Naturalism and the Turn of the Century

This is Unit Twelve of American Literature, part one of two: realism with a thesis attached, and the argument that opened the new century. Unit eleven closed on a period that decided ordinary life was enough. This unit's writers agree and then add a claim, which is the governing idea part two pays off. Naturalism keeps realism's ordinary subjects and argues that people are the helpless pawns of economic and social forces beyond their control. The witness calls it the literary expression of determinism, and the practical consequence is that a naturalist story tests a character against a force rather than against a choice. The thesis came from Darwin and the determinism built on him, and it gave these writers a universe that is a machine with no tendency toward progress, unlike the Enlightenment's benevolent one. So the plots explain a life by inheritance, environment and chance. We take the thesis first, then Norris who wrote its manifesto, then Crane, whose entire career runs under ten years and who changed American prose inside it, then London, Dreiser and Sinclair, and then the turn-of-century argument between Booker T. Washington and W. E. B. Du Bois. By the end you will be able to state the thesis that separates naturalism from realism. To place Norris and account for Crane's short career. To read his war novel, his sea story and his verse. To place London, Dreiser and Sinclair. And to give both sides of the Washington and Du Bois argument.

Four entries on the thesis: what naturalism adds, where the idea came from, the three forces it names, and the essay that defended it.

Ordinary lives, decided by forces.

AML 1101 Naturalism: Realism With a Thesis

Naturalism keeps realism's ordinary subjects and adds a claim: that people are the helpless pawns of economic and social forces beyond their control. The witness calls it the literary expression of determinism, and its stories test a character against a force rather than against a choice. The thesis is what separates it from realism.

A machine going nowhere at all.

AML 1102 Darwin, Spencer, and the Literary Consequence

The naturalists read Darwin and the determinism built on him, and took from it a universe that is a machine rather than a design. The witness contrasts the Enlightenment machine, which was perfect and tending toward progress: this one has no such tendency. The Enlightenment machine was benevolent, and this one is not.

Inheritance, environment, and luck.

AML 1103 Determinism, Heredity, Environment

Naturalist fiction explains a life by three pressures: inherited disposition, the environment a person is born into, and chance. Character remains, but it is not sovereign, and a naturalist plot typically shows a person's intentions overwhelmed by circumstances they did not make. Intentions matter less than pressure does.

A plea to look where it hurts.

AML 1104 Frank Norris and "A Plea for Romantic Fiction"

Norris argued that the novelist should go past the drawing-room accuracy of realism to the extremes where life is lived hardest, calling that reach romance rather than realism. The essay is the naturalists' defence of melodrama, violence and appetite as legitimate subjects. His word romance means intensity rather than escape.

Three entries: two novels where the forces drive the plot, and the beginning of a career that lasted under ten years.

A dentist, a desert, a railroad.

AML 1105 *McTeague* and *The Octopus*

Norris's *McTeague* follows an unlicensed San Francisco dentist destroyed by greed, jealousy and inherited appetite, ending in Death Valley. *The Octopus* sets California wheat farmers against a railroad, and treats both the grain and the corporation as forces larger than any person in the book. The forces rather than the people drive both plots.

Fourteenth child, dead at twenty-eight.

AML 1106 Stephen Crane: A Short Life

Born in Newark in eighteen seventy-one, the fourteenth child of a Methodist minister, Crane left college to write, worked as a freelance journalist, and covered the Spanish-American War as a correspondent. He was dead at twenty-eight, having changed American prose in the meantime. The whole career runs under ten years.

A slum, described without a sermon.

AML 1107 *Maggie: A Girl of the Streets*

Published at his own expense in eighteen ninety-three, *Maggie* follows a girl in the New York slums destroyed by poverty, drink and the respectability of the people around her. Crane refuses to moralize about any of it, which is why publishers refused the book and why it matters. He had to publish it himself.

Five entries on Crane's major work: a battle told in fragments, a sea that is indifferent, two undone conventions, and verse nobody expected.

A battle, seen in fragments.

AML 1108 *The Red Badge of Courage*

Crane's Civil War novel of eighteen ninety-five follows a young soldier through a battle he does not understand, told in short impressionistic bursts of colour and sensation. Crane had seen no combat at all when he wrote it, and veterans assumed that he had. The technique is the novel's claim about what a battle is like from inside.

A wound taken as proof.

AML 1109 Henry Fleming and the Question of Courage

Henry runs from his first engagement, receives a head wound from a fellow soldier that everyone reads as a battle wound, and returns to fight well. Whether he has become brave or has merely been lucky and unreflective is left open, and the novel's irony sits exactly there. The book withholds its verdict on him.

A sea that is indifferent, not hostile.

AML 1110 "The Open Boat"

Four men in a dinghy after a shipwreck row toward a shore they can see and cannot reach, and the sea is described as neither cruel nor kind but indifferent. One of them drowns in the surf, and it is not the weakest of them. Crane based the story on his own shipwreck, and that indifference is its theology.

A shared death, and a fizzled fight.

AML 1111 "The Blue Hotel" and "The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky"

In "The Blue Hotel" a frightened Swede provokes the violence he expects and dies of it, and a character afterwards divides the blame among everyone present. "The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky" lets a gunfight collapse because the marshal has married, and the West turns comic. Both stories undo a western convention rather than using it.

Parables, in no recognizable form.

AML 1112 Crane's Poetry and Its Strangeness

Crane's poems are short, unrhymed, aphoristic and bleak, closer to parable than to lyric, and they were unlike anything else being published in the eighteen nineties. A man asks the universe for recognition and is told the fact of his existence creates no obligation. The verse anticipates modernism by twenty years.

Seven entries: a north where a mistake kills, two fates nobody deserves, and a novel that aimed at the heart and hit the stomach.

A north where a mistake kills.

AML 1113 Jack London and the Yukon

London worked as a sailor, a tramp and a gold prospector before turning that experience into fiction, and the witness places him with the naturalists. His north is a place where a mistake is fatal and where the difference between knowing a fact and imagining it decides who lives. The setting itself is the antagonist.

Two fires, and a surviving dog.

AML 1114 "To Build a Fire"

A man travelling alone in extreme cold ignores the advice of an old-timer, gets his feet wet, and fails twice to build a fire, the second time because snow falls from a spruce and puts it out. He freezes, and the dog he brought walks on toward the camp. Instinct outperforms reasoning, which is the story's argument.

One dog out, one dog in.

AML 1115 *The Call of the Wild* and *White Fang*

*The Call of the Wild* takes a domestic dog stolen into the Klondike and follows him back toward the wild, and *White Fang* reverses the movement exactly. Both treat instinct and environment as the forces that make a creature into what it becomes. The pair are one argument, run twice in opposite directions.

A rise and a fall, neither earned.

AML 1116 Theodore Dreiser and *Sister Carrie*

Dreiser's novel of nineteen hundred follows a country girl to Chicago, through two men and into success on the stage while one of the men sinks to destitution. Carrie's rise is not rewarded morally and Hurstwood's fall is not punished, which appalled the publisher, who suppressed the book's promotion after printing it.

A drowning, and the system behind it.

AML 1117 *An American Tragedy*

Based on a real case, *An American Tragedy* follows a poor young man whose ambition and a pregnancy lead to a drowning that may or may not be murder, and then to an execution. The book spends itself on the pressure rather than on the act, and the verdict on the death is deliberately unclear.

Graceless sentences, cumulative force.

AML 1118 Dreiser's Prose and Its Defenders

Dreiser's sentences are heavy and often clumsy, and critics have complained about them for a century while conceding that the novels work anyway. The argument made for him is that the accumulation of detail produces a weight that no more elegant writer achieves. The stylistic complaint is standard and it is old.

Aimed at the heart, hit the stomach.

AML 1119 Upton Sinclair and *The Jungle*

Sinclair, whom the witness lists among the naturalists, wrote *The Jungle* about immigrant workers in the Chicago stockyards, intending an argument for socialism. Readers were horrified instead by the descriptions of the meat, and federal inspection law followed. The book's effect was not the one its author intended.

Seven entries on the century's opening argument: two programmes for Black America in conflict, and a poet caught between two markets.

From a salt works to a college.

AML 1120 Booker T. Washington and *Up From Slavery*

Born enslaved in Virginia, Washington worked in coalmines and salt works after emancipation, walked to the Hampton Institute at fourteen, and built Tuskegee. His autobiography of nineteen-oh-one tells that rise and became the period's most influential Black American book. It is an argument as much as it is a life.

Separate as the fingers, one hand.

AML 1121 The Atlanta Compromise

In an eighteen ninety-five address Washington urged Black southerners to concentrate on trades and property, and told white southerners that the races could be as separate as the fingers in all things purely social. Critics read it as accepting segregation, and the reading of the speech was contested at once.

Essay, history, sociology, and lament.

AML 1122 W. E. B. Du Bois and *The Souls of Black Folk*

Du Bois grew up in a small Massachusetts town, met Jim Crow when he went south to Fisk, and became the first Black American to earn a Harvard doctorate. *The Souls of Black Folk*, published in nineteen-oh-three, mixes essay, history, sociology and elegy, and the book's form is part of its argument.

Two souls, and a veil between.

AML 1123 Double Consciousness and the Veil

Du Bois describes a sense of always looking at oneself through the eyes of others, a twoness of being both American and Black in one dark body, and pictures the colour line as a veil through which each side sees the other imperfectly. The terms became permanent, and the phrase describes a condition rather than an opinion.

Trades and property, against votes.

AML 1124 The Du Bois–Washington Argument

Du Bois devoted a chapter to Washington, praising his achievement and objecting that his programme asked Black Americans to give up political power, civil rights and higher education for economic gain. Washington's defenders answered that his position was what the South of his day permitted. The course gives both sides and no verdict.

Dialect for the market, standard for himself.

AML 1125 Paul Laurence Dunbar and the Two Voices

Dunbar, born in Dayton in eighteen seventy-two to parents who had been enslaved in Kentucky, was the only Black student in his class and became its president and its editor. He wrote in two modes: dialect poems that publishers wanted, and formal English poems he valued more. The market rewarded the work he liked least.

A grin that hides the face.

AML 1126 "We Wear the Mask"

The poem says the mask grins and lies, hiding cheeks and shading eyes, and that the world need not be over-wise in counting their tears and sighs. Written in standard English and a tight rhymed form, it describes the very performance his dialect poems were bought for. The formal poem comments on the dialect ones.

That is the thesis and its novelists, and the argument that opened the century. Part two takes the poets and the procedures. You can state what naturalism adds to realism, that people are helpless pawns of forces beyond their control, and name the three pressures it explains a life by. You can place Norris's dentist dying in Death Valley and his wheat farmers against a railroad, and account for Crane, the fourteenth child of a minister, dead at twenty-eight, who published his slum novel himself, wrote a battle he had never seen in bursts of colour, withheld the verdict on whether his soldier became brave, put four men in a dinghy under a sea that is neither cruel nor kind, and wrote parables in verse twenty years before modernism. You can place London's north where instinct beats reasoning, Dreiser's undeserved rise and fall, and Sinclair's book that aimed at the heart and hit the stomach. And you can give both sides of the argument between a man who urged trades and property and a man who called that a surrender of votes and college, with Dunbar's mask over both.