272 Reconstructing, Reimagining: 1865–1900And the vision of injustice, inequity he sees everywhere around him in “the moiling
street” is matched by a feeling of emotional and spiritual instability, the conviction
that “this earth is not the steadfast place” earlier generations had presumed it to be.
Doubts are compounded and given a more political slant in his “On a Soldier Fallen
in the Philippines” (1901): an elegy for someone killed in a conflict, the Spanish–
American War, that the poet clearly regards as not just useless but obscene. “Let him
never dream that his bullet’s scream went wide of its island mark, /” Moody
concludes, “Home to the heart of his darling land where she stumbled and sinned in
the dark.” Moody acquired fame during his lifetime from his plays, A Sabine Woman
(1906) and The Great Divide (1909). They deserve a place in American literary
history if only because, unlike many dramatists of the period, Moody chose for them
distinctly American subjects. But it is his verse, collected in Poems and Plays (1912),
that really takes the measure of his times. It is here that he registers, with far more
resonance than most other contemporary poets, the doubt, the sense of vacuum left
by the disappearance of an earlier America and an older faith and by the spread of
evolutionism, determinism, and relativism – and the suspicion that America had
broken faith with its past by moving, in the course of a century, from liberated
colony to imperial power.
But the writers who contributed most to this darkening of emphasis and mood
were novelists, like Norris. The most notable of these, apart from Norris himself, are
Stephen Crane (1871–1900) and Jack London (1876–1916). They also include
Theodore Dreiser, whose long career was to make him a contemporary of F. Scott
Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway and someone, like Edith Wharton and Willa Cather,
standing on the cusp between Victorianism and modernism. And they include Harold
Frederic (1856–1898), whose best novel, The Damnation of Theron Ware (1896),
portrays the religious and psychological decline of a Methodist minister while reveal-
ing the inadequacy of religious and intellectual fashions from Methodism to
Darwinism; Margaret Deland (1857–1945), whose finest novels, John Ward, Preacher
(1888) and The Awakening of Helen Richie (1908), explore moral conflict and growth
in the repressive climate of Calvinism; and Henry Fuller (1857–1929), whose book
The Cliff-Dwellers (1893) takes on a new fictional landscape, the social ambitions
of people living in a skyscraper apartment building. Like Norris, both Crane and
London – and, for that matter, Dreiser – were Naturalists. That is, they subscribed to
a darker, supposedly more scientific form of realism, shared with European writers
like Emile Zola, that denies human agency: in these fictions, environmental forces
control events and the individual is acted upon rather than active, subjected to the
determinations of life – the elemental forces running through nature, society, and
every single human being. “Men were nothings, mere animalcules, mere ephemeri-
des that fluttered and fell and were forgotten between dawn and dusk,” the central
character, Presley, in Norris’s 1901 novel, The Octopus, reflects. “FORCE only existed –
FORCE that brought men into the world, FORCE that crowded them out of it to
make way for the succeeding generation.” In the fiction of the Naturalists, like The
Octopus, the abiding American myths about individual freedom and heroism are
overturned. Human characters are dwarfed, transformed into tiny “specks” on a vastGGray_c03.indd 272ray_c 03 .indd 272 8 8/1/2011 7:54:21 AM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 54 : 21 AM