Jane Austen, Charles Darwin & Emile Zola

 Naturalism.

I came to naturalism through Theodore Dreiser. He got the idea from Émile Zola - as I understand the history. All I knew of Zola was the movie The Life of Smile Zola until I went to prison. There, I read a couple of Zola's novels. Much, much different in style, even a bit in content, from Dreiser. Zola is light on his feet where Dreiser trudges along. Naturalism came to mean for me something akin to journalism. 

Then this evening I read Is beauty natural? by Abigail Tulenko on Aeon. I expected Austen and Darwin from the subtitle. Zola was a surprise, and I think I learned something important about naturalism in the following paragraphs.

Austen’s interest in the natural is readily apparent. Her relationship to naturalism is more difficult to pin down. There are two closely related respects in which Austen might be called a naturalist. Firstly, she is stylistically engaged with naturalism as an artistic movement, or what Peter Graham describes as ‘selective and artful manipulation of detail’. In his naturalist manifesto ‘The Experimental Novel’ (1893), Émile Zola characterised this as an aversion to ‘irrational and supernatural explanations’. In Northanger Abbey, Austen makes her literary naturalism transparent; she critiques a popular journal’s ‘unnatural characters’ and ‘improbable circumstances’ as a mark against its literary merit. Northanger expresses through satire what Zola asserts in his manifesto: ‘[N]ature, being there, makes itself felt, or at least that part of nature of which science has given us the secret, and about which we have no longer any right to romance.’

This naturalism involves not a denial of emotion (as we often see Austen’s heroines attempt) but, as Zola puts it, ‘the necessity of analysing anger and love, of discovering exactly how such passions work in the human being’ through careful observation. For him, naturalist literature provides us with ‘human data’ and indeed, for Graham, Austen is a master of the form, taxonomising the social ecosystems of strategically limited ‘knowable communities’, from Highbury to Bath, in a manner not dissimilar to the way that Darwin analyses the ecosystem of the Galápagos Islands. She is sober in her pursuit of the mundanities a natural historian would note in their daily log; ‘of all this littleness, she evades nothing, and nothing is slurred over,’ writes Virginia Woolf in 1925 on Austen’s style. Likewise, in an 1850 letter critiquing Austen, Charlotte Brontë decries her ‘miniature delicacy’. Austen is a naturalist in form and methodology. Her use of detail and carefully circumscribed choice of scope allows her to pursue a particular realism and psychological acuity.

The lack of superstition makes sense. However, romance and emotions are not exiled from naturalism. If I may be bold, the romanticism Zola wrote of is the mythologizing of nature.

I take issue with outlawing the irrational. Then, too, I have read Kafka and Gabriel Garcia Marquez. I am also heir to history since Darwin's death. My quibbling seems to be answered in the following:

The second way in which Austen engages with naturalism extends beyond participation in the literary movement, to her philosophical commitments. As Graham summarises, a philosophical naturalist is ‘someone who believes that natural causes offer sufficient explanation of the world, its origins, and its development.’ This philosophical perspective is generally characterised by an extreme sort of empiricism that privileges the scientific method as the highest, or even only, avenue to truth. Graham proclaims Austen and Darwin as ‘perhaps the great English empiricists of the 19th century’. Austen’s ‘clear, cold eye’ directed ‘at the concrete particulars of the world’ situates her alongside philosophical empiricists who rejected the existence of anything that couldn’t be verified through sense data, ie, non-material things like God, mind/consciousness, Platonist universals, transcendent moral law, etc.

In a 2005 essay, the novelist Ian McEwan quips that ‘if one reads accounts of … troops of bonobo … one sees rehearsed all the major themes of the English 19th-century novel’ – primal struggles for resources, mates, reproduction, and the perpetuation of one’s lineage. Perhaps this is no surprise, as the 19th-century rise of realist literature coincided with the advent of biology as a natural science. For Graham, Austen’s naturalism is more than mere metaphor. She participates not only in the literary movement of naturalism, which favoured realism and detail, but also in the reductionist empiricism emerging in her time and brought to a height with Darwinism. Applying the observational method of natural science, Austen situates human beings in a continuity with the wider natural world. In her novels, writes Graham, ‘human beings and their societies are understood to be part of nature’; Austen gazes ‘with scrupulous, penetrating, and relatively unbiased attention at the rich and messy details of the world around them.’ Her interests are not in abstract universals; Woolf complains that her work lacks ‘moons, mountains, and castles’. Rather, Austen’s interests lie in the animal particulars of courtship and kin ties, the ‘specimens destined for extinction (those social dinosaurs the landed Elliots)’, as Graham puts it, and the evolution of social arrangements more primed to survive, such as Wentworth’s social mobility, or the unusual marriage dynamics of the Crofts.

Indeed, Austen’s work models a sort of everyday analogue to the scientific method. I would argue that the primary mode by which her characters progress in their moral development is via a form of epistemic humility and responsiveness to evidence. By learning to see beyond their motivated biases, Austen’s heroines are able to take in new information that allows them to better understand their social world...

Reality includes the irrational. I may even be proof of that statement. There is more than enough evidence that otherwise rational people do irrational acts. Assuming logic is a sign of rationality, one may start with an irrational premise and work logically to a conclusion; one might also be able to work irrationally from a rational premise. 

But mythology is also, I think, a part of our reality. The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence stands for this proposition. It may be this is an American idea.

The original essay goes on to speak on fashion. Eventually, it leaves me thinking Jane Austen has a line on what I am thinking.

In Austen, the unnatural is not always bad, and the natural not always good. It is worth noting that she was writing in an era when horticulture was on the rise and florists first set up shop in major cities. Just as the ‘florist’s flower … was compact of both reality and fiction, at once the stuff of Nature – Nature’s gift – and an artefact of human fancy and fetishism,’ writes the literature scholar Deidre Shauna Lynch, Austen seems to suggest that fashion is both in continuity with and can stand opposed to nature. She is insisting on a contradiction that a novelist can make and perhaps a natural scientist like Darwin can’t. Resisting the urge for resolution, she holds taut a tension for readers to tightrope across.

Life's reality (its ultimate reality?) is that resolution evades us all on this side of the grave. Between now and then there are the irrational, actions resulting from mythic beliefs and the bare facts that warm the journalist's heart which constitute the magic of existence.

sch  11/9