Fighting Words: Polemics and Social Change in Literary Naturalism by Ira Wells (review)

Ira Wells’ Fighting Words examines American literary naturalism as an inherently polemical genre. Through their fiction and nonfiction, Wells contends, naturalists have championed some of the least popular arguments in the political, social, and cultural debates of their time. An American Tragedy voices Theodore Dreiser’s belief that eugenics—abortion and birth control—should regulate the development of the underclass. Richard Wright’s Native Son addresses domestic terrorism. More than a literary theme, Wells argues, polemicism has been a structural element in the definition of the naturalist genre. Dreiser’s works found critical support in H. L. Mencken’s diatribes against puritanism and censorship laws. Dreiser’s, Crane’s, and Norris’ legacy was an object of fierce critical debate during the Cold War decades, when the politics of naturalism and, conversely, its artistic merits came under the scrutiny of Malcolm Cowley, Lionel Trilling, Charles Child Walcutt, and Donald Pizer. Overall, Wells suggests, polemics waged by naturalists or triggered by their works have shaped the very definition of the function of literature in America.

Wells’ study is useful primarily because it offers a framework for the discussion of American naturalism beyond its turn-of-the-twentieth-century classic period. By opening the corpus to nonfiction and to critical arguments about the genre, Wells judiciously gestures toward a transhistorical concept of naturalist discourse, tracing out the continuity between figures as different as Stephen Crane and Norman Mailer. Polemicism is a fitting foundation for this argument because the term refers simultaneously to a structural feature—a genre of discourse in its own right—and to historically specific debates. Still, the essay struggles with the task of subsuming a diverse literary field under a single generic heading. In particular, Wells’ focus on polemicism leads him to lend too much credence to Norris’ dissociation of naturalism from realism, thereby excessively de-emphasizing naturalism’s realist agenda. Not only does this choice imperfectly suit the facts of U.S. fiction itself, but it makes little sense from the perspective of the international realist/naturalist movement. Also, the decision to tackle fiction and nonfiction on the same plane, while productive on first inspection, leads Wells to disregard the fact that polemics do not unfold with the same dynamics in either type of text: naturalist fictions are on average less narrowly polemical than nonfiction statements by the same authors. It is therefore not surprising that Wells’ readings of Norris’ The Octopus, Dreiser’s An American Tragedy, and Wright’s Native Son should stray from the argument on polemicism. Wells’ interesting eco-critical reading of The Octopus hardly qualifies as a case study of polemicism since Wells himself concedes that it is teased out from Norris’ far more visible debate on the nature of corporations. Likewise, forced abortion and birth control seem secondary concerns in Wells’ reading of An American Tragedy: they are overshadowed by Dreiser’s reflections on the social shaping of desire. Overall, Wells offers a valuable if slightly incomplete account of a dimension of twentieth-century naturalist writing that deserves further scrutiny.