Frederic and Hawthorne

AROLD FREDERIC'S The Damnation of Ware has puzzled JUL critics ever since its appearance on the best-seller list in I896. Most have chosen to look at it as yet another example of emerging American naturalism in the world. There are, indeed, reasons for this assumption, as we shall see, but Frederic was really trying to accomplish something else. Frederic himself, when asked about his literary parentage, mentioned Emile Erchmann and Alexandre Chatrain, masters of historical and sentimental melodrama, and Nathaniel Hawthorne. If Hawthorne was indeed some sort of midwife or father figure for Frederic, then perhaps the naturalistic label which has stuck to him (Frederic) may be not only too simplistic but particularly wrong-headed. As early as 1939 Charles Walcutt decided that Theron Ware, to conclude, is not a naturalistic novel because its author could not eliminate ethical judgments and motivations in favor of materialistic ones.1 While Walcutt's own definition of naturalism may be too simplistic, his early article, which briefly examines the psychological aspects of Frederic's masterpiece, points in the right direction. Literary naturalism as a philosophy derives, in part, from Emile Zola's blend of the experimental method of science and the sociological notions derived from Darwin. To Darwin environment was all; all organisms were shaped by it, man as one amongst them. Man existed as the sum of all his desires and instincts, the somewhat pitiful victim of a universe operating by blind and iron forces. His primitive yearnings for food and copulation propelled him through this field of forces into a perpetual void that he could never hope to comprehend. The naturalistic aesthetic, if there was such a thing, seems to have been based on the accumulation of factual detail and the recognition of these primitive forces in operation. The idea had

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