The Machine, the Animal, and the Self at 1910

The idea

By nineteen ten American writing had arrived at a set of questions it would carry into the next century, and naturalism put them most starkly. Taking realism's ordinary subjects, the naturalists added a thesis drawn from Darwin and from the determinism built on him: that people are the helpless pawns of economic and social forces beyond their control, in a universe the witness describes as a machine rather than a design, and unlike the Enlightenment's machine this one does not tend toward improvement. Crane is the movement's finest writer and its clearest case: a girl destroyed by a slum and by her neighbours' respectability, a soldier whose courage may be nothing more than a wound he did not earn, four men in a dinghy learning that the sea is indifferent rather than cruel, and a man who freezes because snow falls from a spruce onto his second fire while the dog he brought walks on. London makes the north the antagonist and lets instinct outperform reasoning. Norris argues in print that the novelist must look where life is hardest. Dreiser lets a rise and a fall go unrewarded and unpunished and offends his own publisher. Sinclair aims at the heart and hits the stomach. Running beside all of this is the other great argument of these years, which is not about force but about freedom: Washington telling a country that trades and property come first and that the races can be as separate as the fingers, Du Bois answering that the programme surrenders the vote, civil rights and higher education, and naming the doubleness of looking at yourself through other people's eyes. Dunbar writes the mask that grins and lies in the formal English he preferred, while publishers bought his dialect. Robinson, in strict rhyme, puts a whole Tilbury Town of quiet failures on the page and ends one poem with a bullet and no explanation.