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- W1967734579 abstract "Naturalism in Its Natural Environment?American Naturalism and the Farm Novel Florian Freitag (bio) While many works of American literary naturalism feature a distinctively urban setting, and while this setting plays a key role in the naturalistic aesthetics of these works—see, for instance, Stephen Crane's Maggie: A Girl of the Streets (1893) or Theodore Dreiser's Sister Carrie (1900)—some of the most famous American naturalistic novels are, in fact, not set in the city, but on the farm.1 Indeed, as a genre that flourished roughly from the middle of the 19th to the middle of the 20th century, the American farm novel—a term that includes all novels whose main protagonists are farmers, that are set on a farm, and that also deal with agrarian or agricultural issues2—was not only influenced by realism and modernism but also by naturalism. This is not surprising, since both the farm novel and naturalistic writings often illustrate and dramatize the laws of nature. This article explores the interrelationship between literary mode and genre, between literary naturalism and the farm novel, as depicted in two of the most prominent naturalistic farm novels in American literature, Frank Norris's The Octopus: A Story of California (1901) and John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath (1939).3 Although they may seem incongruously optimistic in the light of the events narrated in the two stories, the conclusions of The Octopus and The Grapes of Wrath, two farm novels that can be designated naturalistic both in a deterministic and a thematic sense of the term, are sustained by the macrocosmic and/or microcosmic point of view from which their terrible events are narrated. Hard Times on the Farm Towards the end of the 19th century, three American writers set out to tell what they considered the truth about the farm. In A Son of the Middle Border (1917), Hamlin Garland recalls his reaction to his editors' plea for charming love stories set in a rural environment: [End Page 97] No, we've had enough of lies. … Other writers are telling the truth about the city …, and it appears to me that the time has come to tell the truth about the barn-yard's daily grind. I have lived the life and I know that farming is not entirely made up of berrying, tossing the newmown hay and singing The Old Oaken Bucket on the porch by moonlight. (319) Accordingly, in Garland's 1891 novel Jason Edwards, the eponymous hero leaves Boston to follow the road to health and wealth (64) to the West, only to find that a farmer's life in the ironically named Boomtown, South Dakota, is even worse than a life as a foundry worker in a Boston slum. Whereas the American Dream, the idea that industry is commensurately rewarded with prosperity, seemed merely seriously endangered in the East ('What's the world comin' to, Jason, when sober, hard-workin' people can't get a decent livin'?' 57–58), it is entirely crushed in the West ('Knocks an eye out of the American eagle, don't it?' 188). After only a few years on his farm in Boomtown, Edwards is poorer than ever before, much grayer, bent and lame (138), and his daughter Alice is worn and weary, and looking ten years older (134). Four years before Jason Edwards, the protagonist of Harold Frederic's Seth's Brother's Wife condescends to say that rural New York 'is just splendid to be born in, no doubt of that,' but, she immediately adds, 'after you are born, get out of it as soon as you can' (34). The narrator heartily agrees: The rural life is a sad and sterile enough thing, with its unrelieved physical strain, its enervating and destructive diet, its mental barrenness, its sternly narrowed groove of toil and thought and companionship (35). Finally, even before Garland and Frederic, Edgar Watson Howe, in The Story of a Country Town (1882), depicted a rural world in which [s]urrounded by decay, death, and evil, the people who came west to 'grow up with the country' are merely degraded by it (Martin 118). Again, the ironically named Fairview—there are..." @default.
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- W1967734579 title "Naturalism in Its Natural Environment?: American Naturalism and the Farm Novel" @default.
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