Frank Norris and Naturalism

Other novelists viewed life as more complex. Californian Frank Norris (1870-1902), for example, who agreed with Howells that the proper subject for fiction was the ordinary person, found Howells's fiction too strait-laced and narrow. Norris was interested in the earthier aspects of life, with the impact of large social forces on individuals. His best-known novel, The Octopus, is about the struggles between wheat farmers and the railroad monopoly in California. Norris was not the first to use the novel to examine social institutions (usually with the aim of reforming them).

Norris, whose principal model was the French novelist Emile Zola, is generally considered to be a naturalist. Following Zola's lead, naturalists relied heavily on the growing scientific disciplines of psychology and sociology. In their fiction, they attempted to dissect human behavior with as much objectivity as a scientist would dissect a frog or a cadaver. For naturalists, human behavior was termined by forces beyond the individual's power, especially by biology and environment. The naturalists tended to look a 'human life bluntly and crudely. Their characters often had only' limited choices and motivations. In the eyes of some naturalist writers, human beings were totally subject to the natural laws of the universe; like animals, they lived crudely, by instinct, unable to control their own destinies.

Henry James and Psychological Realism

New York-born Henry James (1843-1916), America's greatest psychological novelist, concentrated principally on fine distinctions in character motivation. James was a realist, but no realist could be further from the blunt naturalistic view that people were driven by animal-like instincts. In his finely tuned studies of human motivation, James opened the inner mind to the techniques of fiction. He was principally interested in complex social and psychological situations. His novels (such as Daisy Miller and The Portrait of a Lady) most often took place in Europe, because he considered European society, with its long-evolved systems of class and nobility, to be both more complex and more sinister than American society. In a typically "Jamesian" fiction, a straightforward American confronts the complexities of European society and either defeats or is defeated by them.

Stephen Crane and the Uses of Irony

Stephen Crane (1871-1900) was as profound a psychologist as James, but his principal interest was in character at moments of stress. For James the proper setting for an examination of human behavior under pressure was the drawing room; for Crane it was the battlefield, or the streets of a slum, or a western outpost, or a lifeboat lost somewhere at sea. Crane's view of life was as bleak as Howells's vision was bright. Although Crane is sometimes referred to as a naturalist, he is probably best thought of as an ironist. Of all the nineteenth-century realists, only Crane could describe a stabbing death (in his story "The Blue Hotel") in this coolly cynical manner: "[The blade] shot forward, and a human body, this citadel of virtue, wisdom, power, was pierced as easily as if it had been a melon." It would take this sensibility to get the "real war" in the books.

Realism—whether it was psychological realism, naturalism, social realism, or smiling realism—was a powerful way of looking at human life. In fact, realism would virtually control fiction from the 1890's to the middle of the twentieth century.