NATURALISM Yet another spectacular PowerPoint

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NATURALISM Yet another spectacular PowerPoint
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While many modern works contain naturalistic
elements, naturalism refers specifically to a
literary movement that took place in America,
England, and France during the late 1800s and
early 1900s, which produced a unique type of
realistic fiction.
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In order to understand naturalism, we must first
examine realism.

• Realism portrays life realistically without
  sugarcoating.
• Realists try to write reality
• -- records "the smaller details of everyday life,
  things that are likely to happen between lunch
  and supper."
• -- portrays local color, attempting to accurately
  portray the customs, speech, dress, and living
  conditions of their chosen locale.
• -- rejects the idealized presentations,
  imaginative settings, the supernatural, and the
  improbable plot twists of romanticism.
• Naturalism is essentially realism with an
  additional facet Determinism

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Determinism

• Characters do not have free will external and
  internal forces control their behavior.
• This belief is called determinism. All
  determinists believe in the existence of the
  will, but the will is enslaved due to a multitude
  of reasons.
• Characters attempting to exercise free will are
  hamstrung by forces beyond their control.
• Life is an inescapable trap.

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Characters as Marionettes

• Naturalists view individuals as being at the
  mercy of biological and socioeconomic forces,
  whereas realists hold that humans have some
  degree of free will that they can exercise to
  affect their situations.
• Things happen to people, as if they were
  marionettes whose movements are entirely
  determined by forces beyond their control.

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Forces Beyond the Characters Control

• Characters are dominated by external or internal
  forces
• Environmental
• A storm, or a character lost at sea
• Social conditions
• A character born into poverty.
• Chance (fate)
• A characters child is suddenly stricken with
  typhoid fever.
• Internal Passions
• Lust, greed, or desire for dominance or pleasure
  overcome rational behavior.

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Survival of the Fittest

• Heavily influenced by emergent scientific
  theories of the time
• Darwins theory of evolution
• Its corollary, survival of the fittest.
• Fight for survival brings out the "brute within"
  each individual.
• conflict is often "man against nature" or "man
  against himself"

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The Indifferent and Omnipotent Power of Nature

• Nature/Fate is as an indifferent force acting
  upon the lives of human beings.
• Works often describe the futile attempts of human
  beings to exercise free will in a universe that
  ironically reveals that free will is an illusion.
  
• Violence and tragedy is often the result.

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Subject Matter

• Generally deals with raw and unpleasant
  experiences which reduce characters to
  "degrading" behavior as they struggle to survive.
  
• Characters are mostly from the lower-middle or
  lower classes
• Generally poor, uneducated, and unsophisticated.
• drama of the people working itself out in blood
  and filth (Norris).

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• The characters are generally commonplace and the
  unheroic
• life is usually the dull struggle of daily
  existence.
• But, the naturalist reveals qualities in their
  characters that are usually associated with the
  heroic or adventurous.
• Often, acts of violence and passion lead to
  desperate moments and violent death.
• Life at its lowest levels is not so simple as it
  seems to be.
• Panoramic, slice-of-life" drama
• often a "chronicle of despair."

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Naturalism A Scientific Study

• attempts to apply the scientific principles of
  objectivity and detachment to its study of human
  beings
• The characters are but higher-order animals
  fully subject to the forces of heredity and the
  environment.
• These human beasts studied impartially, without
  moralizing about their natures
• The story is told in third person,
• The narrator is detached, objective, and
  unsympathetic.
• The narrator does not comment on the morality or
  the fairness of the situations in which
  characters find themselves
• The reader, however, is meant to empathize with
  the characters.

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Maintaining Dignity in Adversity

• Is conditioned and controlled by environment,
  social conditions, heredity, chance (or fate), or
  instinct.
• But, they have compensating humanistic values
  which affirm their individuality and life
• Their struggle for life becomes heroic and they
  maintain human dignity despite degrading
  circumstances.
• Is faced with overwhelming and oppressive
  material forces that control their lives.
• But, they maintain their self-worth.

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A Few Practictioners

• Emile Zola, Le roman experimental (The
  Experimental Novel) (1880)
• Stephen Crane, The Open Boat (1898)
• Jack London, To Build a Fire (1901)
• Edith Wharton, The House of Mirth (1905)
• Ellen Glasgow, Barren Ground (1925)
• John Steinbeck, Of Mice and Men (1939)
• Richard Wright, Native Son (1940), Black Boy
  (1945)
• Norman Mailer, The Naked and the Dead (1948)
• William Styron, Lie Down in Darkness (1951)
• Saul Bellow, The Adventures of Augie March (1953)

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From "The Open Boat" by Stephen Crane

• When it occurs to a man that nature does not
  regard him as important,
• and that she feels she would not maim the
  universe by disposing of him,
• he at first wishes to throw bricks at the
  temple,
• and he hates deeply the fact that there are no
  bricks and no temples. 

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Naturalistic Poem

• A man said to the universe  "Sir, I exist!" 
  "However," replied the universe,  "The fact has
  not created in me  A sense of obligation."
• --Stephen Crane (1899)