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2 The Polemical Nature of Naturalism in America From the moment they were first uttered by English speakers in the seventeenth century, the words “naturalism” and “naturalist” have emerged from snarling lips. In 1642, the English cleric Richard Montagu warns his readers of the “atheists or men . . . who will admit of nothing but Morality, but Naturalismes , and humane reason.” As early as 1612, one finds evidence of “those blasphemous truth-opposing Heretikes, and Atheisticall naturalists” (OED “naturalist,” n. and a., 2a). In the nearly two hundred years that elapsed before the word “naturalism” came to describe a fin-de-siècle mode of American fiction, the defining features of naturalism had no doubt mutated or pupated beyond any resemblance of that earlier entity. Scholars such as Eric Carl Link have distinguished carefully between the scientific, philosophical, and literary streams of naturalism; the American literary naturalists are not unproblematic “inheritors” of the other, earlier naturalisms.1 And yet writers such as Norris, Dreiser, and Wright do perhaps bear something in common with the “blasphemous Heretikes” and “Atheisticall naturalists” of the past. From the start, it seems, the word “naturalism” has described a party dedicated to waging a kind of cultural warfare, and genteel literary critics, no less than seventeenth-century clerics, have seen fit to vigorously denounce this apparently subversive entity. “Naturalism” has always had a way of courting controversy. This chapter seeks to unpack some of the controversies in which the American literary naturalists involved themselves and to explicate what I take to be the polemical essence of the genre. It is not quite right to say that writers like Norris, Dreiser, and Wright have been “drawn” or “attracted” to polemic, since their writings are more often the source of this eristic energy than a reflection of it. But the polemics of these naturalist authors always emerge in dialogue and argument with their society. To an extent not yet recognized, Polemical Nature of Naturalism in America 35 the naturalists took controversial (and frequently contrarian) positions on a wide range of literary, political, and social issues. Frank Norris famously declared the innate inferiority of female novelists and frequently wrote about literature in tones suggestive of racial warfare. Theodore Dreiser once advocated , with deadly earnestness, a program of state-run infanticide for disabled or unwanted children. (Imagine Swift’s “Modest Proposal,” minus the modesty.) Richard Wright praised the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact of 1939, an agreement of non-aggression between Stalin and Hitler, as “a great step toward peace” (qtd. in Kinnamon and Fabre 25): America’s first best-selling black author publicly supported a dictator who instituted a form of slavery in his own nation. While many of their arguments were irascible, attentionseeking , and self-consciously inflammatory, the polemical spirit that fueled these outbursts remained central to the canonical texts of the movement. Naturalism is less a coherent philosophy than it is an attitude, a posture of aggressive controversy, which happens to cluster loosely around particular philosophical themes. The naturalists were polemicists, and their novels were always soaked through with the same antinomian spirit that pervades their work as journalists and essayists. In the following pages, I take a closer look at polemics by the three authors under consideration. Where possible, I endeavor to focus upon some of the lesser known polemics by these writers (such as Dreiser’s Tragic America and America Is Worth Saving) or to bring to the surface the polemical undercurrents of more familiar works, such as Richard Wright’s “Blueprint for Negro Writing.” The concluding section of this chapter focuses on the polemical construction of naturalism within the academy. Here, I hope to show that the polemical impulse of the original naturalists has been taken up by critics who have, in this polemical sense, extended the naturalist project. Frank Norris: Why Naturalists Should Write the Best Novels (And Why They Don’t) If polemicism is a constitutive ingredient of naturalism, it is perhaps appropriate that this polemical spirit is most conspicuous in the author who first attempted to formalize the movement in America. Benjamin Franklin Norris Jr. would, over the course of his abbreviated career, attack his literary subjects with a ferocious polemical energy. Harold Bloom quite accurately calls Norris “the most aggressive of our Naturalist novelists” (vii), although that aggression was hardly limited to the novels and would work itself out in a polemicism that would remain a crucial component of the genre as a whole. Where (as we’ll see below) Theodore Dreiser would devote...

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