Naturalism

The precise meaning of the term naturalism varies across the disciplines: a literary critic, philosopher, theologian, and political scientist would each use the term in a slightly different way. In its broadest sense, naturalism is a doctrine holding that the physical world operates according to laws discernible through empirical science. The naturalist method, modeled after nineteenth-century innovations in the experimental sciences, involves informed, systematic observation of the material world. For the naturalist thinker, human beings are nothing more than a part of this world—like rocks, plants, and animals, they are subject to the laws of physics, chemistry, and biology, which govern human behavior as inexorably as they govern the natural world. Naturalism is thus materialist and anti-idealist in that is does not recognize the existence of nonmaterial or nonobservable phenomena (such as a spiritual realm or higher moral law); it is also antihumanist in that it grants no exceptional status to human beings. Every action taken by a human being, according to the strict naturalist view, has a cause in the physical plane; human behavior is thus entirely determined by the laws of cause and effect in the material world.

In applying this theory to literature, Zola drew on the work of an older contemporary, the French philosopher, historian, and literary critic Hippolyte Taine (1828–1893). Taine's monumental Histoire de la littérature anglaise (1863–1864; History of English literature)—a philosophical treatise disguised as literary criticism—sought to demonstrate that a nation's culture and character are products of material causes; as he put it in a famous quip, "vice and virtue are products, like vitriol and sugar" (p. 3). Taine argued that works of art are the products of three factors: race, moment, and milieu. Taine's English translator renders this phrase as "race, epoch, and surroundings" (p. 12), though the French term race is much closer to the English words nation or people than to race. In the analysis of literature, Taine claimed, "we have but a mechanical problem; the total effect is a result, depending entirely on the magnitude and direction of the preceding causes" (p. 13).