The Language of the Stones: The Agency of the Inanimate in Literary Naturalism and the New Materialism

Abstract

A suspicion toward inherited notions of agency has long been recognized (and frequently decried) as a defining feature of literary naturalism. But while the deterministic worldview of writers like Theodore Dreiser generated much lively debate in the early twentieth century, literary scholarship’s investment in the unresolved (and perhaps unresolvable) questions of inanimate agency raised by such works was gradually eclipsed by other concerns. Recently, however, a vigorous interest in such metaphysical questions has resurfaced in the discourse of new materialism, an interdisciplinary and politically committed field of scholarship dedicated to revising humanity’s conventional associations of materiality with passivity and predictability. While this is ostensibly a “new” movement, placing new materialism in the context of American literary history underscores how old—or rather timeless—the concerns addressed by the new materialism really are. Given these similarities, Trumpeter proposes that new materialist discourse stands to profit from a more nuanced understanding of literary naturalism and the discourse of new materialism can likewise help American literary scholars return to naturalist works with a more refined and reenergized perspective on the genre’s perennial concerns. This essay examines the role of the inanimate in Sister Carrie and An American Tragedy as a means for tracing connections and highlighting divergences between these two intellectual movements engaged in drawing humanity’s attention to the surreptitiously active nature of things.

Naturalist Smellscapes and Environmental Justice

“…The vanguard of civilization holds its nose at the pit of undiluted naturalism, and can only be brought to bend over it with sympathy and curiosity when, by cunning engineering, a drain from the boudoir and the sacristy has been turned into it." 13 While contemporary critics such as Bill Brown (2003) and Kevin Trumpeter (2015) have illuminated the social liveliness of things in realist and naturalist novels, scholars of these genres tend to overlook the "animacy" of airto adapt Chen's (2012) term for the capacity of language to attribute degrees of liveliness to bodies, things, and environmental materials such as toxins. In these novels, air functions as both a metaphor for stratified social milieus (it tends Naturalist Smellscapes and Environmental Justice 793 to be more hazardous in spaces occupied by the poor) and an uneven medium of physical and mental health.…”