Polemical Naturalism: The Nature of Controversy in American Letters

This dissertation argues that the crucial quality of American literary naturalism is the polemicism of its major authors and texts. Scholars have long been attuned to the “rebellious” nature of naturalism. Indeed, following the charge of H. L. Mencken (for whom naturalism constituted an aesthetic assault on the pious vacuities of Howellsian social realism), critics have been apt to frame naturalism as the national literature of disobedience. What is less than clear, however, is what, exactly, naturalism is supposed to be rebelling against. In a century of criticism, naturalism has constituted an assault on “machine industrialism” (Parrington), romantic imagination (Trilling), literary realism (Pizer), sentimentality (Lehan), regionalism and local color fiction (Campbell), feminization (Seltzer), capitalism (Benn Michaels), European aestheticism (Dudley), and patriarchal hegemony (Fleissner). My thesis builds on the assumption that the “real object” of naturalism’s rebellion is less definitive than the antinomian spirit itself. The naturalists, in short, were polemicists: naturalism is defined less by a coherent and stable philosophical orientation than by an attitude, a posture of aggressive controversy, which happens to cluster loosely around particular philosophical themes. Moreover, the conspicuous polemicism of the original naturalist project has been registered and extended in the critical construction of the genre over the past century. Naturalism has always depended upon polemical reconstruction by its critics, who were themselves feeding upon the palpable polemicism of Norris, Dreiser, et. al. In chapter one, I argue that the naturalists (and their critics) have adopted a self-effacing polemical rhetoric to establish the genre as the “central marginal” figure in the American canon. By emphasizing their own otherness to the American mainstream, the naturalists were, in effect, claiming it. Then, in close examinations of works by Frank Norris, Theodore Dreiser, and Richard Wright, I argue that the naturalists used their fiction to explore some of the most controversial political and cultural issues in modern American life. Scholars have long noticed how naturalism draws on the scientific theories of Darwin, Spencer, Sumner, Huxley, and others to challenge the prevailing Judeo-Christian cosmology. But the naturalists also charted the basic co-ordinates of a wide range of issues. So, my second chapter considers Frank Norris’s The Octopus in relation to emerging discourses of environmentalism and nascent anxieties over ecological despoliation. Chapter three considers the relationship between abortion and censorship in Theodore Dreiser’s An American Tragedy, and argues that the “tragedy” of Dreiser’s text hinges upon our understanding how its protagonist, Clyde Griffiths, is himself a work of art. In chapter four, I argue that Native Son’s chilling protagonist, Bigger Thomas, represents a distinctly modern figure for terror, and that the novel elaborates a disturbing complimentarity between terrorism and lynching as the crime and punishment that exist outside the confines of the law. While my project considers each of these polemical debates within the cultural and intellectual climates in which they emerged, it is also an attempt to engage with these ideas in their own spirit—that is, to situate naturalistic novels, polemically, within the highly fraught contexts they helped to invent.

Keywords: American literature
Naturalism
polemic
Richard Wright
Theodore Dreiser
Frank Norris
eco-criticism
environmentalism
terrorism
abortion
Advisor: Most, Andrea