Unit 5 The Literature of Romanticism (Part III)

(1865—1900)

l        Key Words: Realism, Local Color Fiction, Naturalism

l       Target: This unit aims at introducing the American Literature from 1865 to 1900. This period is called American. The relevant literary history, the leading writers and their famous works will be fully discussed.

l       Study Points:

1.       Historical Background;

2.       Realism;

3.       Local Color Fiction;

4.       Naturalism

l        Teaching Hours: 16 (History: 8 hours and Reading: 8 hours) 

 3. Naturalism

I.      Background

1.      Charles Darwin’s (1809—1882) Origin of Species (1859) exerted a strong impact in the history of Western thought. Darwinism indicates that the origin of species is derived by descent, with variation from parent forms through the natural selection of those best adapted to survive in the struggle for existence.

Ø        The struggle for existence: the competition in nature among organisms of a population to maintain themselves in a given environment and to survive to reproduce others of their kind.

Ø        Natural selection: a process in nature resulting in the survival and perpetuation of only these forms of plant and animal life with certain favorable characteristics that best enable them to accept to a specific environment.

Ø        Survival of the fittest: the fact or principle of the survival of forms of plant and animal life best fitted for existing conditions, while related but less fit forms become extinct.

2.       Herbert Spencer (1820—1903) developed the theory of social Darwinism— the weak and stupid would fall victim in the natural course of events to economic forces. His ideas were then applied to society. They would explain why some people were successful and why some people were failures.

II.        Emergence

Emile Zola (1840—1902) wrote in the late 19^th century that the purpose of a novelist was to be a scientist, to place his characters in as situation and then to watch the influences of heredity and environment destroy them, or if they were good enough, to watch them overcome the inimical force of heredity and environment. Therefore, heredity and environment had an influence over human ability to survive. This idea was picked up by French writers and applied in American literature. Under the French influence, American writers ushered in a literary movement called Naturalism in America.

III.    Major features

1.       Humans are controlled by laws of heredity and environment.

2.       The universe is cold, godless, indifferent and hostile to human desires. Life becomes a struggle for survival.

3.       The literary naturalists have a major difference from the realists.

1)      The naturalists also describe real life, the way things really are. They do not escape into a world of imagination. But they dismiss the realists as far too “genteel.”

2)      The naturalists look at a different spot to find real life. They do not look at the average, but at the violent, sensational, sordid, unpleasant, and ugly aspects of life.

3)      Instead of going to a middle-class neighborhood and writing about middle-class life, the naturalists would go to the slums and write about the life of poverty and crime. (Darwinism)

4)      They write about war, about prostitution, about criminals, and all of these other aspects of life that are not too pleasant to consider.

IV.     American Naturalism

American naturalism was a new and harsher realism, and like realism, it had come from Europe. Naturalism was an outgrowth of realism that responded to theories in science, psychology, human behavior and social thought current in the late nineteenth century. American naturalism had been shaped by the war, by the social upheavals that undermined the comforting faith of an earlier age, and by the disturbing teachings of Darwinism. America’s literary naturalists dismissed the validity of comforting moral truths. They attempted to achieve extreme objectivity and frankness, presenting characters of low social and economic classes who were determined by their environment and heredity. In presenting the extremes of life, the naturalists sometimes displayed an affinity to the sensationalism of early romanticism, but unlike their romantic predecessors, the naturalists emphasized that the world was amoral, the men and women had no free will, that lives were controlled by heredity and environment, that the destiny of humanity was misery in life and oblivion in death. The pessimism and deterministic ideas of naturalism pervaded the works of such American writers as Stephen Crane, frank Norris, Jack London and Theodore Dreiser. These writers’ detailed description of the lives of the downtrodden and the abnormal, their frank treatment of human passions and sexuality, and their portrayal of men and women over-whelmed by blind forces of nature still exert a powerful influence on modern writers.

Although naturalist literature described the world with sometimes brutal realism, it sometimes also aimed at bettering the world through social reform. This combination of grim reality and desire for improvement is typical of America as it moved into the twentieth century.

American Naturalists

Stephen Crane (1871—1900) ====================================================== American author, whose second novel, The Red Badge Of Courage (1895), brought him international fame. The Red Badge of Courage depicted the American Civil War from the point of view of an ordinary soldier. It has been called the first modern war novel. ======================================================

◆    Life

Ø        Born in Newark, new Jersey, on November 1, 1871.

Ø        Being the fourteenth child in a Methodist clergymen’s family, Crane was brought up in a household of conventional piety.

Ø        His father died in 1880 and the mother made money by writing moralistic articles for religious magazines.

Ø        He was restless and sickly as a child. He studied at Lafayette college and later at Syracuse University. He left school in 1891.

Ø        By 1891, he moved to New York City and began writing for the newspaper where his brother worked.

Ø        They were fired from the newspaper in 1892 due to his sympathetic report of a worker’s strike.

Ø        Then he moved to the Bowery in New York City where he lived in poverty.

Ø        After his success of his novels, he was sent to Cuba by the Herald and Tribune as war correspondent in 1896 and then to Mexico in 1897.

Ø        Crane died of tuberculosis in Badenweilder, germany on June 5, 1900. His body was brought back to merica, and buried at Elizabeth, New Jersey.

◆     Literary Career

Ø        In 1893 Crane published his first novel Maggie, A Girl of the Streets.

Maggie, A Girl of the Streets

This story, set in New York Slums, tells about a young girl whose parents are alcoholics. They do not support her. The girl must support her brothers and sisters, and the only thing available for her is to turn to prostitution. Maggie ends up drowning herself by walking into the river at the end of the novel.

Ø        In 1895 he publish his most famous book about American Civil War called The Red Badge of Courage, which is marked by a convincing sense of reality: the animal man in a cold, manipulating world.

The Red Badge of Courage

The novel is about a young boy who leaves home with dreams of glory, of how great and heroic a soldier he will be. When the first battle comes along, he runs away in horror. By the end of the novel he has successfully participated in the battle, and he has this feeling that now he has matured, that now he understands life realistically.

Ø        Poetry: War Is Kind (1899)

Ø        George’s Mother (1896)

Ø        The Third Violet (1897)

Ø        Active Service (1898)

Ø        Collections of stories: The Little Regiment (1896), The Open Boat and Other Stories (1898), and The Monster and Other Stories (1898)

◆    Major Features

Crane’s writing has been called realistic, naturalistic, and impressionistic.

1)      He understood the significance of isolated immediate moment.

2)      He emphasized the feelings that exist in immediate experience.

3)      His syntax is direct and simple.

4)      He used symbols.

5)      Crane was very much influenced by impressionistic painters.

6)      He used irony.

7)      Crane was very careful in choosing narrative point of view.

8)      Crane’s writing is also characteristic of vivid color, animal imagery, stereotyped characters, colloquial English, and simple and straightforward narration.

◆     See More from the Following Websites

Stephen Crane

Biography and Works

The Stephen Crane Society

 Jack London

(1867—1916)

Jack London (born Jan. 12, 1876, died Nov. 22, 1916) is best known for his books The Call of the Wild, White Fang, and The Sea-Wolf, and a few short stories, such as "To Build a Fire" and "The White Silence." In fact, he was a prolific writer whose fiction explored three geographies and their cultures: the Yukon, California, and the South Pacific. He experimented with many literary forms, from conventional love stories and dystopias to science fantasy. His noted journalism included war correspondence, boxing stories, and the life of Molokai lepers. A committed socialist, he insisted against editorial pressures to write political essays and insert social criticism in his fiction. He was among the most influential figures of his day, who understood how to create a public persona and use the media to market his self-created image of poor-boy-turned-success. London's great passion was agriculture, and he was well on the way of creating a new model for ranching through his Beauty Ranch when he died of kidney disease at age 40. He left over fifty books of novels, stories, journalism, and essays, many of which have been translated and continue to be read around the world.

◆    Life

Jack London was one of the most articulate and militant spokesman of the working class at the turn of the century.

Ø        He was born John Griffith Chaney in San Francisco on January 12, 1876, the illegitimate son of a self-taught man and eccentric woman. He took the last name of his stepfather and was called John Griffith London.

Ø        He grew up in extreme poverty. Before he was ten, he had to work before and after school to support the family.

Ø        He took a job in a cannery at 13, and at 15 he was the captain of an oyster-pirate boat. He lived on the fringes of society until he was 17.

Ø        In 1893 he became a sailor. For the next four years he worked his way around the world. He learned the jungle law of nature, the survival of the strong and the death of the weak. He wandered his way across the United States, even begging his food from door to door.

Ø        He went to high school at the age of 19, entered a preparatory school, and then spent a semester as a special student at the University of California in 1896.

Ø        Influence by Marxism and Darwinism, and also by Nietzsche’s view of superman, London believed both in the success of the working class and in the survival of the strongest.

Ø        He also learned practical knowledge in between journeys as a tramp and participation in Klondike gold rush in 1897.

Ø        For a period of many years, esp. between 1905 and 1907, London was a strong supporter of the socialist movement in the United States.

Ø        He was a newspaper reporter in Asia at the time of the Russian-Japanese War, and served in the same capacity in the Mexican Civil War in 1914.

Ø        In 1916 he resigned from the Socialist Party because he could not resolve the tensions exemplified in his fiction.

Ø        He died of a gastrointestinal type of uremia on November 22, 1996.

◆    Literary Career

Ø        The first collection of stories: The Son of the Wolf (1900《狼子》)

Ø        The Call of the Wild (1903 《 野性的呼唤》) (Story about a domestic dog becoming the leader of a wolf pack. )

Ø        The People of the Abyss (1903 《深渊中的人们》)

Ø        The Sea Wolf (1904 《海狼》)

Ø        White Fang (1906 《白獠牙》)

Ø        The Iron Heel (1908 《铁蹄》)

Ø        Martin Eden (1909 《马丁· 伊登》)

Ø        The Valley of the Moon (1912)

Ø        The Star Rover (1915)

Ø        The Little Lady of the Big House (1916)

“London was a storyteller of great emotional power and excitement, a master of temp and pace whose adventure stories continue to fascinate a large reading public. He was, as a writer, bold, sensational, tragic, and, like his characters, a champion and a victim of the ‘wild indulgence’ of life and nature “ (McMichael 885-886). London, however, had written too fast to concern about the stylistic refinement and characterization. His works also betray his contradictory views of man’s nature and destiny. But his stories of man in and against nature remain popular even today.

◆    See More from the Following Website

 London's Life and his Books

 Frank Norris

(1870—1902)

◆    Life Ø        Born in Chicago from a rich merchant family and in 1884 the family moved to San Francisco. Ø        When he was 17, his father sent him to study art in London and Paris. But he was more interested in literature. Ø        He studied from 1890 to 1894 at the university of Carl folia at Berkley and spent one year at Harvard. Ø        From Harvard, Norris went to South Africa to write travel sketches, but he got involved in the politics of the Boer War and was expelled from the country. Ø        Then for a long time he worked as a journalist in the American West. Ø        Between 1895 and 1898 he went to Cuba and South Africa as a war correspondent for McClure’s Magazine. Ø        Then he became an editor for the publishing firm of Doubleday. Ø        He died from a ruptured appendix in October, 1902.

◆    Literary Career

His literary career can be divided into three parts.

1)       The 1^st Part: 2 novels 1894—1895

Ø        Mcteague (Published in 1899)

Ø        Vandover and the Brute (Published in 1914)

Mcteague has been viewed as “the first full-bodied naturalistic American novel” and “a consciously naturalistic manifesto.” It bears many trade marks of naturalism. The novel shows the inevitable effect of environment and heredity on human lives. Mcteague is a good example of the “animal man” with primitive behavior and wild desires. Under the pressure of a bitter environment, the “animal” in him gets the upper hand, and reverts him to brutality. Mcteague’s tragedy indicates the cruel fact that he can not get rid of the crushing influences of heredity and environment which are bound to destroy him as a man.

2)     The 2nd part: 3 conventional novels

Ø        Moranof the Lady Letty (1898)

Ø        Blix (1899)

Ø        A Man’s Woman (1900)

3)     The 3rd part:

The Epic of the Wheat

a trilogy about the production, distribution, and consumption of wheat. The three books are:

Ø         The Octopus (1901 《章鱼》)

Ø         The Pit (1903)

Ø         The Wolf (Unwritten due to his death)

It is generally held that Norris’s most impressive work is the prose epic The Octopus. Adopting symbolism, he described the battle between the wheat growers and monopolists “as a symbolic struggle between the primitive force of the fertile Earth and the nonorganic force on the Machine.” “Even so, The Octopus opened the way to a new kind of primitive epic that later writers such as Wolfe and Steinbeck were to develop. The most ambitious of American novels up to its time (with the exception of Moby Dick), its very overreaching of its author’s limitations makes it historically important” (Spiller 156-157).

Norris represented the contradictions and paradoxes of America at the turn of the centuries. Different from Crane’s gloomy view, Frank Norris saw social Darwinism as a motivating force in human progress. His characters supposedly contributed to an overall social improvement. Crane’s pessimism and Norris’s optimism are but two manifestations of determinism.

◆    See More from the Following Websites

Frank Norris

Frank Norris  at the Howells Society

Frank Norris @ University of Virginia Library

 Theodore Dreiser

(1871—1945)

====================================================== Considered by many as the leader of Naturalism in American writing, Dreiser is also remembered for his stinging criticism of the genteel tradition and of what Howells described as the "smiling aspects of life" typifying America. In his fiction, Dreiser deals with social problems and with characters who struggle to survive. His sympathetic treatment of a "morally loose" woman in Sister Carrie was called immoral and he suffered at the hands of publishers. One of Dreiser's favorite fictional devices was the use of contrast between the rich and the poor, the urbane and the unsophisticated, and the power brokers and the helpless. While he wrote about "raw" experiences of life in his earlier works, in his later writing he considered the impact of economic society on the lives of people in the remarkable trilogy - The Financier, The Titan, and The Stoic. His best known work is An American Tragedy which shows a young man trying to succeed in a materialistic society. ======================================================

◆     Life

He was one of the first American writers to come from the lower level of society.

Ø        Dreiser was born from a large, poor, religious, immigrant family at Terre Haute, Indiana on August 27, 1871.

Ø        He spent his childhood in bitter poverty, lacking education, skill and status.

Ø        From the age of 15 he was mainly on his own, taking a variety of menial jobs.

Ø        In 1886— 1887 he attended an Indiana high school and then dropped out to seek jobs in Chicago.

Ø        He acquired his real education from direct personal experience and from independent reading and thinking. Spencer’s social Darwinism had determining effect on his outlook.

Ø        He worked on various jobs and later became a reporter, a free-lance journalist and a magazine editor.

Ø        In 1898 he married Sara White and began writing short stories in Mallmee, Ohio in July, 1899.

Ø        In 1926 he toured to Scandinavia, Germany, France, and England.

Ø        In 1927—1928 he visited the Soviet Union for eleven weeks and published Dreiser Looks at Russia in 1928.

Ø        In 1938 he attended International Peace Conference in Paris.

Ø        In 1944 he was awarded the Merit Medal for Fiction by the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Ø        In May, 1945, he joined the American Communist Party.

Ø        He died of heart failure in Hollywood, California, on December 28, 1945.

◆    Literary Career

◇  Sister Carrie (1899)

It’s the story of a poor country girl who goes to Chicago to pursue the American dream. This novel focuses on a female character, the new woman. The new woman of the late 19^th century implies a woman who had more freedom in society, more independence, more ability to run her own life without being tied to a family, or without being tied to a husband. The emergence of the new woman was the beginning of what is now women’s liberation movement.

Dreiser presented the reader a picture of this woman who drifts in life. He neither condemned her nor praised her.

◇  Jennie Gerhardt (1911《珍丽姑娘》) marking the beginning of a full-time writer

◇  The Trilogy of Desire 《欲望三部曲》dealing with powerful businessmen in society.

Ø       The Financier (1912《金融家》)

Ø       The Titan (1914《巨头》)

Ø       The Stoic (1947《》)

◇  The Genius 《天才》an aptly autobiographical novel examining the artistic temperament.

◇  Plays of the Natural and Supernatural (1916)

◇  An American Tragedy (1925《美国的悲剧》) masterpiece

It is a story of a young man who wants to be wealthy and acts as if the only way he can be truly fulfilled is by acquiring wealth—through marriage if necessary. It tells the whole life in complete detail from birth to death. He is born of a poor family and his parents are religious. They sing religious songs in the street corners and work for religious organizations. Then he gets a job in a hotel. As he wants to be rich, he moves to another city where he meets some wealthy people. He falls in love with a rich woman. In order to marry this woman, he murders his pregnant lover. He tries to escape from the police in vain and is taken to jail and executed for his crime.

◇  Dreiser Looks at Russia (1928《德莱塞对俄罗斯的观感》) stating his left views about socialism and capitalism.

He gave further expression to his growing hopes for socialism in Tragic America (1931) and America Is Worth Saving (1941).

◆  Major Features

1)      As a naturalistic writer, Dreiser stressed determinism in his novels which deal with everyday life, often with its sordid side.

2)      As a naturalist, he developed the capacity for photographic and relentless observations, thereby truthfully reflecting the society and people of his time.

3)       His narrative method is natural and free from artifice. His tone is always serious, never satirical or comic.

Dreiser has been called “the wheelhouse of American naturalism,” and “chief spokesman for the realistic novel,” and “a profound and prescient critic of debased American values.” It is in his works that American naturalism is said to have come of age. His fiction records “the coarse and the vulgar and the cruel and the terrible” in life in defiance of the genteel and evasive current literature (Fiedler 242).

◆    See More from the Following Websites

Theodore Dreiser 1

Theodore Dreiser 2

Theodore Dreiser 3

Part 1 || Part 2 || Part 3

Reference Books:

q      Chang Yaoxin: A Survey of American Literature, the 2^nd edition. Tianjin: Nankai University Press, 2003.12

q      Liu Cunbo: Selected Readings in British and American Literature, Beijing: Higher Education Press, 2001

q      陈新选著：《英美名家短篇小说精品赏析》，北京：中国对外翻译出版公司，

q       李翠葶，李正栓：《美国文学学习指南》，北京：清华大学出版社，2002

q       万　莉，陈范霞：《英美文学选读》，北京：光明日报社，2001

q    吴定柏：《美国文学大纲》，上海：上海外语教育出版社，1998

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