Title: AMERICAN NATURALISM Sources Development of science: Darwin s
1AMERICAN NATURALISM
2Sources
On June 18th, 1858, Darwin, well launched into
writing his long-planned multi-volume work on
species, was shocked to receive a letter mailed
in February by a fellow-naturalist on his way to
New Guinea. The letter propounded a theory of
natural selection in species development eerily
like the theory he had himself long hugged to
himself as the culmination of his researches.
Influential allies immediately took charge, and
arranged that both theories should be read into
the scientific record on July 1st, a bare two
weeks after Wallace's bombshell had arrived.
Wallace, long an admirer of Darwin, took it all
with remarkable good grace, but Darwin had to
abandon his full-scale book and instead prepare
the preliminary overview of his theory that we
know as The Origin of Species.
- Development of science Darwins theory of
evolution - The first public announcement of natural
selection Charles Darwin, and Alfred Russel
Wallace, 1823-1913."On the tendency of species to
form varieties and on the perpetuation of
varieties and species by natural means of
selection. Journal of the Proceedings of the
Linnean Society Zoology, 3 (1858)
When Charles Darwin published The Descent of Man
in 1871, he challenged the fundamental beliefs of
most people by asserting that humans and apes had
evolved from a common ancestor. Many critics of
Darwin misunderstood his theory to mean that
people had descended directly from apes. This
caricature of Charles Darwin as an ape appeared
in the London Sketch Book in 1874.
3Charles Darwin
Madeleine Danova Darwin's most famous book was
at first envisaged as only a brief overview of
his central case, that "species have changed, and
are still slowly changing by the preservation and
accumulation of successive slight favorable
variations." Inevitably, it drew in a broad range
of the issues and evidence he had been
contemplating for so long. He began writing in
July 1858, and the whole text, totaling nearly
500 pages, was in proof by the following
September. By the time it was first offered for
sale to the public, on November 22nd 1859, the
first edition of 1250 copies (less review and
presentation copies) had all been taken by the
trade. Darwin's apprehension about public
response to the book can be seen in his careful
choice of the two epigraphs that face the
title-page.
- On the Origin of Species by means of Natural
Selection, or, The Preservation of Favoured Races
in the Struggle for life. London John Murray,
1859 - Revealed the animalistic struggle underlying all
human behaviour
4Progress and Poverty
From it come the clouds that overhang the future
of the most progressive and self-reliant nations.
It is the riddle which the Sphinx of Fate puts to
our civilization, and which not to answer is to
be destroyed. So long as all the increased wealth
which modern progress brings goes but to build up
great fortunes, to increase luxury and make
sharper the contrast between the House of Have
and the House of Want, progress is not real and
cannot be permanent. The reaction must come. The
tower leans from its foundations, and every new
story but hastens the final catastrophe. To
educate men who must be condemned to poverty, is
but to make them restive to base on a state of
most glaring social inequality political
institutions under which men are theoretically
equal, is to stand a pyramid on its apex.
- Henry George Progress and Poverty, 1879
- This association of poverty with progress is the
great enigma of our times. It is the central fact
from which spring industrial, social, and
political difficulties that perplex the world,
and with which statesmanship and philanthropy and
education grapple in vain.
This image (from a Henry George Cigar box)
reflects George's fame at the time of his run for
the Mayoralty of New York in 1886 (and later in
1897). George outpolled a young Theodore
Roosevelt, but lost to machine Democrat Abraham
Hewitt. The rooster was George's campaign icon,
and his slogan was "The democracy of Thomas
Jefferson. And although the cigars were
advertised "for men", George was in fact an
outspoken advocate for women's suffrage.
5Muckraking journalism
- A period of grim social struggle
- Issues of poverty and political abuse
- Blended into the reportages of the muckraking
journalists - Both Crane and Dreiser - journalists exploring
the life of the slum long before they were
novelists
Correspondents Richard Harding Davis (left) and
Stephen Crane during the Spanish American War
6Emil Zola
- Showed how this 'scientific' vision might be
expressed in fiction - "I chose characters completely dominated by their
nerves and their blood, deprived of free will,
pushed to each action of their lives by the
fatality of their flesh."
7Absolute determinism
- In determinism, individuals no longer appeared as
morally independent actors in a Christian
Universe - Filings aligned by magnets
- Succumb to the logic of heredity and environment
- Thus behaviour - a problem for science, not a
mystery of life
8Naturalist Characters
- A thoroughly different sense of character
emerges - - dehumanized
- - determined
- - moved by inner and outer forces beyond
conscious moral control
9Naturalist Vs. Realist Characters
- Realist characters - effective choice, free
will, autonomous action - Each character has the ability to choose and
characteristically does so through scenes that
enact a process of deliberation - Weighing of alternative actions through
consideration of consequences - The possibilities for the self are conceived in
terms of responsible choice
10Naturalist Vs. Realist Characters
- Naturalist characters act out of a similar set of
motives and desires - Differ only in being unable to resist the
conditions that press upon them - The self may be no more than an illusion
- The dynamic forces that constrain one's actions
from within as well as without not only overwhelm
an otherwise integrated self but rather are that
self in a fragmented state - No disjunction between outer events and inner
disposition
11Naturalist Vs Realist Characters
- Circumstances are the source of character in
naturalism - The realist heroes might always act differently
in circumstances that destroy them - They can attain a tragic stature
- Not so with the naturalist characters
- All the major American realists succumbed to
certain determinist possibilities - Sinclair Lewis fictionalized circumstances that
deprive their characters of autonomy
12Absolute Determinism
- How could such a philosophy thrive in a country
so committed to personal liberty and
individualism? - Partly explained by
- - rapid industrialization
- - unprecedented influx of immigrants
13American Naturalists
- Lacked any sense of common purpose
- No self-conscious 'school
- Shared in common an attraction to the
philosophical determinism - This concept that inspired the new narrative
conceptions of setting and character was fully
incorporated in the works of four American
writers - Frank Norris, Stephen Crane, Theodore
Dreiser and Jack London
14Stephen Crane 1871 - 1900
- The most bleakly nihilistic of the group
- Created the most clearly self-conscious body of
work - His career spanned little more than half a dozen
years before he died of tuberculosis at
twenty-eight
15Cranes Works
- Maggie A Girl of the Streets 1893
- The Red Badge of Courage 1894
- George's Mother 1895
- The Open Boat and Other Tales of Adventure 1898
- The Monster and Other Stories 1899
- War is Kind 1899
- Active Service 1899
- Whilomville Stories 1900
- Wounds in the Rain 1900
16Cranes Art
- The perspective he offers is of a fundamentally
indifferent universe - Directly contradicting those realists who felt
that moral claims redeemed the starkness of
experience, Crane depicted the world as
inherently amoral and irredeemable - Nature provides no haven in his fiction, nor are
its processes altered by desire - Dramatizes the emptiness of deliberation and
choice intensifying this vision of a thoroughly
unaccommodating universe
17Cranes Art
- Settings of war, shipwreck and blizzard
precluding quiet contemplation - Characters who seem in the end enslaved no less
by conventions than by circumstances - Part of his characters' inability to take
responsibility for experience results from the
unusual form of his representation his 'nervous'
style contributes to a radical questioning of the
very concept of the self
18Cranes Art
- The absence of strong plots
- Characters often lack names
- A tacit repudiation of conventional labels and
predictable judgements - His narratives call into question all casual
assumptions - They compel us to recognize how any conclusion
can only emerge from predetermining expectations - Became the originator of Symbolism in America
19Theodore Dreiser1871 - 1945
20Theodore Dreiser1871 - 1945
- No less a hybrid practitioner than other major
American naturalists - Eludes clear classification as 'pessimistic',
'optimistic' or 'reform writer - The first Catholic
- The first to hear a foreign language at home
- The first whose family was impoverished and
disreputable
21Dreisers Art
- In his novels impersonal energies always engulf
desire, which becomes cause for neither nihilism,
nor optimism - Settings no longer constrain desire, but now
express it fully, if only to confirm in the end
that desire itself can never be satisfied - Identifying desire with urban settings, described
in unprecedented detail - The greatest chronicler of American cities
22Dreisers Works
- Sister Carrie 1900, 1907, 1912
- Jennie Gerhardt, 1911
- The Financier, 1912
- A Traveller at Forty, 1913
- The Titan, 1914
- Free, and Other stories, 1918
- The Hand of the Potter (a play), 1918
- Twelve Men (sketches), 1918
- Hey, Rub-A-Dub-Dub, (essays), 1920
- A Book About Myself, 1922
-
23Dreisers Works
- An American Tragedy, 1925
- Chains, (stories), 1927
- Moods, Cadenced and Declaimed, (poems), 1928
- Dreiser Looks at Russia, 1928
- A Gallery of Women, 1929
- America is Worth Saving, 1941
- The Bulwark, 1946
- The Stoic, 1947
24Dreisers Art
- Recurrence of chance alignment of desire and
environment - Characters drift from place to place, and from
person to person - More than any other naturalist, Dreiser
dramatized chance as a means of compelling
characters to pay or gain for actions not their
own
25Dreisers Significance
- Subsequent writers have borrowed from the fiction
of Crane, Norris, and London - The adaptations from Dreiser have made the
tradition seem to continue - John Dos Passos, John Steinbeck and Norman
Mailer, even William Faulkner and Ernest
Hemingway have seemed to resemble Dreiser in
technique or material
26American Naturalism
- Naturalism is distinguished by no particular
attitude or assumption, no specific technique or
style - Crane's 'impressionistic' vignettes hardly call
to mind Dreiser's lumbering prose - American literary naturalists are bound together
by historical context and philosophical
determinism
27American NaturalismBasic Bibliography
- Vernon L. Parrington, Main Currents in American
Thought,The Beginnings of Critical Realism in
America, 1930, v.III - Charles Child Walcutt, American Literary
Naturalism A Divided Stream 1956 - Lars Ahnebrink, The Beginnings of Naturalism in
American Fiction 1891-1903, 1961 - Donald Pizer, Realism and Naturalism in
Nineteenth-Century Literature, 1966
28Bibliography
- John J. Conder, Naturalism in American Fiction
The Classic Phase, 1984 - June Howard, Form and History in American
Literary Naturalism, 1985 - Mark Seltzer, "The Naturalist Machine, in Sex,
Politics, and Science in the Nineteenth-Century
Novel, ed. Ruth Bernard Yeazell, 1986 - Walter Benn Michaels, The Gold Standard and the
Logic of Naturalism, 1987 - Lee Clark Mitchell, Determined Fictions American
Literary Naturalism, 1989 - Michael Davitt Bell, The Problem of American
Realism, 1993