Joyce Carol Oates: Naturalism and the Aberrant Response

JOYCE CAROL OATES: NATURALISM AND THE ABERRANT RESPONSE Steven Barza* Naturalism is literature predicated upon a scientific model, upon the assumption that a human life can be measured and charted, that human behavior can be predicted as the outcome of social forces. Emile Zola is credited with founding the movement, formulating the theory, and providing the first major works. L'Assommoir treats the decline of the washerwoman Gervaise as the direct result of her circumstances : squalid neighborhood, drunken husband, spiteful friends. The enviroment dominates the narrative exactly as it dominates her life. The reader must have all evidence first-hand, must feel the effect for himself. Gervaise's destiny is not, strictly speaking, determined. The reader cares for her only because she possesses a will, is caught up in the book's drama only because the conclusion is not foregone. In Zola's Nana, nearly identical conditions produce the opposite response. Nana rises in station; the sadness and filth that surround her only hardens her resolve to escape. Even the father of European Naturalism shows a range of character reaction. The father of American Naturalism, Theodore Dreiser, shows the identical range. Clyde Griffiths ofAn American Tragedy is beset upon, and finally crushed, by a combination of economic, biological, and legal forces. Sister Carrie, on the other hand, maneuvers herself into a position of power and wealth. There are, it seems, two distinctive genres: the Naturalistic tragedy and the Naturalistic success story. In the first category falls L'Assommoir, An American Tragedy, Stephen Crane's Maggie, Frank Norris's McTeague, and Richard Wright's Native Son. Sooner or later the protagonists all succumb to the pressures around them. In doing so, argues Charles Child Walcutt, they perfectly embody Naturalistic theory: "The overwhelming power of the enviroment can be demonstrated only if it destroys the individual ."1 But in works of the second type, Nana, Sister Carrie, Dreiser's Cowperwood trilogy, where the life is so shaped, one might 'Professor Barza, who teaches at the University of Richmond, has published short fiction in Aspect, Ataraxia, and The Laurel Review. His scholarship has appeared in the Colorado Quarterly, New Letters, and The Kansas City Star. 142Steven Barza say narrowed, twisted, mis-shaped, by the drive for upward mobility, the case for the environment is still powerfully made. Some characters rise and some fall but they all agree what a rise and fall consist of; they all react to stimuli in comprehensible ways. Only if they do can the extremities they are driven to, acts of cruelty and self-destruction, of suicide and murder, be traced back to social conditions. Whatever political indictment the Naturalistic writer intends is implicit. But for it to exist at all, social forces must be paramount . The links in the causal chain must be clearly defined. Character response must be transparent, non-ambiguous, accessible to the least imaginative reader. Perhaps this is why Naturalism has fallen into disfavor in recent decades. Its mechanistic psychology seems uninspired. Its weight of documentary evidence makes for a tedious read. Fictional taste has moved to the elliptical, the mysterious, the willfully invented. Social criticism has given way to metaphysical challenge, earnestness to irony. Life is not unjust; it is preposterous, magical, absurd. In that context, the work ofJoyce Carol Oates seems a throwback. Loretta Wendell of her novel Them is a figure from Naturalistic tragedy: a woman who exhausts her youthful dreams in a flurry of impulsive acts, finds herself trapped, begins the long slide into senescence. Her son Jules aspires to a better life, but he, too, falls short. Like Clyde Griffiths, he mingles romantic dreams and social aspirations in the doomed pursuit of a daughter of the upper class. It is his sister Maureen who finds a niche in the higher strata. She is a figure from the Naturalistic success story, a Nana or Carrie, a women drained of illusion, devoid of scruple, determined to achieve her ends. Like the Naturalists, Oates masses her fiction with detail, shows lives being formed by the steady accretion of day-to-day experience. But here the similarities end. Oates is a contemporary voice. Her Naturalism is a Naturalism for her time. Individual destiny may...