Sorting Naturalism From Realism

The idea

Realism and naturalism look alike on a page and separate on three tests. First, the ending: realism lets consequences follow from character and choice, while naturalism lets them follow from force, so a naturalist ending is usually a defeat that the character could not have avoided. Second, the vocabulary of causation: naturalist passages reach for heredity, appetite, environment, machinery and animal comparisons, and describe people with the words used for weather or livestock. Third, the narrator's distance: realism stays close enough to judge a character, while naturalism pulls back to the distance from which a person looks like a specimen, which is the distance Crane takes in the dinghy when he calls the sea indifferent. Ask whether the story could have gone otherwise; if not, it is naturalism.