Naturalism in literature
One of the most widely read and respected English novelists, Hardy created an important artistic bridge between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The influence of Charles Darwin's recently published Origin of Species (1859) on his thought, and his subsequent loss of orthodox religious faith affected all of his writings. Although his novels were uneven in skill, when he stayed in the rural settings of his youth and focused on relations between the sexes, they took on a tragic power rarely equaled by other English novelists. He is credited with introducing fatalism into Victorian literature -- a pessimistic assessment of humanity's ability to cope with a changing social environment. In two of Hardy's final novels, Tess of the D'Urbervilles (1891) and Jude the Obscure (1896), his bleak and open treatment of sexuality and marriage caused such an outrage among the puritanical Victorian public that he was deeply disillusioned. Hardy abandoned fiction, and for the rest of his life wrote only poetry.
At about the time Hardy was active as a novelist, the French writer Emile Zola formulated a branch of literary realism called naturalism, which reflected many of Hardy's concerns as a novelist. The terms naturalism and realism are often used almost interchangeably, but there is a significant distinction between them: while naturalists supported the realists' aim of careful observation and mimetic depiction of the outer world, their view of the human condition and specific method of writing was strongly indebted to advances in the natural sciences, specifically the impact of Darwin's theory of evolution. In their biologistic view, the human animal was a creature conditioned by influences beyond his or her control and therefore largely devoid of free will or moral choice; a creature shaped by external factors such as heredity, environment, and the pressure of immediate circumstances. In this respect, the premises of the naturalists have gained a reputation for pessimism. Their method was indebted to the natural and social sciences as well: according to Zola, the writer was to work as an objective 'experimenter' whose function was to observe and record the chain of cause and effect dispassionately and impersonally, without moral judgments. A further formative influence on naturalism can be found in the social consequences of the Industrial Revolution. The misery of the working classes in urban slums became one of the naturalists' favorite themes in analyzing the human condition.
Naturalism was prominent in drama as well. 'Free' theaters were established throughout Europe for the presentation of naturalist plays, exploring new techniques of acting and production and making use of the potential of artificial lighting. The unsavory, often shocking, but theatrically effective products of naturalism found an expression in the title chosen by George Bernard Shaw for a collection of his dramas, Plays Pleasant and Unpleasant (1898). Shaw began his career as a novelist, publishing in socialist journals. He was active in socialist and anarchist political movements, and in 1883 he became a founding member of the Fabian Society, an influential socialist organization. Although his novels found little favor with the critics and the public, Shaw began to reach a wide audience through his magazine articles and reviews. His first play, Widowers' Houses, was produced in 1892 and was followed in rapid succession by The Philanderer (1893), Mrs. Warren's Profession (1893), Arms and the Man (1894), Candida (1893), and You Never Can Tell (1895), which were all published together in Plays Pleasant and Unpleasant. To make his published plays more accessible to the reading public, Shaw added novelistic stage directions and lengthy prefatory essays revealing his mastery of English prose. During the first decades of the twentieth century, Shaw wrote his greatest and most successful plays: Man and Superman (1904), Major Barbara (1905), and Pygmalion (1913). Although Shaw won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1925 and went on writing plays almost until his death at the age of 94, none of the later plays enjoyed the same kind of success as these earlier works. His influence on twentieth century drama, however, was profound, revolutionizing the overwhelmingly melodramatic Victorian stage with dramas of ideas.