Notes on Naturalism

Some Naturalist Authors:

Henry Adams, Willa Cather, Stephen Crane, John Dos Passos, Theodore Dreiser, Jack London, Frank Norris, Edwin Arlington Robinson

Notes from Hart's The Concise Oxford Companion to American Literature:

• Aims at a detached, scientific objectivity in the treatment of natural man
• More inclusive and less selective than realism
• Holds to the philosophy of determinism--the doctrine that everything, especially one's choice of action, is determined by a sequence of causes independent of one's will
• Conceives of man as controlled by his instincts or his passions or by his social and economic environment and circumstances
• Believes that man has no free will
• Naturalist writers do not make moral judgments and tend toward pessimism
• Is an outgrowth of 19th-century scientific thought following in general the biological determinism of Darwin's theory or the economic determinism of Marx
• Stems from French literature, in which Zola emphasizes biological determinism and Flaubert emphasizes economic determinism

Notes from Holman and Harmon's A Handbook to Literature (5th ed.):

• A form of extreme realism
• In the simplest sense, the application of the principles of scientific determinism to fiction
• The naturalist view of human beings is that of animals in the natural world, responding to environmental forces and internal stresses and drives, over none of which they have control and none of which they fully understand
• Differs from realism not in its attempt to be accurate in the portrayal of its materials but in the selection and organization of those materials, selecting not the commonplace but the representative and so arranging the materials that the structure of the work of literature reveals the pattern of ideas--in this case, scientific theory--which forms the author's view of the nature of experience
• Naturalism is the writer's response to the revolution in thought that modern science has produced
• From Newton it gains a sense of "mechanistic" determinism
• From Darwin it gains a sense of "biological" determinism and the inclusive metaphor of competitive jungle that it has used perhaps more than any other—biological determinism is the single greatest force operating on naturalism
• From Freud it gains a view of the determinism of the inner and subconscious self
• The fidelity to detail and the disavowal of the assumptions of the romanticists give naturalism clear affinities with realism
• Naturalist works have tended to emphasize either a biological determinism, with an emphasis on the animal nature of human beings, particularly their heredity, portraying them as animals engaged in the endless and brutal struggle for survival, or a socioeconomic determinism, portraying them as the victims of environmental forces and the products of social and economic factors beyond their control or full understanding.
• But, whichever of these views is taken, the naturalist strives to be honest and objective, even documentary, in the presentation of material; to be amoral in the view of the struggle in which human animals find themselves, neither condemning nor praising human beings for actions beyond their control; to be pessimistic about human capabilities--life, the naturalist seems to feel, is a vicious trap, a cruel game; to be frank and almost clinically direct in the portrayal of human beings as animals driven by fundamental urges--fear, hunger, and sex; to be deterministic in the portrayal of human actions, seeing them as explicable in cause-and-effect relationships; and to exercise a bias in the selection of characters and actions, frequently choosing primitive characters and simple, violent actions as best giving "experimental conditions."  No single naturalistic work displays completely this catalog of qualities, but taken together they tend to define the directions and intentions of naturalism.