Industrial Age: Literature

Literary naturalism began in France around 1865. Its early exponents were Edmond and Jules de Goncourt, who collaborated on Germinie Lacerteux (1865), and émile Zola, who wrote Thérèse Raquin (1867), two novels that marked the beginnings of the naturalistic movement in literature. Zola followed his incipient venture into the field with his monumental series of twenty naturalistic novels written between 1871 and 1893 and gathered under the general title Les Rougon Macquart. This group of novels, exemplifying the principles Zola articulated in his seminal essay, Le Roman expérimental (1880; The Experimental Novel, 1893), served as models for future naturalists.

Zola named the movement, decreeing how ideal naturalists would construct novels. Naturalism moved beyond REALISM, which in England was already flourishing in the novels of Charles DICKENS and William Makepeace THACKERAY. Naturalists applied the techniques of laboratory science to their writing. Zola directed naturalistic authors to apply the exacting rules of laboratory experimentation to their writing. They must observe closely, record with utmost accuracy what they observe, and report their observations dispassionately. Documentation lay at the heart of naturalistic writing. Moralizing and value judgments had no place in pure naturalistic works, although most naturalists found it difficult to remain as detached from their work as Zola commanded.

Naturalists assert that human life is subject to natural laws. The realists had already established the legitimacy of writing about working-class people. The naturalists, usually focusing on working-class people, applied medical and evolutionary theories to their writing, which emphasized the survival of the fittest and the need for people to adapt to their environments. Determinism—social, economic, and genetic—imposes upon individuals situations beyond their control.

As a movement in American literature, realism is associated with the rise of novelists such as Mark Twain (Samuel Langhorne Clemens), Henry James, Rebecca Harding Davis, and William Dean Howells, who defined it as “nothing more and nothing less than the truthful treatment of material.” The influence of realism on American literature was strongest between the end of the Civil War in 1865 and the mid 1890s, and its tenets and tendencies encompass a broad spectrum of related ideologies and practices such as Dialect or Vernacular Writing, Local Color and Pragmatism. Several important factors combined in this period to prompt many writers to see Romanticism and related modes as no longer appropriate. Among these were a rise in literacy rates, the harsh consequences of the war, and the often sober realities of newly ascendant industrialism. In place of the noble hero or heroine, exponents of realism tended toward average, middle-class characters; instead of depicting remarkable events and exotic locales, they focused on everyday actions close to home. These emphases led also to differences in form and method, with set structures and ordered plots exchanged for experimentalism and seeming randomness.