“Changing Attitudes toward Steinbeck’s Naturalism and the Changing Reputation of East of Eden: A Survey of the Criticism since 1974”

If you have read other Steinbeck novels and are interested in understnading this one in relation to those others, or if you were interested in the message of the novel, I recomend this article.

While reading Changing Attitudes toward Steinbeck’s Naturalism and the Changing Reputation of East of Eden: A Survey of the Criticism since 1974, consider:
1) This article uses some big and unusual words.  You may need to look them up.
2) What do literary critics mean when they say that Steinbeck is a naturalist?  what do they mean when they describe some of his works as "dramas of conscious"?  From your point of view, in which category does East of Eden belong?
3) Steinbeck is more than just a story teller.  He is also a bit of a philosopher. How so?

“Changing Attitudes toward Steinbeck’s Naturalism and the Changing Reputation of East of
Eden: A Survey of the Criticism since 1974”

In the following essay, Etheridge examines how “the perception of Steinbeck’s naturalism has changed since the early 1970s,” and how “these changes have affected the reevaluation of East of Eden.”

Until a few years ago, John Steinbeck’s literary reputation depended upon how critics perceived his naturalism. As long as he wrote in what was perceived as a naturalistic vein, he received high praise. When his work became less overtly naturalistic, his reputation declined drastically. During the past fifteen years this pattern of criticism has changed as critics have begun to question whether or not Steinbeck was a naturalist. No novel is a better barometer of how Steinbeck’s reputation is faring than East of Eden. Upon its initial publication, it was considered a disaster; now some scholars call it Steinbeck’s finest work. The purpose of this study is to survey how the perception of Steinbeck’s naturalism has changed since the early 1970s, when scholars began to reevaluate Steinbeck’s post–World War II fiction, and to speculate on how these changes have affected the reevaluation of East of Eden.

The Steinbeck Society Session at the 1974 Modern Language Association Convention marks the beginning of the reevaluation of Steinbeck’s Naturalism. These papers were collected and published in a special issue of the Steinbeck Quarterly in 1976. In his “Introduction,” Warren French divides Steinbeck’s work into two distinctive categories: the “Naturalistic” works and the “Dramas of Consciousness,” placing both The Grapes of Wrath and East of Eden in the latter category. That he grouped these two novels into the same category marks a departure from previously held views such as the one Leo Gurko stated in his 1952 review of East of Eden: “The Steinbeck who was as much the genius of the 30’s as Sinclair Lewis was of the 20’s is scarcely in evidence” (235).

French continued to explore what he felt was a change on the part of Steinbeck from naturalistic to other forms of writing in “John Steinbeck: A Usable Concept of Naturalism,” originally published in 1975. French finds three distinctive stages in the novelist’s naturalism. Steinbeck’s first two works exhibited no naturalism, the works from Pastures of Heaven to Chapter 14 of The Grapes of Wrath are decidedly naturalistic, and everything from that chapter on is neither naturalistic nor post-naturalistic. French concludes that in 1938 Steinbeck “was shaken out of the pessimistic viewpoint undergirding [his naturalistic novels]” (78) and points to Lee’s speech explaining the significance of the “thou mayest” translation of timshel to show that “Steinbeck’s post–World War II novels . . . are not naturalistic.”

Although it was probably not apparent in 1975, the concluding sentence of French’s essay marks an important step forward both in Steinbeck criticism and in the reevaluation of East of Eden: Apparently from his observation during and after World War II, he reached the conclusion that man must take responsibility for his actions and that man is capable—however reluctantly—of taking this responsibility. (78)
Unlike critics who had previously written on East of Eden, French was not holding Steinbeck to a
preconceived standard of what his work should have been like. By concluding that Steinbeck’s apparent departure from naturalism was a result of a conscious artistic and philosophical choice, French anticipates a generation of critics who will begin to examine and appraise the artistic choices Steinbeck made and the changes he underwent, rather than making the a priori assumptions that the later works were different from the earlier and are therefore inferior.

One of the most damning comments made about East of Eden was that in it Steinbeck virtually abandoned naturalism. Yet in papers such as Peter Copek’s “Steinbeck’s ‘Naturalism?,’” critics began to question an assumption which a critic writing two decades earlier would have thought self-evident and unquestionable: that John Steinbeck was a naturalist. While Copek does find strong evidence of naturalistic elements in Steinbeck’s fiction, he concludes that such elements do not necessarily a naturalist make; he does not find the author of East of Eden or The Grapes of Wrath a naturalist “in that this does not lead to a pessimistic vision, a cynical vision, or even one which I could comfortably describe as a fiction whose characters are ‘at the mercy of’ omnipotent determining forces” (10).

Changing Attitudes toward Steinbeck’s Naturalism and the Changing Reputation of East ofEden: A1 8Survey of Copek then points to a passage from Steinbeck’s own work which apparently refutes a conventionally naturalistic reading of his work: “whoever employs this type of [nonteleological] thinking with other than few close friends will be referred to as detached, hard hearted, or even cruel. Quite the opposite seems to be true. Non-teleological methods more than any other seem capable of great tenderness, of an all-embracingness which is rare otherwise” (Log 147). Copek continues, “such thinking-without-blaming becomes ‘living into’” (11). Rather than seeing Nature as something which places people “at the mercy of omnipotent determining forces,” Steinbeck finds an “almost spiritual” quality in nature. What critics call Steinbeck’s naturalism should instead be referred to as “ecology” or “a spirit of ecstasy” (12). Copek affirms the label Woodburn Ross placed on Steinbeck in 1949: “Naturalism’s High Priest” (206). But Copek is careful to emphasize a less often-quoted passage from Ross in which he notes that Steinbeck was “the first . . . to build a mystical religion upon a naturalistic base” (Ross 214). Copek stresses over and over that when the term “naturalism” is used in conjunction with the work of John Steinbeck, it should not be confused with the naturalism of a Stephen Crane or a Frank Norris or an Ernest Hemingway.

Donald Pizer, author of a number of books on naturalism, reinforces Copek’s thesis when he says, “I am uncertain that calling John Steinbeck a naturalist offers a useful insight into the distinctive nature of his work or of his literary imagination” (12). Like Copek, Pizer believes that “the term is too encrusted with the clichés and polemics of past literary wars to serve as a guide to the complex individuality of either a major Steinbeck novel or Steinbeck’s work as a whole.” Clearly, both critics felt in 1974 that the term “naturalism” as it had come to be understood was “not particularly useful” when applied to Steinbeck. Such comments show the beginning of a movement toward a reevaluation of Steinbeck’s work, and they question previously held views. And it is not unreasonable that such a critical reexamination may ultimately rejuvenate Steinbeck’s literary reputation. Pizer implies that perhaps Steinbeck’s work has been read in a less than advantageous light when he says, “it would probably be disastrous to attempt a complete explication of a Steinbeck novel as a reflection of naturalistic themes and techniques” (12). Ultimately, Pizer concludes that the naturalistic elements in Steinbeck’s writing bear stronger affinity to the naturalists of the nineteenth century than of the twentieth.
Although in their discussion of Steinbeck’s naturalism critics such as Pizer, Copek, and French do not always consider East of Eden, the issue of Steinbeck’s naturalism is nevertheless central to an understanding of how critics perceive the book. One of the most bitter criticisms leveled against the novel by its earliest reviewers was that in it Steinbeck “abandoned” his naturalism. It would be inaccurate to say that the naturalism they found missing had never been there, but it would not be incorrect to look at the comments of a Pizer or of a French and conclude that the naturalism Steinbeck displayed in East of Eden is not the naturalism the book’s reviewers expected to see. Whatever the critics ultimately conclude about it, the issue of what form of naturalism is present in Steinbeck’s writing will appear again and again in criticism which seeks to reevaluate the work.

John Ditsky sought to explain the apparent change in Steinbeck’s style in the first chapter of his 1977 book Essays on East of Eden. Entitled “Toward a Narrational Self,” Ditsky’s essay deals mainly with biographical elements, showing passages from Steinbeck’s works and letters in the 30s and 50s and using them as examples of how Steinbeck’s work changed. For the Steinbeck of the 1930s, the role of the artist is to become “merely a recording consciousness, judging nothing, simply putting down the thing” (1); as a result the author “developed the device of the objective and dispassionate narrational voice.” Later, as Steinbeck’s interests changed, he became less concerned with the idea of “group-man,” a semi-deterministic theory about the biological nature of man which is central to what is probably the most naturalistic of Steinbeck’s novels, In Dubious Battle, and informs the earlier chapters of The Grapes of Wrath.

In a letter which bears a strong resemblance to Chapter 13 of East of Eden, Steinbeck recants much of his previous belief in group man: I think I believe one thing powerfully—that the only creative thing our species has is the individual, lonely mind. Two people can create a child but I know of no other thing created by a group. The group ungoverned by individual thinking is a horrible destructive principle. (Ditsky 4)
At this point, says Ditsky, “John Steinbeck has finally resolved the issue of the group-man by returning to something like the Christian idea of moral responsibility—and is ready to incorporate the changes in his attitudes, and in himself as a person, into the novel” (4).

Ditsky maintains, as does French in “A Usable Concept of Naturalism,” that the break from naturalism apparent in East of Eden is a stage in Steinbeck’s development as artist. Ditsky takes his case farther than do either French or Copek, and provides for the first time in print an overt denial of Steinbeck’s naturalism, saying, “Throughout a lifetime of writing third-person fiction, John Steinbeck had resisted the temptation to moralize, but he had done so at the cost of sundering spirit and substance. The price of his apparent objectivity was a mistaken reputation as a naturalist, however impressive the achievement” (13, emphasis added). Ditsky’s position is clear; he is dissatisfied with prevailing wisdom about Steinbeck and about East of Eden and, like French and other critics who question Steinbeck’s naturalism, feels that aspects of Steinbeck’s art are as yet unexplored. It is Ditsky who labels much Steinbeck criticism “cookie cutter” (ix).
The question of naturalism and other strong disagreements with previous Steinbeck criticism figure prominently in Karen J. Hopkins’ “Steinbeck’s East of Eden: A Defense.” Hopkins echoes Ditsky’s commentary about “cookie cutter criticism” when she notes “that most critics who read East of Eden expect it to live up to some standard they’ve set, either for the novel as a genre, or for Steinbeck in particular, especially the Steinbeck of The Grapes of Wrath” (63). Furthermore, “both points of view respond to conventions rather than to the individual work.” Like Ditsky, Hopkins feels that commentary about East of Eden has been prescriptive rather than descriptive. Steinbeck irritated a generation of critics by violating these conventions, or, as Hopkins puts it, “there are certain things which can’t be done in a novel, and Steinbeck does them, QED” (63).

Borrowing from Charles Child Walcutt’s American Literary Naturalism: A Divided Stream, Hopkins notes that “American naturalism has refused to accept” that “the mind is merely a chemical reaction” (65). In other words, American literary naturalism has tended to be idealistic. In East of Eden, Steinbeck articulated this tension between naturalism and idealism by incorporating elements of both.

Many critics have considered this novel anti-naturalistic because of the Old Testament elements and the discussion of timshel. However, says Hopkins, “The problem with this . . . is that the universe of the novel is as fiercely deterministic as even the most determined naturalist could want, more deterministic and much less pleasant, in fact, than exterior nature in some of Steinbeck’s other novels” (67).

Hopkins also says that the essential element in East of Eden is the way characters react to their universe; she divides the characters in the novel into two categories: “those who tend to fictionalize and those who tend to analyze” (68). Characters who hold too closely to their fictions—Cyrus, Aaron, Cathy—are often destroyed. Put another way, “Man, enjoying a narrow and therefore false security in his ability to decipher and understand his surroundings, is suddenly destroyed or nearly destroyed by the intrusion of facts that imagination has refused to acknowledge” (68). The world of this novel is naturalistic.

Hopkins’ study is instructive for a variety of reasons. Obviously, this work is a landmark in that it is the first article in a critical collection or journal which openly praises East of Eden. Also, it is instructive to note theway in which Hopkins summarizes and appraises earlier criticism of the work; to her it is a book whose reputation has sunk low enough (and in her opinion, unfairly so) that she feels it needs defense. Her reasoning anticipates Steinbeck criticism in the 1980s which seeks to reevaluate Steinbeck’s naturalism.

During the 80s, the view that Steinbeck never was a naturalist gathered momentum. Robert DeMott’s view, which he himself labels “extremely revisionary,” stems from the proposition that “we have misread Steinbeck” who is “primarily a Romantic ironist, who experimented tirelessly with varying formal and technical elements in his fiction, and maintained an intense lifelong interest in psychology, myth, and the shaping processes of the creative imagination” (“The Interior Distances of John Steinbeck” 87–88). DeMott, who bases his case solely on Steinbeck’s post-1945 fiction, notes that “in his later years, from 1945 on, he consciously moved toward fabulation . . . in order to explore the implication inherent in the structural and epistemological tradition of the Romantic expressive fictional line” (88). Most of DeMott’s premise hinges upon his discussion of the “interior life” of certain characters East of Eden and Winter of Our Discontent (a more detailed analysis of this argument follows here in discussion of changing critical reactions toward Steinbeck’s characters such as Kate/Cathy). DeMott concludes his discussion of Steinbeck’s “Romanticism” with a quote from Travels With Charley: “I am happy to report that in the war between reality and romance, reality is not the stronger” (136). DeMott is not the first to find Romantic tendencies in Steinbeck, but he is among the first to view these tendencies positively.

DeMott backs away from his somewhat radical suggestion in the last sentence of his essay by saying, “It is time, I suggest, to recognize Steinbeck’s adherence not only to the tradition of mimetic or empirical writing, but to the larger and infinitely more exciting tradition of Romantic fictionalizing” (99); apparently Steinbeck used not only naturalistic elements but other elements as well.

DeMott is not alone in suggesting that Steinbeck should be read as a Romantic rather than a Naturalist. In 1979, Daniel Buerger writes that “the hero of East of Eden is the Romantic ‘I’ narrator” (12). By 1980, Paul McCarthy can write of “Steinbeck’s Realism” as a “necessary realignment” to aid in the reading of Steinbeck’s post–World War II fiction: “romance provides . . . [the] influence and mode in East of Eden” (118) and “something romantic is perceptible in the general patterns of East of Eden” (119).

Although it is risky to use a term such as “consensus” in connection with any Steinbeck novel, one might say that two of the most recent and influential works concerning Steinbeck have reached some sort of consensus in Steinbeck’s naturalism. The first is Jackson J. Benson’s The True Adventures of John Steinbeck, Writer, a book which has rapidly become the “standard” biography of the writer. Benson contends that Steinbeck was a naturalist, but differed from other American writers of this tradition: “he would become, to use a term more familiar to those involved in literature, the most thoroughgoing naturalist among modern writers” (236). What distinguishes Steinbeck’s particular brand of naturalism was that “he was the only major writer within the American tradition of naturalism who reacted to science in a positive way, embraced a scientific perception of the universe with enthusiasm, and who knew something about science” (244). Furthermore, “Steinbeck’s own lack of ego made it easier for him to accept the relative unimportance of man and turn instead to a calm and even joyful realization of man’s interdependence with the whole of nature.” The works of other naturalistic writers constitute something of a lament; Steinbeck accepted this view of the universe. Benson does not view East of Eden as a “departure” or an “abandonment” of naturalism. Rather, he feels that it was an “outgrowth” of Steinbeck’s naturalism, a further formulation or refinement of an idea he had worked out in his previous novels:

Basic to his philosophy and carried over into East of Eden are the beliefs that man is but a small part of a large whole that is nature and that this whole is only imperfectly understood by man and does not conform to his schemes or wishes. Furthermore, as a part of nature, man often obscures his place and function and the true nature of his environment by putting on various kinds of blinders—whereas it is essential to both his happiness and his survival that he learn to see himself and his surroundings . . . In East of Eden, Steinbeck adds a further element, prompted by his own recent struggle to survive and his concern for the future of his sons: in this materialistic, mechanistic universe, is there any chance for the individual to affect his own destiny? (236–37). Benson’s view gains strength because he is the “authoritative” biographer of Steinbeck. His opinion, as well, anticipates the increasingly accepted stance that East of Eden is philosophically consistent with Steinbeck’s previous fiction. This is as “revisionary” as DeMott’s thesis that Steinbeck was never a naturalist. And although Benson does not suggest that East of Eden is Steinbeck’s best novel (in fact, he finds it seriously flawed), neither does he suggest that the work is without merit or reflects a “decline” in the novelist’s powers.

John Timmerman’s view, put forth in his 1986 John Steinbeck’s Fiction: The Aesthetics of the Road Taken, takes a synthetic view, somewhere between that of Benson, who called Steinbeck “the most thoroughgoing naturalist” in American letters, and DeMott, who denies that Steinbeck ever was a naturalist. Instead, Timmerman finds in Steinbeck a “supernatural naturalism” and “a world which God has departed, like the dissipation of other ancient myths” (15). Timmerman places this aspect of Steinbeck’s naturalism “solidly within the framework of his literary precursors” such as Crane, Hart, or Dreiser (26).
However, Steinbeck is also outside the naturalist tradition; “the term ‘naturalistic’ simply will not do as a final description of Steinbeck’s view of humankind” (29). Instead, he “finds a supernatural power and presence observable in the natural, in the flora and the fauna and earth itself, and in humankind” (29). Where Crane would find the cosmos indifferent or perhaps even hostile, Steinbeck would find something which is nurturing and generative. He “probes the supernatural with typology and symbolism” (30). In East of Eden, says Timmerman, Steinbeck’s conception was basically naturalistic:

Furthermore, its vastness was compelling to him. Instead of being a small slice of life like Tortilla Flat, Cannery Row, or Sweet Thursday, this work took on the whole life. It contained in practice the theory of The Log from the Sea of Cortez—that all life must be seen whole in its whole environment, in relation to the all. It would bring all the threads together for him. It is no accident that over and over in Journal of a Novel he concludes a letter to Covici with this phrase: “I will get to my knitting.” (211)

Although Timmerman’s view is unique, it presents a plausible synthesis of other views. The various attitudes towards Steinbeck’s naturalism, particularly its relationship to the novel under discussion, indicate recent changes in critical perception. Certain assumptions are simply no longer held or clung to. The issue of whether or not Steinbeck “declined” is no longer argued and, while the question has never been resolved, it has been replaced by new and perhaps more productive studies which examine the wealth of the Steinbeck canon. Perhaps the clearest indication that East of Eden is finally being given a close reading and judged on its own merits is that many studies of the novel make no mention of The Grapes of Wrath. Perhaps Steinbeck critics have abandoned the “cookie cutter” John Ditsky complained of more than a decade ago.

Works Cited

Etheridge, Jr., Charles L.. “Changing Attitudes toward Steinbeck’s Naturalism and the Changing Reputation of East of Eden: A Survey of the Criticism since 1974,” in The Steinbeck Question: New Essays in Criticism, edited by Donald R. Noble, Whitston Publishing, 1993, pp. 250–59.