary naturalism can be traced to French novelist Emile Zola, who in 1868 declared a new fiction of determinism, of characters “completely dominated by their nerves and blood, without free will” (qtd. in Mitchell vii).  Zola, and other writers working with naturalist ideas, wrote in the context of Charles Darwin’s and Herbert Spencer’s recently published work on biological evolutionary theory and the crisis in traditional, religious or humanist, systems of order that evolutionary theories provoked.  Literary naturalists adopted versions of Darwinian and Spencerian ideas in concert with aspects of social realism to produce novels that depicted human behavior as determined by factors of heredity and environment.  

In Zola’s “The Experimental Novel” (1880), the first major treatise on literary naturalism, Zola argued that the novelist should assume the role of a scientist or doctor, and a novel should be “a controlled experiment in which the characters function as physical phenomena” (qtd. in Civello 23).  By describing specific human actions, Zola stated, the novelist could discover biological and environmental “laws” governing human behavior in society (23).  By employing this compositional perspective, Zola also hoped to avoid the metaphysical concerns or recourses to supernatural or spiritual forces he critiqued in Romantic literary modes.  Zola aimed to focus on material, biological, and environmental causes to account for the actions of characters in his novels. 

One casualty of naturalist fiction, then, is the idea of the agency of the individual “self.”  In American novelist Theodore Dreiser’s classic naturalist text Sister Carrie (1900), he writes: “Among the forces which sweep and play throughout the universe, untutored man is but a wisp in the wind” (qtd. in Pizer 4).  Lee Clark Mitchell interprets American naturalist approaches, evident in lines like Dreiser’s, as rejecting the category of the self in favor of characters who are simply “occasions for passing events” (xiii).  Dreiser, and authors Frank Norris, Stephen Crane, and Jack London are most often cited as the key American naturalists writers who took up Zola’s determinism at the turn of the twentieth century and applied it to various contexts (such as urban and rural) and subjects (such as capitalist economics and forces of nature) (Civello 1).  As Donald Pizer writes, their works often depicted middle and lower class characters as “limited by the violent and irrational within [themselves] and by the oppressive restrictions within society” (5).  Speaking to the predominance of lower class characters in naturalist novels, Pizer notes that naturalist texts often portray ideas such as the lack of political agency of the poor, or how the powerful control the weak (6).  Many critics have also pointed to the extraordinary or sensational aspects of human experience that naturalist fiction often foregrounds and documents.

Literary critic Paul Civello’s comment that “American literary naturalism is not of a piece” (1) aptly indexes both the diverse works that are characterized as naturalist and the divergent constellation of critical opinion about American naturalist writing.  The category of naturalism, much like Romanticism or modernism, can be characterized by particular features, but these features do not always fully represent a particular “naturalist” text.  For example, while in essays Zola expounded on both heredity and environment as determining factors of human behavior, in his novels he generally focused on environmental factors (Civello 26).  Other critics argue that naturalist texts at times incorporate elements of free will or moral responsibility (and some conclude that when this happens, the naturalist project fails) (Pizer x).  Zola’s idea of the writer as a scientist continues to provoke discussion and literary and critical projects.  Paul Civello’s work, for example, considers naturalism as a narrative mode that, while first emerging from a post-Darwinian set of problems, continues to emerge and shift as novelists respond to modern and postmodern scientific paradigms such as new physics and systems theory.  (BH)

Works Cited:

Civello, Paul. American Literary Naturalism and Its Twentieth-Century Transformations: Frank Norris, Ernest Hemingway, Don DeLillo. Athens: U Georgia P, 1994.

Mitchell, Lee Clark. Determined Fictions: American Literary Naturalism. New York: Columbia UP, 1989.

Pizer, Donald. Twentieth-Century American Literary Naturalism: An Interpretation. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1982.