W harton's and James's dissections of hidden sexual and financial
motivations at work in society link them with writers who seem
superficially quite different: Stephen Crane, Jack London, Frank
Norris, Theodore Dreiser, and Upton Sinclair. Like the cosmopolitan
novelists, but much more explicitly, these naturalists used realism
to relate the individual to society. Often they exposed social
problems and were influenced by Darwinian thought and the related
philosophical doctrine of determinism, which views individuals as
the helpless pawns of economic and social forces beyond their
control.
Naturalism is essentially a literary expression of determinism.
Associated with bleak, realistic depictions of lower-class life,
determinism denies religion as a motivating force in the world and
instead perceives the universe as a machine. Eighteenth-century
Enlightenment thinkers had also imagined the world as a machine,
but as a perfect one, invented by God and tending toward progress
and human betterment. Naturalists imagined society, instead, as a
blind machine, godless and out of control.
The 19th-century American historian Henry Adams constructed an
elaborate theory of history involving the idea of the dynamo, or
machine force, and entropy, or decay of force. Instead of progress,
Adams sees inevitable decline in human society.
Stephen Crane, the son of a clergyman, put the loss of God most
succinctly:
A man said to the universe: "Sir, I exist!" "However," replied the
universe, "The fact has not created in me A sense of
obligation."
Like Romanticism, naturalism first appeared in Europe. It is
usually traced to the works of Honor?de Balzac in the 1840s and
seen as a French literary movement associated with Gustave
Flaubert, Edmond and Jules Goncourt, È Zola, and Guy de Maupassant.
It daringly opened up the seamy underside of society and such
topics as divorce, sex, adultery, poverty, and crime.
Naturalism flourished as Americans became urbanized and aware of
the importance of large economic and social forces. By 1890, the
frontier was declared officially closed. Most Americans resided in
towns, and business dominated even remote farmsteads.
Stephen Crane (1871-1900)
Stephen Crane, born in New Jersey, had roots going back to
Revolutionary War soldiers, clergymen, sheriffs, judges, and
farmers who had lived a century earlier. Primarily a journalist who
also wrote fiction, essays, poetry, and plays, Crane saw life at
its rawest, in slums and on battlefields. His short stories -- in
particular, "The Open Boat," "The Blue Hotel," and "The Bride Comes
to Yellow Sky" -- exemplified that literary form. His haunting
Civil War novel, The Red Badge of Courage, was published to great
acclaim in 1895, but he barely had time to bask in the attention
before he died, at 29, having neglected his health. He was
virtually forgotten during the first two decades of the 20th
century, but was resurrected through a laudatory biography by
Thomas Beer in 1923. He has enjoyed continued success ever since --
as a champion of the common man, a realist, and a symbolist.
Crane's Maggie: A Girl of the Streets (1893) is one of the best, if
not the earliest, naturalistic American novels. It is the harrowing
story of a poor, sensitive young girl whose uneducated, alcoholic
parents utterly fail her. In love and eager to escape her violent
home life, she allows herself to be seduced into living with a
young man, who soon deserts her. When her self-righteous mother
rejects her, Maggie becomes a prostitute to survive, but soon
commits suicide out of despair. Crane's earthy subject matter and
his objective, scientific style, devoid of moralizing, earmark
Maggie as a naturalist work.
Jack London (1876-1916)
A poor, self-taught worker from California, the naturalist Jack
London was catapulted from poverty to fame by his first collection
of stories, The Son of the Wolf (1900), set largely in the Klondike
region of Alaska and the Canadian Yukon. Other of his best-sellers,
including The Call of the Wild (1903) and The Sea-Wolf (1904) made
him the highest paid writer in the United States of his time.
The autobiographical novel Martin Eden (1909) depicts the inner
stresses of the American dream as London experienced them during
his meteoric rise from obscure poverty to wealth and fame. Eden, an
impoverished but intelligent and hardworking sailor and laborer, is
determined to become a writer.
Eventually, his writing makes him
rich and well-known, but Eden realizes that the woman he loves
cares only for his money and fame. His despair over her inability
to love causes him to lose faith in human nature. He also suffers
from class alienation, for he no longer belongs to the working
class, while he rejects the materialistic values of the wealthy
whom he worked so hard to join. He sails for the South Pacific and
commits suicide by jumping into the sea. Like many of the best
novels of its time, Martin Eden is an unsuccess story. It looks
ahead to F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby in its revelation
of despair amid great wealth.
Theodore Dreiser (1871-1945)
The 1925 work An American Tragedy by Theodore Dreiser, like
London's Martin Eden, explores the dangers of the American dream.
The novel relates, in great detail, the life of Clyde Griffiths, a
boy of weak will and little self-awareness. He grows up in great
poverty in a family of wandering evangelists, but dreams of wealth
and the love of beautiful women. A rich uncle employs him in his
factory. When his girlfriend Roberta becomes pregnant, she demands
that he marry her. Meanwhile, Clyde has fallen in love with a
wealthy society girl who represents success, money, and social
acceptance. Clyde carefully plans to drown Roberta on a boat trip,
but at the last minute he begins to change his mind; however, she
accidentally falls out of the boat. Clyde, a good swimmer, does not
save her, and she drowns. As Clyde is brought to justice, Dreiser
replays his story in reverse, masterfully using the vantage points
of prosecuting and defense attorneys to analyze each step and
motive that led the mild-mannered Clyde, with a highly religious
background and good family connections, to commit murder.
Despite his awkward style, Dreiser, in An American Tragedy,
displays crushing authority. Its precise details build up an
overwhelming sense of tragic inevitability. The novel is a scathing
portrait of the American success myth gone sour, but it is also a
universal story about the stresses of urbanization, modernization,
and alienation. Within it roam the romantic and dangerous fantasies
of the dispossessed.
An American Tragedy is a reflection of the dissatisfaction, envy,
and despair that afflicted many poor and working people in
America's competitive, success-driven society. As American
industrial power soared, the glittering lives of the wealthy in
newspapers and photographs sharply contrasted with the drab lives
of ordinary farmers and city workers. The media fanned rising
expectations and unreasonable desires. Such problems, common to
modernizing nations, gave rise to muckraking journalism --
penetrating investigative reporting that documented social problems
and provided an important impetus to social reform.
The great tradition of American investigative journalism had its
beginning in this period, during which national magazines such as
McClures and Collier's published Ida M. Tarbell's History of the
Standard Oil Company (1904), Lincoln Steffens's The Shame of the
Cities (1904), and other hard-hitting exposé. Muckraking novels
used eye-catching journalistic techniques to depict harsh working
conditions and oppression. Populist Frank Norris's The Octopus
(1901) exposed big railroad companies, while socialist Upton
Sinclair's The Jungle (1906) painted the squalor of the Chicago
meat-packing houses. Jack London's dystopia The Iron Heel (1908)
anticipates George Orwell's 1984 in predicting a class war and the
takeover of the government.
Another more artistic response was the realistic portrait, or group
of portraits, of ordinary characters and their frustrated inner
lives. The collection of stories Main-Travelled Roads (1891), by
William Dean Howells's protéé, Hamlin Garland (1860-1940), is a
portrait gallery of ordinary people. It shockingly depicted the
poverty of midwestern farmers who were demanding agricultural
reforms. The title suggests the many trails westward that the hardy
pioneers followed and the dusty main streets of the villages they
settled.
Close to Garland's Main-Travelled Roads is Winesburg, Ohio, by
Sherwood Anderson (1876-1941), begun in 1916. This is a loose
collection of stories about residents of the fictitious town of
Winesburg seen through the eyes of a na‹ve young newspaper
reporter, George Willard, who eventually leaves to seek his fortune
in the city. Like Main-Travelled Roads and other naturalistic works
of the period, Winesburg, Ohio emphasizes the quiet poverty,
loneliness, and despair in small-town America.
NATURALISM AND MUCKRAKING
69
0
5 минут
Понравилась работу? Лайкни ее и оставь свой комментарий!
Для автора это очень важно, это стимулирует его на новое творчество!