lecture 12: Naturalism and Impressionism
A) “Muckraking”
- in the 1890s: the Genteel Tradition still dominant (idealistic, polite and polished picture of the country’s life in spite of
the new directions of Western thought and the unfolding materialism and commercialism of the age amidst the
acceleration of modernization)
- the frontier had closed; the new frontier: the city itself, with immigrants and internal migrants driven off their lands by
the agricultural depressions of the 1880s
- America: shaping up as a consumer society, with a rapid urban development; social unrest, long strikes and riots
“muckraking literature” (journalism as well as fiction): growingly sensitive to the conflict of poor and rich; research
into corruption; the darker sides of capitalism, industrialism and political conflict
1897 Henry Adams: Democracy
1904 Lincoln Steffen: The Shame of the Cities (investigative journalism); also: Hamlin Garland, Frank Norris
B) Naturalism
- emerged at the turn of the century); influenced by Charles Darwin: On the Origin of Species, 1859 (the message: life
was a chancy process rather than a path toward redemption, with environment as a shaping force)
- Herbert Spencer and the representatives of a new science, sociology: human nature did not derive from God but was
constructed by humans themselves, in the course of their social development; the individual was displaced from the
center of existence, the old ideals of 19th century America came into question (Social Darwinism)
according to contemporary intellectuals, naturalism:
- explored the primitive, instinctive and irrational in human nature, the mystery of sex
- emphasized the ideals of objectivity and documentary truthfulness
> naturalism: became realism scientized, taken beyond realist principles
- naturalism had an appeal to American writers after the turn of the century as well (as a means of dramatizing “hard
times” in the sense of both economic and spiritual decline, e. g. in the fiction of Hemingway)
- some women writers of the late 19th and early 20th century are also viewed in naturalistic terms (e.g. Kate Chopin and
Edith Wharton: their central theme of the entrapment of women within the confines of certain social codes and taboos)
- naturalism: a critical response to the conditions of American life in the given period, touching on areas of society, the
life of working people, the problems of cities, unexplored by genteel awareness
- the short story and the novella yielded well to the mode of naturalistic impressionism.
Stephen Crane (1871-1900)
1893 Maggie: A Girl of the Streets
- the shaping power of environment: the city as a Darwinian jungle
- the disestablishment of the centrality of character entails that the story is told through scenes that pose contrasts and
provide unexpected juxtapositions
1895 The Red Badge of Courage set in the American Civil War
- war as a key naturalist image of life, a field of struggle and competition; the mortal reduction of the individual
- Henry Fleming’s wound, the red badge: a token of arbitrary and nihilistic reality
- reality is immediate and hostile; perception of, reaction to and immersion in reality
- impressionism moved towards abstraction, mingling with visionary naturalism
- narrator describes the scene; presents the mental activity of the protagonist; unreliable narration and narrative irony
1897 “The Open Boat” (1897): man appears exposed and adrift in a nature that is indifferent
- as a naturalist, Crane wrote about the failure of genteel and religious explanations of life, and about the ironic status of
the human agent in the world (Crane can be considered the initiator of American literary Impressionism)
C) the most important features of literary impressionism:
- reality is perceived as fragmentary; it is unstable, a matter of perception, elusive
- records the impression of characters; life apprehended through the play of perceptions, suggesting that man’s
experience of the world is multifaceted
- states the subjectivity of reality, reality appears as perceived, shifting
- characters: always in the process of interpreting the world around them and having to distinguish the real from their
view of it, ability to understand reality becomes a theme
- the character is alone, uncertain of reality, caught up in the process of becoming themselves, experiencing epiphany
- presents people responding to unfamiliar actions, situations
Stephen Crane’s fictional language: evocative, represents how things are seen, with colors, light, images often used
- narrative mode Crane often employs: ‘third-person limited’
- manipulates point of view, displaying the protagonists’ illusions by a narrative perspective that is distinct from,
sometimes superior to the characters’ sensibility, often resulting in irony
- the device of parallax: method of presenting a scene as perceived by multiple narrators
“The Open Boat”: the 4 characters have a restricted viewpoint, juxtaposed by narrator’s detached observation; narrative
consciousness closely identified with the mind of a character (close to stream of consciousness technique)
- narrative chorus (refrain in “The Open Boat”: the generalized thinking of the 4 men, their protest, rage against Fate)
- the collective consciousness becomes associated almost exclusively with the mind of the correspondent
- Crane’s concern: with sensory experience rather than with external reality (pointing toward the modernist interest in
epistemological processes, the problematic disparity between truth and illusion)
- structure: episodic because of experiencing the world in fragments; episodes: arranged artistically, in patterns
- frame: ending the story with an ironic event or comment
Kate Chopin (1851-1904)
1899 The Awakening
- novel of psychological development and defeat
- the naturalist plot of decline: contextualizing Edna Pontellier’s coming to consciousness and inability to resist
the social and psychological forces that lead to her decline (suicide)
- impressionism manifested in the changing perception of the woman (psychological and sexual “awakening”)
the woman’s perspective
- Louisiana: the Creole society of New Orleans (Edna stands apart as a non-Creole)
- women’s lack of autonomy and self-fulfillment
- Edna’s failure to break free from the restrictions of society / family / her own limitations
- arrested psychological development of the woman (Edna as child; M-lle Rattignolle’s lack of individuality)
- women’s lives shaped by coercive social reality
art and the artist
- M-lle Reisz the pianist / E. as painter and music-lover / M-me Rattignolle as piano player on social occasions
- art as an agency contributing to psychological “awakening”
- insufficiency of E. as artist; art: means of diversion (artiste manquée: has the sensitivity but not the creativity)
- lack of psychological strength necessary for the process of individuation / development of her creativity
symbolism
- the sea as a vehicle for Edna’s consciousness (vast, fluid, undifferentiated, dangerous and lethal)
- the sea-like meadow of her childhood memory: her emotional state at Grand Isle
- the bird with broken wings: E’s powerlessness to go through the process of achieving maturity & independence
Frank Norris (1870-1902)
- born in Chicago, where a new school of urban sociologists was exploring immigrant conflict and social deprivation
1903 “The Responsibilities of the Novelist”: contains essays about naturalism, explaining naturalism less as a form of
- social reportage than as a form of modern epic, reaching into the unconscious part of life (considering this kind of
writing romantic too, depicting the strong emotions of people in their encounter with extreme situations)
1899 McTeague
1901 The Octopus and
1903 The Pit: a move towards the sociological and evolutionary theme
- the figure of the businessman as the modern American hero
- explores the conflict of the material and the ideal, the commercial and the cultural in the national existence
Theodore Dreiser (1871-1945), German Catholic immigrant family; trained as a journalist
1900 Sister Carrie became accepted in America only after its success in Europe
- will and desire defeating convention; transhuman forces render moral questions irrelevant
- the scene: the rootless, tempting city, a “magnet”
- the moral downfall of Carrie is actually her ascent: from self she becomes an object (the opposite happens to
Hurstwood: desire crushes him)
- desire: a force in the novel; the sequence of seeing / wanting / buying constitutes an underlying deterministic structure
- Hurstwood: becomes a nameless body, buried in a pauper’s grave; Carrie: becomes a name used to advertise the
pleasures of illusion (her figure is on a large billboard)
- Carrie ends under a false name, transformed into an image of consumption, her original self lost in the process of
consuming and advertising consumption
- the woman’s figure: the site where determinism and desire intersect, she herself is static but generates a vortex of
forces that flow inexorably toward consumption and death, as it happens to Hurstwood who desired her
- narrator stands outside: comments, explains action in neo-scientific terms (e.g. using Spencerian behaviorist views)
- metaphors used to reinforce the flow of success and failure; people are referred to as “moths”
- Dreiser’s “trilogy of desire,” containing:
1912 The Financier, 1914 The Titan, 1947 (posthumously) The Stoic
1925 An American Tragedy
D) The period of the Depression and John Steinbeck’s epic realism
beginning of the Depression period (1929): intensification of economic and social problems in the country, the mood
of the 1920s disappeared.
- progressive attitudes renewed themselves, naturalism, muckraking, the language of documentary were revived
- many writers engaged themselves politically, the rhetoric of social identification became important
- the early 1930s saw the publication of novels of social concern and committed naturalism
- realism and naturalism seemed the appropriate way to record a changing and troubled society, leading to the creation
of novels that look at America itself in a manner of radical self-analysis.
John Steinbeck (1902-68) was born in the Salinas Valley of Caifornia where many of his books are set
- owed a great deal to turn-of-century naturalism, especially to the works of Frank Norris and Jack London.
- invested his subjects with large mythical concerns, the most important among them being that of the westering
movement of Americans across the continent towards California.
- also linked with the Transcendentalists, inheritor of Emersonian idealism that saw the unified soul in man and nature
- natural comradeship: theme in earlier fiction, e.g. Tortilla Flat (1935) and Of Mice and Men
1936 In Dubious Battle: title and myth from Milton, battle between capitalism and the workers during a strike among
fruit-pickers
- tried to recover epic myth as a language of social commitment.
1939 The Grapes of Wrath sums up the concerns of the 1930s
- a tale of migration from the Oklahoma Dust Bowl area to the California valleys
- local conditions of the migrants’ lives, their individual courage and endurance
- Steinbeck was also interested in the biological and social determinants of being, the emotions below consciousness and
control
- as an epic narrative, The Grapes of Wrath highlights the social, economic and political context which gives broader
significance to the Joads’ journey by using the structural device of a series of interchapters.
- interchapters offer a philosophical perspective on the migration as a movement invovling many families, and keeps an
intellectual distance from the Joads who as individuals invite the readers’ emotional identification
- the novel employs two governing myths:
1. that of American westering, seen as the mythic journey toward the promised land which hints at the spiritual
significance of the epic journey
2. myth of heroic evolution from solitude to selfhood in community, the rise above individual selfishness
- the repetition of concrete detail in Steinbeck’s style suggests an archaic, elemental form capable of imposing order on
the chaos of contemporary life
- at the close of the novel the inner story of the Joads and the outer world have to be brought together, when the family
take refuge in the various camps in California at the end of their journey
- it is in the federal camp that they start to rediscover their lost dignity and sense of communal values
- the book concludes with an individual symbolic act in which Rosasharn offers her breast milk to a starving old man
- Steinbeck’s essential conservatism and political uncertainty leads him away from more radical solutions towards an
agrarian pastoralism
- yet the novel remains a powerful critique of 1930s social trends, and an equally powerful affirmation of faith in the
individual’s ability to win over deprivation.
- mythic naturalism was carried on into Steinbeck’s later novels, e.g.
1952 East of Eden
- the American West appearing as Eden, the two main characters, brother figures, repeating the Biblical Cain and Abel
conflict
- transcendental hope, however, remains still powerful in spite of the grim outcome of the novel