Topics for final exam

American Naturalism and Muckraking literature

Industrialism produced financial giants, but at the same time created an industrial proletariat entirely at the mercy of external forces beyond their control. Slums appeared in great numbers where conditions became steadily worse. New ideas about man and man’s place in the universe began to take root in America. Living in a cold, indifferent, and essentially Godless world, man was no longer free in any sense of the word. Darwinian concepts like “the survival of the fittest” and “the human beast” became popular catchwords and standards of moral reference in an amoral world. French naturalism, with its new technique and new way of writing, appealed to the imagination of the younger generation. Naturalism as a literary movement was especially popular in America from 1880 - 1920. Naturalism applies scientific principles of objectivity and detachment to the study of human beings so that the characters in the story may seem like the subjects of scientific case studies. Determinism, detachment, scientific objectivism, and social commentary.
The major representatives of American naturalists include

1. 
   Jack London,
   
2. 
   Stephen Crane,
   
3. 
   Frank Norris,
   
4. 
   Theodore Dreiser and so on.
   

Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Naturalism At its most basic level, naturalism was a state of mind put into words, a set of principles from which its practitioners drew in creating fiction that they believed truly represented reality. It was not a conscientiously formulated literary ideology promoted by an organized group with personal connections, like the later Southern Agrarians. The four authors principally associated with naturalism – Stephen Crane, Frank Norris, Theodore Dreiser, and Jack London – had few personal connections, although Frank Norris helped to launch the career of Theodore Dreiser, when, as a reader for Doubleday, Page, he recommended that Sister Carrie be published. As Nancy Glazener points out, the term 500 American Literary Naturalism ª 2011 The Author Literature Compass 8/8 (2011): 499–513, 10.1111/j.1741-4113.2011.00819.x Literature Compass ª 2011 Blackwell Publishing Ltd ‘naturalism barely surfaced in influential journals except with reference to Zola, and … the authors we associate with naturalism were not grouped together by contemporary reviewers’ (6). Crane, Norris, Dreiser, and London all came to naturalism from different intellectual backgrounds, but their fiction shares certain characteristics, such as settings of urban poverty or an inhospitable wilderness, an interest in heredity and environment, a deterministic philosophy, and a deep sense that U.S. culture and the realist literature it had produced were wholly inadequate to respond to the social problems they saw. The naturalistic landscape of urban poverty and violence appears in Stephen Crane’s Bowery Tales,1 which provided an ironic twist on sentimental slum tales such as the ‘Chimmie Fadden’ stories (1895) of Edward Townsend or Brander Matthews’s ‘Vignettes of Manhattan’ series in Harper’s (1894).2 As David Baguley observes, ‘Naturalist texts constantly undermine parodically the myths, plots, idealized situations, and heroic character types of the romantic and the institutionalized literature to which they are opposed’ (Baguley 21), and tales like Maggie: A Girl of the Streets, George’s Mother (1896), ‘An Ominous Baby’ (1894), and ‘A Dark Brown Dog’ (1901) ironically invert the standard expectations of the slum story. For example, Maggie is a ‘girl who goes wrong’, yet she is not led astray from a loving family by a deceptive, lecherous lover but by someone she sees as a ‘knight’ who rescues her from a violent, chaotic home. Crane also satirizes the conventions of the temperance tract, in which a father’s drunken, violent behavior condemns his innocent wife and family to poverty, by portraying a family in which Mrs Johnson, Maggie’s mother, is the more drunken and violent parent. Unlike the prostitutes of slum tales, Maggie is neither redeemed by a clergyman – indeed, a clergyman ostentatiously avoids her as she trolls for clients – nor dies in the knowledge of redemption. Staples of sentimental fiction such as parental love, children, and pets are not held sacred in the naturalistic tale. George Kelcey, of George’s Mother, is not saved by a mother’s love but is instead driven to drink by it, a complete reversal of the theme of redemption by a Christian mother’s faith common in tract literature.3 In ‘An Ominous Baby’, a poor child does not wait for charity but wrests the toy he wants from the hands of a rich child, an act with overtones of class warfare. The dog of ‘A Dark Brown Dog’ does not grow up to be a loyal friend of the child who owns it but is heaved out the window to its death by the random impulse of a drunken, angry parent. What is shocking is not the fact that violence exists, for violence is a constant in a naturalistic, Darwinian universe, nor the description of pervasive alcoholism, but the naturalistic story’s casual acceptance of violence and alcoholism as an ordinary part of life.

8.