Stephen Crane Naturalism

American history is filled with ups and downs. First you have the settlement era where very clueless and scared individuals move across the world to live in a very unfamiliar place. Then you have the enlightenment era were people change up their philosophies and start to take more about nature and science. It continues all the way to the era we are currently in, postmodern era where we write more freely. American literate styles changes as time goes on. These styles change because of historical events that may have taken place during that time and along with these event, the view of man changes and these different viewpoints can be seen in the writing.

During the Settlement Period (1620-1700) two groups of people were trying to move to America …show more content…
During this time the civil war was taking place so people didn’t want to read about how great nature could be and about how everything is sunshine and rainbows. They wanted to read about themselves or someone similar to them; a working or middle class citizen trying to make it in a world where the odds are stacked against them. Within this same time period, naturalism shines through as well. Naturalism is just like realism except for the fact that naturalism is the idea that nature is trying to kill you. Because of all of these factors, man was seen as helpless and powerless. Within Stephen Crane’s The Open Boat, four characters are stranded on a dingy and are forced to deal with the harsh conditions of mother nature. “A singular disadvantage of the sea lies in the fact that after successfully surmounting one wave you discover that there is another behind it just as important and just as nervously anxious to do something effective in the way of swamping boats” (Crane 1769). This quote personifies nature and makes it seem like nature is a person literally trying to kill the characters and, really, anxious to do so and characters on the boat could literally do nothing about it. The narrator in The Yellow Wallpaper was also very helpless but not because of nature, because of society. She is a woman in a society where women weren’t seen as “humans” or just productive people of the society. “The faint figure behind seemed to shake the pattern, just as if she wanted to get out” (Gilman 1676). In this quote, the narrator tries to relate to the woman trapped behind the wallpaper by saying she wants to escape society and the ideals of women that is forced onto her and even when she tries to escape them, there is always someone on the other side trying to stop her like her