Naturalism and the Turn of the Century

This is Unit Twelve of American Literature, part two of two: a caged bird, an invented town, and three procedures for the period. Part one ended with a mask that grins and lies, written in the formal English Dunbar preferred while publishers bought his dialect. This part opens on his other famous poem and then widens out, and the unit's governing idea pays off in a particular way here. Naturalism said people are moved by forces they cannot control, and the poets of these same years say something adjacent without the thesis attached. Robinson's Tilbury Town is full of people whose lives have quietly failed, described in strict rhyme and meter, and the poem the board prints whole ends with a bullet and offers no explanation at all. That refusal to explain is the exam's sixth sample question, and this course teaches it here and drills it in the capstone unit. Around those poems sit James Weldon Johnson, who published a novel anonymously and wrote a song that became an anthem, Hamlin Garland on the prairie, Ellen Glasgow on Virginia, and a memoir recovered into the archive long afterwards. Then three procedures. By the end you will be able to read "Sympathy" and place Johnson. To describe Tilbury Town and its three poems. To place Garland, Glasgow and Nicholas Said. To sort naturalism from realism. And to place an author of these years by subject.

Nine entries: Dunbar's other famous poem, a novelist and songwriter, a town of quiet failures, and three writers widening the period.

A prayer, and not a carol.

AML 1127 "Sympathy" and the Caged Bird

"Sympathy" says the speaker knows why the caged bird sings, and that the song is not a carol of joy but a prayer flung from the heart's deep core. A later writer borrowed the image for a book title, and that borrowing has almost swallowed the poem it came from. The poem is bleaker than the phrase it gave away.

A novel published without a name.

AML 1128 James Weldon Johnson and *The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man*

Born in Jacksonville to a hotel waiter and the first Black teacher in Florida, Johnson was a novelist, poet, songwriter and diplomat. His novel, published anonymously, narrates a light-skinned man's decision to pass as white and what he felt he had sold in doing it. Readers took the fiction for an actual memoir, which was the anonymity's effect.

A schoolroom song, become an anthem.

AML 1129 "Lift Every Voice and Sing"

Johnson wrote the words and his brother the music for a song first performed by schoolchildren in eighteen ninety-nine, later adopted by the NAACP and widely known as the Black national anthem. It moves from a stony road toward a hope kept in bitter history. The song is a poem before it is an anthem.

An invented town of quiet failures.

AML 1130 Edwin Arlington Robinson and Tilbury Town

Robinson, who won the first Pulitzer Prize awarded to poetry, set many poems in an invented New England town and filled it with failures, drunks and men admired from a distance. He wrote in traditional rhyme and meter about people modern fiction was only beginning to notice. Traditional forms, carrying modern subjects.

Four stanzas of envy, one fact.

AML 1131 "Richard Cory"

The townspeople describe a rich, courteous, admirably schooled gentleman they envy, in the vocabulary of royalty, and the last line reports that on a calm summer night he went home and put a bullet through his head. The poem stops there and explains nothing. The speakers report the death without ever accounting for it.

Born too late; drinking alone.

AML 1132 "Miniver Cheevy" and "Mr. Flood's Party"

Miniver Cheevy, born too late, loves the medieval past, scorns the present, and keeps on drinking. Eben Flood drinks alone on a hill above a town where nobody is left who knew him, toasting himself in two voices. Both poems are comic and both are not, and in each the comedy carries the pity and then reverses into it.

The trails west, and a main street.

AML 1133 Hamlin Garland and the Middle Border

Garland, whom the witness calls a protégé of Howells, published *Main-Travelled Roads* in eighteen ninety-one, a gallery of ordinary midwesterners whose poverty shocked readers and whose farmers were demanding agricultural reform. The title names both the westward trails and the dusty streets of the towns. It was written to support a farm movement.

Virginia, without its own myth.

AML 1134 Ellen Glasgow and the Southern Realists

The witness pairs Ellen Glasgow with Willa Cather as regional novelists who explored women's lives in vividly evoked settings, noting that neither set out to write about women and that both turned to it as their confidence grew. Glasgow's subject is Virginia and the myths it told about itself. The witness resists calling them women writers.

A memoir written in a fifth language.

AML 1135 Nicholas Said and the Widening Archive

Nicholas Said, born in the Bornu Empire in what is now Nigeria, was sold in the trans-Saharan trade, served enslavers across Europe, learned many languages, and published a memoir in eighteen seventy-two. Anthologies now print him beside the period's better-known writers. The archive keeps enlarging by recovery rather than by discovery.

Four entries to close: three procedures for the period's passages and authors, and the unit's capstone.

Could the story have gone otherwise?

AML 1136 Sorting Naturalism From Realism

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 the character could not have avoided. Second, the vocabulary of causation: naturalist passages reach for heredity, appetite, environment, machinery and animal comparisons, describing 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, and if not it is naturalism. A grim realist story is not automatically naturalist; the test is whether the outcome was available to the character.

Name the force, watch it act.

AML 1137 Reading a Naturalist Passage for Its Force

A naturalist passage is answered by naming the force, and three questions get there. First, what is bigger than the person in this passage: the cold, the sea, a corporation, a city, a crowd, an inherited appetite. Second, how does the prose treat it, since naturalist writing gives the force the grammar of an agent, so the cold does things and the man merely responds, which is why "To Build a Fire" spends its sentences on temperature. Third, what does the passage do with the character's intention, since it usually states the plan and then shows it failing on a detail the character could not have controlled, like snow falling from a spruce. The exam's questions are normally about that gap between intention and outcome. Do not read the force as a symbol: in naturalism the cold is cold, and treating it as a metaphor reverses the movement's whole claim.

Subject sorts faster than style.

AML 1138 Placing a Turn-of-the-Century Author by Subject

The years around nineteen hundred hold several groups at once, and subject sorts them faster than style does. A passage about the far north, the sea, a slum, a stockyard or a battlefield, with a person overwhelmed, belongs to the naturalists: Crane, London, Norris, Dreiser, Sinclair. A passage arguing about education, trades, the vote and the colour line belongs to Washington or Du Bois, and the tone separates them, since Washington narrates a rise and Du Bois analyzes a condition. A passage in rhyme and meter about a small town's failures is Robinson. A passage in dialect about Black life, or a formal poem about wearing a mask, is Dunbar. A passage about farms and reform on the midwestern prairie is Garland. Dunbar and Du Bois are contemporaries writing about the same country in different forms, and the exam pairs them as distractors: one writes verse, the other writes the sociology.

A machine, a sea, and a veil.

AML 1139 The Machine, the Animal, and the Self at 1910

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: 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 one that 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 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 his dog 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. Sinclair aims at the heart and hits the stomach. Running beside all of it is the other great argument of these years, which is about freedom rather than force: Washington telling a country that trades and property come first, Du Bois answering that the programme surrenders the vote and civil rights and higher education, and naming the doubleness of looking at yourself through other people's eyes. Dunbar writes the mask in the formal English he preferred. Robinson puts a whole town of quiet failures on the page and ends one poem with a bullet and no explanation. The naturalist thesis is voiced here as the movement's own, and the Washington and Du Bois disagreement is given from both sides with no verdict.

That closes the turn of the century, and with it the exam's third period. You can read the caged bird whose song is a prayer rather than a carol, and place Johnson's anonymous novel that readers took for a memoir and his schoolroom song that became an anthem. You can describe Tilbury Town, where a poet working in strict rhyme filled an invented place with quiet failures, and read the three poems set there: a rich man envied in the vocabulary of royalty who goes home and shoots himself with the poem explaining nothing, a man born too late who keeps drinking, and a man toasting himself alone above a town where nobody knows him. You can place Garland's prairie written for a farm movement, Glasgow's Virginia stripped of its myth, and a memoir recovered into the archive a century later. You can sort naturalism from realism by asking whether the story could have gone otherwise. You can name the force in a passage without turning it into a symbol. And you can place an author of these years by subject. Unit thirteen takes Harlem.