Twentieth Century American Literature

Survey Course Instructor:Mihai Mîndra

Lecture 6Scientific Materialism:

Jack London’s Call of the Wild (1903). Social Determinism:

Stephen Crane’s Maggie: A Girl of the Streets (1893)

Naturalism

Scientific MaterialismSocial determinism

Naturalism – Main Features naturalism was born in France in the 1880s with Zola

appreciation that “a novelist must be only a scientist, an analyst, an anatomist and his work must have the certainty, the solidity, the practical application of a work of science”.

Characteristics : Lower class life Survival orientation. The middle class concern with

status and social behavior is supplanted by elemental drives of hunger, fear and sex among the “have-nots” who must battle simply to exist.

Naturalism – Main Features Sordid language, settings and events of an

animalistic environment. Deterministic philosophy: heredity &

environment manipulate human destiny. Free will is an illusion.

Denial of the American myth - a dispassionate, clinical study of the actuality encountered by the underprivileged American

Literary art should apply the techniques of the biological sciences.

Naturalism – Main Features An essentially pessimistic, tragic view of

life. Man as an organism buffeted by the exterior forces that he never made and cannot govern.

Move toward irrational man. The realists still believed that man was a creature of reason who could solve his problems if he tried. The naturalists : no hope, man is driven by passions and appetites wholly beyond control.

Frank Norris (1870 – 1902)

Social Darwinism, Naturalism as Romantic (1870-1902) Fiction The Responsibilities of the Novelist(1903)

– Naturalism as Drama (romance) plus Social Observation (Realism) > polemics with Howells.

McTeague (1899) – an application of his theory on Naturalism as Romance plus Social Observation.

Theodore Dreiser (1871-1945)

Naturalism (social determinism) Sister Carrie(1900) – impact and

entrapment of self by money (Charles Drouet, George Hurstwood); city (Chicago, New York) working (Carrie Meeber’s sister and brother-in-law), middle class.

Jack London (1876-1916)

Social Darwinism, Nietzschean “blonde beast”/ fight for supremacy, Racism, Socialism/Scientific Materialism. Call of the Wild (1903) – environment

(symbolical – historical [the Nietzschean Zarathustra/ Übermensch myth-the 1890s Gold Rush-Klondike, Alaska).

The Iron Heel (1908) – Socialist dystopia: Capitalism as Fascism.

Stephen Crane (1871-1900)

Naturalism: social environmental determinism. Maggie, a Girl of the Streets(1893) –

New York slums; sweatshops; prostitution; brutality; dipsomaniac mother; slums immorality: hypocritical middleclass ethics.

Scientific Materialism connection between Darwin’s theory

and socialism

man and history are evolving toward a terrestrial paradise created by Promethean humanists.

Call of the Wild (1903) A romance/fable/parable of scientific

theory: the doctrine of evolution. Determinism / social Darwinism

Jack London’s Socialism –Nietzscheanism

From The Call of the Wild (1903) to The Iron Heel (1906): Buck = romantic, fable/parable, unconscious

stage of Ernest Everhard Ernest Everhard (The Iron Heel): introduced by

London as “a superman, a blond beast such as Nietzsche described, and in addition he was aflame with democracy.”

No contradiction Socialism – Nietzscheanism with London: his Socialism was exotic, unorthodox, a political extension of his Nietzsche.

Social Determinism Naturalism as Social Determinism:

illustrated dramatically, in order to move the liberal middle-class reader to reform

the protagonist’s fall and willing elimination through suicide at different social levels Maggie, a Girl of the Streets (1893) –

Maggie, the New York slum Sister Carrie (1900) – George

Hurstwood, Chicago business middle class

House of Mirth (1905) – Lily Barth, New York aristocracy

Stephen Crane (1871 – 1900)

Maggie: A Girl of the Streets (1893) early 1890s, Stephen Crane set out to

reinvent the tenement novel inability to find a publisher for Maggie is an

indication of his success -- especially when one considers that at the time slum fiction was in vogue, and certain books about the poor were becoming veritable bestsellers.

the scandal of Crane's work was not its setting but, rather, his refusal to judge slum life according to middle-class standards + defiance of slum fiction conventions

Maggie: A Girl of the Streets (1893) The traditional novel of the poor was centered around

a moral struggle and transformation The drama usually involved a battle to resist the bad

influences of the slums and the pressures of physical misery.

Dime novels about slum girls would climax with a similar trial, but, of course, the heroine would triumph.

Most slum novels of the 1880s and 1890s focused on moral conflict and metamorphosis (pedagogical). The slum in these renditions is not so much a

territory of strange habits and appearances as a den of vice and moral decay.

Maggie: A Girl of the Streets (1893) The slum novel is often elaborate in its description of

moral transformation: The exploration of the experiences of sin and remorse

is exhaustive; the lesson is not to be missed e.g. Cora (Edgar Fawcett, The Evil That Men Do

(1889)), the good and honest woman from the country, has no choice but to "mix" with bad people. As she puts it, "I can't get rid of 'em; I sometimes wish I could.

"The story chronicles its heroine's moral struggle and corruption: her temptations to vice (numerous men try to seduce her; various loose women hammer away at the pointlessness of virtue), her attempts to resist these temptations, her eventual yielding and fall into sin, her remorse and shame, her complete moral demise (she becomes a defiant prostitute), and finally her miserable death.

Maggie: A Girl of the Streets (1893) The moral transformation at the center

of a slum tale might also be for the good. Horatio Alger boy hero in Ragged Dick; or, Street

Life in New York ( 1867) swears off his bad habits, gives up his "vagabond life," seeks out an education, and makes himself into "a respectable man."

Ethnographic detail is basically a digression in these stories devoted to Protestant moral exposition as well

as social investigation touristic observations usually give way to reports

of despicable living conditions.

Maggie: A Girl of the Streets (1893)

The plot of moral struggle accompanied by a general moral as well as

social commentary on the slums E.g.: Townsend, A Daughter of the Tenements)

[43]: Reverend Chapin: "The Bowery! . . . [T]he Bowery presents . . . a microcosm. There is man in worldly condition from wealth to bitterest poverty; in morals, from him who is devoting his life to following Christ's example among the poor, to him to whom every crime and vice are familiar by practice." (Townsend 90)

The Bowery at Night, c. 1895William Louis Sonntag, Jr. (1869 -1898)

Maggie: A Girl of the Streets (1893) CRANE’S CORRECTION OF THE SLUM TALE:

Not in the sentimental pedagogical tradition, Crane claimed that: "an artist has no business to preach“ he boasted to his friends that "you can't find any

preaching in Maggie." he regarded the sentimental novels of his

contemporaries as "pink valentines," in a letter about Maggie he specifically derided

Townsend Daughter of the Tenements: the absence of moralistic and social

preaching and the acid rejection of Victorian standards > unusual at that time.

Maggie: A Girl of the Streets (1893) Maggie recounts the same basic tale as The Evil That Men Do also shares a compelling resemblance with Reverend Thomas

de Witt Talmage's Night Sides of City Life (1878) and Charles Loring Brace’s Dangerous Classes of New York -- depending on how one reads Maggie's death scene. Like Maggie, Fawcett's heroine is a slum girl subjected to the

hardships of violent parents and menial labor; she is made love to and abandoned by a man, and she ends up as a prostitute and then a corpse (Cora is murdered).

According to Talmage, a fallen woman must choose between the cold garret of a sewing girl and the East River; Brace includes a drawing of a woman who is about to throw herself in the same river, which Maggie approaches in her last moments (perhaps to kill herself).

Maggie: A Girl of the Streets (1893) Crane's ethnography is more profound than that of his

contemporaries not simply because it is more prevalent or because it is

uninterrupted by conventional moral and social asides because he imagines the distinctive codes and

values -together, the distinctive ethics -- that lie behind the distinctive slum action.

An action is largely incomprehensible on its face, and this is why the action in the slum novels of the day can often appear exotic: it is unexplained; its cause is obscure; it has the ontological status of either a genetic disease or a freak of nature.

To understand an action, one must also know the ethics: the ethical code (so one knows whether it is an observance or a violation) and the ethical values (so one knows why and how the actor engages in the action).

Maggie: A Girl of the Streets (1893)

Townsend’s book violence (beating up) is not explained just rendered as exotic and typical.

That’s the way this slum phenomenon carries on.

Jacob Riis: often acknowledges that the poor districts have their own "standards and customs.“ (How the Other Half Lives, 1890)

Maggie: A Girl of the Streets (1893)

For Crane, it is not just the living conditions and the ways of the urban poor that are other; so is their morality.

Maggie is a kind of counterdemonstration. He takes an old tale and retells it: to get it right.

It is as if Crane is saying to his colleagues, yes, you got the basic plot elements, the basic action correct, but you completely misunderstand how it comes about.

Maggie: A Girl of the Streets (1893) For Crane, the rough outline of the action is correct, but

everything else is mistaken. The details of the sexual behavior are wrong: Maggie is

not seduced, and not by a playboy of a higher class; she falls in love with a tough.

The significance of the sexual action is misinterpreted because the local ethical code is not understood: a portion of Crane's Bowery has no prohibition against premarital sex.

Finally, the girl's inner experience is misrepresented because her values do not correspond to those of the middle class -- because, in particular, chastity is not an ethic for her: Maggie experiences no temptation and resistance to sin

and no remorse for the act; rather, she is attracted to a tough because he is, in her ethics, a moral exemplar.