The Vast and Terrible Drama: American Literary Naturalism in the Late Nineteenth Century
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The Vast and Terrible Drama: American Literary Naturalism in the Late Nineteenth Century
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Overview
A broad treatment of the cultural, social, political, and literary under-pinnings of an entire period and movement in American letters
The Vast and Terrible Drama is a critical study of the context in which authors such as Oliver Wendell Holmes, Stephen Crane, Frank Norris, Theodore Dreiser, and Jack London created their most significant work. In 1896 Frank Norris wrote: "Terrible things must happen to the characters of the naturalistic tale. They must be twisted from the ordinary . . . and flung into the throes of a vast and terrible drama." There could be "no teacup tragedies here." This volume broadens our understanding of literary naturalism as a response to these and other aesthetic concerns of the 19th century.
Themes addressed include the traditionally close connection between French naturalism and American literary naturalism; relationships between the movement and the romance tradition in American literature, as well as with utopian fictions of the 19th century; narrative strategies employed by the key writers; the dominant naturalist theme of determinism; and textual readings that provide broad examples of the role of the reader. By examining these and other aspects of American literary naturalism, Link counters a century of criticism that has perhaps viewed literary naturalism too narrowly, as a subset of realism, bound by the conventions of realistic narration.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780817390891 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Alabama Press |
| Publication date: | 10/18/2016 |
| Series: | Studies in American Literary Realism and Naturalism |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 238 |
| File size: | 1 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
The Vast and Terrible Drama
American Literary Naturalism in the Late Nineteenth Century
By Eric Carl Link
The University of Alabama Press
Copyright © 2004 University of Alabama PressAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8173-9089-1
CHAPTER 1
Defining American Literary Naturalism
In 1899 Frederic Taber Cooper contributed an article on the works of the novelist Frank Norris to The Bookman. Printed on the first page of the article was a picture of Norris, a reproduction of a painting by Norris's friend Ernest Peixotto. A simple portrait, the painting portrays a young, solemn — though not overly serious — Norris in dress coat and collar, sitting in a dark chair and resting one hand against his chin. The angle of his head accents Norris's prematurely gray hair. The title of the article appears underneath the picture in capital letters: "FRANK NORRIS, REALIST." The article makes the striking assertion of the title a little less bold. Cooper finds Norris's work puzzling. On the one hand, Norris is "frankly, brutally realistic," and yet, "paradoxical as it may seem, he has an obstinate and often exasperating vein of romanticism running through all his work." The conclusion Cooper comes to is that Norris is a realist who, at times, perversely succumbs to romanticism. According to Cooper, romanticism is Norris's "pet failing," his "besetting sin."
Cooper's difficulty assessing the literary creed governing Norris's fiction isn't simply a matter of one critic's confusion or one novelist's literary failure. On the contrary, the literary incongruities discussed by Cooper strike right to the heart of late-nineteenth-century American literature. Norris's work is not only the product of a young author's powerful imagination, it is also the product of his age, and the puzzling character of Norris's fiction (as well as the fiction of contemporaries such as Jack London, Stephen Crane, Kate Chopin, Edith Wharton, and Harold Frederic) reflects the shaping influence of a whole century of competing literary creeds, theories, manifestos, and critical opinions.
These authors grew up in an America ripe with incongruities. New discoveries in science and natural history conflicted with long-standing religious tradition. Industry and agriculture underwent unparalleled economic expansion and growth, but sometimes through the exploitation of the democratic and capitalistic values that such growth seemed to justify. It was not only a time of labor unrest, but also a time in which real wages grew and the cost of living went down. In 1886, when Chopin was thirty-five; Frederic, thirty; Wharton, twenty-four; Norris, sixteen; Crane, fifteen; and London, ten, agriculture in the Midwest was devastated by drought, there were more strikes than in any other single year in the nineteenth century, anti-Chinese riots broke out in Seattle, anarchists and police collided in Chicago's Haymarket Square riot, and Geronimo's capture in Arizona marked the end of the last major Indian war. In that same year, however, technology rolled on: important discoveries in metallurgy made it possible to extract aluminum from ore, and the alternating current system of electricity for commercial applications was introduced by George Westinghouse; meanwhile, the Statue of Liberty was dedicated on October 28 in New York Harbor. Although the "Gilded Age" was a time of political malaise, materialism, and commercialism, it was also a time of technological advancement and economic growth, through which the United States began to move toward center stage in the world theatre. A symbol of the complexities in American society might be found in the American city, balancing newly raised skyscrapers against burgeoning slums.
In many respects Norris, London, and Crane grew up in a scientific age. The intellectual imagination in the latter half of the nineteenth century was captivated by new scientific theories and philosophies from Charles Darwin, Herbert Spencer, John Fiske, William Graham Sumner, Thomas Huxley, Karl Marx, Charles Lyell, and Arthur Schopenhauer. One rarely opened an issue of the North American Review or the Forum without encountering long discussions of "Social Progress and Race Degeneration," "The Progress from Brute to Man," "Morality and Environment," "Heredity and Environment," "How Evolution Evolves," "Natural Selection, Social Selection, and Heredity," and virtually any imaginable combination of the above. Collectively, these scientific theories marked the coming-of-age of the "naturalistic" shift in scientific thought that had begun with the Enlightenment. These scientific and philosophical theories increasingly sought to explain humankind and the natural world through reference to natural phenomena and physical laws. In this respect, at least at the academic level, the age of Norris, London, and Crane was a naturalistic age. Naturalistic fiction was certainly a product of this age. Still, the question for students of late-nineteenth-century American literature is what do we mean when we refer to Norris, London, Crane, and company as literary naturalists?
Literary naturalism is difficult to define. Variously defined over the years, literary naturalism is usually identified as generally dire in outlook, deterministic in philosophy, and aesthetically aligned with literary realism. Typically, such definitions are based on the theoretical writings of Émile Zola. As influential as Zola was, however, he was not the only critic in the nineteenth century who tried to define literary naturalism. Adding to the confusion experienced by the contemporary student of naturalism, many of these other critics and authors describe it in terms far different from Zola. The nineteenth-century definitional debate can be briefly illustrated by looking at an essay written by the Spanish author Leopoldo Alas.
In a preface to the second edition of Emilia Pardo Bazán's La cuestión palpitante (1883), Alas explicitly distances his definition of literary naturalism from Zola. Two of Alas's six points are of particular importance. First, Alas argues that naturalism is not "subordinate to positivism, or limited in its procedures to observation and experiment in the abstract, narrow, and logically false sense in which such aspects of method are understood by the illustrious Claude Bernard. It is true that Zola in the worst of his critical works has said something to this effect; but he himself later wrote what amounted to a correction; and in any event naturalism is not responsible for Zola's systematic exaggeration" (268). By separating literary naturalism from Zola's aesthetic strategies in Le roman expérimental (1880), Alas allows more latitude in literary naturalism to explore hidden realities and nonempirically verifiable truths and premises. It also allows certain literary naturalists — the ones who do not wish to restrict their writing to documentation, observation, and experimentation — more freedom in shaping their narratives. Equally important about Alas's claim is that he believes literary naturalism must be distinguished from philosophical naturalism. Philosophical naturalism does indeed have a positivistic inclination in that it leans toward allowing only strictly empirical evidence to enter into truth-determining equations.
Alas further separates literary naturalism from Zola's "systematic exaggeration" when he asserts that naturalism is not pessimism. "It is true that Zola speaks on occasion ... of what Leopardi called 'the utter vanity of everything'; but this does not occur in a novel; it is a critic's opinion. And although it may be demonstrated, though I doubt it, that the novels of Zola and Flaubert prove that their authors were pessimists, that does not prove that naturalism, a school, or rather a purely and exclusively literary tendency, is strictly bound to deterministic ideas about the causes and goals of life" (268–69). In this manner Alas allows for the possibility of a naturalistic narrative that is not pessimistic, or unremittingly deterministic, but that may conceivably exhibit or provoke a whole range of emotional and intellectual responses.
What is most striking about Alas's 1883 preface is that it seems at odds with the views of many twentieth-century critics who have defined naturalism as realistic fiction that incorporates a pessimistic determinism and whose form is dictated by a "Zola-esque" spirit of documentation and experimentation. A definition of literary naturalism based on Alas rather than Zola likely would maintain that naturalistic fiction should not be held to the strict mimetic/verisimilar standards of literary realism (especially in its positivistic manifestations), nor should one expect all naturalistic texts to be pessimistically oriented or be characterized by their incorporation of a strict determinism. It would be a liberating definition of literary naturalism, for sure, though we would still be pressed to say what literary naturalism is, rather than simply what it is not.
Of course, Leopoldo Alas should not be taken as the final authority in naturalist literary theory. In fact, Alas's countryman Don Armando Palacio Valdes asserted in 1889 that naturalism was indeed a type of realism characterized by a pessimistic determinism. Naturalism, Valdes writes, is "nothing else than a species of limited and pessimistic Realism" and is associated with "ideas of determinism and of pessimism." Whereas Alas (largely a proponent of literary naturalism) attempted to minimize the importance of French naturalism in general, and the theoretical writings of Émile Zola specifically, Valdes (less sympathetic with literary naturalism than Alas) creates a definition that seems largely based on these same influences.
Historically, Alas's preface is significant because it provides evidence that some Continental writers felt that the school of literary naturalism was larger than the narrow confines of Le roman expérimental. Texts that did not necessarily conform to the formal strategies and philosophical orientations of Zola's positivistic and putatively objective realist strain of naturalism (as described in his theoretical writings) might still be considered naturalistic on other grounds. But granting a larger domain for naturalistic fiction does raise an important question: if the school of literary naturalism is not theoretically bound by the claims of Le roman expérimental, what are the boundaries of the school? And even more importantly for the present study is the corollary question: what are the boundaries or defining characteristics of the American school of literary naturalism? How one arrives at answers to these questions is the focus of the present chapter and requires, first, a look at the relationship between the French school and the American school, and, second, the drawing of certain distinctions among philosophical, scientific, and "literary" naturalism.
The French Connection
Critics of literary naturalism have been plagued by the problems that arise when an attempt is made to reconcile "American literary naturalism" with its European counterparts. Why does the movement in America seem to encompass more diverse forms and treatments? Why did American literary naturalism remain a viable mode well into the twentieth century, while its European counterparts had all largely faded away, if not been completely abandoned, by the turn of the century? (Even Zola had turned to other projects by that time.) If we propose Zola's concept of the "experimental novel" as a leading influence on the American literary naturalists, then what are we to make of those American texts that diverge widely from the largely realist creed set forth by Zola? For instance, how do we account for the presence of a distinctly romantic symbolism (based largely in metaphysical and epistemological concepts regarding the relationship between man and nature) in McTeague (1899), Sister Carrie (1900), The Red Badge of Courage (1895), and, of course, in the korl woman of "Life in the Iron Mills" (1861), as opposed to the more common intratextual symbolism found in the works of literary realism (what Edwin Cady in The Light of Common Day referred to as the "imploding symbol" used by the realists to "intensify inwardly the total effect of a novel" but that did not "refer outside the novel to general meaning"). Are these flaws in otherwise realistic novels, or do they represent a break on the part of the literary naturalists from the aesthetic creeds of William Dean Howells and Henry James? The answer to these questions is twofold: (1) the American tradition was not as closely linked to the French and European traditions as has been traditionally asserted; and (2) there is a discrepancy between naturalist theory and practice that has not been fully accounted for in studies of the school of literary naturalism.
The tendency to try to account for American literary naturalism by linking it with the theories of Zola and with his school of fiction began early with the writings of critics such as Vernon Louis Parrington (1930), Oscar Cargill (1941), Malcolm Cowley (1947), and Lars Åhnebrink's The Beginnings of Naturalism in American Fiction (1950). Available evidence, however, suggests that accounting for American literary naturalism in this manner tells only one part of a larger story. In fact, American literary naturalists, while not provincial, were hardly disciples of Zola. Of Norris, London, Crane, and Dreiser, only Norris seems to have eagerly read and studied the French naturalists. London was far less interested in French aesthetic theory than he was in philosophy and in the "business" of writing; Crane, though he probably read several of Zola's works in translation, claims to have found Zola's fiction "tiresome," and he openly distanced himself from the French author; and Dreiser declared in November of 1911 that he had "never read a line of Zola" — which (if true) would mean that Dreiser did not read any of Zola's fiction or theoretical writings until after he had published both Sister Carrie and Jennie Gerhardt (1911) and was well into writing The Financier (1912). The implication is not that there is no connection between American literary naturalism and its French counterpart; it is merely that to define literary naturalism for American authors in the 1890s on the basis of Zola's theory and literary circle is to skew any historically accurate treatment one wishes to give American naturalistic narrative. In general, the connection between American naturalism and French naturalism is there, but it is blurry, primarily indirect, and needs to be treated as such.
Theory versus Practice
One of the main problems with the French/American connection is that Zola's theory — around which so many definitions of American literary naturalism have been built — does not correspond with the practice of many literary naturalists, both in America and in Europe. Taken at its face value, Zola's Le roman expérimental describes an aesthetic practice that corresponds to the theory and practices of literary realists. It comes as no surprise that Zola saw Balzac and Stendhal as the pioneers of naturalistic fiction in France. Looking at Le roman expérimental — in particular, the essays "The Experimental Novel" and "Naturalism in the Theatre" — one finds Zola championing narrative strategies typically associated with literary realism. In "The Experimental Novel" Zola emphasizes that material in a novel should be rendered mimetically through careful and purposeful observation, and that fiction should not depart from the laws of nature (166–68, 189, 191). In "Naturalism in the Theatre" he identifies several key features of naturalistic fiction. He claims that naturalism is a "return to nature" (from the realm of fantasy, or the romantic) that seeks "direct observation, exact anatomy," and "the depiction of what is" (200–01). Likewise, naturalistic fiction inquires into "nature, being, and things," without recourse to "fable" or the "imagination" (207). And like all good realists, the naturalist author is "impersonal" and "never intervenes" into his narrative through a process of selection or idealization (208–09). With these characteristics it is understandable that descriptions of literary naturalism built on Le roman expérimental would view literary naturalism as a type, subset, or extension of literary realism. As one reviewer wrote in 1881 regarding Le roman expérimental: "This medication [via Claude Bernard] of literature which Zola advocates is only of use so far as it is an appeal in favor of realism in literature."
The problem arises when one actually tries to account for naturalistic fiction in light of Zola's theory. Zola's strict rejection of romanticism, his call for purely objective scientific documentation and observation, and his positivism do not characterize much naturalistic narrative, especially in America. One might allow for a more rigidly (and traditional) linkage between literary realism and naturalism in studies focused on a description of those French and European authors who are more directly tied into French aesthetic theory — such as early studies like Martin Schutze's "The Services of Naturalism to Life and Literature" (1903), and later studies like Naturalism in the European Novel (1992), edited by Brian Nelson; David Baguley's Naturalist Fiction: The Entropic Vision (1990); and Yves Chevrel's Le naturalisme (1982). But the same standard cannot be so rigidly applied to treatments of American literary naturalism. And even studies of the French and European traditions have noted the considerable discrepancy between Zola's own theory and practice, as well as between his theory and the works of his Continental contemporaries.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Vast and Terrible Drama by Eric Carl Link. Copyright © 2004 University of Alabama Press. Excerpted by permission of The University of Alabama Press.
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