Nature in Our Life free essay sample

Whartons  and  Jamess  dissections of hidden sexual and financial motivations at work in society link them with writers who seem superficially quite different:  Stephen Crane,  Jack London, Frank Norris,Theodore Dreiser, and Upton Sinclair. Like the cosmopolitan novelists, but much more explicitly, these naturalists used realism to relate the individual to society. Often they exposed social problems and were influenced by Darwinian thought and the related philosophical doctrine of determinism, which views individuals as the helpless pawns of economic and social forces beyond their control. Naturalism is essentially a literary expression of determinism. Associated with bleak, realistic depictions of lower-class life, determinism denies religion as a motivating force in the world and instead perceives the universe as a machine. Eighteenth-century Enlightenment thinkers had also imagined the world as a machine, but as a perfect one, invented by God and tending toward progress and human betterment. Naturalists imagined society, instead, as a blind machine, godless and out of control. We will write a custom essay sample on Nature in Our Life or any similar topic specifically for you Do Not WasteYour Time HIRE WRITER Only 13.90 / page The 19th-century American historian Henry Adams constructed an elaborate theory of history involving the idea of the dynamo, or machine force, and entropy, or decay of force. Instead of progress, Adams sees inevitable decline in human society. Stephen Crane, the son of a clergyman, put the loss of God most succinctly: A man said to the universe: Sir, I exist! However, replied the universe, The fact has not created in me A sense of obligation. Like Romanticism, naturalism first appeared in Europe. It is usually traced to the works of Honor‚ de Balzac in the 1840s and seen as a French literary movement associated with Gustave Flaubert, Edmond and Jules Goncourt, Emile Zola, and Guy de Maupassant. It daringly opened up the seamy underside of society and such topics as divorce, sex, adultery, poverty, and crime. Naturalism flourished as Americans became urbanized and aware of the importance of large economic and social forces. By 1890, the frontier was declared officially closed. Most Americans resided in towns, and business dominated even remote farmsteads.