Naturalism.
Refers to a literary movement influential in Europe, England, and America, originating in the later nineteenth century. Novelists associated with the movement include Zola (France), Hardy (England), and Norris, Crane, Dreiser, and London (America). Naturalism has been understood as both an extension of realism and a break from it. It reflects a philosophy, highly influenced by the publication of Darwin''s Origin of Species (1859) and Descent of Man (1870), which has been characterized in its purest form as follows: "a human being exists entirely in the order of nature and does not have a soul nor any mode of participating in a religious or spiritual world beyond nature; and therefore, that such a being is merely a high-order animal whose character and behavior are entirely determined by two kinds of forces, heredity and environment. A person inherits compulsive instincts-especially hunger, the accumulative drive, and sexuality-and is then subject to the social and economic forces in the family, the class, and the milieu into which that person is born" [M.H. Abrams, A Glossary of Literary Terms, 6th ed. (Fort Worth, TX: Harcourt Brace, 1993), 175]. Zola expresses the principles of naturalism in his essay "The Experimental Novel" (1880), arguing that the novelist must work like the chemist, physicist, or physiologist and replace imagination with "observation and experiment." In "A Plea for Romantic Fiction" (1901), Norris criticizes Howellsian realism as "meticulous" and "commonplace"-"the drama of the broken teacup"-and calls for a true Romance that explores "the unsearched penetralia of the soul of man." The American Naturalists cannot be pigeon-holed into a single definition, and the extent to which they allow for the existence of free will and the soul is an open question (see Norton 2: 6-12). |
