Twentieth Century American

Literature

Survey Course Instructor:

Mihai Mîndra
 Lecture 6
Scientific Materialism:
Jack London’s Call of the Wild (1903).
Social Determinism:
Stephen Crane’s Maggie: A Girl of the
Streets (1893)
 Naturalism

Social determinism Scientific Materialism

 Naturalism – Main Features
 naturalism was born in France in the 1880s with Zola
“a novelist must be only a
appreciation that
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. 1895
William 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.