Harold Frederic: His Fictive Imagination and the Intellectual Milieu
Harold Frederic: His Fictive Imagination and the Intellectual Milieu
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Date
1980
Authors
Clark, Jean Marshall
Advisor
Thorberg, Raymond
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Abstract
Harold Frederic reflects in his novels and stories the intellectual
milieu of the latter nineteenth century. Most of the major philosophic
concerns of the age are present in one way or another in his fiction:
metaphysical idealism, Comtian positivism, Darwinism, the Higher
Criticism, pragmatism, and, as the power of reason-indeed reason
itself-came more and more into distrust, a voluntarism deriving from
Schopenhauer and Nietzsche. While Frederic tended to synthesize ideas
rather than to develop his own systematic philosophy, the psychological
penetration of his characters evidences his awareness of such concerns. He
is a careful craftsman in the drawing of his fictional personalities, and he
often makes explicit note of the inclusion of intellectual elements in their
delineations.
Frederic's atypical writing possibly reflects his atypical lack of
artistic isolation. His continued journalistic activity as well as his
membership in various literary and political clubs might account for his
remaining highly responsive to contemporary politics, economics, and
religion. His fictional canon reads like a small compendium of the thought
of the century's closing decades, tracing its broad diverse movements and interrelated philosophic strands. His early writing was vitalized by the new
currents of thought generated by sociologists and economists in revolt
against the social Darwinists, and by new approaches instituted by the Bible
exegetes. Included among these were the views most compatible with his
own liberalism and his optimistic attitude toward life. Later such hopes as
they inspired found themselves weighed in the dramatic balance of his
fiction against an unvanquished Darwinism, a spreading skepticism, as well
as the darker visions of voluntarism. His final work, while yet bearing
witness to an open, inquiring mind, shows a receptiveness to the blending of
the spiritual and scientific conceived by American pragmatism.
Frederic's writing, according to Walter Taylor, "anticipates the
mingled realism, naturalism, and disillusion of the twentieth century." It is
to employ a wrong set of terms, however, to assess him, as Charles Child
Walcutt does, as "a kind of naturalist manqué," making implicit comparison
thereby with, say, Crane or Dreiser. More to the point is the statement by
Austin Briggs that "in the works of no other American novelist does one so
fully sense what it was like to be alive in those turbulent years."