美国自然主义

helpless and hopeless. European writers like Emile Zola had already developed this acute social consciousness. They saw man’s life as governed by the two forces of heredity environment Heredity and environment are forces absolutely beyond man’s control. American naturalism had been shaped by the war, by the social upheavals that undermined the
predecessors, the naturalists emphasized


that the world was amoral,
that men and women had no free will,

that lives were controlled by heredity and environment, that the destiny of humanity was misery in life and oblivion in death.

Crane’s Maggie: A Girl of the Streets is the first American naturalistic work. Norris’s McTeague is the manifesto of American naturism. Dreiser’s Sister Carrie is the work in which naturalism attained maturity. These writers detailed description of the lives of the downtrodden and the abnormal, their frank treatment of human passion and sexuality, and
The pessimism and deterministic ideas of naturalism pervaded the works of such American writers as Stephen Crane, Frank Norris, Jack


London and Theodore Dreiser.
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American naturalism was a new and harsher realism and like realism, it had come from Europe. Naturalism was an outgrowth of realism that responded to theories in science, psychology, human behavior and social thought current in the late nineteenth century. In the last decade of the nineteenth century, with the development of industry and modern science, intelligent minds began to see that man was no longer a free ethical being in a cold, indifferent and essentially Godless universe. In this world he was both


comforting faith of an earlier age, and by the disturbing teachings of Darwinism. America’s literary naturalists dismissed the validity of comforting moral truths. They attempted to achieve extremes objectivity and frankness, presenting characters of low social and economic classes who were determined by their environment and heredity. In presenting the extremes of life, the naturalists sometimes displayed an affinity to the sensationalism of early romanticism, but unlike their romantic



their portrayal of men and women over-whelmed by blind forces of nature still exert a powerful influence on modern writers.

The background
The post war decades witnessed the emergence of “Modern America.” Industrialism and science and the new philosophy of life based upon science were among the important factors which helped to create the economic, social and cultural transformations of the country. 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