Intimate Knowledge in American Naturalism and Realism

Intimate Knowledge in American Naturalism and Realism Katrin Horn (bio) and Katharina Motyl (bio) Wedged between sentimentalism's excessive appeal for sympathy and a community based on domestic ideals on the one hand and modernism's focused study of interiority and stylistic experiments with solipsistic impressions on the other, realism and especially naturalism with their detached narrators and scientific interest in society's structures (and decline) might seem to be a comparatively odd choice for an investigation of intimate knowledge in US American literature. Beyond these stylistic concerns, intimate matters as an avenue of inquiry might seem to stand in sharp contrast also to most recent investigations into the late nineteenth century that have focused on large-scale changes such as the growth of mass media and the consolidation of American national identity. Moreover, in classrooms realism and naturalism have long been employed "to teach the social tensions and ideological conflicts underlying the formation of American culture in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century" (Ernst et al ix). Yet we propose that to arrive at a fuller assessment of literary naturalism and realism—regarding scope, style, authors—it is equally necessary to pay close attention to their negotiation of the small, intimate concerns of life. In "A Plea for Romantic Fiction," for example, Frank Norris positions the realm of the intimate as naturalism's very domain. Romance, which he uses synonymously with what later came to be called naturalism and which he vehemently differentiates from both sentimentalism and realism (215), is tasked with "prying, peeping, peering into the closets of the bedroom" and the secret box screwed to a shelf in the library (217). Naturalism presents "a bag of hopes and fears and a package of joys and sorrows" to readers, about which Norris comments "That is Life!" (217–18). [End Page vii] Norris here positions naturalism as revealing instincts, passions, and secrets hiding in the depths of the human psyche, while "Realism," in Norris's view, "notes only the surface of things" (215). Although unflatteringly denounced by name in Norris's aforementioned broadside at realism, William Dean Howells also connects the mode of writing he so centrally shaped to intimate knowledge—albeit with a different trajectory—when he formulates the ideal that realism should allow us to "know one another better" (188). Whereas Norris conceives of the naturalist writer in the role of the philosopher who makes known the intimate "penetralia of the soul of man" ("Plea" 220) to investigate how free human will really is, and to what degree the animalistic lurks in all of us, Howells positions the realist writer as an anthropologist creating intimate knowledge and thus, recognition, on the interpersonal and intercommunity levels. These programmatic positions proclaimed by Norris and Howells in their role as literary theorists represent archetypes of naturalist and realist writing, respectively, with which their own literary texts do not always conform. While critics used to decry moments of excessive emotion and sensationalism in naturalist texts as failures to approximate a realist aesthetic, more recently, scholars have identified the aesthetics of melodrama (if not its philosophical underpinnings) as central to the naturalist agenda. According to Keith Newlin, "naturalism often employs the dichotomies and dramatic techniques of melodrama to articulate its thesis. Thus the prevalence of the sensational in plots, the emotional excesses in dialogue and characterization, the gothic portrayals of character, and the overt pronouncement of doctrine" (10). These quotations suggest that a closer look at intimate knowledge in and through naturalist and realist literature is not only warranted but will also result in a more differentiated assessment of these modes of writing. Focusing on intimacy may, in fact, help contour a central distinction between the two. We understand intimacy as including yet going far beyond the concerns of sex and sexuality, which are not only the most intuitive associations with that term (see D'Emilio and Freedman), but which extant scholarship has also noted as among naturalism's chief concerns. Yet sex might be most relevant to naturalism only in its least intimate versions, namely in its "fascination with sexual violence" (Campbell, Bitter 4) and to index characters' being governed by drives and instincts.1 For instance, when the eponymous...