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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and announced that naturalism had superseded it as a form of literature.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)
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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 necessary 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 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 19thcentury 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 investigation 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 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 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 organized 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
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‘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 constantly 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 condemns his innocent wife and family to poverty, by portraying a family in which Mrs
Johnson, Maggie’s mother, is the more drunken and violent parent. Unlike the prostitutes
of slum tales, Maggie is neither redeemed by a clergyman – indeed, a clergyman ostentatiously avoids her as she trolls for clients – nor dies in the knowledge of redemption.
Staples of sentimental fiction such as parental love, children, and pets are not held
sacred in the naturalistic tale. George Kelcey, of George’s Mother, is not saved by a
mother’s love but is instead driven to drink by it, a complete reversal of the theme of
redemption by a Christian mother’s faith common in tract literature.3 In ‘An Ominous
Baby’, a poor child does not wait for charity but wrests the toy he wants from the hands
of a rich child, an act with overtones of class warfare. The dog of ‘A Dark Brown Dog’
does not grow up to be a loyal friend of the child who owns it but is heaved out the
window to its death by the random impulse of a drunken, angry parent. What is
shocking is not the fact that violence exists, for violence is a constant in a naturalistic,
Darwinian universe, nor the description of pervasive alcoholism, but the naturalistic
story’s casual acceptance of violence and alcoholism as an ordinary part of life.
In contrast to Crane’s professedly intuitive and experiential approach, Frank Norris
admitted his debt to the novels of Emile Zola, the preeminent French naturalist author.4
Proclaiming in ‘The Experimental Novel’ (1880) that the novelist must be a scientist or
‘experimental moralist’, Zola developed the characters in his Rougon-Macquart series as
figures in a grand experiment to test the physical and emotional responses of the human
beast. Norris’s McTeague is an exercise in Zolaesque experimentation, with characters
who face an inevitable downward spiral through their hereditary predispositions to alcoholism, violence, and greed. Less overtly naturalistic than McTeague, Norris’s later novels,
such as The Octopus (1901) and The Pit (1903), share the earlier novel’s fascination with
the underlying mechanisms that govern the operations of the universe. This concept of a
‘universe of force’, as Ronald E. Martin calls it, carries with it something of the 18thcentury rationalist’s faith in a God as divine watchmaker: if the forces were observed and
calculated carefully enough, according to the naturalists, the mechanisms that drove them
could be calculated and understood. Like Zola, Norris organizes the plots of his later
novels around a central apparatus symbolized by a single major place or object. In
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The Octopus, the apparatus is the system of monopoly capitalism epitomized by the Southern Pacific railway, which, symbolically incarnated as a train engine, carelessly destroys a
herd of innocent sheep, an obvious foreshadowing of the farmers’ eventual fates at its
hands. In The Pit, the apparatus of capitalism is the trading floor or pit of the Chicago
Board of Trade, which performs a similarly destructive function.
Theodore Dreiser and Jack London derived their practice of naturalism from direct
observation, which they supplemented by extensive reading in philosophy and the natural
sciences. Although London spent a semester at the University of California at Berkeley
and Dreiser a year at Indiana University, both were raised in working-class poverty, an
experience that colored their perspective on the struggles of the poor and sharpened their
interest in Herbert Spencer’s theories. Spencer’s concept of Social Darwinism, or ‘survival
of the fittest’, informs Dreiser’s early story ‘McEwan of the Shining Slave-Makers’
(1901), which echoes Spencer’s later theories in its concluding vision of social cooperation. Later works, including Sister Carrie, Jennie Gerhardt (1911), The Financier (1912), and
An American Tragedy (1925), also contain themes of Social Darwinism, but in them Dreiser also explored the role of chance as a factor in an otherwise deterministic plot. In Sister
Carrie, Hurstwood takes a stack of bills from his employer’s safe, but as he toys with the
idea of stealing the money, the open safe door accidentally clicks shut and locks. What
interests Dreiser is not simply the inexorable play of forces but the ways in which the
characters confront their destinies and respond to the accidents and opportunities that
come their way: Hurstwood’s impulsive flight to avoid discovery, which leads to his
downfall; the abilities of Frank Cowperwood in The Financier to seize the moment and
make his fortune; or Clyde Griffiths’s passivity in allowing his pregnant lover to drown
in An American Tragedy.
In his early stories, London explored the idea of racial inheritance, atavism, and civilization in the pitiless landscapes of the frozen Yukon. In ‘The White Silence’ (1899), the
Malemute Kid travels with his friend Mason and his pregnant Native wife, Ruth, until a
falling tree fatally injures Mason. With that chance event, social hierarchies break down
as the sled dogs turn to cannibalism and ‘the hoary game of natural selection was played
out with all the ruthlessness of its primeval environment’ (London 14). But the Malamute
Kid is not a helpless pawn in this ‘hoary game’, driven into an atavistic survival mode by
his heredity. Instead, he must choose between the rules of civilization dictating that a
wounded person must never be left behind, which would be fatal for all three of the
travelers in the pitiless frozen landscape, and a swift, merciful death for the fatally
wounded Mason. The Malamute Kid shoots Mason and hurries on with Ruth, ensuring
not only their survival but that of Mason’s bloodlines, thus enacting the Darwinian
imperative of the preservation of the race. The same ethos of survival informs The Call of
the Wild and The Sea-Wolf, in which Buck, an overcivilized dog, and Humphrey Van
Weyden, an overcivilized man, respectively learn to connect with their primitive natures
and fight to survive. In London’s work, primitivism and atavism join violence as methods
by which naturalism represents the disruption of the social order.
In addition to the classic phase of naturalism, three other forms of naturalistic fiction
emerged in the 20th century: the Progressive Era novel of reform; the proletarian novel
of the Great Depression; and the dystopian city novel of the 1960s and later. Appearing
at the end of classic naturalism, the Progressive Era reform novel differs from its precursor
primarily in its overt protesting of a specific social evil. This ‘novel with a purpose’
tendency caused some Progressive Era reform novels to incorporate formulaic plots and
sensationalistic details: Reginald Wright Kauffman’s The House of Bondage (1910), for
example, portrayed the White slave trade in the prostitution of young girls in the starkest
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possible terms, with the heroine, Mary Denbigh, captured and sold into brothel life. Progressive Era novelists more concerned with literary quality include Upton Sinclair, David
Graham Phillips, and, although he is better known as a naturalist, Jack London. Sometimes considered a naturalistic novel, Sinclair’s The Jungle exposed the conditions in a
Chicago meat-packing plant and led to the Pure Food and Drug Act. Other novels by
Sinclair attack different institutions with the same vigor: The Brass Check (1920) describes
journalistic corruption, and Boston (1928) critiques the procedure and the verdict of the
Sacco and Vanzetti trial. Phillips’s greatest novel is the posthumously published Susan
Lenox, the story of a young woman whose descent into prostitution and later triumph as
an actress echoes Sister Carrie and Maggie. Unlike Kauffman, Phillips explores shades of
gray in his portrayal of prostitution, which becomes for Susan not a matter of moral absolutes but of practical economic necessity. It echoes two of the principal issues that
absorbed Phillips: the position of women in the professions and in conventional marriages
(Old Wives for New [1908], The Hungry Heart [1909], The Social Secretary [1905]) and the
effects of capitalism and wealth on the upper as well as the lower classes (The Cost
[1904], The Fashionable Adventures of Joshua Craig [1909], The Second Generation [1907]).
Although not known as a muckraker, as Phillips and Sinclair were, Jack London also
addressed reform efforts in his fiction, promoting sustainable scientific farming methods in
The Valley of the Moon (1913) and The Little Lady of the Big House (1915).
During the Great Depression, naturalism returned with a more overt political agenda
in the form of the proletarian novel. The proletarian novelist, according to Michael Gold,
is ‘a wild youth of about twenty-two, the son of working-class parents, who himself
works in the lumber camps, coal mines, and steel mills’ (Qtd. in Castro 16). Although
Gold’s famous definition leaves out female workers, women’s novels are well represented
in the ranks of proletarian novels, in which Agnes Smedley’s Daughter of Earth (1929),
Josephine Herbst’s Rope of Gold (1939), and Catherine Brody’s Nobody Starves (1932) take
their place beside Robert Cantwell’s The Land of Plenty (1934), Jack Conroy’s The Disinherited (1933), and Michael Gold’s Jews without Money (1930). Proletarian novels represented the power and abuses of capitalism from a working class perspective and proposed
solutions through collective action such as an expression of class solidarity, an education
into collective ideology, or a strike. In contrast to the earlier naturalists’ emphasis on biological determinism, the naturalists of the 1930s relied more heavily on representing psychological and economic determinism, with Freudian theories of sexuality and repression
and Marxist analyses of class and capital replacing earlier theories of hereditary traits. Economic determinism informs the naturalism of John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, John
Dos Passos’s USA, and James T. Farrell’s Studs Lonigan (1932–35), with Dos Passos’s trilogy a multi-character panorama and Farrell’s a detailed chronicle of the title character’s
life and early death. In the 1940s, African American writers such as Richard Wright
(Native Son) and Ann Petry (The Street) employed naturalism to register disillusionment
with, and a protest against, the injustices visited upon Black Americans by a racist U.S.
society.
From the 1950s through the 21st century, although it has not been a dominant literary
form, naturalism has never really left the American literary landscape. Among the midcentury books considered naturalistic are Norman Mailer’s war novel The Naked and the
Dead (1948), William Styron’s Lie Down in Darkness (1951), and Nelson Algren’s The
Man with the Golden Arm (1949). In the 1960s, Hubert Selby, Jr’s Last Exit to Brooklyn
and John Rechy’s City of Night (1962) depicted what were for the time sexually transgressive characters and communities, such as drag queens and gay subcultures. As James
R. Giles writes in The Inner City Novel in America: Encounters with the Fat Man, the
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presence of subcultures threatening to the ‘frozen’ void of middle class life is like the
‘repressed fat man’ of Crane’s Maggie, symbolically forcing his way ‘to the surface of the
naturalistic ghetto novel’ and requiring that his humanity be recognized (Giles 5). Joyce
Carol Oates’s them (1969) consciously echoes classic naturalism in its violence and sexuality, but its conclusion set during the Detroit riots of 1967 suggests that violence brings
the possibility of freedom. Tracing a line of descent from Norris to Hemingway to Don
DeLillo, Paul Civello reads DeLillo’s Libra as an ‘undoing’ of the naturalistic novel:
despite echoing naturalism’s ‘leitmotif’ of ‘the self’s struggle within a material world of
force’, the novel describes a ‘universe of looping systems’ that defies scientific rationalism
and individual control (161).
Critical Debates
Critical debates over classic naturalism have tended to focus on its limitations, in all
senses: the limited possibilities of plots governed by its deterministic philosophy; the limitations of characters, defined by their heredity and often hampered by a lack of intelligence and economic opportunities; and the self-imposed limits of writers working within
the laws of probability and what could rationally or scientifically be explained. But two
of the key issues in defining naturalism have historically been the ways in which it may
be differentiated from other genres, such as the social problem novel or the realist novel,
and the shifting relationship that naturalism has had with the romance.
Distinguishing naturalism from tragedy and the social problem novel presents fewer
problems than defining naturalism in the context of realism. With their typical plots of
decline and strong sense of causation, naturalistic novels resemble classic tragedy, but the
cause of the decline and the sense of agency differ in each. As Donald Pizer describes
him, the American ‘naturalistic tragic hero’ is not a noble character who falls from a high
position; rather, he is a character whose ‘potential for fineness’ is blocked or crushed by
circumstance (22). In classic tragedy, the protagonist chooses an action that may lead to
his downfall because he has the power to do so and the hubris to believe that his action
is right. Naturalism, in contrast, presents characters whose reasoning abilities and hence
choices are hampered by unfortunate hereditary traits and a limited environment.
The choice and ability to act – or not to act – is central in naturalism. As Lee Clark
Mitchell points out, an important difference between realist and naturalist novels is that
characters in realism can choose not to act and thereby demonstrate their free will,
whereas ‘when everything required for an action is present, determined characters cannot
refrain’ from acting (7). The choice to act also distinguishes naturalistic fiction from the
19th-century social problem novel, because naturalism’s aim is to present the problem as
primarily an aesthetic exercise rather than as call to action. By contrast, social problem
fiction such as Elizabeth Gaskell’s North and South (1855), Elizabeth Stuart Phelps’s The
Silent Partner (1871), or Rebecca Harding Davis’s ‘Life in the Iron Mills’ (1861) builds to
the point at which the protagonist, and by extension the reader, understands the course
she must follow to ameliorate the industrial or social crisis that has drawn her attention.
Rather than such purposeful action toward a positive goal, characters in naturalism
engage in accidental gestures that prove to be their undoing or in endless loops of pointless activity, as Barbara Hochman and Jennifer Fleissner have shown in their studies of
naturalist characters’ compulsive tendencies toward repetitive action.
The principal issue critics faced in defining naturalism well into the 20th century was
its difference from realism, a term used in two senses by its critics: realism as a literary
technique and as a time-delimited literary movement. In its primary sense, ‘realism’
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describes a technique for representation based on an assumption of an existing reality.
Naturalism differs from ‘realism’ in that it implies the philosophical position of determinism and takes the imperatives of realist representation to their logical extremes by using
sordid subject matter and extensive, even excessive, documentary detail. Analyzing the
difference between realism and naturalism, Georg Lukács calls Flaubert an author who
‘narrates’, hence a ‘realist’, whereas Zola and other authors who merely ‘describe’ in a
mechanical manner are naturalists.5 The secondary definition of literary realism in American literature describes the form of fiction practiced in the 1870s and 1880s by Henry
James and W. D. Howells, its principal theorists. Howells called realism ‘nothing more
and nothing less than the truthful treatment of material’ (Howells 1889:966), with the
‘material’ being the ordinary events governing the lives of middle-class characters. His
novels focused on the ethical consequences of characters’ choices and their social class
and familial relationships.
Mirroring the lives of their middle-class audience, American realist novels promoted an
‘aesthetic of the common’ that dissolved social differences through ‘a vision of a common
humanity’ (Kaplan 21). More specifically, realism addresses the emerging world of consumer capitalism within which characters were enmeshed, as evidenced by realism’s
obsessive interest in the making and dispersing of fortunes through wills, marriages, business schemes, and social alliances. In representing such a world, and in rejecting the system of divine rewards and punishments common to sentimental fiction, these novels
evoke ‘the promise of contract’, according to Brook Thomas (8), and with it the possibility ‘of achieving a just social balance by experimenting with exchanges and negotiations
among contracting parties’ (Thomas 8). Yet despite the efforts of Howells and others to
achieve a ‘just social balance’ by tackling social problems – for Howells, divorce in A
Modern Instance (1881) and labor unrest in A Hazard of New Fortunes (1890) – American
realism had by the 20th century acquired the modifier ‘genteel’, an epithet it has never
entirely lost. Novelists such as Sinclair Lewis attacked Howells for an excess of gentility,
finding a prescription for authorial timidity in Howells’s admonition to focus on the
‘smiling aspects of life, which are the more American’ (Howells 1886:641). As Rita Felski
contends in Beyond Feminist Aesthetics, in recent years realism has been characterized as
conservative aesthetically because of its insistence on transparency of representation and
the possibility of closure, just as Amy Kaplan finds it conservative politically, because realism’s ‘narrative construction of common ground among classes … efface[s] and reinscribe[s] social hierarchies’ (Kaplan 11).
These perspectives raise another issue important at the time of naturalism’s emergence:
the extent to which realism in all its forms was an attack on the venerable tradition of
romance. As Michael A. Elliott points out, opponents of realism such as William Roscoe
Thayer, anticipating Lukác’s objections, excoriated realism because it elevated a passion
for details over narrative, thus frustrating the human ‘instinct for story’ (49) in ways that
the romance was able to satisfy. Norris tried to bridge this conceptual gap between realism and romance by declaring that naturalism owed more to romance than to realism,
since it, like romanticism, ranged beyond the polite parlor conversation of realism. If realism dealt with the ordinary facts of life, wrote Norris, naturalism must abuse its characters: ‘[t]errible things must happen’ as they are ‘twisted from the ordinary’ and tossed into
‘a vast and terrible drama that works itself out in unleashed passions, in blood, and in
sudden death’ (Norris 1107). Only in the excesses of romance rather than the restraints of
realism would the workings of the human mind and thus the laws of human nature be
revealed.
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Critical Perspectives
Critical perspectives on American literary naturalism have undergone a significant shift
over the past 50 years, and, like that of any literary movement, naturalism’s stock has
risen and fallen over the decades. After World War I, the naturalists’ commitment to
realistic representation and their earnest attempts to fathom the scientific laws of human
nature were out of keeping with postwar disillusionment about the fragmentary nature of
truth. As an aesthetics of style replaced that of ‘sincerity’6 during the advent of modernism during the 1920s, naturalistic authors such as Dreiser came under fire for ponderous
and outdated writing. A shift back toward naturalism occurred during the Depression of
the 1930s, when economic hardship and awareness of the hard plight of workers gave rise
to the social realist principles that valued the proletarian novel. Revitalized by leftist intellectual theories, the new aesthetic elevated political awareness and economic themes over
elitist features like classical allusions and stylistic experimentation, with V. L. Parrington’s
Main Currents in American Thought emphasizing the imprisonment of the individual under
the forces of capitalism and influencing the Marxist perspectives of Granville Hicks and
the socialist interpretations of Alfred Kazin (Pizer, Documents 184). But by the late 1940s
and early 1950s, social realism, naturalism, and the proletarian novel were out of fashion,
condemned as reductive and artistically inadequate. The conservative political climate of
the 1950s encouraged critics such as Malcolm Cowley to turn against communism and
replace the socially conscious, activist criteria of literary value that they had earlier promoted with supposedly ‘apolitical’ formalism and an emphasis on close reading.
Beginning in the late 1950s and 1960s, however, critics such as Lars Åhnebrink,
Charles Child Walcutt, George F. Becker, and Donald Pizer began to take a fresh look at
naturalism with an eye toward examining its formal properties rather than its overt philosophical and political implications. Åhnebrink and Becker locate the essence of naturalism
in its philosophical outlook, with Åhnebrink defining it as the representation of ‘life as it
is in accordance with the philosophic theory of determinism’ (vi), a view in keeping with
Becker’s definition of ‘pessimistic materialistic determinism’ (Becker 35). Focusing on
naturalism’s American context, Walcutt claimed that naturalism could be seen as an inversion of the optimistic visions of benevolent nature found in Transcendentalism. Donald
Pizer transformed the direction of criticism on naturalism by addressing naturalistic novels
as literary works of art rather than as philosophical treatises that succeeded or failed based
on how closely they hewed to the principles of determinism. From the 1960s to the present, Pizer’s interpretations draw attention to and reconcile the tensions within naturalism,
such as those between a deterministic world view and the seemingly heroic qualities
shown by naturalistic characters, a tension that renders the naturalistic novel a dynamic
rather than an inert chronicle of life.
Critics writing on naturalism in the 1970s and 1980s focused on its intersections with a
wide variety of theoretical perspectives, including those dealing with economics and consumption, cultural criticism, and philosophical and social systems. Several focused on cultural anxieties. Amy Kaplan’s The Social Construction of American Realism (1988), for
example, proposed that realism was a strategy for managing social change through narrative forms, and June Howard’s Form and History in American Literary Naturalism (1985)
explored the figures of the brute and the observer as expressions of anxieties over immigration and class instability. Philip Fisher’s Hard Facts (1985) explored the links between
commodity capitalism and naturalism, a topic also addressed in Walter Benn Michaels’s
The Gold Standard and the Logic of Naturalism (1987). Michaels inverts traditional perspectives on the relationship between capitalism and naturalism: Instead of the critique of
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capitalist practices that had been considered naturalism’s forte, according to Michaels, naturalism is in fact complicit with the aims of capital, principally through its dual evocation
of desire for commodities as well as a critique of that desire. Two studies of naturalism
and philosophy revived long-standing philosophical debates over determinism and free
will. John J. Conder’s Naturalism in American Fiction (1984) argued that naturalism progressed from a Hobbesian belief in strict, time-defined causation in Crane and Norris to a
more Bergsonian perspective that permitted greater free will by the time of The Grapes of
Wrath, whereas Harold Kaplan’s Power and Order (1981) found that power consistently
tended to trump individualism and the characters’ humanity in naturalist texts.
In the 1990s, contextual and theoretical studies of material culture, race, and gender
added new dimensions to the study of naturalism. Mark Seltzer’s Bodies and Machines
(1992) took a long-recognized trope of naturalism, the human being as machine, and analyzed the ‘body-machine’ complex in its relation to spectacle and commodity culture.
Keith Gandal’s The Virtues of the Vicious (1997) and Bill Brown’s The Material Unconscious
(1996) and, later, A Sense of Things (2003) addressed naturalism from the perspective of
spectacle and material culture, as did Lori Merish’s essay ‘Engendering Naturalism’.
Kenneth Warren’s Black and White Strangers (1995) pairs Du Bois’s Souls of Black Folk with
James’s American Scene to analyze the ways in which James’s longing for a usable past caused
him to conjure up nostalgic antebellum images based in Black stereotypes. In analyzing
urban naturalism, Christophe Den Tandt (1998) proposed a ‘naturalist sublime’ and discussed naturalism’s connections with Gothic tradition. In The Inner-City Novel in America
(1995) and, later, The Spaces of Violence (2006), James R. Giles explored the connections
between naturalism, space, and violence, with marginal spaces being linked to a violence
that exceeds even that of classic naturalism. In separate studies of Jack London, Jeanne
Reesman (1992) and Christopher Gair (1996) analyzed London’s female character Saxon
Brown in The Valley of the Moon, finding that her voice and the discourses of domesticity
and business savvy that it represents marks a more nuanced and egalitarian depiction of
women than was previously attributed to London. Donna Campbell’s Resisting Regionalism
(1997) argues that American naturalism, largely considered the purview of young White
men, grew in part from a gender-based reaction not only against realism but against the
popular local color fiction of the day, which was largely dominated by women writers such
as Sarah Orne Jewett and Mary Wilkins Freeman; for example, traces of this reaction to
local color appear in the ‘Old Grannis-Miss Baker’ subplot in Norris’s McTeague.
In the 2000s, approaches to naturalism emphasized issues of place, race, and gender.
Mary Lawlor’s Recalling the Wild (2000) and Nicolas Wistchi’s Traces of Gold (2002) examine the significance of the Western rather than urban settings in naturalism, with Lawlor
finding that naturalism’s ‘preoccupations with the wild and the primitive’ fit well with
Western romanticism but that the distancing effects of naturalism emphasize that such
romanticism is an anachronism (10). Like Daniel Borus in Writing Realism (1989) and
Christopher P. Wilson in The Labor of Words (1985), which address the profession of
authorship in realism and naturalism, John Dudley’s A Man’s Game (2004) focuses on the
mediating position of the male author and analyzes the ways in which issues of masculinity and race emerge within the Progressive Era’s ‘masculinist discourse’ (Dudley 14) of
sports. Fleissner’s Women, Compulsion, Modernity (2004) rejects the idea of naturalism as a
masculine genre, given its focus on ‘the figure of the modern woman’, and challenges
naturalism’s reliance on the plot of decline, arguing that characters’ repetitive actions
instead create a ‘sense of temporal suspension’ (Fleissner 11).
Essays in Mary E. Papke’s Twisted from the Ordinary: Essays on American Literary Naturalism (2003) further extend naturalism’s areas of inquiry by considering such ideas as gift
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theory, sentimentalism, imperialism, and chaos theory. Papke’s volume demonstrates the
variety of contexts within which naturalism operates, such as detective fiction and social
justice fiction, as well as the diversity of authors who could be considered naturalists,
including women writers such as Elizabeth Stuart Phelps and Evelyn Scott and writers of
color such as Paul Laurence Dunbar and Ann Petry. Returning to questions of aesthetics
and form, Eric Carl Link, in The Vast and Terrible Drama (2004), contends that many of
the problems in defining naturalism arise from the confusion of the three separate, if
related, concepts of scientific naturalism, philosophical naturalism, and literary naturalism;
it is instead ‘the artistic integration of naturalist theory as theme’ (Link 20) that defines
naturalistic works. Like Papke’s volume, Link’s study, with its focus on naturalism as a
theme rather than as a time-defined movement, extends the possible range of texts that
could be considered as naturalistic. Richard Lehan’s Realism and Naturalism: The Novel in
an Age of Transition (2005) is a comprehensive analysis of European and American naturalism from its beginnings through criticism published until the mid-1990s. Instead of looking back toward realism, Gina Rossetti looks forward toward naturalism’s ties to
modernism in Imagining the Primitive (2006). Donald Pizer’s work continues to explore
and extend the limits of naturalism both temporally, with books and essays on authors
from John Dos Passos to Edith Wharton to Don DeLillo, and culturally, in books like
Dreiser and the Jews (2008).
Thematic Approaches
Given the multiplicity of recent approaches described above, four thematic entry points
suggested by these approaches may provide a snapshot of naturalism’s epistemological preoccupations and thus help to shape a new and more inclusive conception of naturalism.
The four areas are space and place, or encounters with the environment; corporeality, or
coming to terms with the body; mechanisms and technologies, or how things work; and
‘drawing the line’, or negotiating limits and boundaries, both in the subject matter of naturalism and in the formal properties of naturalism as a genre.
The first of these, naturalism’s use of the environment, is already familiar in its
incarnations of the tropes of the urban jungle, the going-to-the-city plot, and the theme
of human beings opposing nature. One of the earliest approaches to naturalism, the study
of naturalism’s environments is central to work by Lawlor, Witschi, Den Tandt, Pizer,
and Giles, among others. However, additional features of naturalism emerge when
highlighting this idea. For example, the distinctive experiences of women in the city, of
African Americans, or of those in ethnic enclaves exoticized and racialized by White male
writers may present variations on naturalism even though they appear in fiction not
typically classed as naturalistic. Using theories of space and place opens out additional areas
of inquiry: the spatial relationships within a given environment might govern the
naturalist character’s negotiations of primitivism and modernity, for example, as happens
in the use of architecture in James Weldon Johnson’s Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man
(1912).
Other questions arise as well: In what ways does naturalism present sites of trauma, of
violence, or of the construction of the self? What narratives or counter-narratives
of empire, another construction of symbolic space mapped onto physical place, critique
or exemplify naturalist ideologies? To what extent do authors seek to impose naturalist
narratives on places in order to articulate and contain problematic categories of spaces,
such as wilderness spaces or zones of cultural contact? In work ranging from Paul Laurence Dunbar’s The Sport of the Gods (1902) to Norris’s McTeague and Vandover and the
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Brute (1914) to Jack London’s The Call of the Wild, particular kinds of spaces dominate
the narrative, especially in exaggerated sizes or hyperbolically described forms, such as the
vastness of cities or wilderness spaces. Borrowing from theories of ecocriticism and
environmental justice may prove useful in challenging naturalistic assumptions about the
nature of space. For example, juxtaposing the ravaged landscapes of Jack London’s
‘All-Gold Canyon’ (1905) and Burning Daylight (1910), Norris’s McTeague, and Mary
Hallock Foote’s mining stories with the desert sketches of Mary Austin provides a more
nuanced view of naturalism’s ecological concerns. Another fruitful direction for studies in
naturalism has been postcolonial theory, especially for discussing the Norris’s imperialist
ideologies or London’s complicated responses toward U.S. imperialism in Hawai’i.
The second issue, corporeality or coming to terms with the body, also has been a consistent point of discussion in recent criticism on naturalism. Critics such as Seltzer, Campbell, Papke, Michaels, and Fleissner have noted the prevalence of female characters in
naturalist texts, and often these characters participate in spectacles that place their bodies
on display, a plot feature that has gained added attention given contemporary theories of
gender performance. Sister Carrie’s stage career, Maggie’s prostitution, and Lily Bart’s
participation in the tableaux vivants in The House of Mirth (1905) are all examples of this
phenomenon. But scenes of spectacle also raise other issues: to what extent is the female
body placed on display with the consent of the woman to whom it belongs? To what
extent is the performance willed, and to what extent is it forced? What issues of
violation, exchange, or appropriation obtain?
In naturalism, three forms of spectacle featuring women’s bodies are especially prevalent; the motionless body, often of a violated woman, as when, in Susan Lenox, Susan
awakens after being drugged and raped to find her abuser staring at her with evident satisfaction; the writhing body contorted with pain or ecstasy, as in the monstrous, red-faced
Mrs Johnson of Crane’s Maggie; and the performing body that impersonates another
woman, the acting or performance creating a doubleness that in itself is a trigger for
desire, as in Susan Lenox, The House of Mirth, Sister Carrie, and The Street. Seen within this
context of a naturalistic tableau of women’s bodies, the concluding scene of The Grapes of
Wrath, in which Rose of Sharon suckles the dying old man after asking for privacy, is
not evidence of sentimentality but of Steinbeck’s use of a meaningful naturalistic convention: that of the woman whose body performs a function over which she has limited
control for the benefit of others and who tries to negotiate the form that the spectacle it
creates will take. Similarly, in The Street Lutie Johnson’s feelings of disembodiment both
within her home and after her nightclub performances are linked to private spectacle (she
is watched by Joe, the superintendent of her building) and public performances in which
she engages to survive.
Issues of the body also have implications for a discussion of scientific theories of racial
formation, evolution, and sexuality as explored by Bender, Gair, Berkove, and Pizer,
among others. Critics have already explored constructions of masculinity and femininity
in naturalism, both in their ‘primitive’ states and in their turn-of-the-century incarnations
as the overcivilized man and the ‘New Woman’. But ‘coming to terms with the body’
also suggests the social regulation of the bodies of immigrants, workers, and the disabled.
Moreover, naturalism frequently features characters who are inarticulate or nearly so,
those whose youth, ethnicity, intelligence, or addictions impair their ability to become
speaking subjects. The ultimate tension in many naturalist texts exists in the ways in
which the body ‘speaks’ – through gestures, through acts of violence, or, in the case of
female characters, through pregnancy – in ways that resist both the character’s conscious
wishes and the culture within which the character must exist. Reading bodies is a key
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feature of naturalist novels, where seeing, being seen, and forms of performance pervade
the text, and this dissonance between the body’s articulations and those of the character
as a speaking subject provide another means of investigating the problematic status of free
will within naturalism.
A third way of looking at naturalism integrates recent critical discussions about technology with the preoccupations of the writers themselves. An interest in how things
work, or the symbolic uses of the technologies, mechanisms, and systems, appears constantly in naturalistic fiction. Seltzer and Michaels have already analyzed mechanical and
economic systems, and Bender has explored the use of scientific systems of belief, such as
evolution, evolution in naturalist texts. But further investigation is needed into the ways
in which visual technologies of film, photography, and print media, to say nothing of
advances in recording devices, affected the development of naturalism, which after all was
in itself theorized as a technology of representation. The puppet show in Maggie, the
kinetoscope in McTeague, the rotogravure feature article in Jennie Gerhardt, and the silent
film to which Charity drags her lover in Edith Wharton’s Summer (1917) all function as
kinds of representational technologies that momentarily astonish the characters and introduce a self-referential note into the narrative. As extensions of the novelistic trope of the
‘mirror scene’ of self-recognition, these moments of visual representation in naturalistic
novels suggest an important shift to a technologically mediated vision of the self. Other
questions also arise when considering this theme: to what extent were visual technologies
complementary to naturalism and incorporated into its strategies of representation, and in
what ways do technologies of representation require a category separate from that of
other material objects?
The final approach uses naturalism’s obsessive interest in lines, definitions, and boundaries as an interpretive space. In realist texts, this interest manifests itself as the crossing of
social boundaries, but in naturalist texts, the stakes are often much higher. Characters frequently display anxiety about some seemingly minor boundary that they must approach
and possibly cross, a line that sometimes manifests itself as a physical space. For instance,
Cynthia Griffin Wolff reads the many scenes of hesitation on the threshold in Wharton’s
Ethan Frome (1911) as signifying not only the novel’s differing psychological spaces but
the narrator’s entrance into the truth of Ethan’s life. The line of colorful glass bottles that
demarcates the garden in The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man fascinates the narrator,
and his actions in digging them up, disrupting the order they represent, and being
punished for the act prefigure his later experiences in crossing the color line. Because of
naturalism’s emphasis on causation and its interest in establishing taxonomies of behavior,
a similar hesitation occurs over questions of crossing the line of conventional morality, as
when Jennie Gerhardt contemplates her relationship with Lester Kane.
But lines and boundaries can also mark a terrifying descent in naturalism. Characters
can slip over the boundaries that separate human from animal, as Vandover does in
Norris’s Vandover and the Brute, or that breach a protective distance between past and
present, as in Norris’s ‘Lauth’ (1893). A different sort of boundary between past and
present is crossed when Cather’s Tom Outland raises the issues of ownership of native
artifacts in Cather’s The Professor’s House (1925). Like Mary Austin in The Land of Little
Rain (1903), Cather asks whether reverence for the past helps to preserve its artifacts and
the dignity of its indigenous people or whether such an approach constitutes cultural
appropriation. She also questions various forms of nostalgia and the use of problematic
primitivist ideas to characterize indigenous peoples. ‘Tom Outland’s Story’ interrogates
the preservation and subsequent trivializing as ‘souvenirs’ the cultural totems to which
Anglo America has no rights and asks where the line should be drawn between cultural
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appropriation and preservation. The image of the thin line or boundary also applies to
the ever-shifting field markers of naturalism itself, which for all its interest in taxonomy,
observation, and definition has failed to draw sufficiently solid boundaries.
As this survey of critical perspectives demonstrates, the history of American naturalism
is far from a completed chapter in literary history. In contemporary writings about naturalism, its key characteristics and practitioners continue to serve as touchstones for further
discussions; Crane’s depictions of violence; Norris’s perspectives on degeneration and
heredity; Dreiser’s views on capitalism, and London’s stories of racial atavism and primitivism are still points of departure for discussion. But as current theories of postcolonial
identity, of space and place, of racial formations, of the global circulation of capital, and
of gender performance are increasingly used to inflect traditional entry points for interpretation of naturalist texts, the result has been a broader sense of the possibilities inherent
in naturalism as a whole, both in naturalism’s subject matter and in the increasingly
diverse set of writers recognized as naturalist writers.
Short Biography
Donna Campbell’s research focuses on the cultural intersections and gendered dimensions
of regionalism, naturalism, and women’s writing, with a particular emphasis on the visual
impact of early silent film. Her book Resisting Regionalism: Gender and Naturalism in American Fiction, 1885–1915 (Ohio U P, 1997; Northeast MLA Book Prize, 1995) argues that
American naturalism emerged in part as a reaction against women’s regionalist writing.
Her work on late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American literature has
appeared in a number of edited collections and the Norton Critical Edition of Frank
Norris’s McTeague as well as in Studies in American Fiction, Legacy, Studies in American
Naturalism, American Literary Realism, The Edith Wharton Review, and Resources for American
Literary Study. Recent and forthcoming articles on naturalism include essays in The Cambridge History of the American Novel, The Oxford Handbook of American Literary Naturalism,
The Cambridge Companion to Kate Chopin, A Companion to the American Short Story, and A
Companion to the Modern American Novel, 1900–1950. From 2000–2008 she wrote the
‘Fiction: 1900 to the 1930s’ chapter for American Literary Scholarship (Duke U P). She is
associate professor of English at Washington State University, where she has recently held
the Buchanan Distinguished Professorship (2007–2010). Her current book project is Bitter
Tastes: Naturalism, Early Film, and American Women’s Writing.
Notes
* Correspondence: Department of English, Washington State University, PO Box 645020, Pullman, WA 991645020, USA. Email: [email protected]
1
Although the University of Virginia edition identifies Maggie and George’s Mother as Bowery Tales, Crane was
actually writing not about the Bowery but about the east side of Manhattan. See Wertheim, Stanley. ‘The New
York City Topography of Maggie and George’s Mother.’ Stephen Crane Studies 17.1 (2008): 2–12.
2
For an examination of Crane in the context of slum stories, see Keith Gandal’s The Virtues of the Vicious. George
Monteiro places Crane’s stories in the context of temperance literature in Stephen Crane’s Blue Badge of Courage.
3
For further discussions of Crane’s use of parody, see Eric Solomon’s Stephen Crane: From Parody to Realism.
4
Many critics have discussed the extent to which Norris owes a debt to Zola; see especially Lehan, Link, and Pizer.
5
Lukács, Georg. ‘Narrate or Describe?’ Writer and Critic and Other Essays. Ed. and trans. Arthur Kahn. London:
Merlin Press, 1970. 110–48.
6
See Wilson, Christopher P. ‘American Naturalism and the Problem of Sincerity.’ American Literature 54.4 (1982):
511–27.
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