This chapter traces naturalism, a radical outgrowth of realism and one of the earliest movements in modernist theatre, beginning with its first articulations by Émile Zola and his French contemporaries through to manifestations, variations, and subversions of naturalist ideas across Europe, the United States, China, and India. Based in scientific epistemologies and a rejection of aesthetic idealism, naturalism introduced still potent innovations in dramatic form, scenography, audience experience, and the division of labour in theatre. Through confronting depictions of character and agency as fundamentally shaped by physiological, hereditary, and environmental forces, naturalism paved the way for later reformist theatre while seeding subsequent modernist movements that rebelled against its physicalist and materialist accounts of human experience.

Venturing beyond Britain’s established railway lines, this chapter investigates fictional entanglements with late-nineteenth-century ambitions to build a railway tunnel between England and France. It explores debates surrounding the proposed Channel Railway (1880–82), showing how fiction exacerbated fears about what (other than trains, passengers, and freight) such a line might carry. Thomas Hardy’s 1881 novel A Laodicean depictstransport and communications infrastructures enabling and impeding cross-Channel understanding. By linking A Laodicean to the Channel railway debates, this chapter reveals the political stakes of connection in a text that has attracted critical attention for its treatment of telegraphy and the postal service. Hardy’s rich railway soundscape of subterranean rumblings and distant disturbances taps into late nineteenth-century preoccupations with the reverberative qualities of industrial architecture. A by-product of the machine ensemble, reverberation could be both heard and felt. In this chapter, reverberation becomes evidence of the leakiness of a supposedly rational system, and with errant sounds working against the railway’s vector-like ideal.

This chapter takes up Zola’s self-portrait as Saint Thomas in the wake of his much-commented visit to Lourdes in 1892. The novel he went on to write about the Pyrenean shrine, ‘that divine land of dreams’, was largely based on those supposedly miraculous events he had witnessed, and about which he remained sceptical. This chapter looks to Zola’s Lourdes (1894), in conjunction with the heated polemic it provoked, to better understand the stakes of the author’s divisive foray into matters of Catholic practice and dogma. More than an expression of Zola’s anti-clericalism, the novel aroused debates that were aesthetic as much as ideological, as adversaries argued over questions of representation, proofs, facts, documents, and faithfulness. The chapter reads a set of material penned by Catholic detractors, who were determined to defend the divine status of the miracle, casting Zola’s naturalism as an illegitimate, unbelievable – even, à la limite, idealist – aesthetic mode.

This chapter engages with an important tradition of Marxist literary criticism – principally via Fredric Jameson – that has insisted on the insufficiencies of the naturalist novel as a vehicle for revolutionary impulses. It takes up Jameson’s claims as a spur to reconsidering the contested politics of Zola’s best-selling strike novel Germinal (1885). The chapter conceives of the strike as a particular vehicle for the idealist imagination that Zola obsessively discredits – casting it as a form of ‘impossibilism’, an epithet applied to the earliest manifestation of French Marxism. Embedded in contemporary schisms on the Left, Zola’s strike novel is shown to negotiate with debates about the ethical and political legitimacy of this weapon of working-class struggle, as well as the figure of the ambitious strike leader. Zola’s critical account of political idealism ultimately entails a set of anxious reflections on the naturalist novel’s own modes of representation, as well as its equivocal sense of political purpose.

The epilogue broaches the wrangling over Zola’s posthumous fortune: principally, the shifting attitudes that were brought about by his heroic support of Dreyfus, and the energetic debates attending his Pantheonisation. At Zola’s funeral, Anatole France famously described the writer as ‘an ardent idealist’, his speech emblematising a wider effort to recast Zola’s literary career in the gilded light of his sacrifice. This epilogue tackles, then, a supposition only alluded to in earlier chapters: that the positing of Zola as an idealist goes hand in hand with his emergence as an exemplary object of idealisation. Reflecting on Zola’s evolution as a writer, it explores the irresistible pull of biographical destiny as something of an ultimate horizon for our reading of his fiction. To account for idealism in Zola is inevitably, or perhaps especially, it is argued, to grapple with the question of teleology that the Dreyfus Affair imposes.

This chapter tackles Zola’s incongruous experiment in Le Rêve (1888) with an ‘idealist’ style of fiction. Generally understood as a strategic demonstration of the author’s versatility, Le Rêve also responds to a longstanding negotiation with the language of idealism – one rooted, the chapter argues, in Zola’s complex relationship to the century’s most prominent idealist writer, George Sand. The chapter reads Le Rêve as effectuating a return to Sand’s aesthetic, which Zola had assimilated into the troublesome figure of the dream. It tracks the burgeoning imagination of Zola’s heroine via Freud’s ‘Family Romances’, then via Marthe Robert’s Freudian genealogy of the novel, which together reveal the mutual entailments of authorial creativity and childhood fantasy. Zola’s roman d’artiste emerges as another projection of idealist tendencies onto women – most obviously, Sand, but also the artist-heroine of Le Rêve, who is made to embody Sand’s congenital extravagance.

The Introduction makes the case for privileging idealism in our accounts of Zola’s thought and writing, and, in turn for recovering the fundamental role it plays as a cornerstone of naturalism’s self-image. Exploring naturalism’s relationship to its chief antagonist can open up new perspectives on two thorny critical questions. First, how to grapple with the gap between naturalist theory, in all its dogmatism, and the experimental, even contradictory, nature of naturalist writing in practice. Second, how to make sense of Zola’s own eventual destination as the author of utopian novels (1899-1902), where the rhetoric of idealism, of the dream, surfaces as the best expression of the writer’s political commitment. Against prevailing accounts of Zola’s ‘late’ fiction as a product of subterranean, emotional, or instinctual impulses, the Introduction reframes Zola’s idealism as a strategic political and intellectual project.

The first instalment of Zola’s novel Vérité appeared on 10 September 1902, just nineteen days before the author died under suspicious circumstances that were likely related to his involvement in the Dreyfus Affair. The novel provided an allegorical transposition of the contemporary political drama that had divided the nation, but which, as yet, had been denied its proper dénouement. This chapter explores how Zola imagined the right and just resolution of the legal case, as well as of the national crisis it galvanised. Working across Zola’s journalistic and fictional versions of the Affair, it argues that Zola understood the Dreyfus case as an aesthetic problem: as a matter of style, taste, plot, and plausibility. In order for the truth to win out, Zola must imagine the aesthetic and ethical re-education of a nation; and this happy ending involves harnessing an acceptable version of the idealist imagination.

This chapter charts the long history of what Zola dubbed ‘the quarrel of the idealists and the naturalists’. In its wide-ranging account of a shifting literary field in the last two decades of the nineteenth century, the chapter shows how naturalism came to be defined by its double-edged relationship to its chief adversary: idealism. It sets out some of the key charges that Zola formulated against idealism, as the means to justify naturalism’s ethical, political, and aesthetic superiority. Then, in looking to Zola’s contemporaries, it examines a strain of literary criticism that sought to trouble the binaries Zola established - notably, by claiming to determine an idealist tendency in the naturalist author’s own writing , albeit ‘à rebours’. The remainder of the chapter describes the so-called idealist reaction that took hold in the late 1880s, forcing Zola to contemplate ways of adapting to the demands of a younger generation.

Experimental physiology was exploited as a metaphor and a model for the work of authors and critics. The final two chapters advance the book’s trajectory which takes in increasingly diverse literary forms and traces how vivisection became loosened from its ethical and political contexts. Chapter 7 studies how Émile Zola and August Strindberg drew up principles of naturalism by fashioning themselves as literary vivisectors and presenting the stage and the novel as sites of experimentation. They did so by interrogating the connection between observation and intervention and by cultivating an attitude of objective absence imported from experimental physiology. By reframing their works within the context of the vivisection debates (to which naturalism was deeply indebted), the chapter offers a reconsideration of how these writers sought to uncover physiological and psychological laws that would make literature entirely scientific.

Tumultuous nineteenth-century political debates, fears of violent revolutions, and the rise of women’s rights campaigns in Britain, the United States, and France provide a context for considering Darwin’s theory of sexual selection and its engagement with feminism. The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex (1871) identified sexual differences, male–male combat, and female choice in courtship as key elements of animal copulation, while insisting that male choice controls human sexual relations, ideas that inspired radically different reactions from feminists, who objected to what they regarded as Darwin’s sexism, and fiction writers, who highlighted women characters resisting patriarchal expectations and making independent decisions. The long history and profound consequences of the concepts of sexual difference and sexual selection call for careful consideration of the intertwining of Darwin’s scientific theories about sexual difference and choice with divergent cultural formations, ranging from social Darwinism to feminist theory, and propose a more fluid understanding of sex and gender that supersedes the earlier two-sex model.

Chapter four traces the nebulous narrative of degeneration theory in Zola’s La curée, (The Kill) from its origins in medicine to its influence in fiction, and then back to case studies of hermaphrodism. This trajectory reveals how the degeneration diagnosis fundamentally shifted doctor-patient relationships. The French fin-de-siècle natality crisis elevated the stakes of hermaphrodism and non-reproductive sexuality, illustrating how social anxiety can fundamentally alter scientific findings, and how science can, in turn, influence lived experience in fundamental ways. Zola’s obsession with androgyny is merely a partial reflection of what became widespread cultural terror inflected in the writings of numerous authors and doctors, from the well-known Rachilde and Huysmans to the more obscure Armand Dubarry and Dr. Laupts. In La curée, hermaphrodism becomes a scary confluence of scientific, moral, and social anxiety that prefigures its treatment in later nineteenth and early twentieth-century sexology. At the same time, however, Zola’s use of androgyny in La curée unexpectedly subverts his normalizing use of science. By portraying unstable gender identities, La curée undermines the seemingly inexorable calculus of degenerate heredity inherited from medicine and recasts literary naturalism in a new light—less as a derivative of science than as a critic of it.

This chapter explores the close, if often vexed, relationship between the novel and the Republic towards the end of the nineteenth century. It examines how the dominant aesthetic of prose fiction in this period, naturalism, framed itself as an ally of democracy – most directly with its expansion of the novel’s horizons to include, and do justice to, the experience, idiom, and political claims of the working classes. The political use of the naturalist novel as a critical document of social life resided, as Émile Zola saw it, precisely in its declared objectivity. But the form of naturalist fiction produced more contradictions than its theory allowed. This chapter returns the evolution of the naturalist novel to its political context, while tracking the rise of its rival forms (Symbolist and Decadent literature; the psychological novel), which often repudiated those central tenets of the Republic: positivism, scientism, democracy, anti-clericalism. Maurice Barrès and Paul Bourget scrutinised the academic and intellectual principles of a generation schooled by the Third Republic, in ways which offered an alternative pedagogy. By the time of the Dreyfus Affair, the novel had become a prime vehicle for conflicting ideological visions of a nation that was increasingly divided against itself.

Chapter 1: This chapter starts by tracing the development of objectivity in both science and theatre through classical and early modern theatre, in which it was a fairly unimportant epistemic virtue, into the late eighteenth century where objectivity begins to emerge through the idealizations of ‘Truth-to-Nature’ in biology and in literary and theatrical Romanticism. Although some conceptions of scientific objectivity and observation treat these as virtuous by the extent to which they rise above personal or historical bias, the practice and theory of both objectivity and observation have changed through history. Drawing on the work of Lorraine Daston and others, the chapter goes on to show that the emergence of modern (‘mechanical’) objectivity, and a new relationship with observation, mark both nineteenth-century science and Naturalist theatre. Making the comparison explains some of the antitheatrical claims of Naturalist authors and the contradictions of Naturalist practice. As nineteenth-century ‘objectivity’ is superseded, so the theatrical figuration of science gravitates towards areas of ambiguity, chaos, and indeterminacy.