By Lechi Eke
Naturalism started in 1880 and lasted through to 1930; comparable to literary Realism which rejects imaginative idealization of Romanticism in favour of close observation of outward appearances, but Naturalism goes further to depict the ideas of determinism and pessimism. It also embraced such literary devices as detachment, scientific objectivism, and social commentary in its portrayal of realistic situations.
Because it also focuses on narratives based on scientific method, Charles Darwin stands out as the most famous naturalist followed by French critic, Hippolyte Taine, who was the proponent of the theory. The third towering naturalist is French novelist, Emile Zola, whose books are packed with naturalistic theories.
Naturalism began in France, from Hippolyte Taine’s 1863-64 Histoire de la litterature anglaise (History of English Literature) book that states, “There is a cause for ambition, for courage, for truth, as there is digestion, for muscular movement, for animal heat. Vice and virtue are products like vitriol and sugar.” The French critic replicated the determinism in scientific thought prevalent in his time. For Taine, “A work could be explained in terms of the race, milieu, and moment that produced it.”
The concept of Naturalism is a realistic approach to art that rejects idealized experiences such as supernatural explanations. Naturalism rather pursues the belief that nothing exists beyond the natural world. Instead of using supernatural or spiritual explanation, naturalism focuses on the explanations that come from the laws of nature with focus on determinism. Beyond the belief that everything can be explained using nature, it is also a term for a particular style of art and literature in the 19th century. One writer wrote, “Individual characters are seen as helpless products of heredity and environment, motivated by strong instinctual drives from within and harassed by social and economic pressures from without.”
Some of the characteristics of Naturalistic fiction are: Narrative Detachment, Determinism, Pessimism, Social Environment, Heredity/Human Nature, plus Poverty and Survival, etc. A Naturalistic Character is therefore described as possessing “controlled heredity, instinct, ‘the brute within’ and the environment as well as certain forces of an indifferent and deterministic universe.”
Guy de Maupassant’s 1884 short story, The Necklace, is a good example of Literary Naturalism depicting pessimism and determinism with its characters as “helpless product(s) of heredity and environment … harassed by social and economic pressures from without.”
A plot overview of Maupassant’s The Necklace
A pretty woman who is born poor marries a common clerk. Her name is Mrs Matilde Loisel. She loves the good things of life and dreams about living in a stately house, but her situation in life inhibits her. She has nothing to her name, and suffers great privation and longs for expensive and luxurious things which are unachievable for her. She craves for gourmet food while her husband is satisfied with plain things having adjusted to his status in life.
Matilde is frustrated and even thinks of giving up a rich friend of hers, a schoolmate named Mrs Jeanne Forrestier. One day her clerk husband returns from work with an envelope he thinks its content would excite his wife. It is an invitation to a dinner at the Ministry of Education, a great event! The invitation upsets Matilde because she has nothing to wear to such a great social event. Her husband, heart-in-mouth, asks her if they can buy anything decent and affordable. She mentions a figure with fear not wanting to be refused because she wants the high society event so much. The dress will cost her husband his summer vacation, which does not include his wife! He makes the sacrifice anyway.
As the day of the dinner approaches, Mathilde complains that she has no jewelry for the dress; apparently, jewelry will complete the dress. A solution comes from her husband – go to your rich friend and borrow one. Mathilde is happy. Although self-conscious, she visits her former schoolmate who opens her box of jewelries, and let her have her pick. Matilde picks a diamond necklace.
The party is a huge success as Mathilde steals the thunder! However, she has to leave the venue in a hurry because of her cheap inelegant shawl so that other women wearing expensive furs will not notice. In her haste, she refuses to wait for her husband to get a cab, but rushes out with him, and they frantically searches for a vehicle home. They embark on some trekking in the freezing cold and eventually got an old rickety buggy that only operate after dark in Paris at that time.
Getting home, Matilde stands in front of the mirror and removes the cheap shawl to admire herself once again, alas, the necklace is gone! This sent her husband back into the streets that night, but search as he can, he finds not the necklace. He reports to the police, the newspaper office, and even the buggy office.
Mathilde becomes lethargic, all energy drained from her. There is no way around the matter; they have to buy back the diamond necklace! They find it in a jeweler’s shop. It costs thirty-four thousand francs! Loisel, Mathilde’s husband, has savings, money he inherited from his father, but it is a paltry eighteen thousand francs. They have to borrow the rest. They go to a great trouble to borrow from different people, and institutions, until with an agreement with the jeweler that if they find the lost necklace, he will buy it back, they laid down that heavy cash for the diamond, and returns it to Mrs Forestier who suspects nothing.
This launches them into a life of misery and hardship in order to come out of debt. Mathilde loses the little privileges she formerly enjoyed like using a maid, manicuring her fingers, living in not so-terrible quarters, etc. Now she does all the menial housework and cannot afford manicure anymore; she haggles at the market to save pennies because the maid is gone. They move to a cheaper accommodation, and her husband works day and night to meet up with the monthly debt payment. This goes on for ten years! At the end of ten years, the debt is paid; Matilthe is worn out, looking haggard and old.
She goes to the park to ‘exhale’, there she runs into her rich former schoolmate. Who cries out at the looks of Matilde. She has to tell her friend what happened to them. Mathilde receives the shock of her life when her friend tells her that the original necklace was costume jewelry, a replica, worth at the most five hundred francs!
This story is told in the third person omniscient with a detachment that’s astonishing, for although Mathilde is the main character, the narrator does not employ her point of view. Rather he tells the story as an observer, saying what he sees in and around the main character, and even her husband, Loisel.
So we see Narrative Detachment which is a literary device of Naturalism shown in the author not being judgmental about his chief character, Mathilde, who readers might find fault with. Readers might judge Mathilde – if only she had been content with her circumstance in life! But Maupassant doesn’t judge her. He is also sympathetic with Mathilde when he wrote, “Mrs Loisel soon discovered the horrible life of the needy. She did her share, however, completely, heroically. That horrifying debt had to be paid. She would pay. They dismissed the maid; they changed their address; they rented an attic flat.”
We also see the literary device called Determinism which is typical to Naturalism. Determinism shows that people don’t have much control over their fate in Naturalistic fiction. This is scientific objectivity – what happened to Mathilde has no supernatural explanation. It can be empirically traced to her inability to adjust to her social circumstance, and the natural situation Mathilde finds herself. She is pretty, and poor, but desires a good life; when she aspires to live it, she falls into trouble and is dragged down, not even back to square one, but below it! It is as if she plays out a script that she cannot run away from – that’s determinism!
Pessimism is another feature of literary Naturalism. This device adopts the outlook that the glass is totally half empty! Naturalistic fictions also depict poverty and the survival struggle. So naturalistic fictions tell the stories of sad poor people, who no matter what they do, do not make it out of their situation in life!
Guy de Maupassant was a student of Flaubert, the French novelist, one of the founding writers of Realism, who wrote the bestseller, Madame Bovary. Matilde seems like a relation of Madame Bovary – who’s beautiful, marries poor, and craves for a better life. However, Maupassant birthed the Narrative Twist, just at the end of the story when everything has wrapped up, the author introduced a twist – the necklace the chief characters labour to pay for for ten years, was fake! It makes the reader think of all that glitters… and avoidable hardship – if only the couple had told Mrs Forrestier that her necklace was missing…So many regrets…
Some readers believe that The Necklace is a moral story with several lessons – that’s for you to decide.
Some of the Naturalist writers are Jack London, Emile Zola, Hippolyte Taine, Stephen Crane, Julius Hart, Frank Norris, Guy de Maupassant, etc.