Eduthink: 22-Realism and Naturalism

Last month, (November 2015), a former colleague rang me up asking for a clarification regarding ‘Realism’ and ‘Naturalism’ which his daughter needed as part of an assignment. Clarifying over the telephone using technical terms, I knew will not work…So I prepared the following and emailed it to my colleague requesting for clarification if required. I did not receive a call…and I presume this material proved useful.

*They are two separate literary movements with lots of similarities and differences.

*Realism shows the world as it is while Romanticism shows the world as the heart tells us it should be. Naturalism shows the world as man usually is with hidden animal instincts.

Realism	Naturalism
Popular between 1861- 1914 *An artistic movement in 19^th c France	*Popular between 1890 - 1915
*Artists and writers strove for detailed realistic and factual description. They tried to represent events and social conditions as they actually are, without idealization.	*Describes a type of literature that attempts to apply scientific principles of objectivity and detachment to its study of human beings.
*Realist novelists did not follow established tradition- a formal plot structure and a series of events leading to a climax and resolution because they believed that life did not follow such patterns.	Naturalistic novelists like Jack London did have plots for their novels. But writers rejected the notion of free will and presented characters whose behaviour was determined by “nerves and blood”. So themes of Naturalism in Literature included violence, taboo etc.
Characters of Realist novelists like Mark Twain(American) and Anton Chekov(Russian) were ordinary people. Writers used ordinary speech and dialect .	Characters of Naturalistic novelists Emlie Zola are usually of the low-socio economic class.
Characters are in control of their own destiny and are superior to their circumstances.	Characters do not have free will (determinism) and showed a naturalist tendency to depict primal urges which is powerful than higher thinking. * Emlie Zola’s novels showed a frankness about sexual functions, shocking readers resulting in banning of his works.
Realistic drama is a representation of life on the stage, portraying life as we know it.	In Naturalistic drama, the actors behave ‘as they would’ not ‘as they could’. [That is, in Realistic drama the actors would rarely act facing their back to the audience, but it is usually so in Naturalistic drama because the actor attempts to act exactly as in real life, unaware that he is presenting before an audience]
Specimen lines from Poem Like A Flower Plucked a flower just for me, You fucked it up, like you fucked up me… You didn’t water it, you didn’t lavish it in sunlight, You watched it wither. You watched it die. You crushed the flower with your careless palms, You stomped the petals to dust, The stem, the thorns and all… You crushed my heart with your greedy hands, You squeezed it dry. …. by Tory Edana Talbott	Specimen lines from Poem George Sterling I saw a man open an iris petal. He ran his finger underneath the edge, unfolded it, and smoothed it out a little, not as one guilty of a sacrilege — because he knew flowers, and understood that what he did would maybe help them grow - though for a moment he was almost God. … by Jack London