Contents: 1 introdiction 2

1.2The Realistic Imagination

The foregoing suggests that realism is an adaptive genre, changing its contours over the course of time as new ideas arise and as new writers (and critics) respond to those ideas and to the work of the writers before them. It is useful to conceive of the naturalist novel as primarily a novel of ideas, functioning like the Blob in the 1958 science fiction movie of the same title—absorbing everything it can to propel the idea—and this capacity for absorption explains not only the varied plots and philosophies contained in realism but also the prevalence of the narrative strategies of realism, documentation, sensation, sentiment, and romance; the occurrence of stereotyped characters and dialogue; the role of chance and coincidence; and especially the frequency of sensation and didactic exposition.Realism’s receptivity to adaptation reveals its similarity to another genre, melodrama, and exploring realism as a version of melodrama is a useful way of understanding its many anomalies and inconsistencies. Scholars typically conceive of realism as a version of realism, as a genre that grafts realistic detail onto a necessitarian ideology. When realistic fictions seem to depart from the realistic paradigm, usually through the inclusion of sensational effects, sentimental scenes, stilted dialogue, and improbable coincidences, critics often disparage such departures as instances of flawed technique or defective artistry. But these “flaws”—in fact, the narrative strategies of melodrama—provided the naturalists with an effective means through which to articulate the impingement of Darwinian and Spencerian thought upon such social issues as land speculation and poverty, marital infidelity and the double standard, political corruption and labor agitation, and deviance and crime. Like melodrama, and unlike realism, realism conspicuously employs such emotive effects to promote the acceptance of a thesis, and this melodramatic vision is registered clearly and unmistakably in the literature of realism.Realism in general shares with melodrama a tendency to focus on the universal and to depict the type rather than the individual to illuminate the abstraction that the plots and characters are contrived to illustrate. Like melodrama and unlike realism, realism is an essentially didactic literature with a thesis to prove, whether it be economic determinism, the latent atavism of human beings, or the inescapable force of heredity. The naturalist tends to share with the melodramatist a belief in the ultimate intelligibility of the world and of the discoverability of the forces that shape it. This shared belief encourages each to communicate a vision of human beings caught up in a welter of discreet events that combine to direct and prescribe their actions. Such a vision is an essential characteristic of both the melodramatic and realistic imaginations, and it accounts for the frequent intrusion of sensational scenes, improbable coincidences, and stilted rhetoric into fictions that are often derided as merely aesthetically flawed versions of realism.What I am suggesting, then, is a way of reading realism that does not see it primarily in terms of evolutionary and deterministic philosophy applied to realism but rather in terms of popular narrative strategies, derived from melodrama, enlisted in support of a propagandistic cause.London, Norris, Dreiser and other naturalists were writers with an agenda. Compelled by their acceptance of Herbert Spencer’s evolutionary synthesis, outraged by the privations they witnessed on the farms and in the cities, and persuaded by the implications of advances in science, these writers employed the narrative devices of melodrama as an efficacious means to convince readers of the truth of their theses and to elicit sympathy for their protagonists or even, as in the case of Hamlin Garland, Upton Sinclair, and London, to prompt readers to take action to redress social imbalance. Although he deplored the genre’s unflattering portrait of human beings and its tendency to exaggerate for effect, Malcolm Cowley appreciated the didactic strain that runs throughout these fictions. “Their books are full of little essays or sermons addressed to the reader; in fact they suggest a realistic system of ethics complete with its vices and virtues,” he wrote in 1947. “Most of the characters presented sympathetically in realistic novels are either the victors over moral codes which they defy … or else victims of the economic struggle” .Modern criticism has been quick to condemn the didacticism and sensationalism inherent in realistic fiction partly because the aesthetic yardstick by which most critics measure these fictions privileges organic integrations of theme and character, symbol and ambiguity, irony and narrative restraint. When a novel displays stereotyped characters, sentimental language or sensational scenes, as do Garland’sMain-Travelled Roads (1891), Norris’sMcTeague(1899), and London’sThe Sea-Wolf(1904), critics have typically dismissed these elements as inept and derivative or as examples of authorial pandering to an audience hungering for romance. Thus Ronald Martin notes the power of Norris’s “melodramatic realism” to “affect the reader’s deepest feelings and fears,” but he denounces these effects as Norris’s “artistic failings” (150). Even Donald Pizer, who has done more than anyone to clarify our understanding of realism, occasionally misreads the place of melodrama in realism. In one article, Pizer argues that “the melodramatic sensationalism and moral ‘confusion’ which are often attacked in the realistic novel should really beincorporated into a normative definition of the mode and be recognized as its essential constituents” (“Late Nineteenth-Century” 12). Yet elsewhere, under the category of “inept narrative devices,” he claims that “several of the stories ofMain-Travelled Roadsare marred by melodramatic and sentimental touches” (Introduction xiii).
The New Critical perspective has so shaped our understanding of the narrative strategies of realism that, occasionally, some critics have even resorted to ad hominem attacks when encountering fictions that work upon a reader’s sensibility in order to promote acceptance of a certain vision of the world. After outlining the “dark chain of necessity” evoked in Garland’s “A Branch Road,” Charles C. Walcutt notes the optimistic close in which Garland sketches the promise of a better world awaiting Will and Aggie, and then chides Garland for violating the unity of his conception: “It is scarcely necessary to say that we expect some degree of wisdom, rather than daydreams, from a serious artist; we expect that he will pursue the logic of his situations to the bitter end” .Walcutt concludes his discussion of Garland’s “rather pathetic failures” by claiming that Garland was too “unsophisticated and therefore completely at the mercy of the literary techniques which [he] absorbed from [his] Victorian world” to know how to “integrate the new ideas into a fictional structure” (62).Rather than condemn Garland’s fictions by insulting the intelligence of their author, it is perhaps more useful to question whether our own interpretive assumptions prevent us from recognizing and appreciating the utility of melodramatic sentiment and sensationalism in realistic works. Restoring melodrama’s place in realism—that is, understanding why the naturalists employed such narrative strategies in their fiction despite their frequent condemnation of romantic and sentimental fiction—will enable us to recognize what Jane Tompkins calls the “cultural work” of fiction. Like the sentimental novelists about whom Tompkins writes, Garland, Norris, Dreiser, and London had “designs upon their audiences, in the sense of wanting to make people think and act in a particular way” (xi). Because these writers were attempting to elicit particular responses in their readers, they employed narrative devices that worked upon their readers’ sympathies—to motivate them to outrage, in the case of Garland; to recognize the dominance of instincts, in the case of Norris; to push them to pity, in the case of Dreiser; and to persuade them to identify with primordial figures of strength, in the case of London.
To recognize the function of melodrama in their fictions is not, of course, to explain why these particular writers were attracted to melodrama. We might arrive at such an understanding first by recognizing that melodrama is not only a specific genre (like tragedy and comedy), with defining plot movements and stylistic strategies, but also that the melodramatist sees the world differently than does the tragedian or the comedian (or the realist or satirist). As James L. Rosenberg notes, “Melodrama, like tragedy, is a way of seeing, not a trick of writing. You write a melodrama—agoodmelodrama—because you see the world that way, not because you think: ‘Today I think I’ll write a melodrama’” (235). What distinguishes the imaginations of Garland, Norris, Dreiser, and London from that of such an arch-realist as Howells is that the former persisted in seeing the world melodramatically, despite their advocacy of realism. The realists were chiefly committed to exploding romantic stereotypes and (p. 8) reforming sentimental expression. They believed that romance had degenerated into works that “merely tickle our prejudices and lull our judgment, or that coddle our sensibilities or pamper our gross appetite for the marvellous” (Howells 95–96).The naturalists, while sharing the realists’ distaste for sentimentality, additionally were immensely attracted to Herbert Spencer’s evolutionary synthesis, which encouraged a melodramatic perception of the world. Spencer’s paradigm tends to polarize the subjects of inquiry—into the Knowable and the Unknowable, stability and instability, homogeneity and heterogeneity, evolution and dissolution, reflecting the late nineteenth century’s preoccupation with either/or abstractions: the rich and the poor, supply and demand, science and faith, progress and poverty. Just as melodrama insists upon the ultimate defeat of misfortune, Spencer’s evolutionary synthesis assured people that the conflict of forces tended toward a harmonious equilibrium in which conflicting forces achieved a balance that benefited society. Garland announced this faith in the peroration to Crumbling Idols(1894), his manifesto of a new American literary nationalism: “In evolution there are always two vast fundamental forces: one, the inner, which propels; the other, the outer, which adapts and checks. One forever thrusts toward new forms, the other forever moulds, conserves, adapts, reproduces. Progress is the resultant of these forces” (191). Spencer’s system reaffirmed the ultimate benevolence of the universe and humanity’s ability to comprehend the operations of that universe, for his “synthetic philosophy” documented, in exhaustive detail, exactly how the extant social inequities inescapably worked toward a better society. His evolutionary optimism thus reassured the naturalists that science would facilitate humanity’s ascendancy through discovery of and adherence to nature’s laws.
What prompted the naturalists to adopt Spencer so readily was the melodramatic determinism inherent in his system that explained so smoothly the interconnections among events. As Dreiser wrote in a meditation on Spencer for an 1897 issue of Ev’ry Month: All life has been comprehended best by him. He has explained the value of things that are, and the purposes for which they are intended. Rain, sunlight, the seasons; charity, generosity, virtue,—all these are set down in their true order, and having established the empire of the mind, he invites you, as subjects, to acquaint yourselves with its laws. They are unalterable laws. (“Reflections” 107)In their desire to express Spencer’s “unalterable laws,” the naturalists gravitated toward the melodrama of deterministic plots, which pushed characters to inevitable conclusions. In a 1911 essay defining melodrama, Clayton Hamilton, a prolific playwright, critic, and drama editor for the Bookman, recognized the determinism of events as central to the genre. “Bymelodrama,” he stipulated, “is signified a serious play in which the incidents determine and control the characters…. A train of incidents is foreordained and the characters are subsequently woven into the tiny pattern of destiny that has been predetermined for them” (310).
The naturalists seem to have recognized the congruence of the melodramatic and the Spencerian vision, for in their fictions and in their autobiographies they record again and again the moment when Spencerian thought shattered their faith (p. 9) in a Christian hierarchy of clear moral imperatives, only to replace that disruption with a new faith in evolutionary thought. That these writers should be led to accept Spencer’s distortions and simplifications of evolution is not surprising, for, as Wylie Sypher suggests, melodrama is the characteristic modality of the nineteenth-century imagination, for which “[t]he world becomes a theatre of tensions between abstractions” (262). Following Spencer, the naturalists envisioned a world in which conflicting abstract forces both motivated and circumscribed humanity’s
actions. Such a view, Sypher observes,
encourages not only a melodramatic ethics (the strong and the weak, the hard and the soft, the good and the bad) but also emotive history and emotive science, which, as Huxley confidently assumed, can satisfy the spiritual longings of man. Having done with a personal God, the 19th Century could now displace the drama in its mind into the universe itself by means of the laws of geology, biology, energy, and, more immediately, economics. (261)
Responding to the melodrama of Spencerianism, the naturalists adopted melodramatic plots and narrative strategies to affect their readers’ emotions the better to convey the drama of the impingement of science upon human activity.