The Melodramatic Diegesis: Sensational Realism, Dramatism, and the Advent of Literary Naturalism

It is commonplace in literary studies to see Naturalism as the final destination of the literary mode of nineteenth century realism; to see the Naturalistic style as a hyper-realism, or intensification of the verisimilar, driven by its connections to science and journalistic documentation. This dissertation challenges such a traditional view of Naturalism by rereading the Naturalistic mode not as an extension or elaboration of realism, but instead as the inauguration of a new, modernistic style of melodrama, transposed into narrative form: what I call the melodramatic diegesis of Naturalism. Victorian literature had always been partially shaped by melodramatic tropes, as for instance with Dickens, where the modal shifts towards the melodramatic had generally focused on the application of melodrama as a reflection of sentimental, communitarian values; yet these modal shifts were carefully contained, walled-off as it were, from the otherwise ostensibly realistic representations of people, places, and things through the author's use of omniscient narration. In Naturalistic narrative fiction, we see the emergence of a new type of melodramatic mode, which---through its expulsion of sentiment---attempts to fashion a melodrama of intense solipsism and individualism. The result of Naturalism's transposing of melodrama to narrative literature in this new, totalizing way creates a hyperbolic verisimilitude centered on surface perceptions and internalized sensations, a sensational sort of realism. This narrative style is arranged through the illusion of an unmediated, unadulterated, point of view, akin to the experience of watching a theatrical performance. This dissertation, which tracks the development of Naturalism's intrinsic dependence on the melodramatic mode through novels by George Moore, George Gissing, and Stephan Crane, as well a thorough the plays of Ibsen and Shaw, manifestos by Emile Zola, and the reformist journalism of writers like W. T. Stead and Andrew Mearns, shows the ways in which Naturalism imitates the sensational excesses of melodrama while simultaneously rejecting the sympathetic relations that gave nineteenth century melodrama its communitarian, populist politics.