to his plight. This blend of skepticism with humanism is sometimes carried out suc-
cessfully by naturalists, and sometimes not. In many well - known cases, such as Zola ’ s
Th é r è se Raquin, Norris ’ s McTeague , Dreiser ’ s Sister Carrie (1900), or London ’ s Adventure (1911), human life is unremittingly bleak, and anything resembling an “ ideal ” is hard
to spot.
The naturalistic hero ’ s tragic condition differs from that of Aristotle ’ s classic tragic
hero, who has already reached his full stature and is brought low through a fall, for
the naturalistic hero ’ s potential for growth is never allowed to develop – he does not
174
Jeanne Campbell Reesman
understand himself before or after the forces that caused his fall. As Pizer puts it:
“ wrenched by their desires or by other uncontrollable circumstances from their grooved
but satisfying paths, ” these protagonists “ fall from midway ” ( Realism and Naturalism
37). Such a defi nition of tragedy is perhaps America ’ s true epic literature, with heroes
such as Miller
’
s Willy Loman or Dreiser
’
s Hurstwood
–
or even Crane
’
s Henry
Fleming. Furst praises the naturalist narrator ’ s attempts at fi nding meaning in the
“ fortunate fallacy ” of naturalism ( Furst and Skrine , Naturalism 52 – 3). Thus there is
no purely “ naturalist ” text, and there is no agreement on what that might look like.
And the pursuit of meaning may be only a fallacy. Naturalism, as a rule, tends to ask
questions and cast doubts rather than arrive at resolution. If one were purely a natu-
ralist, one would have no reason to create a work of literature or art, which, after all,
represents an attempt at dialogue with an audience, an affi rmative humanistic value.
Naturalist subject matter ranges from the cosmic questioning of Crane ’ s awed and
terrifi ed young Union soldier Fleming in The Red Badge of Courage (1895) to Norris ’ s
and Upton Sinclair
’
s expos
é
s of the enormous power of capitalism in California
’
s
agricultural valleys and Chicago ’ s slaughterhouses in The Octopus (1901) and The Jungle
(1906). Though human nature seems inevitably to go wrong, it can sometimes also
be saved in rugged environments where “ civilized ” notions such as self - gain are no
longer useful, as in Crane ’ s “ The Open Boat. ” Paradoxically, where only “ primitive ”
ideas of community prevail, group survival takes precedence over individual wants,
and the civilized vices of pride and self - aggrandizement fi nd no place. As the unnamed
protagonist of “ To Build a Fire ” learns, too late, the motto of the Northland is “ Never
Travel Alone. ”
The most important force behind naturalism was Darwinian thought. Life as a
series of events governed by natural selection, proposed in Darwin ’ s Origin of Species
(1859) and The Descent of Man (1871), suggested that the strong survive and the weak
are destroyed: this notion ran counter to received religion and genteel morality,
including social reformism. The middle classes and the Church were incensed at
Darwin. Was nature only a set of deterministic forces working upon humans, invisible
in contemporary time and discerned only by science? Were human beings only
animals determined by heredity, environment, and the pressures of the moment? This
was to deny free will and responsibility for human actions. Any action would merely
be the inescapable result of physical forces and conditions totally beyond one ’ s control
and hence seemingly without meaning (see Furst and Skrine , Naturalism 18).
Herbert Spencer infl uenced naturalist writers with his applications of Darwin ’ s
ideas to society. “ Social Darwinism ” identifi ed hereditary reasons why some would
succeed in the new global society of the twentieth century, and some not. Norris and
London, in particular, wrote stories that dwelt upon hereditary infl uences, but their
real interest was the Darwinian concept of adaptability. Though they sometimes
impose racial or biologically “ degenerate ” stereotypes, especially Norris, naturalist
writers are rarely outright so much racists (especially as compared to non - naturalist
authors of their day, such as Kipling), who have always existed, but more accurately
racialists . That is, they, and London in particular, did not so much attack other races
Frank Norris and Jack London
175
as subscribe to what was called “ race science ” in the late nineteenth and early twen-
tieth centuries, the accepted “ scientifi c ” ideas on race of their day, particularly when
it came to such ideas as eugenics and nativism. These ideas were taught at the best
universities of the day, including the University of California at Berkeley, and
Stanford. The patrician Norris could be quite dismissive of ethnic “ others ” and was
not above the crudest stereotypes. He often seeks romantic, philosophic, and biological
explanations for situations that later writers would view as social in nature. In
McTeague: A Story of San Francisco (1899) , Norris ’ s characterizations of Mac as the son
of an Irish drunkard and of Trina as the product of Swiss - German “ peasant ” stock,
not to mention Maria Macapa ’ s Mexicanness and Zerkow ’ s stereotypical Jewishness,
are supposed to speak for themselves.
London presents a thornier problem with race. As a socialist and member of the
working class, he embraced the equality of humankind and attacked capitalists world-
wide, but he also entertained a strong attraction to powerful individualist fi gures. In
his short stories London nearly always attacks racism, often making the hero the non -
white character, but in some of his novels and public essays he is as viciously racist
as the worst social Darwinist, particularly about Asians. Short stories with memorable
non - white heroes include “ The House of Pride, ” “ Mauki, ” and “ The Mexican. ” Novels
of particularly leaden racism include A Daughter of the Snows (1901) , Adventure (1912),
and The Mutiny of the Elsinore (1914). London ’ s handling of race is an easy predictor
of a work ’ s quality: he is a much better writer in the short fi ction; in the novels the
more racism, the weaker the book. Norris ’ s and even more so London ’ s contradictions
point to the ferment of complex ideas that characterized the turn of the century and
helped create the naturalists and sustain their questioning of social realities.
The works of Zola were a heavier infl uence on Norris, who had studied in Paris
and who wrote essays about him, than on London, but both display Zolaesque features.
Zola ’ s twenty - volume Rougon - Macquart
series (1871
–
93) presented the life of one
extended family during the Second Empire. Zola had a great interest in heredity as
the dominating force in human destiny, corroborated by his friend Hippolyte Taine ’ s
assertion that humans are a product of race, place, and time; yet despite his belief in
heredity, the humane is never missing in his work. He agreed with E
dmond Goncourt:
“ seuls, disons - le bien haut, les documents humains font les bons livres ” ( “ only human docu-
ments make good books, let ’ s say it loud and clear ” ) (preface to Les Fr è res Zemgano ,
quoted in Furst and Skrine , Naturalism 13 – 14). The phrase “ human document ” was
picked up and used by other realists and naturalists, from Sarah Orne Jewett to Jack
London. Zola wrote about all classes, choosing the conditions of heredity and environ-
ment as the organizing principles of characters, in the end, demonstrating that all
people are fundamentally similar, for better or worse. Zola ’ s naturalism thus rejects
the notion of heroism and the (romantic) extraordinary individual.
The work of nineteenth - century British novelist Thomas Hardy and the German
naturalist playwrights notwithstanding, the story of naturalism was really a French
and American one. That naturalism never caught on in Victorian and Edwardian
England was a result of a more conservative national entitlement system and its
176
Jeanne Campbell Reesman
imperialistic supports. Zola ’ s agonized depiction of the lower classes seemed overly
French and overly revolutionary to English readers. The British disliked naturalism ’ s
reluctance to make moral judgments. Darwinian doctrines further alienated them.
The French may have envisioned themselves as a second generation of realists, but the
British had their own realism without what they regarded as Zola ’ s “ depressing view
of man and his ‘ fi lthy ’ method ” ( Furst and Skrine , Naturalism 30 – 3).
Howells, James, and Twain, all born in the 1840s, appear to have been among the
last believers in the very possibility of objective realism in the American novel. The
next generation of naturalists were more open to Zola ’ s ideas because they sprang from
what Pizer calls a “ struggle to survive materially rather than to prevail morally, ” with
fi ction as the means of exploring economic, social, and sexual worlds in terms of
survival (Pizer, Twentieth - Century 3 – 5). Between the Great Panic of the 1890s, which
left unheard - of masses of people out of work, and the terrors of World War I, there
developed literature of fragmentation, as naturalism and early modernism mingled
loss of meaning with the horrors of war. But unlike modernism in its early forms,
naturalism recognized and embraced popular culture. Unlike what became “ high ”
modernism, naturalism was a literature for the masses to accompany the broadening
of other forms of popular art, such as photography and fi lm. The popularity of some
of the naturalist writers certainly hurt them with critics – including London, Dreiser,
and Steinbeck, most notably.
Many of the naturalists, including Crane, Norris and London, began in journalism.
Led by the Hearst Syndicate, newspapers depicted the shocking lives of the poor in
the manner of Jacob Riis in How the Other Half Lives , fi rst published in Atlantic Monthly
in 1899 – 1900. In the same issue appears Norris ’ s “ Comida: An Experience in Famine, ”
about civilian war victims in Cuba, and London ’ s short story “ An Odyssey of the
North, ” the tale of the deadly impact of white miners upon the Indians of the Yukon.
Riis and the “ muckraker ” journalists, including Crane in his novel Maggie: A Girl of
the Streets, A Story of New York
(1893), documented the slums. Norris
’
s
McTeague
related the inevitable social decline of its characters due to their greed and fear of
poverty. London ’ s The People of the Abyss (1903) , a study of the poor of London ’ s East
End, is a forerunner to later sociological works such as Herbert Asbury ’ s The Gangs
of New York (1928) . Naturalists offered a full range of racial and class complexities in
the post – Civil - War landscape.
London wrote essays on Poe and other writers from a naturalist point of view, but
Norris was the earliest and most organized critical thinker on naturalism; his prema-
ture death in 1902 robbed his readers of further development in his theories. In “ Zola
as a Romantic Writer ” (1896) , Norris discounts William Dean Howells ’ s realism as
that of people “ who live across the street from us, ” people of “ small passions, restricted
emotions, dramas of the reception - room, tragedies of an afternoon call, crises involving
cups of tea ” (Norris, “ Zola as Romantic Writer ” 85). For Norris, Howells is uninter-
esting insofar is he is not passionate or romantic. Crane satirizes Howellsian “ teacup
tragedies ” in the sardonic closing scene of “ The Monster, ” his disturbing story of
middle - class gentility confronted with its own racism, when the doctor ’ s wife stares
Frank Norris and Jack London
177
at the empty teacups from her failed party as her husband relates the fate of their
black servant, Henry, horribly disfi gured while rescuing their son from their burning
house.
Naturalism is “ not an inner circle of realism, ” says Norris. Quite the contrary:
To be noted of M. Zola we must leave the rank and fi le, either to the forefront of the
marching world, or fall by the roadway; we must separate ourselves; we must become
individual, unique. The naturalist takes no note of common people, common as far as
their interests, their lives, and the things that occur in them are common, are ordinary.
Terrible things must happen to the characters of the naturalistic tale. They must be
twisted from the ordinary, wrenched out from the quiet, uneventful round of every - day
life, and fl ung into the throes of a vast and terrible drama that works itself out in
unleashed passions, in blood, and in sudden death.
Characters may be “ common, ” but what happens to them cannot be: “ These great,
terrible dramas no longer happen among the personnel of a feudal and Renaissance
nobility, those who are in the fore - front of the marching world, but among the lower
– almost the lowest – classes; those who have been thrust or wrenched from the ranks
who are falling by the roadway ” (Norris, “ Zola as Romantic Writer ” 86 – 7).
Norris could have formed an “
intellectual ” school of thought, but didn ’ t, and
because of the brevity of his career it is hard to guess what he may have done had he
lived longer. Norris ’ s most signifi cant contribution in his non - fi ction essays is to
outline how he hopes to meld the realism of Balzac and Flaubert with the demands
of a new American and an even newer West Coast, Pacifi c Rim world. Rather than
try to promote Zola ’ s uncompromising exactitude or fi t Zola ’ s naturalism with the
New England realism of Howells, Norris was drawn to Zola ’ s mixed naturalist ethics
of identity, befi tting the young Western writer ’ s possibilities. This quality Joseph M.
McElrath, Jr., describes as Norris ’ s “ celebrative description ” of naturalism as a “ plu-
ralistic and tolerant orientation ” (McElrath, Dictionary 172 – 3, 177 – 8; see also Norris,
“ Frank Norris ’ s Weekly Letter ” ).
Norris ’ s The Octopus makes an interesting comparison with London ’ s The Call of the
Wild. Both take place in the wide open spaces of the
West rather than in the tene-
ments of San Francisco; they are both “ epics ” in the sense that they are mythic tales
with mythic structures; they both address the failures in the American Dream and in
modern American society even as they celebrate the regenerative quality of the land.
Like Norris, London refl ects in his “ naturalistic romances, ” as Jacqueline Tavernier -
Courbin calls them, the romantic and the mythic dimensions of survival, though
London ’ s symbolic landscapes and archetypes are a far different thing from Norris ’ s
half - hearted nod to the romantic in the conclusion of The Octopus ; the paean to “ the
Wheat ” strikes many readers as an embarrassing evasion of the massacre that has gone
before. The longer and more complex Octopus – with its social criticisms of capitalism
and human greed diffused by romanticism, especially in the conclusion, and by the
dreamy sub - plots of the poet/protagonist Presley and the reveries of the wanderer
Vanamee – lacks the sheer force of the argument and the personal story of The Call
178
Jeanne Campbell Reesman
of the Wild . In contrast, Norris ’ s McTeague might suggest the parallel of London ’ s
psychopathological intensity in The Sea - Wolf (1904).
Both McTeague and The Call of the Wild offer intense emotional focus playing out
in life - or - death situations, portraying in graphic terms the effects of greed – their
characters must live or die by the rule of gold. In a strange way, as both protagonists,
Mac and Buck, become unproductive members of society, they become their “ true ”
selves (as is also the case with Vanamee, though probably not of Presley). Mac loses
his dental practice and, as Michael Bryson notes, he also “ loses the ability to produce,
and thus own, his self ” and reverts to an atavism (Bryson 5). Within that fi eld, many
of Norris ’ s themes and symbols in McTeague would fi nd parallels and mirrorings in
the patterning of The Call of the Wild . Critical elements in each book involve such
key naturalistic concerns as the nature of the self; heredity and environment in shaping
lives versus free will; Darwinistic ideas concerning an individual ’ s ability to adapt to
environment; awareness of the human capacity for animalistic and brutal behavior;
patterns of dominance and submission; survival of the individual versus survival of
A Companion to the American Short Story Page 39