The Nonhuman in American Literary Naturalism

American literary naturalism emerged in the late nineteenth century and maintained prominence into the 1920s. Kenneth K. Brandt and Karin M. Danielsson observe that scholarship about this movement has been primarily anthropocentric, although naturalism was influenced by advances in scientific theory that more definitively connected the human and natural—or nonhuman—worlds. As Brandt and Danielsson describe it, the central figure in scholarship on naturalism is the human subject “under pressure” of environment and heredity, thereby obscuring the role of the nonhuman in naturalist texts (2). This gap is where their collection The Nonhuman in American Literary Naturalism intervenes. In their introduction, Brandt and Danielsson critique prior scholarship on naturalism, arguing that it is myopically focused on the human and prioritizes a “decidedly anthropocentric approach to naturalist texts” (3). This standard critical framework has “obscured other and equally strong concerns” of naturalist literature—i.e., the “nonhuman.” Scholars often think of the nonhuman only as it relates to human subjects by, for example, treating the nonhuman aspects of a text as mere allegories or metaphors for the human (4). While The Nonhuman in American Literary Naturalism does not do away with the figure “under pressure” from its environment, it does shift vantage points in its analysis of the genre conventions and thematic concerns of naturalism. Offering a rather expansive definition, Brandt and Danielsson describe the nonhuman as “that which has been obscured but becomes visible when the human subject is skirted, or perhaps, temporarily at least, moved off-center”—including nonhuman animals, landscapes and cityscapes, and “other entities that constitute the environmental forces affecting” humans (3).The Nonhuman in American Literary Naturalism is productively ambitious. The writers in this collection take advantage of Brandt and Danielsson’s broad definition of the nonhuman, covering a breadth of topics and using a range of critical modes to explore the nonhuman in naturalism. Notably, this collection includes two insightful chapters on Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth, reframing it as a naturalist novel that expresses a distinctive engagement with the nonhuman, specifically architecture and nature. As will be discussed, these chapters on Wharton’s novel are some of the most engaging readings of the nonhuman in literary naturalism, offering an exceptional understanding of what constitutes the nonhuman and reframing how the nonhuman functions in naturalist fiction.Sections 1 and 2 focus on mostly classical, first-wave naturalist writers such as Frank Norris, Jack London, and Theodore Dreiser. Section 1, “Other Species,” begins with Danielsson’s “The Outer Animals: Non-Othered Nonhumans in McTeague.” Naturalist texts commonly grapple with the trope of the “animal within” or the “brute within.” Danielsson concludes that whereas humans are often brutish in McTeague, nonhuman animals are often more rational and “unmarked by otherness” (15, 26). In “Jack London and the Perils of Human Exceptionalism,” Paul Crumbley likewise explores the brutishness of the human subject as that subject perpetuates the harm caused by the “epistemological entrapment” of human exceptionalism (31). Per Crumbley, London’s message is that humans must recognize “species interdependence” to counteract the worst outcomes of the Anthropocene, bringing London’s fiction into ongoing debates about environmental degradation (43). Patti Luedecke’s “The Social Contract and Human-Animal Equality in Dreiser’s ‘McEwen of the Shining Slave Makers’” builds on this discussion of species interdependence by placing nonhuman animals squarely within social contract theory. Luedecke challenges common readings of Dreiser’s work, which usually position animals as allegories or metaphors for humanity’s animality or for Darwinian concepts; instead, Luedecke contends that via nonhuman animals Dreiser’s fiction extols readers to form fairer social environments in line with the social contract theory (47). In “Extinction, Genocide, and Atomic Anxiety: Storks in Hemingway’s Under Kilimanjaro,” which concludes this section, Lisa Tyler links Hemingway’s preoccupation with the potential—but imagined—extinction of storks with his concerns about human genocide and the environmental impacts of World War II, along with anxieties caused by the atomic age (63–64). This chapter is somewhat unexpected in a section focused primarily on classical naturalist writers from the turn of the century, but Tyler deftly places Hemingway in this discussion of “other species.”Section 2, “Land and Sea,” turns to landscapes and seascapes in works by two naturalist writers who appear repeatedly in this collection—Stephen Crane and Jack London—along with a notable addition, Willa Cather. In “Environment, Emotion, and the Individual in ‘The Open Boat,’” Rob Welch offers a compelling argument that directly builds on the important critique laid out by Brandt and Danielsson in the collection’s introduction. Commonly, readers and critics of naturalist texts have perceived environment as another determinant that shapes human existence and survival. The problem is that, according to Welch, within that framework, environment “remains in a subordinate position, mattering only as it impacts people” and so replicates an anthropocentric vantage point (79). Welch’s solution is, in part, to bring an ecocritical approach to analyses of naturalist texts. He does so by analyzing affect in Crane’s tale, with a specific focus on the interplay between humans and their emotional responses to—and modification of—environmental determinants (93). Paul Baggett’s “Anthropomorphism Reconsidered: Nature Faking in Jack London’s ‘All Gold Canyon’” offers a compelling reading of anthropocentrism in London’s short story. His analysis differentiates between “crude” and “constructive” anthropocentrism. He contends that perceptions of nature and the nonhuman are often inevitably humancentric or anthropomorphic; importantly, though, we do not have to resort to an exploitative anthropocentrism (98). Baggett concludes that London’s story offers a distinct insight into “human destruction of the nonhuman world” and the “fictions that shape our understanding of nature” while also offering a counternarrative that can help readers to see how “deeply entangled” humans are with the nonhuman world (103). This section ends with an engaging chapter on Willa Cather. In “‘Love’ of the Land as Agrilogistic Tragedy in O Pioneers!: Hazards while Embracing Nonhumans,” Ryan Hediger admits that human biases are inevitable in interpretation, narrativization, or imaging of the nonhuman; the question is what effect that human bias or framing will have (116). Put another way, one cannot presume that “unmediated access to the nonhuman” is possible even in a tradition, like naturalism, that strives for objectivity (117). Like Baggett, then, Hediger reframes our perceptions of the human as most often inevitably anthropocentric and demonstrates that, by acknowledging that inevitability, humans can determine its outcome.Section 3, “Cityscapes and Pseudonature,” shifts focus to the “urban aspects of the nonhuman” in naturalist literature (6). For example, this section includes an intriguing chapter on Ann Petry’s The Street (1946) and “Mother Africa” (1971). “Naturalism’s Nonhuman Streets: Food and Waste in Ann Petry’s Writing” by Cara Erdheim Kilgallen enriches this analysis of cityscapes and urban life in naturalism with its focus on the nonhuman materials of everyday life (e.g., food and water, filth and waste, and materials such as metal). Kilgallen further contextualizes Petry’s writing within a tradition of African American naturalism, which seeks to humanize Black experiences and to provide agency to individuals in a literary tradition marked by its emphasis on determinism’s effects on the human subject. This third section is particularly important here, though, because it includes two chapters on Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth (1905). These two chapters provide different perspectives on Wharton’s distinctive use of space—architectural and pseudonatural. While these chapters cover the same novel, they offer different, but compellingly complementary, readings of The House of Mirth.Daniel Dufournaud uses a deconstructive and posthumanist approach in “Wharton’s Architectural Imagination in The House of Mirth” and examines the architectural metaphors Wharton employs in this appositely titled novel. Dufournaud argues that Wharton’s architectural metaphors reflect a specific view of subjectivity, namely that the human takes shape from the nonhuman, particularly “the architectural structures that are often treated as mere backdrops for human action” (133). Situating The House of Mirth within literary naturalism while noting its deviance from parts of that tradition, Dufournaud argues that the novel does not rely completely on the classical “naturalist plot of decline”; instead, it “stages a complicated relationship between fate and opportunity, one that enacts a posthumanist interplay between architecture and everyday life” (135). While also establishing this posthumanist “line of thinking” in Wharton’s novel, Dufournaud focuses extensively on a deconstructionist and Derridean reading of the signification of architecture (134–35). Dufournaud reiterates Derrida’s argument that “architecture both imposes limits on human subjectivity and makes space for unique, and wholly unforeseen, forms of existence” and thereby undermines the dichotomous framework between human life and architecture (136). Dufournaud outlines several key examples from the novel as representative of this interplay, moments when “the characters’ entanglements with space have consequential effects,” including the novel’s opening scenes at Grand Central Station and then Selden’s apartment and the memorable tableau vivant scene at the Brys’ estate (139–41). By focusing on what could be deemed mere “backdrops for human action,” Dufournaud provides unique insight into the ontological significance of architecture and physical space. Doing so, Dufournaud also reconfigures architecture as a key component of the nonhuman realm in literary naturalism.Jency Wilson’s “Pseudonature in Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth” is a standout chapter in The Nonhuman in American Literary Naturalism. Using a feminist materialist and ecocritical lens, Wilson focuses on what she coins “pseudonature”—the seemingly “natural” spaces that are, in fact, carefully curated, man-made spaces (e.g., parks and gardens). These pseudonatural spaces are liminal, somewhere between “the nature they emulate” and “the society whose bleak industrialization they seek to negate” (149). Within its broader context, this liminality reflects tensions common to naturalist texts that are caused by modernization, industrialization, and urbanization. Applying a feminist materialist lens, Wilson considers the interconnection between the natural world—particularly a feminized landscape lost to modernity—and the female body, particularly the commodified female body, which Wilson sees as best represented by the tableau vivant scene in The House of Mirth (152). Wilson makes a striking argument about Lily Bart and pseudonature specifically. From the opening scene, Lily serves the same function as pseudonature as “a source of spiritual rejuvenation” against “cold and unattractive modern society” (157). Wilson skillfully situates her reading of The House of Mirth and the concept of pseudonature within broader historical and literary contexts; Lily Bart’s exploitation becomes emblematic of more systemic problems that emerged contemporaneously with literary naturalism. Wilson memorably concludes that “pseudonature is produced as a consolation prize for the loss of the thing obscured by human progress—that unspoiled feminized body of land which was the object of a collective cultural fantasy of escape” (161). She also interprets the power imbalance that modernity has fostered between the human and nonhuman as aligned with the power imbalance between masculine and feminine (160). This chapter thereby illuminates the centrality of one form of the nonhuman—pseudonature—not only in literary naturalism but also in the broader historical context from which naturalism emerged. The conditions of modernity (i.e., those caused by industrialization and urbanization) result in the tension between the human and nonhuman exemplified by this concept of pseudonature, a tension that is germane to classical literary naturalism.The final sections of The Nonhuman in American Literary Naturalism pair readings of classical naturalist texts with rather unexpected companions—including James Agee and Walker Evans’s Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941) and contemporary science fiction—extending beyond the first wave of literary naturalism, with its peak in the early twentieth century, and into the twenty-first century. Section 4, “Image, Object, Text,” focuses on photographic rhetoric and method in naturalism. In “Between Word and Image: Western Landscape and Photographic Rhetoric in Stephen Crane’s Prose Writing,” Francesca Razzi traces the influence of landscape photography on Crane’s fictional and nonfictional prose. Razzi contends that via photographic rhetoric, Crane blends fictional and journalistic features in his portrait of the West (184, 193). Markku Lehtimäki offers an engaging reading of the famous Depression-era photography collection, featuring photographs by Evans and writing by Agee, in “‘The Cruel Radiance of What Is’: The Reality of Things in James Agee and Walker Evans’s Let Us Now Praise Famous Men.” Like Kilgallen in her analysis of Anne Petry’s writing, Lehtimäki focuses on the nonhuman element in the collection and thereby reframes this text as a naturalist portrait of tenant farmers’ experience during the Great Depression. Per Lehtimäki, Agee specifically formulates a “nonhuman naturalism” that “downplays human-centered melodramatic plots,” which we commonly associated with literary naturalism, and instead “celebrates the reality of things and existence of material objects and nonhuman lives as an integral part of” these farmers’ world (207). These two chapters thus centralize the visual element in analyses of literary naturalism.The concluding section of The Nonhuman in American Literary Naturalism, “Last Things,” begins with an unexpected reading of classical naturalist writers alongside science fiction (SF) writers Edmond Hamilton and Philip K. Dick in Brandt’s “Trouble with Human-Nonhuman Distinctions in Dreiser, London, Hamilton, and Dick.” The focus shifts exclusively to contemporary SF in Ingemar Haag’s “Davids and Goliaths: Last Days Reconciliation between Humans and Nonhumans in Don DeLillo’s Zero K and Kurt Vonnegut’s Galápagos.” Brandt first contests the rigid periodization of naturalism, particularly one that limits naturalism to its classical or first-wave period; instead, this chapter—like the collection more broadly—promotes post-first-wave naturalist writers like the SF writers Brandt and Haag focus on (213). For Brandt, SF writers often rely on the scientific theories of classical naturalism but reorient those ideas into speculative evolutionary futures; further, like first-wave naturalists, SF writers may explore problems of human motivation and psychology (218). Haag’s chapter builds on Brandt’s reframing of SF as naturalist texts by focusing exclusively on two SF writers. Haag considers the possibility for coexistence between the human and nonhuman in DeLillo’s and Vonnegut’s novels, building on the “intimacy between humans and nonhumans,” whether physical or metaphorical and primarily in its Darwinian manifestations, which are common in naturalism (230). This collection concludes with Stephanie Studzinski’s thought-provoking “Writing What Remains: Naturalism and the Nonhuman after Nature in Sheri S. Tepper’s Plague of Angels Trilogy.” Studzinski methodically makes her case that Tepper’s SF trilogy fits squarely within the naturalist tradition in one of the most detailed readings of the genre’s conventions and themes. Studzinski reframes naturalism as “a sensibility and philosophical position” and so aligns it with similarly philosophically oriented SF (245), an argument implied in Brandt and Haag’s chapters. Importantly, Studzinski brings naturalism into this critical moment of the Anthropocene, in which humanity’s current trajectory is becoming increasingly untenable if it is to avoid the worst of the environmental crisis (261). This exigency gives a new urgency to literature that employs naturalist themes and conventions, which (as these chapters demonstrate) is more expansive and more current than one may assume, given the scholarship of this historied literary tradition.The Nonhuman in American Literary Naturalism, with its anti-anthropocentric grounding, offers a model of how to successfully decenter the human in readings of naturalist texts—and convincingly demonstrates the value in doing so. This collection offers an expansive range of what constitutes the nonhuman and thereby allows a diverse range of issues and critical focuses that cannot be determined in advance; this expansiveness opens new paths of inquiry into naturalist literature, whether canonical or not, whether classical or post-first-wave. Dufournauld’s “Wharton’s Architectural Imagination in The House of Mirth” and Wilson’s “Pseudonature in Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth” are no exception; in fact, these are among the most productive and engaging readings of the nonhuman in this collection. The Nonhuman in American Literary Naturalism thus fundamentally shifts how readers and scholars should view American literary naturalism. Wharton studies can benefit from that turn to the nonhuman.