naturalism

1. Factual or realistic representation, especially:
   1. The practice of describing precisely the actual circumstances of human life in literature.
   2. The practice of reproducing subjects as precisely as possible in the visual arts.
2. 1. A movement or school advocating such precise representation.
   2. The principles and methods of such a movement or of its adherents.
3. Philosophy. The system of thought holding that all phenomena can be explained in terms of natural causes and laws.
4. Theology. The doctrine that all religious truths are derived from nature and natural causes and not from revelation.
5. Conduct or thought prompted by natural desires or instincts.

Naturalism A theatrical style sometimes called “realism,” it began as a rebellion against the romantic artificialities of much 19th‐century theatre. Initially such early exponents as Emile Zola conceived it as simply offering an unadulterated “slice of life” with all theatrical glossing over of hard facts removed and with only limited concern, if any, about the necessity of presenting such views in “well‐made” plays. However, it soon came to be perceived, at least popularly, as unswerving portrayals of the seamiest side of existence. Gorky's The Lower Depths is often cited as the classic example. Those who separate realism from naturalism often suggest that the former is more selective and therefore has to be more carefully contrived, and they offer the best plays of Ibsen as instances. Naturalism is often seen as a heightened form of realism with all five senses involved. David Belasco's productions with dirt on the floor and live chickens on stage were the most obvious examples. O'Neill's sea plays or his The Iceman Cometh and some of the “ living newspaper s” of the 1930s were later examples. Some more recent New York productions that involved naturalism might include American Buffalo (1977), Talley's Folly (1980), and several of August Wilson's dramas.

naturalism, a more deliberate kind of realism in novels, stories, and plays, usually involving a view of human beings as passive victims of natural forces and social environment. As a literary movement, naturalism was initiated in France by Jules and Edmond Goncourt with their novel Germinie Lacerteux (1865), but it came to be led by Émile Zola, who claimed a ‘scientific’ status for his studies of impoverished characters miserably subjected to hunger, sexual obsession, and hereditary defects in Thérèse Raquin (1867), Germinal (1885), and many other novels. Naturalist fiction aspired to a sociological objectivity, offering detailed and fully researched investigations into unexplored corners of modern society—railways in Zola's La Bête humaine (1890), the department store in his Au Bonheur des dames (1883)—while enlivening this with a new sexual sensationalism. Other novelists and storytellers associated with naturalism include Alphonse Daudet and Guy de Maupassant in France, Theodore Dreiser and Frank Norris in the United States, and George Moore and George Gissing in England; the most significant work of naturalism in English being Dreiser's Sister Carrie (1900). In the theatre, Henrik Ibsen's play Ghosts (1881), with its stress on heredity, encouraged an important tradition of dramatic naturalism led by August Strindberg, Gerhart Hauptmann, and Maxim Gorky; in a somewhat looser sense, the realistic plays of Anton Chekhov are sometimes grouped with the naturalist phase of European drama at the turn of the century. The term naturalistic in drama usually has a broader application, denoting a very detailed illusion of real life on the stage, especially in speech, costume, and sets. See also verisimilitude, verismo. For a fuller account, consult Lilian R. Furst and Peter N. Skrine, Naturalism (1971).

Literature

Philosophy

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Art in which the artist represents objects as they are, rather than in a stylized manner.

Bibliography

• Chilvers, Osborne, & Farr (eds.) (1988)
• Jervis (1984)
• Jane Turner (1996)

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Naturalism has traditionally been considered a crude and exaggerated successor to Realism, nourished by the pseudo-scientific theories of its chief exponent, Zola. Amongst the major writers usually associated with the movement along with Zola—Alphonse Daudet, Huysmans, the Goncourt brothers, Maupassant, and lesser figures such as Alexis, Paul Bonnetain, Céard, Descaves, Louis Desprez, Hennique, and Gabriel Thyébaut—there was little agreement, interest, or consistency in theoretical matters.

Zola used the term naturaliste in the 1860s to denote a heritage of realist literature, inspired by the positivist tradition in philosophy, science, and the arts, that rejected the idealistic aspirations of the Romantic movement. Balzac was the main literary model, Taine the model critic and theoretician, Comte and Claude Bernard the intellectual mentors of the scientific age to which Zola linked the movement. The term ‘Naturalism’ conveniently evoked the natural sciences, in which Zola sought to ground Naturalist methods; materialist and positivist philosophy, which provided the broad philosophical framework of the movement; and contemporary art criticism and practices, to which the Naturalist writers frequently had recourse, not only for their themes and techniques, but also for their aesthetic principle of the exact imitation of nature. Zola's theorizing culminated in Le Roman expérimental (1880), heavily influenced by Claude Bernard's Introduction à l'étude de la médecine expérimentale (1865). Here he established a controversial analogy between the writer and the scientific experimenter. The comparison between the naturalist in literature and the scientist or doctor is also made by Céard, a more sober theorist, but only to insist that Naturalism was above all a method, relying upon the close observation of reality. In very general terms, the Naturalists shared a materialistic, mechanistic view which tended to subject mankind to deterministic factors, like the laws of heredity or influences from the environment.

The more solid links amongst the Naturalist writers were at the level of their literary practices rather than their theories. Despite the diversity of Naturalist texts, two fundamental types can be defined. A Goncourtain type depicts tragic dramas of degeneration caused by such determining factors as hereditary taints, neurotic dispositions, adverse social conditions, in which the victims, usually women, as in Zola's L' Assommoir, submit to an inevitable socio-biological fate. A second, more Flaubertian type of work, less scientific and more philosophical than the first, inspired in many cases by Schopenhauer's pessimism, presents the disillusionment and frustrations of a (usually male) protagonist caught up in the dilemmas of daily existence. There is also much social satire in Naturalist texts, as well as a tendency to favour, as relief from the grim realities, decorous descriptions in the manner of contemporary painters.

Historically, the first Naturalist texts, which became models for later writers, date from the 1860s, notably the Goncourt novel Germinie Lacerteux (1864), Zola's Thérèse Raquin (1867), and Flaubert's LÉducation sentimentale (1869). But it was only in the late 1870s, after the furore caused by the publication of L'Assommoir (1877), that a discernible group of writers with common interests formed. With the exception of Zola's novels and two texts by Huysmans, Marthe, histoire d'une fille (1876), and Les Sœurs Vatard (1879), few Naturalist works had in fact been published before the so-called ‘Médan Group’ issued their collection of stories, Les Soirées de Médan, in 1880. The sense of solidarity in the group was fostered more by their common opposition to the hostility with which Naturalist texts were being received by the critics than by a common literary programme; there were dissensions in the group. However, in 1880s, a flood of Naturalist texts appeared, novels, collections of short stories, and theatrical productions. The ‘Manifeste des Cinq’ against La Terre (1887) was considered to be a critical breach in the defences of the Naturalist school, though, in fact, the five young ‘Naturalists’, supposedly representatives of a new Naturalist generation, were never acknowledged by Zola as his disciples and, by then, most of the members of the ‘Médan Group’, had gone their own way. By the time Jules Huret published the results of his Enquête sur l'évolution littéraire (1891), which, notwithstanding the famous telegram from Alexis (‘Naturalisme pas mort. Lettre suit.’), pronounced the movement dead, it was already enjoying considerable success abroad and exercising a lasting influence on writers in France.

Naturalism also had an undeniable influence on the theatre. Numerous works of fiction, mainly by the Goncourt brothers and Zola, were dramatized and the stage adaptation of L'Assommoir (1879), in particular, had a considerable impact. But, in general, the best and most successful works for the stage were produced by writers not associated directly with the Naturalist movement (Becque, Les Corbeaux), or by professional men of the theatre who came later, like Antoine and the Théâtre Libre, or by foreign playwrights like Ibsen and Strindberg.

[David Baguley]

Bibliography

• Y. Chevrel, Le Naturalisme (1982)
• A. Pagès, Le Naturalisme (1989)
• D. Baguley, Naturalist Fiction: The Entropic Vision (1990)

Most generally, a sympathy with the view that ultimately nothing resists explanation by the methods characteristic of the natural sciences. A naturalist will be opposed, for example, to mind-body dualism, since it leaves the mental side of things outside the explanatory grasp of biology or physics; opposed to acceptance of numbers or concepts as real but non-physical denizens of the world; and opposed to accepting real moral duties and rights as absolute and self-standing facets of the natural order. The central problem for naturalism is to define what counts as a satisfactory accommodation between the preferred sciences and the elements that on the face of it have no place in them. Alternatives include instrumentalism, reductionism, and eliminativism, as well as a variety of other antirealist suggestions (see realism/anti-realism). The term naturalism is sometimes used for specific versions of these approaches in particular areas: Moore, for example, defined naturalism in ethics as the doctrine that moral predicates actually express the same thing as predicates from some natural or empirical science. This suggestion is probably untenable, but as other accommodations between ethics and the view of human beings as just parts of nature recommend themselves, these then gain the title of naturalistic approaches to ethics. See also nature.

In sociology, a theoretical stance which adopts the naruralistic approach.

Naturalism, a literary mode developed in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, characterizedby detailed description, scientific and sociological themes, an objective, documentary quality, and a deterministic philosophy. The term "naturalism" is especially, but not exclusively, applied to novels. French writers such as the Goncourt brothers and Émile Zola pioneered naturalism in the late 1860s and 1870s. In the following three decades, naturalism appeared in Germany (the plays of Gerhart Hauptmann) and England (the novels of George Gissing and Arnold Bennett).

When transplanted to American soil near the turn of the twentieth century, naturalism flourished in the hands of such novelists as Harold Frederic, Frank Norris, Theodore Dreiser, Jack London, Stephen Crane, Hamlin Garland, David Graham Phillips, and Upton Sinclair. Many later works also have naturalistic qualities—including John Dos Passos's U.S.A. trilogy (1930, 1932, 1936), John Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath (1939), James Farrell's Studs Lonigan trilogy (1932, 1934, 1935), Richard Wright's Native Son (1940), Norman Mailer's Executioner's Song (1979), Tom Wolfe's Bonfire of the Vanities (1987), and Bret Easton Ellis's American Psycho (1991). Naturalism's endurance suggests that it has become a fixture in the American literary landscape.

Influences

Naturalism's most important theorist, Émile Zola, was perhaps its leading practitioner. His preface to the second edition of Thérèse Raquin (1868) defines naturalism, while his "The Experimental Novel" (1880) elaborates on its method. Zola urges novelists to work like scientists, placing characters in controlled environments and studying temperaments rather than individualized characters. This strategy results in a narrative posture of detached objectivity and clinical observation. Zola exemplified these qualities in his twenty-volume Rougon-Macquart series, illustrating the effects of heredity and environment on several generations.

Naturalism absorbed scientific and social scientific ideas, in particular Charles Darwin's theory of evolution and Karl Marx's theory of class struggle. These influences suggest why naturalists deliberately depict limited characters—not autonomous agents but creatures acted upon by biological or social forces. That Dreiser's Carrie Meeber "drifts" through Sister Carrie (1900), or that Sinclair's Jurgis Rudkis is pummeled by circumstances throughout The Jungle (1906) is precisely the point. Coercion or chance will more likely determine events than will choice, deliberation, or morality.

Naturalist works respond as much to material changes as to intellectual currents. Industrialization and urbanization occurred rapidly in America following the Civil War, and naturalists responded by addressing new literary subjects such as factory work (The Jungle), immigrant populations (Abraham Cahan's The Rise of David Levinsky, 1917), slums (Crane's Maggie: A Girl of the Streets, 1893), the closing of the western frontier (Norris's The Octopus, 1901), and the growth of consumer culture (Sister Carrie). Despite a characteristic interest in dislocations brought on by the modern economy—or perhaps because of it—some naturalist authors trace a retreat from civilization, such as to the high seas (London's The Sea Wolf, 1904), or examine the provincial countryside that was increasingly being eclipsed by urban centers (Garland's Main-Travelled Roads, 1891).

Characteristics

Naturalists often depict biological, social, and economic determinants as interdependent, though dominant preoccupations can be isolated. Racial or genetic conditions may prevail (as in McTeague or The Octopus), or environmental ones (as in Wright's Native Son, 1940, or Maggie); economic class may be decisive (Dreiser's An American Tragedy, 1925), as may gender (as in Edith Wharton's The House of Mirth, 1905). Often naturalistic narrators, or their mouthpieces, engage in lengthy disquisitions explaining abstract concepts incomprehensible to their hapless characters (as in book three of Native Son, where the defense lawyer provides a Marxist analysis of why Bigger Thomas committed murder). Such lectures may seem digressive, while also placing the characters at a distance from the author and the reader. Such narrative interpolations also suggest the overlap of naturalism with social science. Indeed, naturalist novels share topics and rhetorical strategies with such nonfiction treatises as Charlotte Perkins Gilman's Women and Economics (1898), Thorstein Veblen's The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899), Jacob Riis's How the Other Half Lives (1890), the criminology of Cesare Lombroso, and the time-motion studies of Frederick Winslow Taylor.

Degeneration or "devolution" is a dominant naturalistic motif, manifesting itself in studies of crime and violence (such as Native Son and American Psycho) and in the liberal use of animal imagery to describe human conduct, as in the famous lobster and squid episode at the beginning of Dreiser's The Financier (1912). The animal fixation extends to one of Norris's characters thinking he becomes a wolf (Vandover and the Brute, 1914), and to London making a dog the protagonist of The Call of the Wild (1903).

Although some American naturalists attempt the objectivity lauded by Zola, most write more like journalists than like scientists. Many worked for newspapers and magazines before adapting journalism's characteristic descriptiveness into fiction. Sinclair's on-site research for The Jungle helped make his exposé of the meatpacking industry so shocking. Norris's research for McTeague ranged from dentistry to actual murder cases. In describing the trolley strike in Sister Carrie, Dreiser drew liberally from an account he had written for the Toledo Blade. Furthermore, journalism itself becomes a literary motif: in An American Tragedy, Clyde Griffiths reads a news account that inspires him to murder his pregnant girlfriend; in Native Son, Wright uses newspapers to expose the racist bias of the press; in the U.S.A. trilogy, Dos Passos combines actual news clippings to produce the "Newsreel" sections. American naturalism's documentary strategies have made it a reliable source for historians.

Another hallmark is a fixation on sexuality and gender. Naturalism has been described as hypermasculine, with its rugged male characters such as Norris's plain-spoken Buck Annixter in The Octopus, the virile tycoon Frank Cowperwood of Dreiser's Financier trilogy (1912, 1914, 1947), or London's brutal sea captain Wolf Larsen of The Sea-Wolf. Naturalists often depict women in similarly exaggerated terms: Dreiser's Carrie is more aroused by shopping than by her lovers; the large-armed Hilma Tree of The Octopus seems more nature goddess than human; and the miserly Trina McTeague parodies the frugal housewife. Women have not written as many naturalist novels, though Ann Petry's The Street (1946), Edith Wharton's The House of Mirth (1905), and Kate Chopin's The Awakening (1899), all profound studies of environmental pressures on women, certainly qualify.

Despite naturalist authors' overarching interest in ideologically charged subjects, it is impossible to generalize about their political positions. London and Sinclair were proud to be socialist reformers, and the development of proletarian literature in the 1930s owes much to naturalism. Norris, by contrast, looks down on his working-class characters, especially in McTeague. Authors frequently change positions over time: Dreiser, for instance, is critical of capitalism in Sister Carrie (the beginning of which shows factories exploiting workers, especially women) and in An American Tragedy (where Griffiths's unquestioning acceptance of the dominant ideology of success and ambition causes his downfall), but he glorifies capitalist unscrupulousness in the Financier trilogy.

Naturalism and Literary History

American naturalism has never been a self-conscious school, nor have its practitioners issued systematic theories. Naturalism is often situated alongside the more polite realism of such writers as William Dean Howells or Henry James. The comparison is both necessary and inconclusive, for some authorities maintain naturalism is an outgrowth of realism, and others, that naturalism repudiates the genteel premises of realism. An additional complication is that some authors said to exemplify naturalism, such as Dreiser, are also hailed as landmark realists. Further confusion results from archetypal naturalist Norris defining his writing (and also Zola's) as romanticism in The Responsibilities of the Novelist (1903). That text, along with Garland's Crumbling Idols (1894) and Dreiser's "True Art Speaks Plainly" (1903), are important manifestos of American naturalism with widely different emphases.

One way of resolving this confusion is to consider realism and naturalism as existing on a continuum. Both employ descriptive detail and social themes, but realism tends to adopt more conventionally moral positions, while seeming less extreme, less pessimistic, and simply less bizarre than naturalism. Thus, Howells's Rise of Silas Lapham (1885) shows its allegiance to realism by locating a businessman's "rise" in his decision to place morality above money making, while Dreiser's The Titan (1914) exemplifies naturalism in depicting a businessman's being rewarded for his amorality through financial success and multiple sexual partners.

The case of American naturalism demonstrates that literary modes are not absolute categories but flexible approaches that authors can shape, combine, and rework. The treatment of the oppressive urban environment in Henry Roth's Call It Sleep (1934), for example, is naturalistic while its stream-of-consciousness narration is a modernist technique. Much of the nightmarish imagery of The Street is expressionistic, notwithstanding its naturalistic treatment of the effects of the ghetto on character. The compulsive characters in Winesburg, Ohio (1919) suggest naturalism, while Sherwood Anderson's Freudian emphasis on dreams and sexuality aligns his book with modernism.

This fluidity is especially significant because neither naturalism nor realism has ever enjoyed the éclat of the literary modes that flourished before it (the romanticism of Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville) or after it (the modernism of Gertrude Stein and William Faulkner). Naturalism's detractors have claimed its penchant for plots of decline, deterministic vision, and limited characters demonstrate its impoverished vision. Such unpleasant features caused many early twentieth-century readers to complain of barbarous and even immoral writing. Dreiser's response is exemplary: "True art speaks plainly. … The sum and substance of literary as well as social morality may be expressed in three words—tell the truth" (reprinted in Becker, p. 155). Even if unwilling to grant naturalists the ground of superior truthfulness that they prized, we can still appreciate their widening of the literary canvas, their engagement with important social issues, and their often unembarrassed political engagement. The mode that struck earlier readers as "immoral" is indeed strong medicine, but has opened up countless literary possibilities that have yet to be exhausted.

Bibliography

Becker, George J., ed. Documents of Modern Literary Realism. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1963.

Howard, June. Form and History in American Literary Naturalism. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1985.

Kazin, Alfred. On Native Grounds: An Interpretation of Modern American Prose Literature. Fortieth Anniversary Edition. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1982.

Michaels, Walter Benn. The Gold Standard and the Logic of Naturalism: American Literature at the Turn of the Century. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987.

Pizer, Donald. Realism and Naturalism in Nineteenth-Century American Literature. Rev. ed. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1984.

Pizer, Donald, ed. The Cambridge Companion to American Realism and Naturalism: Howells to London. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1995.

Wilson, Christopher P. The Labor of Words: Literary Professionalism in the Progressive Era. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1985.

In the visual arts, an attempt to depict the natural world as accurately and objectively as possible.

Look up naturalism in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.

Naturalism (as distinct from Naturalist, Nature and Natural) refer to various topics within philosophy and science, environmental movements, and other areas.

In the arts, naturalism may refer to:

• Naturalism (arts), a style in painting and the visual arts
• Naturalism (literature), a literary style
• Naturalism (theatre), a movement in theatre and drama that began in the 19th century

In philosophy and science, naturalism may refer to:

• Naturalism (philosophy) is any of several philosophical stances wherein all phenomena or hypotheses commonly labeled as supernatural, are either false or not inherently different from natural phenomena or hypotheses.
  • Methodological naturalism can mean simply that science is to be done without reference to supernatural causes. It can also be a methodological assumption in the philosophy of religion that observable events are fully explainable by natural causes without reference to the supernatural. Finally, it can mean that philosophy has the same basic aims and methods as natural science.
  • Metaphysical naturalism means that the cosmos consists only of objects studied by the natural sciences, and does not include any immaterial or intentional realities.
• Ethical naturalism, the theory that ethical terms can be defined in non-ethical terms
• Humanistic naturalism emphasises scientific reasoning as a basis for humane behavior.

• Sociological naturalism is the view that the natural world and the social world are roughly identical and governed by similar principles.
• Political naturalism is a politic and legal system based on the belief in the existence of a fair natural law.
• Naturalistic observation is an empirical method of study by which the researcher introduces no outside stimulus, instead witnessing behavior as it naturally occurs in the environment.
• Natural history, especially in older texts.

Within environmental movements, naturalism can refer to:

• Conservation ethic in relation to preserving "natural ecosystems":
  • Conservationist, proponent or advocate of conservation
  • Conservation movement, movement seeking to protect plant and animal species as well as the habitats they live in
  • Conservation ecology, any part of ecology that has a bearing on conservation
  • Conservation biology, the protection and management of biodiversity
• Environmental education
• Environmental preservation
• Sustainable living

See also

All pages beginning with "Naturalism"

• Naturism, the practice of "social nudity"

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Dansk (Danish)
n. - naturalisme

Nederlands (Dutch)
naturalisme

Français (French)
n. - naturalisme

Deutsch (German)
n. - Naturalismus

Ελληνική (Greek)
n. - νατουραλισμός, φυσιοκρατία

Italiano (Italian)
naturalismo

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n. - naturalismo (m)

Русский (Russian)
натурализм

Español (Spanish)
n. - naturalismo

Svenska (Swedish)
n. - naturalism

中文（简体）(Chinese (Simplified))
自然主义, 本能行动

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n. - 自然主義, 本能行動

한국어 (Korean)
n. - 자연주의

日本語 (Japanese)
n. - 自然主義

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‏(الاسم) النزوع الطبيعي, المذهب الطبيعي, الواقعيه‏

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n. - ‮טבעיות, אמונה בדת הטבע, נודיזם, נטורליזם, עבודת עצמים טבעיים, תיאוריה פילוסופית שאינה מביאה בחשבון את העל-טבעי או הרוחני‬

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