The Nonhuman in American Literary Naturalism

The critical study of American literary naturalism has long chafed against artificial and unnecessary limitations. One of those limitations has been thematic: the focus on determinism in the naturalistic canon has been relentless—as focused, perhaps, as the determinism of the works themselves. Even works that engage more broadly, such as Jennifer Fleissner's Women, Compulsion, Modernity (2004), mainly draw their inspiration from the idea of determinism.Second, the naturalistic canon has orbited tightly around a group of mostly-male authors who came to prominence at the turn of the twentieth century. That's not to say that Dreiser, Norris, London, and Crane don't deserve attention, but they have sucked up a disproportionate amount of the critical oxygen in discussions of literary naturalism. Considering these self-imposed constraints, Kenneth K. Brandt and Karin M. Danielsson's The Nonhuman in American Literary Naturalism is a salutary addition to the field. The most particular virtue of the book lies in its extension of the narrow parameters of naturalism studies.That extension is a natural one. Naturalism ought not to be considered simply the output of a Social Darwinian moment. Certainly that moment, in which the humanness of human beings came under scrutiny from emerging scientific and social scientific disciplines, provides a launch point. But that launch should not boomerang. We should look outward from it.Beginning with Zola, much naturalist fiction insistently compares humans to animals. But we've not spent much time looking at the actual animals in these books. Brandt and Danielsson's collection includes a cluster of essays on animals, full stop. Not surprisingly, animals proliferate in the naturalist canon. Of course these animal characters offer valuable insights into the humans in the stories—as we see in Danielsson's essay on the dogs in McTeague and Paul Crumbley's discussion of some of Jack London's animal characters, for example. But this collection also considers animals as animals, in the service of themes less directly concerned with human biology (as in Lisa Tyler's essay on storks in Hemingway's Under Kilamanjaro, which connects the idea of extinction not to Darwin but to post-nuclear anxiety).The collection's “nonhuman” focus also encompasses inanimate things. Among the essays illustrating that turn, Daniel DuFournand shows how Edith Wharton's characters reflect, and are reflected by, the houses they live in, showing “a porous distinction between architecture and human subjectivity.” His close reading is persuasive as well as clever. And Cara Erdheim Kilgallen persuasively demonstrates how we may use foodways to track the harshness of Ann Petry's New York in The Street. There is even an essay on photojournalism, in which Markkhu Lehtimäki argues that James Agee and Walker Evans’ Let Us Now Praise Famous Men juxtaposes “human lives and minds” with the thing-ness of life in 1930s rural Alabama. I was surprised—and pleased—to see such an essay in a book that has “naturalism” in its title. The willingness of Brandt and Danielsson to explore themes outside the usual naturalist constellation also leads to a welcome broadening of the authorial canon. The usual stalwarts are present, of course, along with lesser-known but still identifiable naturalists like Petry, but the book goes further. In his own contribution, Brandt show how numerous works of science fiction share certain thematic preoccupations—especially the borders and limits of humanity—with classic naturalism.Such generative thinking offers a productive and interesting future for the naturalist critical enterprise. It's a signpost toward a wide and welcome horizon.