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Various literary critics mention the presence of an element of tension in traditional texts of American naturalism, an element that is not necessarily characteristic of British and European naturalistic works. Charles Child Walcutt, for example, in American Literary Naturalism, A Divided Stream, argues that American naturalism at the end of the nineteenth century displays a tension between, on one hand, idealism, progressivism, and social radicalism, and, on the other, mechanistic determinism (10). He further suggests that such contradictions exist in every piece of American naturalism: a tension between hope and despair, rebellion and apathy, defying nature and submitting to it, god as science and god as devil, and man’s striving and admitting defeat (17). In summary, says Walcutt, “All ‘naturalistic’ novels exist in a tension between determinism and its antithesis” (29). In addition, Lilian Furst considers dualism to be intrinsic to naturalism, suggesting that naturalism is torn between “materialism and idealism, between pessimism and optimism” (quoted in Howard 37), and June Howard points out that naturalism contains elements of determinism as well as opposing elements of reformism, sensationalism, and assertions of human will (40).
Furthermore, Donald Pizer, in Realism and Naturalism in Nineteenth-Century American Literature, appears to agree with Walcutt when he claims that a keynote of the fiction of this period is a tension between actuality and hope, between man’s limitations—imposed by his biological past and sociological present—and his stature as a creature of significance and worth. In addition, Pizer characterizes the subject matter of naturalism as an intermingling of contradictory elements: the commonplace and the sensational, the humanly ennobling and the humanly degrading (11-12). Referring specifically to Frank Norris, Pizer claims that these tensions and contradictions in naturalism are what Norris characterizes as “the romance of the commonplace” (12).