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| Literary Background |

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a) Naturalism: historical background

The novel Eline Vere is a prime example of Dutch naturalist prose. The naturalist movement finds its origin in nineteenth-century French literature and can be seen as a literary manifestation of Empirism, an ideology built on the belief that experience is the only legitimate source of knowledge. It is a search for objective truth, based on precise and verifiable facts. As a result, writers ceased to take a moralistic or idealistic stance as this implied subjectivity. Instead, they aspired to being objective investigators of human nature. They saw it as their task to depict reality according to certain laws similar to those in the exact sciences. Novelists like Emile Zola (>link) became influential advocates of naturalism and soon the movement became fashionable outside France.

Another crucial influence was Charles Darwin (>link) whose theories on biological evolution and natural selection rocked the foundations of nineteenth-century science and orthodox Christianity. Just as animals and plants, through mutation, had been forced to adapt to new environmental conditions, so the development of the human species was continually being shaped by a number of external factors. Many scientists became convinced that man's life was determined by heredity (genetics), upbringing and social environment (class) from which it was impossible to break free. It became very difficult to reconcile this idea with the existence of a free will. Hence, people began to replace free will with the concept of fate as the driving force in life. This focus on fate - 'noodlot' in Dutch, which is the title of one of Couperus's novels - is a typical feature of naturalist writing.

Click (>link) to learn more about the characteristics of Dutch naturalism.

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