- Focused on everyday life
- Represent events as they actually are with detailed realistic and factual description.
- Opposed to Idealism, Romanticism, and Nominalism
- Aims to interpret the actualities of any aspect of life, free from subjective prejudice, idealism, or romantic color.
Naturalism (1880-1940)
- Opposed to romanticism and surrealism
- Naturalism focuses on the realities of life: the everyday life. It is an extension of realism, where realism only focuses on the realities of the subject, while naturalism focuses on the underlying “scientific” aspects that influence on the actions of the subject.
- Naturalists were influenced by Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution
- Naturalists believed that heredity and social environment determines one’s character.
- Naturalist works exposed dark harshness of life
- racism
- poverty
- violence
- disease
- corruption
- prostitution
- filth
Naturalism in the Theaters
- characters are of working class
- developed in the late 19th and early 20th centuries
- detailed, three dimensional settings (understandings of the determining role of the environment into the stating of human drama)
- everyday speech forms (prose, not poetry)
- secular world view (no ghosts, spirits or gods intervening human actions)
- Plays of naturalism:
- A Bitter Fate
- The Power of Darkness
- A Doll's House
Realism & Naturalism in relation to A Doll's House
- Nora is a disillusioned wife - flirtatious with Dr. Rank
- A controlled father (Nora's father)
- Broken marriage
- Corruption - Krogstad threatens to blackmail Nora
