Naturalistic Characters

1. Naturalistic Characters • Ethnically marked citizens of America • Part of the lower middle class • Ill-educated characters governed by forces of heredity, instinct, and passion • Attempts to exercise free will • Forces are beyond the characters’ control • Tough exterior • Strong and warring emotions

2. More about Naturalist Characters • Fight for survival • Pessimistic • hopeless

3. Traits of Naturalist Authors • Mostly writers from the Great Depression and the Harlem Renaissance • Had a difficult life and connect their lives’ with their stories

4. Naturalist Authors • Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck • “To Build a Fire” by Jack London • Their Eyes were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston • The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald

5. Essentials of Naturalism • Specifically concerned with using practical methods for acquiring knowledge • Everything explained through natural causes • Hypotheses have to be testable and practical, not just based on miracle itself • Excludes any supernatural agent or activity • Physical matter is the only reality • Principle underlying modern science

6. Naturalism in Literature • Seeks to portray the common values of the individual in which he/she may receive highly symbolic, idealistic, and sometimes supernatural treatment • Writers try to focus on the filth of society and the toil of the lower classes as the main point of their writing • Heavily influenced by Marxism and evolutionary theory • Authors attempted to apply the important parts of these two theories to an artistic representation of society • Naturalism describes a type of literature that attempts to apply scientific principles of objectiveness and detachment to its study of humans • Characters studied by their interaction with surroundings • Influenced by Darwin’s evolution theory, by how one’s surroundings and hereditary makeup make their character • Serves to expose the dark side of life, such as immorality, prostitution, filth, disease, poverty, injustice, etc. • Often very pessimistic and criticized for their bluntness

7. Major Themes Seen in Naturalism • Key ideas: survival, determinism, violence, and taboo • The "brute within" each individual. composed of strong and often warring emotions: passions, such as lust, greed, or the desire for dominance or pleasure; and the fight for survival in an amoral, indifferent universe. The conflict in naturalistic novels is often "man against nature" or "man against himself" as characters struggle to retain a "veneer of civilization" despite external pressures that threaten to release the "brute within." • Nature as an indifferent force acting on the lives of human beings

8. Continued… • An indifferent, deterministic universe. Naturalistic texts often describe the futile attempts of human beings to exercise free will, often ironically presented, in this universe that reveals free will as an illusion.

9. Naturalism Compared to Other Beliefs • Opposite of Romanticism: Naturalism tries to apply scientific principles, and less emotions and feelings • Compared to Monotheism, Naturalism believes everything can, in principle, be explained by material objects guided by natural law. • No God(s) • Religions considered Naturalist: atheism, scientism, secular humanism, existentialism and nihilism • Postmodernism is heavily influenced by Naturalism