Naturalism
Naturalism
In a Nutshell
Welcome to the cruelest literary movement ever, Shmoopers. "Naturalism" refers to nature, but it sure doesn't refer to babbling brooks and pretty birdies and flowers and a landscape that looks like it's grafted from the set of Teletubbies.
It refers instead to the harshest nature you can think of. Death Valley. Pompeii. Antarctica, minus the penguins. Greenland, in January. The middle of the Pacific Ocean, on a raft, with no water.
Get ready for a hailstorm/firestorm/Superstorm/snowstorm/worst-kind-of-weather-storm-you-can-imagine of bleakness. Get ready for a polar vortex of sorrow. This hurricane's name is Naturalism and it's going to blow your home to smithereens and make you an orphan and you're going to have to become a beggar.
Short version: Naturalism is depressing.
Ugh. Who even thought up Naturalism?
The literary movement Naturalism—which first spread in France beginning in the 1860s—developed partly in response to some big scientific discoveries that were being made about the natural world at the time.
We've all heard of a guy called Charles Darwin. He was the scientist who pointed out that not only are we descended from apes (cue thousands of Victorians saying "Yikes!") but also that all species develop as a result of a natural process called evolution.
Well, Darwin's ideas not only made a big splash in the scientific world, they also made a big splash in the literary world. The earliest Naturalist writers—among them the French writer Émile Zola, who is considered to be the "father" of Naturalism—were very interested in Darwin's discoveries. You know, because they're freakin' fascinating.
These writers sought to apply Darwin's ideas to the study of society and human nature. In the Naturalist fiction of this school of writers, characters are depicted as products of their social environment, in the same way that animal species, in Darwin's theories, are a product of their natural environment. In addition, these writers liked to explore "Darwinist" themes such survival and heredity… but within the context of human society.
Naturalist writers studied and wrote about society as if it were a big, bad jungle. Who survives in this jungle? Who dies? Why? Why do tigers have stripes, anyway? In what ways does environment determine human nature? Should we fear all the frogs that have pretty markings, or are only some of them poisonous? And do we have any power to fight the pressures of our environment?
These are just some of the big questions that the Naturalists tackle—not including the tiger and frog questions unfortunately—and they tackle them brilliantly, eloquently and, oh yeah, super depressingly.