Donna Campbell
In “The Responsibilities of the Novelist,” Frank Norris (1870–1902) summed up what he considered to be the primary requirement for a novelist: “By God, I told them the truth. They liked it or they didn’t like it. What had that to do with me? I knew it for the truth then, and I know it for the truth now” (Crisler and McElrath 2013: 170). Norris’s obsession with telling the underlying truth, which he distinguished from mere superficial accuracy, mirrors that of his contemporaries Stephen Crane (1871–1900), Theodore Dreiser (1871–1945), and Jack London (1876–1916). Not all shared Norris’s enthusiasm for the French novelist and theorist Émile Zola, but all shared his commitment to truth and the principles that defined American literary naturalism, even if they did not name it as such. They, like Norris, wrote to find evidence of the forces – hereditary, environmental, social, and economic – that determined the course of human lives, and they recorded the often sordid or destructive causes and consequences of human behavior, breaking with literary norms of decorum to do so. As subject matter they chose violent or conflict‐filled events that revealed human nature in its most primitive state. Their themes of nature’s indifference and the illusory quality of free will challenged the belief that human beings were distinct from the rest of the animal kingdom, although, as Donald Pizer has argued, a “compensating humanistic value” creates a thematic tension in many naturalistic works (Pizer 2006: 11). As traditionally defined, literary naturalism pairs a method of composition based in experimental science – objective documentary realism marked by scrupulous observations and an accumulation of details – with a deterministic philosophy that represents human beings at their most elemental and at the mercy of forces over which they had no control.
To investigate these forces, Crane, Norris, Dreiser, and London took their subjects from people existing on the social, economic, or geographic margins of society, often those trapped in poverty or struggling to survive in an unforgiving natural world. They rejected the optimistic solutions of the social‐problem novels of Rebecca Harding Davis and Elizabeth Stuart Phelps in the 1860s and 1870s, the middle‐ and upper‐class realism of Henry James and William Dean Howells in the 1880s, and the escapist imperial adventure tales and romances of George Barr McCutcheon and Richard Harding Davis in the 1890s, believing that none adequately represented the conditions of life as they saw it. Whether guided by Zola, as Norris was, by practical observations during their poverty‐stricken childhoods, like Dreiser and London, or by experiences as a penniless reporter, like Crane, each saw the struggles of individuals against economic and social systems that kept them in poverty less through design than through indifference. As naturalists, they adopted the scientific empiricism of the nineteenth century, including the evolutionary theories of Charles Darwin (1809–1882) and Herbert Spencer (1820–1903), whose theory of the “survival of the fittest,” like Darwin’s theories of inherited traits in On the Origin of Species (1859), supported the naturalists’ belief that human beings were fundamentally, in Zola’s term, “human beasts” whose animal nature would reveal itself under duress, when the veneer of civilization was stripped away by the pressures of a dangerous or obstructive environment. As Zola wrote in “The Experimental Novel” (1880), “Naturalism, in letters, is equally a return to nature and to man; it is direct observation, exact anatomy, the acceptance and depiction of what is” (Zola 1963: 201). Depicting “what is” took precedence over features such as balanced structural elements and style, for, as Norris wrote in 1899, “Who cares for fine style! Tell your yarn and let your style go to the Devil. We don’t want literature, we want life” (Norris 1986a: 67). At its best, their professed indifference to style and commitment to representing “life” meant that the naturalists stripped away nineteenth‐century rhetorical excesses and wrote prose that was vigorous and strikingly modern, as Crane and London did. At its worst, paying secondary attention to style raised the ire of subsequent generations of critics schooled in modernist literary values.
These four naturalist authors shared biographical as well as philosophical similarities. Born within a half‐decade of each other in the 1870s, all came of age when the robber barons of the Gilded Age made conspicuous consumption and income disparity the topic of mixed national scandal and popular envy. All four worked as journalists in their twenties, reporting on strikes, urban poverty, and industrial conditions; three were also war correspondents, with Norris briefly covering the Boer War and the Spanish–American War in Cuba, Crane sending dispatches from Cuba and the Greco–Turkish War, and London traveling to Korea for the Russo–Japanese War in 1904 and to Mexico to cover Pancho Villa in the Mexican Revolution of 1914. Their journalism provided them with some literary material, yet the relationship of their fiction to their journalistic experiences is complex, for none could be considered a conventional reporter. Despite his brief forays into war journalism, Norris’s experience included two years as an editor of and contributor to The Wave, a San Francisco weekly devoted to arts and leisure, and writing essays on fiction for the Boston Transcript and World’s Work; Crane was commissioned to write as a war correspondent only after he had worked as a reporter in New York and published his most famous novel, The Red Badge of Courage; Dreiser wrote features for the St. Louis Globe‐Democrat, the St. Louis Republic, and the Pittsburgh Dispatch and worked as the editor of Ev’ry Month and, later, The Delineator before becoming known primarily as a novelist; and London wrote for the Hearst syndicate only after he had made his name as a novelist.
In the case of Crane and especially London, whose adventures made news in their own right, the intersections of journalism, autobiography, and fiction blurred generic distinctions between fact and fiction. Shifting between fiction and journalism throughout their careers, all four would fit within the “fact–fiction discourse” of the late nineteenth century, when, according to Michael Robertson, readers were less concerned about the “ideology of objectivity” that came to dominate newspaper reporting during the 1920s (Robertson 1997: 4). All but Dreiser died young, and before their deaths each had reached beyond the intensely material foundations of naturalism to explore elements of the supernatural or spiritual: Crane in the bitter, ironic parables of quarrels with an unfeeling God that constitute a large portion of his poetry; Norris in the spiritual reincarnation fantasy of Angèle Varian in The Octopus (1901); Dreiser in the “Efrit,” the spirit or genie of An American Tragedy (1925) and the philosophical musings of his essays in Hey Rub‐a‐Dub‐Dub (1920); and London in the atavistic theories and, later, Jungian archetypes that informed the past lives primitivism of his fiction. Taken together, these four authors comprise a representative though by no means comprehensive sampling of the various forms of American literary naturalism in its classic phase, and they embody the contradictions that have made naturalism a difficult‐to‐define, complex literary form.
The concepts of naturalism to which these authors responded were based in nineteenth‐century scientific empiricism. Naturalist authors studied human beings as scientists studied organisms under the microscope, adding complexity and obstacles to challenge their characters and observe the results. Yet except for the evolutionary principles of Darwin and Spencer, the scientific theories they adopted were often dubious or dangerously wrong, as in Norris’s and London’s belief that evolutionary theory supported Nordic and Anglo‐Saxon superiority over other races. London’s The Call of the Wild (1903) and Norris’s short story “Lauth” (1893) rely on atavism, or the reversion to an ancestral type during to an earlier, simpler stage of evolution, as well as race memory, traces of a subconsciously remembered primordial past, for their characters’ transformation from civilization into a more primitive state of existence. For London, the transformation can be beneficial: when an overcivilized man, such as Humphrey Van Weyden of The Sea‐Wolf (1904) and Freddie Drummond of “South of the Slot” (1909), or an overcivilized dog, such as Buck in The Call of the Wild, reverts to a more primitive state, he not only gains physical strength but also returns to a sense of true values grounded in natural rather than man‐made law. Another concept, devolution or degeneration, proposes that under the pressures of society, human beings decline into degeneracy, an idea popularized by the Hungarian physician and social critic Max Nordau in Degeneration (1892). The degeneration of the title character in Norris’s posthumously published Vandover and the Brute (1914) occurs as dissipation and a lack of will conspire to make Vandover, like the title character of Norris’s earlier novel McTeague (1899), more animal than human – a barking wolf when his fits of “becom[ing] the brute” (Norris 1986b: 233) overtake him, and an abject, weak‐willed near‐beggar the rest of the time. Equally dubious but treated seriously by Norris in his early story “A Case for Lombroso” (1897) were the Italian physician Cesare Lombroso’s theories of criminality as an inborn predisposition to brutishness predicted by the individual’s physiognomy and racial traits. In describing Hurstwood’s decline in Sister Carrie (1900), Dreiser theorizes that emotional states of mind could produce “chemisms” such as “katastates,” or “poisons in the blood,” and “anastates,” or “helpful chemicals” (Dreiser 2006: 231), another adaptation of nineteenth‐century scientific principles. Despite these later‐disproven views, however, the naturalists were ahead of their time in their use of science, not only in their broad acceptance of evolutionary theory and scientific treatment but also in positing biological, and later, unconscious psychological, motives for human actions.
Nor were Crane, Norris, London, and Dreiser the only ones writing naturalistic fiction, often narrowly defined by the period in which it first came to prominence (1895–1915), by assumptions about the race and gender of its authors (young, white, and male), and by the self‐imposed limitations of its deterministic philosophy and objective method. Their contemporaries include Harold Frederic, whose The Damnation of Theron Ware (1896) caused a sensation for its portrait of a minister who loses his faith; Hamlin Garland, for his bleak portrayal of Great Plains life in Main‐Travelled Roads (1891) and of female sexuality in Rose of Dutcher’s Coolly (1895); and Paul Laurence Dunbar, whose The Sport of the Gods (1902) combines several naturalistic features – imprisonment and the failure of justice, poverty, sexuality, the lure of the city and the breakdown of the family – with a critique of institutional racism. Women novelists often classed as naturalists include Kate Chopin, for The Awakening (1899), which chronicled its heroine’s growth as an artist and as an independent woman experiencing sexual desire; Edith Wharton, for the social determinism of The House of Mirth (1905), Ethan Frome (1911), Summer (1917), and The Age of Innocence (1920); Willa Cather, for the environmental determinism that hampers artistic temperaments in early stories such as “The Sculptor’s Funeral” and “Paul’s Case,” both published in 1905; Ellen Glasgow, whose early naturalistic city novels The Descendant (1897) and Phases of an Inferior Planet (1898) prefigure Barren Ground (1925), her masterpiece of rural naturalism; and Edith Summers Kelley, whose little‐known classic Weeds (1923) is a frank presentation of female desire and the rigors of childbirth. The techniques of naturalism, including its concrete and often repellent descriptions, its gritty violence, its focus on working‐class lives, including the brutal physical toll of factory work, and its representation of sexuality, served a more pointedly progressivist agenda in novels such as Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle (1906) and David Graham Phillips’s Susan Lenox: Her Fall and Rise (1917), naturalistic novels weighted more heavily toward social reform.
Later in the twentieth century, naturalism continued to flourish due to what Donald Pizer characterizes as its trademark “flexibility and amorphousness […] [that] rest[s] on the relationship between a restrictive social and intellectual environment and the consequent impoverishment both of social opportunity and of the inner life” (Pizer 1995: 13). In the 1920s and 1930s, John Dos Passos, James T. Farrell, Evelyn Scott, and John Steinbeck wrote naturalistic fiction, while the fiction of Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, and F. Scott Fitzgerald (in The Beautiful and Damned, 1922) showed its influence. Proletarian realists of the 1930s such as Meridel Le Sueur (The Girl, 1939), Henry Roth (Call It Sleep, 1934), and Mike Gold (Jews Without Money, 1930) relied on the same impoverished characters and urban backgrounds as naturalism; and the hard‐boiled novelists James M. Cain (The Postman Always Rings Twice, 1934) and Horace McCoy (They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? 1935) adapted naturalism’s representations of violence, desire, and class constraints to a Depression‐era setting. Dos Passos’s Manhattan Transfer (1925) and his massive U.S.A. trilogy – The 42nd Parallel (1930), 1919 (1932), and The Big Money (1936) – combine the techniques of literary modernism, such as fragmentary narration and elliptical construction, with the naturalistic representation of working‐class characters trapped in biological, social, and economic environments that imprison them. Less well known than Dos Passos, Evelyn Scott, beginning with The Narrow House (1921) and continuing with its two sequels (Narcissus, 1922, and The Golden Door, 1925) renders a suffocatingly intense multigenerational family drama, replete with emotional violence and death, through the modernist technique of refracting the plot through multiple narrators and through imagistic, impressionistic prose. Farrell’s Studs Lonigan trilogy (Young Lonigan, 1932; The Young Manhood of Studs Lonigan, 1934; and Judgment Day, 1935) and Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath (1939) chronicled the descent into poverty of working‐class families struggling in the Depression. In the 1940s and 1950s, Richard Wright’s Native Son (1940) and Ann Petry’s The Street (1946) represented African American experience through a naturalistic lens, which Norman Mailer in The Naked and the Dead (1948) turned upon soldiers in World War II. From the 1960s to the present, writers hailed as naturalistic include Joyce Carol Oates (them, 1964), Hubert Selby, Jr. (Last Exit to Brooklyn, 1964), William Kennedy (Ironweed, 1983), Don DeLillo (Libra, 1988), and Cormac McCarthy, whose The Road (2006) owes something of its title and tradition to Jack London’s 1907 non‐fiction account of his life as a self‐described hobo.
From its earliest days naturalism has caused controversy both for its “enslave[ment] by scientific methods” and for the “obscenities and filth” that result when “some angel of the pit, some new Zola, will come to stir the surface of the cesspools of society,” as William Roscoe Thayer wrote disapprovingly in 1894 (Thayer 1998: 166). Treated as both brave and shockingly real from its earliest works, such as Stephen Crane’s Maggie: A Girl of the Streets (1893, 1896), Frank Norris’s McTeague (1899), and Theodore Dreiser’s Sister Carrie (1900), naturalism attracted critical outrage for its frank portrayal of urban poverty, violence, and sexuality without the superimposition of middle‐class morality. When Crane wrote “it is inevitable that you will be greatly shocked” (Sorrentino 2014: 110) as an inscription in Hamlin Garland’s copy of Maggie, the shock to which he referred was less the fact of Maggie’s fall or even her death, both staples of sentimental slum literature, religious tracts, and fallen woman stories, than to its lack of a didactic conclusion. In a more sympathetic vein than Thayer, William Dean Howells praised Norris’s development in McTeague as “a change from the romantic to the realistic temperature” and noted that Norris “reminds you of Zola” in ignoring “any sort of nature or character beyond or above those of Polk Street or San Francisco.” But, cautions Howells, Norris has not learned all of his lessons as an artist: “His true picture of life is not true, because it leaves beauty out,” meeting the principles of Zola but lacking “the spiritual light and air, the consecration which the larger art of Tolstoy gives” (Howells 1899: 241, 242). Unwilling to cede entirely the decorum of realism, Howells praised the new naturalism while still affirming the higher ethical purposes of the older form.
Although outrage based on naturalism’s supposed obscenity had subsided by the 1920s, it slid further in critical esteem during this period with the rise of two cultural movements. The first, the New Humanism of Paul Elmer More, Stuart P. Sherman, and Irving Babbitt, imposed an aesthetic criterion of moral order and free will on literary characters that ran contrary to naturalism’s disinterested perspective and insistence on uncovering the animal nature beneath the human skin. As Stuart Pratt Sherman put it in his famous attack in The Nation, “Mr. Dreiser drives home the great truth that man is essentially an animal, impelled by temperament, instinct, physics, chemistry – anything you please that is irrational and uncontrollable” (Sherman 1915: 649), something that London, with his insistence that “You must not deny your relatives, the other animals,” would have seen as a virtue rather than a flaw (London 1910: 265–266). Sherman charged that Dreiser’s details were “the certification of the unreal by the irrelevant” (650), a means of divorcing the inherently moral nature of human beings from their biological functions. The second and more influential movement, literary modernism, accepted naturalism’s sense of random causality but scorned its admitted indifference to style. While influential critics such as H.L. Mencken praised Dreiser’s work for its power and saw style as part of that effect, Dorothy Parker, in the New Yorker, spoke for the modernists when she implicitly rejected Mencken’s perspective by complaining, “It is not of such small importance to me that Dreiser writes in so abominable a style. […] [I]t is the first job of a writer who demands rating among the great, or even any good, to write well […] [and] Mr. Dreiser […] muffs it” (Parker 1931: 70). A defense of Dreiser’s style would not be mounted effectively until decades later, most recently in Paul Giles’s sophisticated poststructuralist reading of it as not “maladroitness but […] a lack of trust in the fidelity of the relationship between language and object” (Giles 2004: 59).
Postwar criticism held a premature burial for naturalism, culminating in Edward Stone’s What Was Naturalism? (1959), derived from what can only be called the “simpler time” thesis – that although naturalism’s focus on external reality and sociological approach were appropriate for the problems of earlier decades, postwar anxieties and fragmentation had turned the field of battle inward, toward psychological and psychoanalytic approaches. Left silently unaddressed by postwar critics is naturalism’s engagement with exposing social injustice, which caused its reputation to decline during the politically conservative anti‐communist climate of the 1950s. Instead, critics steered clear of politics and focused on sources and influences, as in Lars Åhnebrink’s influential The Beginnings of Naturalism in American Fiction, 1891–1903 (1950), which found French models for American naturalism. George Becker, who attempted to “dismiss the credibility of realism and naturalism as terms in American literary history” (Pizer 1995: 4), called naturalism “pessimistic materialistic determinism,” a succinct and often‐quoted definition that defined naturalism by its limitations (Becker 1963: 35). But criticism in the half‐century since Becker’s definition has challenged each of these terms, revealing aesthetic complexity, broad relevance, and political immediacy in a literary movement once derided as reductive.
In the 1960s and 1970s, criticism on naturalism underwent a revival when studies went beyond the intellectual history of the movement to provide a stable ground for close readings of naturalist authors. Adding the tools of New Criticism and formalism to traditional bibliographic and influence studies, critics examined “naturalism as a far more complex phenomenon than a transplanting of Zolaesque deterministic themes to the American scene” (Pizer 2000: 30). Among these critics were Charles Child Walcutt, who in American Literary Naturalism: A Divided Stream (1956) saw in naturalism’s vision of indifferent nature an inverted transcendentalism; and Pizer, who in Realism and Naturalism in Nineteenth‐Century Literature (1966) and a series of other book‐length studies and essays over the next several decades established the aesthetic complexity of naturalistic works, including their themes, structure, and use of symbolism.
In the 1980s and 1990s, Walter Benn Michaels’s The Gold Standard and the Logic of Naturalism (1987) sidestepped the perennial debate over whether naturalism was distinct from or a subsidiary of either romance or realism by arguing that naturalist characters, rather than being victims of indifferent forces, shared complicity in a capitalist system that victimized them. Amy Kaplan’s The Social Construction of American Realism (1988) and June Howard’s Form and History in American Literary Naturalism (1985) addressed issues of class anxieties, with Kaplan seeing realism as a strategy for managing threats of social change and Howard, in an influential Marxist reading, demonstrating the class instabilities and the fear of falling into poverty that inhere in and structure naturalist novels. Another strand of criticism was the material turn, reflected in studies such as Rachel Bowlby’s Just Looking: Consumer Culture in Dreiser, Gissing, and Zola (1985), which studied characters’ relationships to physical objects in a genre that objectifies its characters, especially women, as inarticulate characters in a consumer culture that seeks to consume them in return; later materialist readings include Mark Seltzer’s Bodies and Machines (1992) and Bill Brown’s A Sense of Things: The Object Matter of American Literature (2003). In the 1990s, Paul Civello’s American Literary Naturalism and Its Twentieth‐Century Transformations (1994), Christophe Den Tandt’s The Urban Sublime in American Literary Naturalism (1998), Donna M. Campbell’s Resisting Regionalism: Gender and Naturalism in American Fiction, 1885–1915 (1997), and James R. Giles’s The Naturalistic Inner‐City Novel in America (1995) explore the thematic relations of naturalism to modernism, to the urban sublime, to the gendered relationships between regionalism and naturalism, and to the landscapes of urban violence and anxiety, respectively.
Twenty‐first‐century criticism has continued to broaden the scope of naturalism’s relevance and complexity by expanding its canon temporally, by including women writers and authors of color, and by offering new theoretical perspectives. Eric Carl Link’s thematic approach in The Vast and Terrible Drama (2004) continues expanding the canon by including Oliver Wendell Holmes, and Richard Lehan’s historical overview of naturalism in Realism and Naturalism (2005) proposes naturalism as a mode rather than a genre. Nicolas Witschi’s Traces of Gold (2002) and Mary Lawlor’s Recalling the Wild (2000) focus on naturalism, ecocritical concerns, and the national fascination with frontier mythology in the West. Other recent studies overturn common critical assumptions, as in John Dudley’s investigation of African American naturalism in A Man’s Game (2008), Jennifer Fleissner’s study of the modern woman as central to naturalism’s plots of repetition rather than decline in Women, Compulsion, Modernity (2004), Donald Pizer’s analysis of anti‐Semitism in Naturalism and the Jews (2008), and Donna M. Campbell’s study of women writers, early cinema, cultures of waste, and alternative forms of naturalism in Bitter Tastes: Literary Naturalism and Early Cinema in American Women’s Writing (2016). In The Antinomies of Realism (2013), Fredric Jameson revisits the debate over whether naturalism is simply an offshoot of realism by calling it “far more class marked and localized than realism in general” and concluding that its “trajectory of decline and failure” (149) and “the fear of déclassement” render it a “specialized” (150) form. Other newer theoretical studies include Michael Lundblad’s animal studies approach in The Birth of a Jungle (2013). This increasing interest attests to the flexibility and currency of naturalism’s traditional preoccupations and to their applicability to contemporary concerns: the relationship between bodies, technology, and inanimate objects; the nature of free will, sexuality and gender construction, and consciousness as shaped by environment; the economic and political systems, both hidden and overt, that shape the lives of human beings, especially those disadvantaged by class, race, or gender; and the challenging of concepts of “human” and “individual” in an era of the posthuman.
The best‐known apostle of naturalism in his own day, Frank Norris deliberately patterned his writing on that of Émile Zola. “Terrible things must happen to the characters of the naturalistic tale,” wrote Norris in “Zola as a Romantic Writer.” “They must be twisted from the ordinary, wrenched out from the quiet, uneventful round of every‐day life, and flung into the throes of a vast and terrible drama that works itself out in unleashed passions, in blood, and in sudden death” (Norris 1986b: 1107). Born to a well‐to‐do family in Chicago on 5 March 1870, Norris grew up in San Francisco and returned to the city after studying painting at the Académie Julian in Paris from 1887 to 1889, an experience that sharpened his aesthetic sense and eye for detail. Learning evolutionary theory from Professor Joseph LeConte at Berkeley, Norris attended Harvard University in 1894–1895, writing the daily themes that later served as raw material for McTeague. After spending two years writing for The Wave, Norris published Moran of the Lady Letty (1898), A Man’s Woman (1900), and the courtship novel Blix (1899), which examined the nature of masculinity through their protagonists’ encounters with strong women characters. Norris became a full‐fledged member of the New York publishing world in 1899, when he oversaw the publication of McTeague and promoted the publication of Theodore Dreiser’s first novel, Sister Carrie. As he wrote to William Dean Howells, the preeminent proponent of realism in the United States, he planned to write a trilogy, the “Epic of the Wheat,” which would be “First, a story of California, (the producer), second, a story of Chicago (the distributor)[,] third, a story of Europe (the Consumer) and in each to keep to the idea of this huge, Niagara of wheat rolling from West to East” (Norris 1986a: 73). Norris completed two novels of this ambitious plan: The Octopus (1901), based on the 1880 Mussel Slough conflict between farmers in the San Joaquin Valley of California and the Southern Pacific Railroad; and The Pit (1903), based on Joseph Leiter’s real‐life cornering of the wheat market and the subsequent collapse of that market in 1892. Returning to California, Norris died on 25 October 1902, while planning a round‐the‐world trip to research The Wolf, the last volume in his “Epic of the Wheat.” Although the posthumously published Vandover and the Brute (1914) and The Pit (1903) are significant novels, McTeague and The Octopus are considered his best work.
Narrated in a manner that mimics evolutionary time – that is, with brief bursts of disruption requiring adaptation followed by long periods of equilibrium – McTeague establishes that chance events have a long train of consequences that initially remain hidden. It follows Norris’s principles in its depiction of the forces of heredity and environment, its rendering of lower‐class characters riven with desires and drives that they cannot understand, and an atavistic portrayal of the “beast within” that emerges from McTeague’s heredity to challenge his veneer of civilization. As a naturalistic character, McTeague encounters forces he cannot control: his limited intellect (he is called “stupid” 35 times in the novel), a “foul taint” of inherited alcoholism, and an urban environment in which his massive physical strength is a liability rather than an asset. Overcome with sexual desire, the brutish but somnolent dentist McTeague kisses Trina Sieppe, the cousin and girlfriend of his best friend, Marcus Schouler, while she is unconscious in his dental chair. From that point, random events pierce the equilibrium of their lives: Trina, now engaged to McTeague, wins $5000 in a lottery, stirring Marcus’s jealousy; Marcus then reports McTeague’s lack of credentials to the dental licensing board, which causes McTeague to lose his patients. Prompted by an inability to drink any alcohol stronger than beer, and goaded by Trina’s miserliness, attributed to her Swiss–German heritage, McTeague descends into a brutality that leads to his beating her to death, after which he sets out for the Big Dipper mine and his old life as a miner, with his old nemesis Marcus following him. Out of water, with no way out of Death Valley, Marcus nonetheless attempts to steal the gold that McTeague has stolen from Trina after murdering her. McTeague beats him with his mallet‐like fists, and the dying Marcus handcuffs himself to McTeague, ensuring McTeague’s death as well as his own. In the midst of a vast, arid wasteland, the two recapitulate the enmeshed dependency forged by the values of the city, and, like twins conjoined by their desire for gold, one cannot live if the other dies.
The periods of equilibrium broken by disruption intensify the sense of determinism in the novel’s incidents and settings. Prior to the events that culminate in Marcus’s death, ordinary social occasions, such as a picnic, a vaudeville show, a wedding dinner, and male gatherings at Frenna’s Saloon punctuate McTeague’s monotonous life, yet they often end in disorder and violence. Although disruptive incidents such as Trina’s winning the money are individually unpredictable, the ways in which the characters have been shaped by heredity and environment render their responses inevitable. Even the seeming coincidence of Marcus, bent on revenge, following and finding McTeague in Death Valley is the logical consequence of the characters’ previous actions. Like the sequence of social occasions, the novel’s spatial realism promises an orderly containment of human impulses within the Zolaesque narrow neighborhood of Polk Street, yet this promise deteriorates as McTeague and Trina inhabit increasingly smaller rooms. Their spatial constriction mirrors their descent of the social ladder as each degenerates into inherited traits of alcoholism and brutality, for McTeague, and miserliness, for Trina. The plot unravels from the equilibrium of McTeague’s ritualistic Sunday naps into the undefined spaces of the desert and the chaos of murder, a movement toward entropy that David Baguley (2005) identifies as a chief characteristic of naturalism. Earlier studies traced the novel’s pervasive gold symbolism, its elements of parody and humor, Norris’s influences (Zola, Rudyard Kipling, and the American writer H.C. Bunner among them), and his allusions to art and architecture in the novel. Other critical issues include repetitions in the novel and the “problem” of its structure – McTeague’s movement from San Francisco to the Big Dipper mine and from there to Death Valley.
The first volume of Norris’s abortive “Epic of the Wheat,” The Octopus (1901), follows the movements of the poet Presley, a stand‐in for Norris, as he interacts with the residents of the San Joaquin Valley. Those include the upstanding citizen Magnus Derrick and his family; the semi‐comical confirmed bachelor Annixter, who astonishes himself when he falls in love with and marries Hilma Tree; the wandering mystic Vanamee, who meets Angèle Varian, the daughter and, he believes, the reincarnated spirit of his lost love; and S. Behrman, the agent of the railroad who dies a suitably gruesome death when engulfed in wheat. With a broader scope, a political perspective, and a larger cast of characters than in his earlier novels, The Octopus opens with an ominous image as Presley watches the slaughter of a flock of sheep by a speeding train. In this opening scene and throughout the novel, in a classically naturalistic trope, Norris parallels the helplessness of animals, as in a round‐up of jackrabbits drawn in an ever‐tightening circle of hunters or animals caught by the thresher, with that of the ranchers who are equally unconscious of the machinations of the Southern Pacific Railroad, the Octopus of the title. The novel concludes with alternating sections focusing on the economic losers of the conflict, the starving Hooven family, begging and dying in the streets, and the economic winners, the Cedarquists, stuffing themselves with food and conversation at a dinner party. Whereas earlier criticism of the novel identified sources for the characters and analyzed its Darwinism, its structure, its spiritualism, and its use of Presley as an artist figure on a quest, newer studies offer a wide range of approaches. Just as recent work on McTeague has included approaches through ecocriticsm, postmodernism, the grotesque, cinematic technology, and masculinity and male desire, approaches to The Octopus include geocriticism and mapping, economics and commodity fetishism, ethics and capitalism, classical literature and interpretive conventions, and D.W. Griffith’s adaptation of the novel in his early film A Corner in Wheat (1909).
Unlike Norris and Crane, whose early deaths compressed their entire careers into less than a decade, Dreiser began writing fiction only after an impoverished childhood and a career as a newspaper reporter, publishing his first novel in 1900, when he was 29, and thereafter writing a wide range of other works until his death in 1945. Born in Terre Haute, Indiana, on 27 August 1871, Herman Theodore Dreiser was the twelfth child of a poor but strict Catholic father, John Paul Dreiser, a German immigrant, and a Mennonite mother, Sarah Shänäb Dreiser, whose bent for mysticism and capacity for sympathy drew Dreiser and his siblings close to her. The stigma of the family’s poverty, which Dreiser felt deeply, was exacerbated by the actions of his sisters as first Emma, later the model for Carrie Meeber in his novel Sister Carrie, ran off with a married man, and Mame, the model for Jennie Gerhardt, returned home pregnant and unmarried, both humiliating events in a historical moment when having a child out of wedlock was a source of deep shame. Enthusiastically endorsed by Frank Norris, then a reader for Doubleday & Page, Sister Carrie was published in 1900; however, its poor sales led Dreiser to spread the story that due to Mrs. Doubleday’s shocked response, Frank N. Doubleday refused to publicize it. Despite a physical and emotional breakdown after this setback and the failure of his marriage to Sara Osborne White, Dreiser forged a career that included Jennie Gerhardt (1911); his “Trilogy of Desire,” The Financier (1912), The Titan (1914), and The Stoic (1947), the story of business tycoon Frank Cowperwood; The “Genius” (1916), which was suppressed for its supposed obscenity; and An American Tragedy (1925), as well as additional novels and books of travel, philosophy, drama, and autobiography. Although Jennie Gerhardt and The Financier are significant novels, Sister Carrie and An American Tragedy remain Dreiser’s masterpieces. Dreiser drew from life, yet actual incidents were always merely the skeleton of events upon which to build his critique of a capitalist culture in which social class and economic deprivation rendered the ideal of class mobility a cruel hoax.
Sister Carrie challenges the conventional fallen woman narrative by combining it with a realistic take on the Horatio Alger success story. As Jude Davies points out, the “existing tradition of urban social mobility” of the Horatio Alger story involved a young man’s rise through “luck and pluck,” including the fortuitous help of an “already successful older male” (Davies 2011: 381, 382). The narrative for a young woman was equally formulaic but led to her downfall; as Dreiser’s narrator warns his reader in the opening lines of the novel, a young woman who goes to the city either “falls into saving hands” or “rapidly assumes the cosmopolitan standard of virtue and becomes worse” (Dreiser 2006: 1). With these lines Dreiser echoes conventional views of the city, which traditionally assumes a metonymic force as the cause and signifier of a woman’s ruin, as in “She Went to the City,” a 1904 song written by Dreiser’s older brother Paul Dresser. But Dreiser’s point is that “becoming worse” is relative and that there is an inverse relation between virtue and financial success. Carrie leaves her small town and never looks back. Trapped in a life of drudgery, with repetitive tasks at work and dull poverty at her sister’s home, Carrie is surrounded by seductive consumer goods and an urban environment that speak to her desire for something more, which she achieves by living first with Charles Drouet, a traveling salesman or “drummer” whom she had met on the train; and then with George Hurstwood, a married saloon manager who absconds with the company’s money to transport Carrie to New York. Carrie’s subsequent rise in the theater progresses in counterpoint with Hurstwood’s fall and eventual suicide.
Dreiser’s achievement is the creation of a world in which the material environment of the city speaks as loudly as the characters. The attraction that Carrie Meeber feels is not for Charles Drouet but for the clothes that speak to her imagination and the “two soft, green ten‐dollar bills” that he presses into her hands (Dreiser 2006: 45). In Sister Carrie, the absence of speech expresses deep feeling through what the character fails to say, as when Carrie, on the stage, invests the well‐worn lines of the melodrama Under the Gaslight with a quality of longing that is her distinguishing characteristic. As many critics have noted, Carrie acts from instinct and imitation, her blankness and unsatisfied desire creating a surface upon which audiences can inscribe their own feelings. Dreiser’s characters are often reactive rather than active, asserting themselves only when activated by a situation that thwarts them, as when Hurstwood loses his money and his partnership in a saloon. Faced with poverty and aided by her youth during Hurstwood’s loss of work, Carrie reacts and exerts herself to go on the stage; impoverished and battered after his one stint at running a streetcar during a transit strike, Hurstwood instead retreats to his newspaper to read about life rather than engaging with it. Perhaps the most daring part of Sister Carrie is that Carrie behaves toward Hurstwood as faithlessly as Hurstwood had behaved toward her; instead of the traditional womanly virtues of self‐sacrifice and fidelity, she exhibits a ready sense of self‐preservation and leaves him.
Published 25 years after Sister Carrie, An American Tragedy is ostensibly the story of a murder but is actually an American tragedy of aspiration. Book I provides the background of Clyde Griffiths, son of itinerant street missionaries, whose job as a bellhop allows him to distance himself from his family; when a car he is joyriding in kills a child, he flees, the first instance of his avoiding responsibility for his actions. In Book II, he is a low‐level manager at his wealthy uncle’s collar factory, where he begins an affair with a worker on the production line, Roberta Alden. Mistaken for his handsome cousin, Clyde is taken up by the wealthy Sondra Finchley but continues seeing Roberta. When Roberta becomes pregnant, Clyde tries to find her an abortionist but cannot. A reader of Freud and Jung, Dreiser saw sexuality and its expression as natural; daringly for the time, the book suggests that with adequate knowledge of contraceptive techniques, illegal at that time, Roberta Alden would still be alive. Threatened with exposure, and thinking idly about killing her, Clyde assumes a false identity and travels with Roberta to the Adirondacks. He takes her canoeing on Big Bittern Lake, but when the boat capsizes, he fails to act, leaving her to drown and intentionally scattering evidence to suggest that he has drowned with her. Book III covers the trial, in which a district attorney hungry for reelection tampers with the evidence, yet neither Clyde nor the narrator can attest unequivocally to his guilt or his intention to murder Roberta. For his defense attorneys, his minister, the reader, and even Clyde himself this question remains unanswerable, with the result that he remains a sympathetic figure and his complicity in Roberta’s death a matter of ambiguity. As he made plain in interviews and elsewhere, Dreiser wanted the focus to be less on Clyde’s culpability than on the convergence of desires and external social and economic forces that led to his actions.
In addition to work on the novel’s sources and origins in the sensational Chester Gillette murder trial of 1906, critical commentary on An American Tragedy has ranged from the novel’s naturalism to Dreiser’s portrayal of class, gender, and the social forces that conspire to cause Clyde’s downfall. Like Carrie Meeber, Clyde is initially a reactive rather than an active character, pushed as he is in multiple directions by internal and external forces, including those symbolized by Roberta and Sondra. Yet as Joseph Karaganis contends, in addition to classic determinants such as “instinct, mechanism, the sex drive, [and] survival of the fittest,” Clyde is driven by the peculiarly modern desire for “spectacularity” or celebrity, the pleasure of being seen (Karaganis 2000: 160, 165). Other critics focus on questions of genre and style, as well as Dreiser’s use of repetitive patterns and doubled characters – Clyde is repeatedly compared to and mistaken for his cousin Gilbert, for example – as a means of organizing the work. Perhaps most influential, however, is an implicit critical perspective that sees Clyde as representing the complexities of being human in the modern age. Like Carrie Meeber, he is a “waif amid forces,” drawn by, and shaped by, the trappings of modernity he encounters in the modern city.
An American Tragedy applies these themes of the tensions between passivity and self‐determination, between a desire for class mobility and a rigid social system, and between ambition for self‐betterment and a conventional morality that constrains action. These tensions create a causal path that leads to accidental murder, a seeming oxymoron that reflects the ambiguity surrounding the climactic murder and trial scenes in the book. Despite Dreiser’s sense of kinship with nature and Transcendentalism, which Jerome Loving addresses in his critical biography of Dreiser (2005), nature cannot solve any problems for characters such as Carrie Meeber and Clyde Griffiths. The limits they face are primarily urban and based in social class and economic forces. Dreiser’s characters understand social class not through the power that they hope to wield but through the consumer desires that they hope to satisfy. With a style that relied on the documentary accretion of minute but telling details, Dreiser made the exquisitely ambiguous moral situation from which there was no escape the subject of nuanced emotional calculations on the part of his protagonists, who are caught between conventional standards of ethical behavior and an inchoate longing composed of sexual, consumer, and class‐based desire.
Within the span of 28 years, Stephen Crane published “five novels; two novellas; two collections of poetry; more than two hundred stories, tales, and sketches; and scores of news dispatches” (Sorrentino 2014: 6), gaining a lasting reputation despite the brevity of his career. Crane was born on 1 November 1871, in Newark, New Jersey, the fourteenth child of Reverend Jonathan Townley Crane and Mary Helen Peck Crane, a temperance lecturer. After attending a military boarding school, Crane briefly attended Lafayette College and then Syracuse University before moving to New York. There, he lived in poverty while writing stories and Maggie: A Girl of the Streets, which he published at his own expense under the pseudonym “Johnston Smith” in 1893. A sensation when it was published in October 1895, The Red Badge of Courage made Crane’s reputation and increased demand for his stories and for his war reporting. In 1897 he headed for Cuba, but his ship, the Commodore, sank off the Florida coast, an incident captured in his finest story, “The Open Boat.” After covering the war in Cuba for Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World, Crane moved to England with his common‐law wife, Cora Stewart, and lived for a time in a crumbling manor house near Henry James, Joseph Conrad, and Harold Frederic. As Willa Cather noted when she met him in Nebraska in 1895, Crane seemed to believe that he would not live long, and by 1899 his health deteriorated as he wrote incessantly to support his household. Despite being rushed to a sanitorium in Germany in the spring of 1900, Crane died of tubercular hemorrhages on 5 June 1900. Long considered the most stylistically complex of the naturalist writers, Crane left as his legacy the proto‐modernist poetry of The Black Riders (1895) and War Is Kind and Other Lines (1899), as well as numerous short works published during the 1890s: sketches such as “An Experiment in Misery” and “The Men in the Storm” and classic stories such as “The Blue Hotel,” “The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky,” and “An Episode of Heroism.” But his best‐known work remains Maggie: A Girl of the Streets, The Red Badge of Courage, “The Open Boat,” and, in recent years, his short story “The Monster” (1898).
Maggie opens on a scene showing the violent struggle and competition that pervades the title character’s short life: her brother, Jimmie, stands on a heap of gravel and throws rocks at his assailants for “the honor of Rum Alley” (Crane 1984: 7). Within the space of the first chapter, he is hit by a stone, cuffed by an older boy, Pete, involved in another fight, and kicked by his father before returning home to Maggie, who upbraids him for fighting, and his mother, who beats him for it. Maggie, who “blossomed in a mud puddle” (24), attracts the attention of Pete, who tells her he is “stuck on [her] shape” (27) and takes her to a vaudeville show, the Central Park Menagerie, the Museum of Arts, and the melodrama, where they see “plays in which the brain‐clutching heroine was rescued from the palatial home of her guardian […] by the hero with the beautiful sentiments” (36). When her drunken mother tells her to “go teh hell,” Maggie “went” (41). Now a “girl of the painted cohorts,” she enters a street that grows progressively darker, a radical foreshortening of the experiences of months into moments of a single evening and individuals into ever more degraded types before Maggie’s death in the oily river. The last words are those of the pious hypocrisy of her monstrous, drunken mother, Mary Johnson, judging Maggie by the wildly inappropriate middle‐class standards applied to erring women of the day: “Oh, I’ll fergive her!” (78).
Maggie introduces elements that later became familiar in Crane’s other fiction: a commonplace subject matter transformed through irony, occasionally almost to the point of parody, that disrupts the reader’s expectations not only through language and technique but also through the indeterminacy of its ending. Instead of triangulating the male characters’ actions through shifting positions of conventional courage, false bravado, and suspected cowardice, one of the primary patterns in his stories, Crane chooses the theme of initiation of innocence into experience, which, in the case of a young girl brought up in the slums according to the conventions of sexual morality of the day, can only lead to her downfall. After the success of The Red Badge of Courage, Maggie was republished by Appleton in 1896 in a toned‐down version that omitted some crucial passages, such as the description of “a huge fat man in torn and greasy garments,” Maggie’s last customer in the 1893 edition but expunged in 1896. His presence suggests that Maggie may have been murdered rather than committing suicide, as implied in the 1896 version when the “deathly black hue” of the river shines at “her” rather than “their” feet. As Keith Gandal argues, “Crane’s Bowery is split between two opposing moralities” (Gandal 1997: 57), and Maggie acts according to the values of her generation and her environment by feeling no shame when Pete seduces her. The spokesmen for conventional morality include the clergyman who shuns her and the drunken mother who first berates, then shames, and finally rejects her, both of whom indirectly contribute to her death. Maggie is both a slum tale and a parody of slum and temperance tales. In parodying the temperance movement and its “moralistic theatricality,” Crane moved further from realism, George Monteiro contends, and the novel is clear evidence of his resolve not to pander to the redemptive endings of popular fiction but to retain the “ironic, exasperated, and sometimes angry pessimism” (Monteiro 2000: 46) that resonates with the push for genuine reforms that would later dominate the Progressive Era.
The Red Badge of Courage has inspired the bulk of criticism in Crane studies. Its well‐known plot involves the coming‐of‐age of Henry Fleming, a private in the Union Army, and his progression from ignorance to a relative knowledge of life during the Civil War, including the pivotal Battle of Chancellorsville. In the mid‐twentieth century, critics frequently focused on Crane’s use of color and symbolism, for example in the famous description following the death of Fleming’s friend Jim Conklin: “The red sun was pasted in the sky like a wafer” (1984: 137). In his biography, R.W. Stallman argued that “Crane intended to suggest the sacrificial death celebrated in Communion and the Mass” (1968: 174), a conclusion disputed by critics such as James Nagel, who points out that “the literal wafer could be found in a number of other objects, all of them more common to a war setting than communion wafers,” adding: “Crane’s consistent treatment of Christian rituals throughout his works is ironic and satiric” (1980: 155, 156). Crane’s pervasive irony remains a dividing line for discussions of The Red Badge of Courage, the text of which has also been the site of contested editorial theories governing the creation of new editions. Edited by Fredson Bowers, who based his emendations and manuscript additions on Crane’s probable intentions, the controversial 1975 University of Virginia text of the The Red Badge of Courage includes material not found in the original version published by D. Appleton and Company. Another continuing controversy pits the “affirmative” school of critics, who argue that Henry Fleming gains perspective and redemption by the end of the novel, as is consistent with an initiation story, against those who insist that he remains self‐deluded and that Crane was being ironic when Henry tells himself that “He was a man” after being tested in war (Crane 1984: 212). Recent criticism continues to address Henry’s psychological development and his response to the war, in readings informed by recent trauma theory.
Crane drew upon his own traumatic experience in “The Open Boat,” based on the events following the sinking of the Commodore off the Florida coast, an episode that he first described a few days later in “Stephen Crane’s Own Story” in the 7 January 1897 issue of the New York Press. There, he focused on the sinking of the ship, but at the end of the account he noted: “The history of life in an open boat for thirty hours would no doubt be very instructive for the young, but none is to be told here now” (Crane 1984: 883). He fulfilled that implicit promise in “The Open Boat,” published later that year, which begins with one of the most famous opening lines in American literature: “None of them knew the color of the sky” (Crane 1984: 885). The story powerfully captures the tension of four men in a small dinghy, the gunwales a mere six inches above the waves upon which their eyes are fixed. The captain, the cook, the correspondent, and Billie, the oiler – the only named character – row and bail water intently as if their lives depend upon it, as indeed they do, as the narrator circles the spectacle and considers different perspectives: “Viewed from a balcony,” the men would be picturesque; “In the wan light, the faces of the men must have been gray,” the speculative verb form “must have been” revealing that no certainty and no fixed perspective is possible from where the men sit (886). By the end of the 30 hours, the men have abandoned their dinghy and have been dragged from the surf to the shore, although ironically Billie, the strongest swimmer, lies dead in the sand.
Crane’s treatment of the story’s elements underscores its naturalistic irony. Nature seems to mock the men in the boat: gulls with “black bead‐like eyes” seem to them “uncanny and sinister” (888), a manifestation of malevolent nature; later, an “enormous fin” of a shark, trailing phosphorescence, follows the boat as if to confirm that animate nature opposes them (901). The lifesaving station they see on the shore has no crew, and passengers from a hotel omnibus wave at the men but fail to sense their danger. The lighthouse and land disappear as the correspondent feels that “a high cold star on a winter’s night” (902) is nature’s answer to him. When he sees the “tall wind‐tower […] a giant, standing with its back to the plight of the ants” he learns that nature does “not seem cruel to him then, or beneficent, nor treacherous, nor wise. But she was indifferent, flatly indifferent” (905). The magnitude of the indifference of nature, a key principle of naturalism represented by the blackness of the atmosphere punctuated by refracted light from the high cold star to the beady eyes of the gulls and the untended, useless watch‐fire, exist in tension with the solidarity among the men in the boat, who must nonetheless separately make their way through the surf. In the culmination of his loss of control throughout, the correspondent is gripped “this strange new enemy – a current” before a wave throws him toward shore, each action exemplifying the random causation of the natural world. The oiler, at first “ahead in the race,” drowns, which pits the deterministic laws of physical strength against the chance outcomes of indifferent nature. The men hear the voice of the sea and “felt that they could then be interpreters” (909), yet the wording here is like that at the end of The Red Badge of Courage. Whether they have in fact gained enough to be its “interpreters” or whether the narrative voice renders this ironically, as the men’s illusion, remains ambiguous.
Although “The Open Boat” remains Crane’s most celebrated short work, in recent years “The Monster” (1898), one of the few to feature an African American character, has attracted substantial critical interest. “The Monster” opens amid the suburban placidity of Whilomville, with its band concerts, children’s birthday parties, and male gatherings at Reifsnyder’s barbershop. When the young boy Jimmie Trescott breaks the stem of a peony, he confesses it to his father, Dr. Trescott, who reminds him of the law of consequences; and Jimmie seeks sympathy from Henry Johnson, the family’s African American hostler, thus establishing the story’s themes of the rupturing of the town’s sense of normalcy and hierarchy. After fire breaks out in the Trescott home, the hierarchy is upended when Henry rescues Jimmie and emerges horribly burned, a “thing laid in the grass” (Crane 1984: 451). Expecting his death, the townspeople hail Henry as a hero, but when he survives, his face burned away and his reason gone, only Dr. Trescott defends his right to survive. As generations of critics have noted, the town, not Henry, becomes the monster as its citizens fabricate stories of children terrified by Henry’s appearance. Even the well‐educated Judge Hagenthorpe, a symbol of justice, badgers Dr. Trescott with the suggestion that Henry’s death would have been preferable. “[H]e saved my boy. […] Would you kill him?” Dr. Trescott asks (414–415), highlighting the conflict between Trescott’s indebtedness as a father and the ruthless social Darwinism that demands the death or quiet disappearance of the physically or or mentally disabled. By the end of the novella, Dr. Trescott and Henry mirror one another as victims of the town’s ostracism, devoid of occupation and social networks, as Mrs. Trescott counts the empty cups she had set out for a tea party that no neighborhood women would attend.
Twentieth‐century perspectives on “The Monster” often focused on subjects other than race: its humanistic themes such as moral and social responsibility; the origins of the character of Henry Johnson in a lynching witnessed by Crane’s brother; its formal properties and symbolism, including its Christian allusions; and its analysis of the politics of sympathy and disability or disfigurement. Summing up Crane’s racial attitudes, Stanley Wertheim declared that “Race is ultimately a tangential factor in ‘The Monster’” (Wertheim 1998: 68), but recent critics place American racism at the center of their discussions. For example, while agreeing with Wertheim that Crane held the stereotypical and racist perspectives of his time, John Cleman suggests that critics have either ignored Crane’s racism or “reconfigured [it] within his irony” (Cleman 2002: 121), thereby overlooking Crane’s skepticism about the value of moral uplift. Challenging Cleman, Gregory Laski reads in the mutual indebtedness of Ned Trescott and Henry Johnson the idea of reparations for slavery in “the shape of a debt that cannot be repaid” (Laski 2013: 41). The principles of complicity and causation, of initiation and epiphany, that are often ambiguous in “The Open Boat” and The Red Badge of Courage, manifest themselves in “The Monster” as an ethical dilemma. Identifying the causes of the problem – Henry’s disfiguration, Ned’s principled stance, and the town’s racism and ableism – is the simple part; what remains is, as Dr. Trescott says to Judge Hagenthorpe, the question of what to do about Henry: “Would you kill him?” The absence of a literal and figurative face, due to racism and with it the erasure of identity, renders Henry the faceless face of all Crane’s accusatory victims staring out from the tableaux of his fiction: the fixed gaze of the dead soldier Henry Fleming stumbles upon in The Red Badge of Courage, the staring eyes of the Swede who is stabbed to death in “The Blue Hotel,” and Henry himself, daring the reader to make meaning in a meaningless world.
London’s life and career abounded in dichotomies. He was a tireless advocate for exploited workers and the poor, yet he believed in social Darwinism, and, like Crane, took pride in his English ancestry. He was a committed socialist, yet traveled with a valet as a means of greater efficiency, as he explained to critics. Born into poverty on 12 January 1876, to a spiritualist mother, Flora Wellman, London was raised by his mother and stepfather, John London, in and around Oakland, California. He experienced an unstable and impoverished early childhood, and by the time he was 23 had worked as an oyster pirate, factory laborer, laundry worker, and able seaman before rejecting manual labor in favor of “brain‐work” after he returned from an unsuccessful search for gold in the Klondike in 1898. Beginning with his prizewinning story “A Storm off the Coast of Japan” (1893), London published numerous magazine pieces and 50 books, leaving his last novel, “Cherry,” about a cultivated young Japanese woman living in Hawaii, unfinished at the time of his death in November 1916. Although London wrote in several forms – short stories, novels, plays, war reporting, philosophy and sociological studies, science fiction, and journalistic exposes – many contemporary critics agree with Jeanne Campbell Reesman that the short story was “London’s best genre,” both aesthetically and ethically (Reesman 2009: 268). As Reesman suggests, “There seems to be a sort of moral and ethical continuum on race from the antiracist short fiction through the novels to essays and then to newspaper interviews, and, finally, letters, which contain some of his worst racial invectives” (17). Although London has a reputation as an author whose successful fiction was simply a retelling of his experiences, he studied Herbert Spencer’s Philosophy of Style, and his influences included Rudyard Kipling, Joseph Conrad, Edith Wharton, and Stephen Crane.
Despite the renewed attention to London’s short stories, writings on socialism, and journalism, his most critically acclaimed works remain the novels The Call of the Wild (1903) and The Sea‐Wolf (1904). The tale of a dog, Buck, who is abducted from his comfortable California home and forced to work on a dogsled team in the Klondike, The Call of the Wild draws on London’s experiences in the region but even more strongly on his reading in Darwin and Spencer in its themes of “the survival of the fittest” and atavism. As Buck learns the rules of the harsh social and physical environment of life on the trail – “kill or be killed” – he also hearkens to the voices of his wolf ancestors and has visions of cave‐dwelling fire‐givers that link him to his savage past. From the first moments of his new life, Buck learns that the lessons of animal survival are absolute. When Curly, a “good‐natured Newfoundland” (London 1982: 13), is attacked and torn to pieces, Buck learns a crucial lesson: “No fair play. Once down, that was the end of you” (17). In challenging his enemy, Spitz, Buck knows that the fight must be “to the death” (35), afterwards recognizing that, as the victor, he had become “the dominant primordial beast who had made his kill and found it good” (36). The human beings Buck encounters are governed by the same laws of dominance: Buck passes from owner to owner, experiencing human cruelty with his early masters François and Perrault, stupidity with a group of arrogant newcomers, and harsh conditions everywhere before embracing a loving servitude under the humane John Thornton. When Thornton is killed by a tribe of Yee‐Hats, Buck destroys them and leaves human civilization behind forever to lead a wolf pack, heeding “The Call of the Wild.”
The novel endures because it operates at multiple levels. It is at once a coming‐of‐age story and a quest romance with mythic resonances, as Buck confronts an unjust world and learns to master its complexities; a “naturalistic romance,” in Jacqueline Tavernier‐Courbin’s term (1994), that allows for the workings of individual will in a deterministic universe; a beast fable or allegory, in which the oppressed animal, through skill and cunning, learns to triumph over the oppressive masters despite their superior force; and an evolutionary success story, in which Buck’s traits of adaptation, physical fitness, instinct, and “imagination” (London 1982: 35) allow him to achieve dominance, the only form of freedom in a world governed by evolutionary hierarchies. In addition to these timeless themes, recent critics have read the novel through the lens of history and culture. As Jonathan Auerbach points out, the novel exemplifies cultural anxieties about the role of work, and Buck, constructed as a moral being, has to learn to be wild and to learn as well that, as in “the bildungsroman plot […] the transformation of nature by work leads to self‐transformation, leads up from slavery to freedom” (Auerbach 1996: 58). Reesman pursues this argument further, seeing in Buck’s captivity and liberation the pattern of the slave or liberation narrative, with his journey into captivity, education in survival, recognition of “alternatives to bondage,” and ultimately freedom (Reesman 2009: 83), whereas James Giles reads Buck as an imperial conqueror who like his white imperialist masters destroys a native tribe (Giles 2003). Mark Lundblad reads Buck from the perspective of animal studies, which suggests, following Derrida, that readers “deconstruct the binary of human/animal” (Lundblad 2013: 151).
Like The Call of the Wild, The Sea‐Wolf is a naturalistic novel of education, development, and work masked as a novel of survival. The Sea‐Wolf, like its predecessor, is a tale of captivity and the self‐development that results when Humphrey Van Weyden, the well‐educated product of an overcivilized culture, is forced to confront the realities of life aboard the seal‐hunting schooner Ghost under its brutal captain, Wolf Larsen. Rescued from a shipwreck, Van Weyden discovers that only strength and cunning, not social position, can effect his survival and eventual rise in the hierarchy that obtains on the Ghost, itself a microcosm and traditional metaphor for the entirety of a world. As reviewers at the time noted, Wolf Larsen is a Nietzschean superman who delights in testing men by pitting them against each other and in tormenting those who rebel against him, including two crewmen whom he leads in a tantalizing sea chase before abandoning them to die. Echoing Buck’s understanding that the law of life is “kill or be killed, eat or be eaten” (London 1982: 62), Larsen’s philosophy reduces men and beasts to the level of lower animals. As he tells Van Weyden, “life is a mess […] like yeast, a ferment, a thing that moves. […] The big eat the little that they may continue to move, the strong eat the weak that they may retain their strength” (London 1982: 520). Gaining in strength as Larsen begins to fall due to his intense headaches, a symbolic representation of the inner conflict between his philosophical position of man as brute and the cultural heights in which he is well versed – the “fierce intelligence” encased in the “living clay” of his body (764) – Van Weyden gains a purpose for survival when the Ghost picks up the castaway Maud Brewster, a poet with whom he falls in love and defends against Larsen’s attempted rape. Shipwrecked on Endeavor Island, Maud and Van Weyden fend off the blind Larsen’s attempts at sabotage, and they rebuild the ship’s masts as he dies.
As evolutionarily driven organisms in naturalism must do, Van Weyden adapts and survives, defending himself against the machinations of his enemy, Muggeridge; learning seamanship; and engaging in philosophical debates with Larsen. He has learned Larsen’s strength without endorsing his brutal philosophy. Rather than Van Weyden’s transformation, contemporary reviewers focused on Wolf Larsen because of his striking originality, and they differed over whether London intended to endorse or to criticize the philosophy of his Nietzschean avatar; but, as Eric Carl Link points out, in his letters London expresses disappointment that some readers considered Larsen a hero (Link 2010: 154). More recently, critics have focused on questions of gender and sexuality, as the seemingly incongruous insertion of Maud Brewster into the narrative halfway through interrupts the straightforward tale of Humphrey’s crisis of development from overcivilization to individualism. Whether Maud helps Humphrey to “shed his […] effeminacy” and move toward an adult ideal, as Sam S. Baskett argues (Baskett 2002: 101), or whether their courtship is an example of Darwinian female sexual selection, which grants additional power to Maud, as Anita Duneer contends (2013), the love subplot tempers the development plot’s naturalism, with its focus on violent struggle and dominance.
Indeed, what animates all of London’s works is the idea of struggle – against nature, in his early Northland stories; between races, including imperialist enterprises, in the South Seas tales; and more generally against oppression and the limitations of the self. The books that made London’s reputation are those that combine all these elements. One of the ideas that challenged, even obsessed, London was the figure of the changeling caught between binaries – between races, between classes, between human and animal, between a state of nature and civilization. This takes the form of the outsider who views an alien culture from his own perspective, gradually becoming well assimilated. Yet because of his outsider status he can beat the members of the group at their own game through a watchful superior intelligence. It is this quality that makes Buck triumph over his sledmates and ultimately over the wolf pack; that makes a celebrity of the eponymous writer in Martin Eden (1909) and the wealthy businessman Elam Harnish in Burning Daylight (1910); and that ensures Hump van Weyden’s victory over Wolf Larsen in The Sea‐Wolf. But the victory in each case occurs because the character, whether man or beast, recognizes that his powers of observation are vital and watching must precede doing.
Crane, Norris, Dreiser, and London all wrote naturalistic fiction, but each adapted the principles in ways that suggest the work of later writers. Despite his use of classic naturalistic settings, as in Maggie, and themes, such as the random violence in “The Blue Hotel” or indifferent nature in “The Open Boat,” Crane’s impressionistic prose, ironic perspective, and ambiguous endings anticipate the techniques of modernism, as do his characters who believe that they understand the rules of a situation only to have the ground shifted beneath them and a chasm of perplexity opened before them. With his emphasis on the determinants of heredity and environment, Norris, in McTeague, stuck more closely to Zola’s principles of classic naturalism than the rest. Yet with the scope of The Octopus and The Pit and his insistence on writing about the “unplumbed depths of the human heart, and the mystery of sex, and the problems of life, and the black, unsearched penetralia of the soul of man” (Norris 1986b: 1168–1169), Norris promotes a fearless investigation not only of the “soul of man” but also of the exploitative economic systems examined in later social critiques such as Dos Passos’s U.S.A. trilogy. Dreiser likewise investigates the effects of the American economic system, but in contrast to his “Trilogy of Desire,” which chronicles the career of one of its oligarchs, Frank Cowperwood, Sister Carrie and An American Tragedy show ordinary characters caught in an overlapping web of consumer capitalism and sexual desire. The combination shapes their psychological interiority even as it erodes their sense of self constructed by an older set of values, a conflict that Dreiser implies is the inevitable condition of urban modernity. London bases his fiction in evolutionary determinism, a struggle for survival against external enemies as well as internal drives, as demonstrated through the conflict between characters’ atavistic tendencies and the dictates of civilization. Through his work, he demonstrates that life is no more fair and just in a state of civilization than in a state of nature, whether he applies this sense of struggle for survival to Buck in The Call of the Wild; to the economic struggle of the workers, as in The Valley of the Moon (1913) or the dystopian The Iron Heel (1908); to the racial resistance to colonial oppression in works such as his South Seas story “Mauki” (1909); or to the interior struggle of how to reconcile the world’s brutality with its humanity in The Sea‐Wolf. Together, Crane, Norris, Dreiser, and London created an outlook that brought the influence of naturalism to bear on their own and later eras, clearing the way so effectively for later writers that their frank treatment of violence, sexuality, and the miseries of an urban underclass, which shocked their own generation, has now become standard and even invisible to later generations.
SEE ALSO: CHAPTER 18 (DISABILITY AND LITERATURE); CHAPTER 22 (REALISM FROM WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS TO EDITH WHARTON); CHAPTER 26 (SOCIAL PROTEST FICTION); CHAPTER 27 (THE IMMIGRANT EXPERIENCE).