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American Literature. 030533/4/5, 14 th Nov. 2006. Lecture Eight. The American Realism (III) (1865 - 1918). VI. Naturalism and Muckraking. The reasons on the coming of American Naturalism:
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American Literature 030533/4/5, 14th Nov. 2006
Lecture Eight The American Realism (III) (1865 - 1918)
VI. Naturalism and Muckraking • The reasons on the coming of American Naturalism: • Industrialism produced financial giants, but at the same time created an industrial proletariat entirely at the mercy of external forces beyond their control. Slums appeared in great numbers where conditions became steadily worse. • New ideas about man and man’s place in the universe began to take root in America. Living in a cold, indifferent, and essentially Godless world, man was no longer free in any sense of the word. Darwinian concepts like “the survival of the fittest” and “the human beast” became popular catchwords and standards of moral reference in an amoral world. • French naturalism, with its new technique and new way of writing, appealed to the imagination of the younger generation.
The main characteristics of naturalism: • The writers of naturalism tore the mask of gentility to pieces and wrote about the helplessness of man, his insignificance in a cold world, and his lack of dignity in face of the crushing forces of environment and heredity.In their works there is a desire to assert one’s human identity, to define oneself against the social and natural forces one confronts • They reported truthfully and objectively, with a passion for scientific accuracy and an overwhelming accumulation of factual detail. • The major representatives of American naturalists include Jack London, Stephen Crane, Frank Norris, Theodore Dreiser and so on.
Muckraking: • In dictionary: • Finding and publishing stories, perhaps using underhand methods, that expose misconduct, corruption, hypocrisy, or the like. • Publishing (perhaps invented) stories that give salacious details of peoples’ private lives • In literature: • Muckraking is applied to American journalists, novelists, and critics who in the first decade of the 20th century attempted to expose the abuses of business and the corruption in politics.
Muckraking novels used eye-catching journalistic techniques to depict harsh working conditions and oppressions. Norris’s Octopus (1901) exposed big railroad companies while Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle (1906) painted the squalor of the Chicago meat-packing houses, and Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio, emphasizes the quiet poverty, loneliness, and despair in small-town America. • The muckraking movement lost support in about 1912. Historians agree that if it had not been for the revelations of the muckrakers the Progressive movement would not have received the popular support needed for effective reform.
About the author: • It is believed that London is an illegitimate child, who passed his childhood in poverty in the Oakland slums. He had little formal schooling, but was an avid reader, educating himself at public libraries. • At the age of 17, he ventured to sea on a sealing ship and from then on to voyages on ship became one of his favorites and material for his later writing. • In his teens, he joined Coxey’s Army in its famous march on Washington, D.C., and was later arrested for vagrancy. The turning point of his life was a thirty-day imprisonment that was so degrading it made him decide to turn to education and pursue a career in writing. • His years in the Klondike a Gold Prospector (from 1897-1898 ) had to be ended because of his poor health, which would provide abundant material for his future novels and stories .
Upon his return to Oakland, California, he could not find steady work. In desperation, he decided to dive into writing, launching his writing career. • Jack married two times in his life. The first wife is his math tutor and the second one his secretary. • From 1905 to 1913, London set up his own “Beauty Ranch” totaling 1,400 acres bought. At Beauty Ranch, he raised many animals such as prize bulls, horses, and pigs and cultivated a wide variety of crops, fully enjoying the life of a rancher. • By his death at age forty on November 22, 1916, Jack had been plagued for years by a vast number of health problems, including stomach disturbances, ravaging uremia, and failing kidneys.
His masterpiece: • Many people argue as to what London's masterpiece was. Some say The Call of the Wild, others say The Sea Wolf, and still others say Martin Eden. The Call of the Wild is thrilling adventure story set in the Yukon frontier, telling the gripping tale of a dog named Buck who is wrenched out of his life of ease and luxury to become a sled dog in Alaska. Drawing on his wolf heritage, Buck must fight for survival in an alien environment, experiencing both the cruelty of man and the freedom of the wild.
The Sea-Wolf was based on his experiences at sea. When fate lands Humphrey Van Weyden on board the Ghost, a sealing schooner bound for Japan, little does he know of the weeks of brutality which lie ahead. Captain Wolf Larsen is feared and despised by all on board, and only the chance arrival of Maud Brewster spurs Van Weyden into action in a desperate attempt to free them both from the terrifying power of the Sea-Wolf. This work embraced the concepts of unconfined individualism and Darwinism in its exploration of the laws of nature. London portrays a version of the Nietzschean superman in schooner captain Wolf Larsen, one of the most memorable characters in American literature. • Martin Eden. One of London's most important books is this semi-autobiographical account of a young sailor who struggles to improve himself and achieves eventual success as a writer, but grows disenchanted with fame and wealth. It represents both an indictment of the American dream and an important reflection on London's own background and career.
Evaluation on him: • Jack London, whose life symbolized the power of will, was the most successful writer in America in the early 20th Century. His vigorous stories of men and animals against the environment, and survival against hardships were drawn mainly from his own experience. • In fact, he was a prolific writer whose fiction explored three geographies and their cultures: the Yukon, California, and the South Pacific. He left over fifty books of novels, stories, journalism, and essays, many of which have been translated and continue to be read around the world. • He experimented with many literary forms, from conventional love stories and dystopias to science fantasy. His noted journalism included war correspondence, boxing stories, and the life of Molokai lepers.
A committed socialist, he insisted against editorial pressures to write political essays and insert social criticism in his fiction. • He was among the most influential figures of his day, who understood how to create a public persona and use the media to market his self-created image of poor-boy-turned-success. • London's great passion was agriculture, and he was well on the way of creating a new model for ranching through his Beauty Ranch when he died of kidney disease at age 40.
About the author: • Stephen Crane was born in Newark, New Jersey, in 1881, as the 14th child of a cultural family. Both of his parents did some writing and two of his brothers became newspapermen. • Crane started to write stories at the age of eight; at 16 he was writing articles for the New York Tribune. • Crane studied at Lafayette College and Syracuse University. After his mother's death in 1890- his father had died earlier-Crane moved to New York. He worked as a free-lance writer and journalist for the Bachellor-Johnson newspaper syndicate. While supporting himself by his writings, he lived among the poor in the Bowery slums to research his first novel, Maggie: A Girl of the Streets (1893) • In 1895 the publication of The Red Badge of Courage and of his first book of poems, The Black Riders, brought him international fame.
His reputation as a war writer, his desire to see if he had guessed right about the psychology of combat, and his fascination with death and danger sent him to Greece and then to Cuba as a war correspondent. • His first attempt in 1897 to report on the insurrection in Cuba ended in near disaster; the ship sank, and Crane--reported drowned--finally rowed into shore in a dinghy with the captain. The result was one of the world's great short stories, The Open Boat. His others are The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky, and The Blue Hotel. • In 1898 Crane settled in Sussex, England. On June 5, 1900 in Germany he died of tuberculosis, which was worsened by malarial fever he had caught in Cuba.
His Major Works: • Maggie: A Girl of the Streets • About the story: It is the harrowing story of a poor sensitive young girl whose uneducated alcoholic parents utterly fail her. In love and eager to escape her violent home life, she allows herself to be seduced into living with a young man, who soon deserts her. When her self-righteous mother rejects her, Maggie becomes a prostitute to survive, but soon commits suicide out of despair.
The Red Badge of Courage. • About the story: • The story is set during the American Civil War. Henry Fleming enrolls as a soldier in the Union army. He has dreamed of battles and glory all his life, but his expectations are shattered in his encounter with the enemy when he witnesses the chaos on the battle field and starts to fear that the regiment was leaving him behind. He flees from the battle. • Later he returns to the lines and feels sore and stiff from his experiences. In the heat of the battle, he picks up the regiment's flag with his friend when it falls from the color sergeant's hands. Following the conventions of a bildungsroman, Henry has matured after the final battle and he understands better his strengths and weaknesses.
Relevant Evaluation: • Itdepicted the American Civil War from the point of view of an ordinary soldier and has been called the first modern war novel. • It reveals the basic theme of the animal man in a cold, manipulating world. Here Crane is looking into man’s primitive emotions and trying to tell the elemental truth about human life. • War shown in the novel is a plain slaughter-house. There is nothing like valor or heroism on the battlefield, and if there anything, it is fear of death, cowardice, the natural instinct of man to run from danger. • By thus un-romanticizing war and heroism, Crane initiated the modern tradition of telling the truth at all costs about the elemental human situation, and writing about war as a real human experience. So this was an event of a revolutionary nature both in theme and technique.
Evaluation on him: • Crane was a pioneer writing in the naturalistic tradition. His writings gave the whole esthetic movement of the nineties a sudden direction and a fresh impulse. • Crane was also a pioneer in the field of modern poetry. His early poems, brief, quotable, with their unrhymed, unorthodox conciseness and impressionistic imagery, was to exert a significant influence on modern poetry: As a matter of a fact, he is now recognized as one of the two precursors of Imagist poetry, the other being Emily Dickinson. • His basic motif is about environment and heredity overwhelming man.
Crane’s fictional world is a naturalistic one in which man is deprived of free will and expects no help from any quarter whatever. • The secret of Crane's success as war correspondent, journalist, novelist, short-storywriter, and poet lay in his achieving tensions between irony and pity, illusion and reality, or the double mood of hope contradicted by despair. He was a great stylist and a master of the contradictory effect.
I.About the author: • Benjamin Franklin Norris, 1870–1902, American novelist, b. Chicago. After studying in Paris, at the Univ. of California (1890–94), and Harvard, he wrote McTeague (1899), a proletarian novel influenced by the experimental naturalism of Zola. His most impressive work was his proposed trilogy, “The Epic of Wheat,” of which only two parts were written—The Octopus (1901), depicting the brutal struggle between the wheat farmers and the railroad, and The Pit (1903), dealing with speculation on the Chicago grain market, and The third part, The Wolf, was never written. • Norris spent several years as a war correspondent in South Africa (1895–96) and Cuba (1898).
His masterpiece: The Octopus • It illustrates how social and economic conditions ruined the lives of innocent, powerless people. • The railroad reached out its millions of tentacles , coiling round the throats of the farmers who had no alternative but to choose between leaving their crops to rot and carting them out through the railroad at a capriciously exorbitant freight rate, in either case ending up in bankruptcy and destruction; and what is worse, the railroad raises the price of the land, which it has rented for the people so that all the farmers and the poor in general face stark destitution and ruin.
Homework: • Search for Dreiser’s personal information and report to the class. • Read his masterpiece An American Strategy and report it’s plot summary and main themes to the class next time.
