NATURALISM

A literary movement that took place from the 1880s to 1940s that used detailed realism to suggest that social
conditions, heredity, and environment had inescapable force in shaping human character.

Naturalism emerged as a point of view or tendency common to a number of philosophical and religious systems; it is
an attitude or spirit that inspired the literature movement. As the name implies, Naturalism per se, was a tendency
that consisted essentially in looking upon nature as the one original and fundamental source of all that exists, and in
attempting to explain everything in terms of nature. If its existence is found necessary, has nothing to do with the
working of natural agencies.

But, as the terms nature and natural are themselves used in more than one sense, the term naturalism is also far from
having one fixed meaning. There are three forms of naturalism, of which it must me noted that they all agree in
rejecting every explanation which would have recourse to causes outside of nature.

The literary movement is a branch of Realism, and it found expression almost exclusively within the novel. Naturalism
also found its greatest number of practitioners in America shortly before and after the turn of the twentieth century.
It sought to go further and be more explanatory than Realism by identifying the underlying causes for a persons
actions or beliefs. The thinking was that certain factors, such as heredity and social conditions, were unavoidable
determinants in ones life.

Naturalism and Realism are very much alike. Many authors of the period are, in fact, identified as both Naturalist and
Realist.

However, Naturalism displayed some very specific characteristics that delimit it from the contemporary literature that
was merely realistic. The environment, especially the social environment, played a large part in how the narrative
developed. The locale essentially becomes its own character, guiding the human characters in ways they do not
fully realize. Plot structure as such was secondary to the inner workings of character, which superficially resembles
how the Realists approached characterization.

The dominant theme of Naturalist literature is that persons are fated to whatever station in life their heredity,
environment, and social conditions prepare them for. The power of primitive emotions to negate human reason was
also a recurring element.

The documentary style of narrative makes no comment on the situation, whether it is adversity or not, and there is no
sense of advocating for change. The Naturalist simply takes the world as it is, for good or ill. Everything seems to be
projected from a scientific point of view, what we might call today a materialistic scientism. In fact, materialism is a
kind of naturalism. The sensation by reading these literature is like the documentaries we can watch on television
nowadays.

The work of French novelist and playwright Emile Zola is often pinpointed as the genesis of the Naturalist movement.
His most famous contribution to Naturalism was Les Rougon-Macquart, a collection of 20 novels that follow two
families over the course of five generations.

One of the first truly Naturalist works of literature, and certainly the first in America, was Stephen Cranes Maggie: A
Girl of the Streets. Its the story about Maggie, a young girl from the Bowery (a slum area of New York City) who is
driven to unfortunate circumstances by poverty and solitude.

In Frank Norris, American literature found its most potent expression of Naturalism. Profoundly influenced by
evolutionary theory, Norriss chief concern was with how civilized man overcame the brute, the animal nature that
still lived inside of him. Like many Naturalists, Norris was interested in the trials of life of the poor and destitute.
Naturalism was a relatively short-lived philosophical approach to writing novels. Few writers of the period
experienced real success in the style:

Major Naturalist Writers

Wharton, Edith (1862-1937)

Example of a Naturalist novel:

Stephen Crane's first novel addressed an unpopular subject; with its unflinchingly honest, brutally realistic portrayal of
the seamier side of urban New York, Maggie: A Girl of the Streets was initially rejected by editors who considered the
subject matter inappropriate for publication. The twenty-one-year-old Crane was forced to publish the novel at his
own expense in 1893; even then, he thought it advisable to use a pseudonym, Johnston Smith. It was only in 1896,
with the success of Crane's masterpiece, The Red Badge of Courage that Crane's publisher agreed to publish a revised
version of Maggie. But if Maggie was unappreciated at the time of its publication--and even virtually unnoticed, with
the exception of a few favorable reviews by a few influential critics, among them William Dean Howells--it has since
become recognized as a powerful social novel and a profoundly important contribution to American literature.

Crane grew to maturity in what has become known as the Gilded Age (at least in the Northeast United States, where
Crane's highly religious parents made their home in New Jersey). It was a time of unprecedented prosperity in the
industrial Northeast, and popular novels of the time depicted the city of New York spinning dizzily in its increasing
wealth and importance. To the skeptical young Crane, the novels that appealed to the public seemed largely
sentimental and romantic. Popular novels overlooked the grim poverty that scarred the underbelly of industrial New
York in places like the squalid tenements of the Lower East Side, where Crane got his artistic education. And the
popular novels' moral landscapes were painted in black and white, peopled with prim and proper heroes and heroines
motivated by only the purest of morals, villains with no redeeming features whatsoever.

With Maggie, Crane reacted to this romanticized and homogenized perspective on American life by showing the New
York that he had seen himself. It was a New York inhabited by the poor, the drunken, and the desperate, people
blinded by hypocrisy or driven by need, profane and corrupted. Crane considered this portrait of New York to be
necessary honesty; most of his contemporaries considered it improper, even scandalous.

Summary

As the novel opens, Jimmie, a young boy, is leading a street fight against a troop of youngsters from another part of
New York City's impoverished Bowery neighborhood. Jimmie is rescued by Pete, a teenager who seems to be a casual
acquaintance of his. They encounter Jimmie's offhandedly brutal father, who brings Jimmie home, where we are
introduced to his timid older sister Maggie and little brother Tommie, and to Mary, the family's drunken, vicious
matriarch. The evening that follows seems typical: the father goes to bars to drink himself into oblivion while the
mother stays home and rages until she, too, drops off into a drunken stupor. The children huddle in a corner, terrified.

As time passes, both the father and Tommie die. Jimmie hardens into a sneering, aggressive, cynical youth. He gets a
job as a teamster. Maggie, by contrast, seems somehow immune to the corrupting influence of abject poverty;
underneath the grime, she is physically beautiful and, even more surprising, both hopeful and nave. When Pete--now
a bartender--makes his return to the scene, he entrances Maggie with his bravado and show of bourgeois trappings.
Pete senses easy prey, and they begin dating; she is taken--and taken in--by his relative worldliness and his
ostentatious displays of confidence. She sees in him the promise of wealth and culture, an escape from the misery of
her childhood.

There comes a night when the drunk and combative Mary accuses Maggie of going "to deh devil" and disgracing the
family; Maggie runs into Pete's arms, and we are given to understand that the two are, indeed, sleeping together.
Jimmie is furious that Pete has "ruined" his sister, and he gets very drunk with a friend and gets into a brawl with Pete.
After this, Maggie leaves home and goes to live with Pete. Jimmie and Mary affect sorrow and bewilderment at
Maggie's fall from grace, and her behavior becomes a neighborhood scandal. A scant few weeks after Maggie leaves
home, she is in a bar with Pete when they meet Nellie, a scheming woman with a veneer of sophistication who has no
trouble convincing Pete to leave Maggie. Abandoned, Maggie tries to return home, but her family rejects her.

The linear narrative now ceases, and we are given a series of scenes, arranged in chronological order but separated by
passages of time. There is an interlude in which we see that Jimmie, who acts horrified at Maggie's actions, has in fact
himself seduced and then abandoned at least one girl. In another brief scene, Maggie visits Pete at work, and he, too,
refuses to acknowledge her legitimate claims on him. Months later, we are shown a prostitute--presumably Maggie,
but unnamed--walking the streets of New York, pathetic and rejected, bound for trouble. There is a scene with Pete in
a bar, badly drunk and surrounded by women; he collapses on the floor and, in his turn, is abandoned by the scornful
and manipulative Nellie. Finally, the novel ends with Jimmie giving Mary the news that Maggie's dead body has been
found. Mary stages a scene of melodramatic mourning for her ruined child, which ends with her deeply hypocritical
and bitterly ironic concession: "I'll fergive her!"

Characters

Maggie - The novel's title character, Maggie Johnson grows up amid abuse and poverty in the Bowery neighborhood
of New York's Lower East Side. Her mother, Mary, is a vicious alcoholic; her brother, Jimmie, is mean-spirited and
brutish. But Maggie grows up a beautiful young lady whose romantic hopes for a better life remain untarnished. Her
seemingly inevitable path towards destruction begins when she becomes enamored of Pete, whose show of
confidence and worldliness seems to promise wealth and culture. Seduced and abandoned by Pete, Maggie becomes
a neighborhood scandal when she turns to prostitution. Crane leaves her demise vague--she either commits suicide or
is murdered. She seems a natural and hereditary victim, succumbing finally to the forces of poverty and social injustice
that built up against her even before her birth. Like all the people in this short novel, she seems chiefly a type rather
than an individuated character, serving to illustrate principles about modern urban life.

Pete - A friend of Jimmie's, Pete seduces and then abandons Maggie. A bartender with bourgeois pretensions, Pete
affects bravado and wealth; to the downtrodden Maggie, he seems to promise a better life. But Pete is easily drawn
away from Maggie by the manipulative and relatively sophisticated Nellie. He certainly seems the villain in Maggie's
story, but it is important to remember that he is only the proximate cause of her tragedy; in Maggie, tragedy is
inevitable, and it waits only for human agents, of whom there are many readily available. And it is also true that Pete
seems, as we first meet him, to be the product of the brutalizing atmosphere of the Bowery, shaped as much as
Maggie by his surroundings. Indeed, he, too, can be considered a victim of his environment, and we see at the end,
when he is abandoned by Nellie, that he, too, is an innocent despoiled by circumstance.

Analysis

It is a story that has become a clich, a story about a virtuous and nave girl who becomes ruined by forces larger than
she. The setting is unremarkable. The characters are barely distinguishable from any number of sordid types who
serve as stock and secondary characters inhabiting the alleyways of numerous longer novels. If it were not so deeply
troubling, Maggie would be so banal as to be forgettable.
Crane was a prodigy, bringing the literary movement of realism to America before Americans were really prepared for
his unflinching honesty. In an era that has been labeled the Gilded Age Crane was prepared to expose the misery,
hypocrisy, and sentimentalism that he believed lay beneath the gilt. In this sense, his novel is "realistic": it refuses to
accept platitudes about the goodness of human nature, and about the prosperity of American society.

Largely ignored, Maggie paid a price in its time for being revolutionary. And it is precisely because Maggie was so
revolutionary that it continues to pay a certain price. After a century of novels that have responded to Maggie by
broadening their perspectives and telling stories in greater depth and at greater length than the story told in this
novella, it is easy to question Maggie's contemporary importance; after all, for all its historical importance, it now
seems merely a slim example of a literary genre. But Maggie was not simply first--it was, and remains, one of the best
American realist novels.

The literary school of realism seeks to portray life without pretenses or tinted lenses. But realism is not without its
own set of beliefs. Realist novels tend to expose society's gaping wounds in the service of an ideology that downplays
human agency, substituting a belief in the power of social forces that approaches fatalism. Realist novels tend to
portray their protagonists as subject to massive social forces. These social forces are virtually inescapable; they are as
inevitable as fate. When we first see a broad-brush picture of the Bowery in the second chapter of the novel, we are
told that the people are "withered. . . in curious postures of submission to something." Think about the set of events
at the center of Maggie. Social circumstances--poverty, a lifetime of brutality, and a lack of realistic prospects--force
Maggie towards Pete. She is steered towards a single escape route, and then finds that the only door out is in fact the
path towards tragedy. The ruination of nave women in Maggie is inevitable, as common as the incidence of desperate
girls and reckless bachelors.

But one of the remarkable things about Maggie is that the novel's refusal to blame Maggie does not mean that her
mistakes are forgiven. Maggie's own failings are exposed here as surely as the social forces that lead to her downfall
and death. As the writer Jayne Anne Phillips has observed, Maggie's romantic nature obscures her ability to see the
world clearly, and is as much to blame for her downfall as the forces of reality. This is a novel that shows sympathy to
the humanity of every one of its characters, with the arguable exception of Mary. The novel recognizes that, to a great
and perhaps overwhelming extent, these are people brutalized and hardened and victimized by social forces beyond
their control. But it is also a novel that refuses to condescend through showings of cheap pity. Even as it extends
sympathy to all its characters, it critiques the injustices they work, their hypocrisy, sentimentalism, ridiculous ideas
and attitudes. Maggie is a novel that mocks but rarely condemns utterly, that forgives and seeks to understand even
those things that it cruelly exposes. And thus it is a novel that troubles the reader with its moral complexity. Who is to
blame for these tragedies that continue to repeat themselves, tragedies that breed and interbreed, perpetuating
themselves endlessly? Crane, and Maggie, refuse to provide an answer.
Quotes

- The introductory sentences that establish two of the novel's themes - violence and moral hypocrisy: "A very little boy stood upon a heap
of gravel for the honor of Rum Alley. He was throwing stones at howling urchins from Devil's Row who were circling madly about the heap
and pelting at him." (p3)

- The description of young Jimmie and Maggie watching their sleeping mother after one of her drunken rampages: "The small frame of the
ragged girl was quivering. Her features were haggard from weeping, and her eyes gleamed from fear. She grasped the urchin's arm in her
little trembling hands and they huddled in a corner. The eyes of both were drawn, by some force, to stare at the woman's face , for they
thought she need only awake and all fiends would come from below." (p13)

- Regarding Maggie's thoughts when she first observes Pete: "Maggie perceived that here was the beau ideal of a man. Her dim thoughts
were often searching for far away lands where, as God says, the little hills sing together in the morning. Under the trees of her dream-
gardens there had always walked a lover." (p19)

- Maggie's feelings after leaving home to be with Pete: "As to the present she perceived only vague reasons to be miserable. Her life was
Pete's and she considered him worthy of the charge. She would be disturbed by no particular apprehensions, so long as Pete adored her as
he did now said he did. She did not feel like a bad woman. To her knowledge she had never seen any better." (p39)