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(known as the “Médan group, after the location of Zola’s country estate), only one, Guy de Maupassant (1850–1893), has
achieved a lasting reputation. Although short-lived, Zola’s influence was global: his work was translated into nearly every
language, and writers from Tokyo to Buenos Aires to Moscow
saw in his work both a modern sensibility and a fierce critical
edge. Scholars have long discussed naturalist literary movements in England, Russia, Germany, and Spain, but are still
hard at work mapping naturalism’s influence outside Europe:
in the 1990s, two journals devoted to Zola and his legacy, Excavatio: Nouvelle Revue Émile Zola et le naturalisme and Les
Cahiers Naturalistes, published a number of essays tracing naturalist movements, often short-lived, in eastern Europe, Asia,
and South America.
The U.S. version of naturalism proved to be more enduring: the novelist Frank Norris succeeded in establishing naturalism as a permanent part of the lexicon of literary critics (in
spite of his rather idiosyncratic view of naturalism as a magnification of Romanticism rather than a form of realism). Although naturalism was initially associated with Norris and his
contemporaries Stephen Crane (1871–1900) and Jack London
(1876–1916), a wide range of authors over the next seven
decades have been shown to have been influenced by naturalism. As the U.S. scholar June Howard put it, “the name taken
by a clearly defined, relatively short-lived movement in France
[became] in America a broad term used by some writers and
many critics to characterize a diverse group of works . . . over
a long period of time” (p. 30). The critic Donald Pizer, in
particular, has mapped naturalism’s influence on twentiethcentury U.S. literature.
Although Norris also wrote adventure novels, his McTeague
(1899), The Octopus (1901), and the posthumously published
Vandover and the Brute (1914) are the touchstones of U.S. naturalism and were strongly influenced by Zola; some critics accused Norris of lifting passages directly from the French
novelist. Although Crane’s novella Maggie: A Girl of the Streets
(1893) is sometimes used to mark the beginning of naturalism in the United States, Norris’s criticism established the term
in an American context. Norris also used his influence as a
reader at Doubleday to promote naturalism; his most notable
success was Theodore Dreiser’s masterpiece Sister Carrie
(1900), which the publisher pursued on the strength of Norris’s
recommendation in spite of his own distaste for the book.
Beginning in the 1980s, U.S. naturalism saw a critical revival, as new theoretical developments led to a fresh perspective on the genre—and indeed, on the notion of genre itself.
For traditional literary criticism, focused largely on concerns
of aesthetic merit and often, if implicitly, moral value, naturalism had been somewhat of a problem: as a genre, U.S. naturalism privileges blunt artlessness and—like Zola—posits an
essentially amoral universe. Critical works such as Walter Benn
Michaels’s The Gold Standard and the Logic of Naturalism, a
tour de force of New Historicism, and June Howard’s Form
and History in American Literary Naturalism, broadly informed
by the theoretical developments of structuralism and poststructuralism, examine naturalism as a complex meditation on
cultural contradictions faced by U.S. culture at a pivotal
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moment in its history. Michaels, for example, sees both literary naturalism and debates about the gold standard as part of
an entire culture’s struggle with the relationship between the
material and the ideal—a struggle that, for Michaels, is constitutive of personhood itself. Howard, drawing on the French
philosopher Louis Althusser’s notion of ideology, argues that
naturalism was one way for turn-of-the-twentieth-century U.S.
culture to process threatening contradictions in the social order, such as contradictions between the egalitarian ideals of
democracy and prominent social and political inequalities of
the period. For Howard, the most notable of these are the
dominance of industrial capitalism and the increasingly visible presence of groups—a largely immigrant urban working
class, women, and African Americans—seeking to be included
as agents in U.S. political life.
See also Literature; Naturalism in Art and Literature;
Realism.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Hamon, Philippe. Texte et idéologie: Valeurs, hiérarchies et évaluations dans l’œuvre littéraire. Paris: Presses Universitaires de
France, 1984.
Howard, June. Form and History in American Literary Naturalism. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1985.
Kaplan, Harold. Power and Order: Henry Adams and the Naturalist Tradition in American Fiction. Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1981.
Lukács, Georg. The Meaning of Contemporary Realism. Translated
by John Mander and Necke Mander. London: Merlin Press,
1963.
—. “The Zola Centenary.” 1940. In his Studies in European
Realism, pp. 85–96. London: Merlin Press, 1972.
Masson, Pierre. Le Disciple et l’insurgé: Roman et politique à la
Belle Époque. Lyon, France: Presses Universitaires de Lyon,
1987.
McFarlane, James. “The Mind of Modernism.” In Modernism:
1890–1930, edited by Malcolm Bradbury and James
McFarlane. New York: Penguin, 1976.
Michaels, Walter Benn. The Gold Standard and the Logic of Naturalism: American Literature at the Turn of the Century.
Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987.
Mitterand, Henri. Zola et le naturalisme. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1986.
Pizer, Donald. The Theory and Practice of American Literary Naturalism: Selected Essays and Reviews. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1993.
Schor, Naomi. Zola’s Crowds. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978.
Taine, Hippolyte. History of English Literature. Translated by
H. Van Laun. New York: Henry Holt, 1879.
Walcutt, Charles C. American Literary Naturalism, a Divided
Stream. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1956.
Jonathan P. Hunt
NATURALISM IN ART AND LITERATURE.
Naturalism, a term widely used in the nineteenth century, was employed by novelists, artists, and art critics as a synonym for
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NATURALISM IN ART AND LITERATURE
realism. But, in fact, naturalism was a much more complex
term. The term derived from the theory of positivism developed by the French philosopher Auguste Comte (1798–1857).
The roots of scientific naturalism, emerging from the eighteenth century and coming to fruition in the nineteenth century, considered knowledge as a pure science that was to be
reinforced by a clear understanding of the laws of nature and
an objective observation of facts. In the last half of the nineteenth century writers, primarily novelists, subscribed to this
innovative positivist view of the world around them.
In the course of the nineteenth century the philosopher
Hippolyte Taine applied scientific methods to the study of art
and literature. From 1864 to 1884, as a professor at the influential École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, Taine taught students
that the character and development of visual culture were determined by two qualities: race and the environment in which
art was created. Taine presented the foundation for an evolutionary approach toward human nature and the importance of
family genes in determining the ways in which people reacted.
Similarly, this author’s advocacy of studying the locale or place
in which an individual was brought up emphasized societal
implications in shaping an individual. Taine’s widely read
book The Philosophy of Art conveyed his beliefs to a broad
audience.
Taine’s ideas also provided a scientific method for historians that allowed them to understand the past and even predict the future since it was based on immutable historic laws.
His approach contributed a foundation upon which contemporary thinkers could build literary and artistic examples of
works that were meant to reflect their own era through a factual reconstruction of the “spirit of the time.” This need to be
“of one’s own time” affected writers and visual artists until the
end of the nineteenth century and into the twentieth.
The Father of Naturalism
The best-known “proponent of naturalism” was the novelist
and French art critic Émile Zola (1840–1902); he was one of
the most passionate defenders of Taine’s theories, putting them
to use in his novels. Zola’s foreword to his novel Thérèse
Raquin (1867) became the fundamental manifesto of literary
naturalism. He maintained and enlarged his ideas in his Experimental Novel (1880) and The Naturalist Novelists (1881),
where he advocated that modern literature needed to be as accurate as possible in order to provide a record of “modern history.” To Zola, literature could only be truly real if it examined
life in a verifiable way, similar to a medical experiment or analysis, where humanity, as an organism, would be able to function only by following predetermined hereditary laws that were
to be studied within a very precise social environment. As a
careful note taker of the world in which he lived, Zola used
the documents he compiled as necessary building blocks in the
construction of his novels.
Zola’s naturalism created no less a sensation than the earlier realism of Gustave Courbet when he showed his paintings
at the Salon in Paris (1850–1851). Very quickly, and certainly
by the early 1880s, if not before, literary (and eventually visual) naturalism became the most popular method of creativity
New Dictionary of the History of Ideas
The Haymakers (1877) by Jules Bastien-Lepage. Oil on canvas. Bastien-Lepage (1848–1884) was considered by many to be
the pioneer of the naturalist style in painting. Though he died
quite young, his work inspired the art of numerous other adherents of naturalism. THE HAYMAKERS, 1877, BASTIEN-LEPAGE,
JULES (1848–84)/MUSEE D’ORSAY, PARIS, FRANCE, CREDIT:
PETER WILLI/WWW.BRIDGEMAN.CO.UK
throughout Europe. Much of this influence was due to the
wide dissemination of literary texts through popular journals.
The consistent discussion of Zola’s theories by writers and
painters in the public eye made it clear by the world’s fairs of
1878 and 1889 that naturalism was everywhere; it had become
an international phenomenon.
The Early Naturalist Painters
As an art critic, beginning in the 1860s, Zola was a very passionate and effective critic of contemporary art. He profoundly
admired the work of the French painter Jules Bastien-Lepage
(1848–1884), an artist who was seen at the time as one of the
leading naturalist painters, if not the primary painter working
in this vein. Many younger painters idolized Bastien-Lepage’s
work, especially after his early death from cancer. Zola, along
with the art critic Albert Wolff, saw Bastien-Lepage as the inheritor of the tradition of Jean-François Millet (1814–1875)
and Gustave Courbet (1819–1877). Zola, and to a slightly
lesser degree Albert Wolff, affirmed Bastien-Lepage’s superiority over the Impressionist painters active at the time, since
Bastien-Lepage could, it was believed, factually recreate his impressions in a most organized way. Bastien-Lepage’s canvases,
such as his Hay Gatherers (Musée d’Orsay, Paris) and Potato
Harvesters (National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne), because
of their sense of the momentary and their large-scale presence,
created lively discussion. Critics, and other artists, believed the
artist had originated a naturalist painting style that was photographic and environmentally specific. The painter used the
landscapes of his native region, the Meuse, for his naturalist
reconstructions of rural life.
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Bastien-Lepage’s work excited the imagination of painters
beyond France; he was seen as a pivotal figure in the international naturalist movement. His death was viewed as cataclysmic for the visual arts, and he was assured a position of
importance in the creation of a “new style.” His canvases became models for emulation in Scandinavia, eastern Europe,
England, and the United States, where his example demonstrated that naturalism was a viable and fertile mode of representation.
Using Bastien-Lepage as a touchstone, other painters, including P. A. J. Dagnan-Bouveret, created a heightened naturalism that relied extensively on the use of photography as a
tool, an aide-mémoire, without revealing photography as a primary source. Photography became for visual artists what note
taking was for the novelist; it allowed them to gather visual
facts they could use later in their reconstructions of reality. A
number of well-accepted painters created a compelling version
of “virtual reality” that deeply engaged the general public, who
saw, accurately recorded, elements from their environment and
types from society that they knew well.
Another French painter, one linked briefly with the Impressionist movement, was Jean-François Raffaelli (1850–1924).
In a series of mostly small compositions, he represented people from the lowest level of society in order to convey authenticity and ugliness. Raffaelli’s ragpickers, wanderers, and
social outcasts revealed that beauty and strength came from
character, no matter where this was found. He helped shift the
visual perspective from “ideal nudes” toward the examination
of those whose life was unfortunate, similar to many of the
types in Zola’s novels. Raffaelli’s vision of the world suggested
that sadness and hopelessness were aspects of life experiences
that a modern naturalist painter needed to understand. With
Edgar Degas and Gustave Caillebotte, painters with a strong
naturalist streak in many of their works, the Impressionist
canon was expanded to include themes drawn from urban life,
thereby helping to fulfill the call from many art critics of the
era that themes from modern life could be found everywhere.
In his series of articles on realism published in the review of
the same name, Edmond Duranty (1833–1880) foreshadowed
Zola’s ideas about the position of the artist, writer, or painter
vis-à-vis nature. For Duranty, as for Zola, artists should be
concerned with the truth, with an exacting study of nature.
He called for the artist to portray the practical conditions of
human life, the milieu in which people lived, in order to
represent the social side of man and the influences that affected him.
Spreading Naturalism
As Zola’s novels gained an international following, a large
number of imitators appeared who helped promote the naturalist aesthetic in popular literature that was available to the
masses. Writers such as Guy de Maupassant (1850–1893)
based their stories on Zola’s methodology. At the same time,
Zola’s best-known novels were turned into plays: Nana was
one character who dominated the French stage in productions
of L’assommoir from the 1880s onward; Zola’s mining novel,
Germinal, provided additional evidence of his influence when
performed in popular theaters. During the 1890s, a series of
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printmakers furthered the appearance of visual naturalism in
posters and lithographs published by the ever increasing socialist press. Théophile Steinlen, an avowed radical, saw that
such types as the print “The Barge Man” provided an opportunity to comment on the implied threat found in disgruntled
wanderers; other images, for the periodical Gil Blas, stressed
that those who were out of work and destitute could be found
everywhere. The plight of the poor became a naturalist battle
cry that many artists, in varied artistic media, answered. By
using these themes, writers and visual artists enlarged the social dimension of the naturalist movement, which had first
brought these types to the fore.
But it was the haunting impact of the environment and of
the social milieu on life that remained one of the most trenchant aspects of the naturalist heritage after the turn of the
century. In America, in the novels of Theodore Dreiser (1871–
1945) or Frank Norris (1870–1902), the influence of Zola’s
brand of naturalism was paramount. In Vandover and the Brute
or in the cataclysmic McTeague: A Story of San Francisco,
Norris’s characters were flawed, often overwrought, brutes
whose nature was determined by genetic and environmental
factors. Their pursuit of money underscored uncontrollable
drives; naturalism was now focusing on obsessive traits. Significantly, Norris’s novel McTeague led to another level of naturalist appeal: the influence on early cinema. When Erich von
Stroheim completed his extremely long film Greed, based directly on McTeague, in 1924, he revealed that the naturalist
aesthetic could be transferred to another medium, where it was
used as a means of revealing fatal character traits that cast light
on the lives of troubled people. In effect, Zola’s idea of making art understandable for the masses by creating a detailed
narrative had come full circle with the motion picture.
See also Aesthetics: Europe and the Americas; Impressionism; Literary History; Realism; Symbolism.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Brown, Frederick. Zola: A Life. New York: Farrar Straus Giroux,
1995.
Egbert, Donald Drew. Social Radicalism and the Arts, Western Europe: A Cultural History from the French Revolution to 1968.
New York: Knopf, 1970.
Furst, Lilian R. Naturalism. London: Methuen, 1971.
Gauss, Charles Edward. The Aesthetic Theories of French Artists:
1855 to the Present. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University
Press, 1949.
Guieu, Jean-Max, and Alison Hilton, eds. Émile Zola and the Arts.
Washington, D.C.: Georgetown University Press, 1988.
Hauser, Arnold. Naturalism, Impressionism, the Film Age. Vol. 4 of
The Social History of Art. 3rd ed. New York: Routledge, 1999.
Mitterand, Henri. Émile Zola: Fiction and Modernity. Edited and
translated by Monica Lebron and David Baguley. London:
Emile Zola Society, 2000.
Nochlin, Linda. Realism. Harmondsworth, U.K.: Penguin, 1971.
Nochlin, Linda, ed. Realism and Tradition in Art, 1848–1900,
Sources and Documents. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall,
1966.
Papke, Mary E., ed. Twisted from the Ordinary: Essays on American Literary Naturalism. Knoxville: University of Tennessee
Press, 2003.
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NATURAL LAW
Sacquin, Michèle, ed. Zola. Paris: Bibliothèque Nationale de
France/Fayard, 2002.
Stromberg, Roland N. Realism, Naturalism, and Symbolism: Modes
of Thought and Expression in Europe, 1848–1914. New York:
Walker, 1968.
Weisberg, Gabriel P. Beyond Impressionism: The Naturalist Impulse. New York: Abrams, 1992.
Weisberg, Gabriel P., ed. The European Realist Tradition.
Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982.
Gabriel P. Weisberg
NATURAL LAW.
Natural law theories have a venerable
place in the history of philosophy, stretching back to the time
of Plato (428–348 or 347 B.C.E.) and Aristotle (384–
322 B.C.E.) when the relationship between law and nature first
became a central dynamic of discussion in ethics. Since then
such theories have provided staple ingredients within each major phase in Western philosophy down to the time of
Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) and beyond into the contemporary era. While such accounts have often been short on detailed and practical guidance on right action, the outlook of
natural jurisprudence has been highly influential in ensuring
a continuous focus on the alleged rationality of the natural
world and the constant and uniform accessibility to the human mind of such principles of observed regularity. However,
there has always been a tension between the claim that these
principles are eternal and unchanging, and the particular forms
and uses assigned to natural law: in Ancient Greece the focus
was more on the apparently unchanging character of nature
and the distressing mutability of actual law; in the medieval
age St. Thomas Aquinas (c. 1224–1274) above all emphasized
the accessibility of regular patterns in nature to human nature;
and in the early modern era natural law theories evolved as responses first to skepticism about the sources of knowledge, and
secondly in reaction to the political turbulence that followed
the Reformation, which seemed to shatter the easy symmetry
between the uniformity of church and state both across Europe
as a whole and also within its constituent political units. In
each case the position of natural law was ambiguous, both very
much of its time, and yet claiming its authenticity and authority from its position outside history.
Natural jurisprudential approaches to ethics have proved
difficult to integrate into the historiography of philosophy because of just this same ambiguous relationship to history itself. On the one hand, natural law was viewed as a set of eternal
verities presented by God to humanity in finished and perfect
shape, and found embodied in the moral and civil order as evidence of its divine fashioning, albeit in a form diminished by
the Fall of Man. But on the other hand, natural jurisprudence
is a product of the interaction not just of different and succeeding schools of moral philosophy, but also of the interaction of the range of plausible accounts of divine instigation
and human response within wider politics and society. So, for
example, the neo-Thomist and Lutheran-Aristotelian systems
of natural law that evolved in the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries in Spain and Germany were both a reaction to the
New Dictionary of the History of Ideas
new ideological circumstances of the Reformation and
Counter-Reformation eras as much as they were internal modifications and realignments within academic institutions of the
legacy, above all, of Aquinas and Aristotle. The same epistemological ambiguity runs through the natural law systems of
the early Enlightenment era and the interpretation that they
laid upon the works of Hugo Grotius (1583–1645) and Thomas
Hobbes (1588–1679), which were their foundation and selfconscious inspiration. The writings of Samuel Pufendorf
(1632–1694), Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz (1646–1716),
Christian Wolff (1679–1754), and Christian Thomasius (1655–
1728) sought both to anchor themselves in a newly revealed
metaphysics that stood outside time, and also to comment
powerfully upon and if necessary direct the course of the world
of contemporary practical politics.
Natural Law in the Ancient and Medieval World
At the heart of natural law is an attempt to extract general
principles out of the confusing multiplicity of legal and social
convention; in the Greek world, this was represented by the
contrast and tension between those areas of human life governed by contingency and those controlled by the ineluctable
force of nature. Given the variability of positive law both across
cultures and within them, the question arose of how legal certainty could be identified and located; and immediately battlelines were drawn between those who held that such a moral
law could be found—usually as a divine creation—and those
who remained skeptical of such normative claims, and either
denied that there was any essential morality, or located it
elsewhere. This pattern, which originated with the Sophists,
was to be repeated throughout the history of natural law
arguments.
Part of the explanation of why Aristotle’s writings are regarded as the first important contribution to this discourse is
that they adeptly try to reconcile the distinction between nature and convention. He achieves this by elevating human reason as humankind’s dominant and defining characteristic,
whose proper exercise mediates between what is permanent
and what is ephemeral. This is taken up with greater vigor by
the Stoics, and by Marcus Tullius Cicero (106–43 B.C.E.) in
particular. He regarded human reason as the apex of a rational world order: human nature rather than an innate law outside human beings now provided the ground and basis for
distinguishing between positive law and natural law. Moreover, all humans possessed the rational means, when properly
exercised, to identify this law unaided by God, whose divine
spark reason essentially is. The Stoics also initiated what was
to become one of the most influential strands of natural law
thinking—namely, the view that one of the core principles of
natural law is a sense of broad sociability towards one’s fellow
humans, tempered though not obliterated by one’s own personal priorities.
The rationalism of natural law still runs as a clear thread
through the massive Summa Theologiae of Aquinas, despite its
elaborate metaphysical architecture. Human nature and the rational conclusions that can be generated from it continue to
be his point of departure. However, Aquinas is concerned to
reinstate divine eternal law within his framework, and that does
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