“‘[T]he world’s a beast, and I hate it!’”: Naturalism in Amy Levy’s The Romance of a Shop

Taken from Chapter XI of Amy Levy’s The Romance of a Shop (1888), the brief quotation in the title of this article comes from an exchange between Gertrude Lorimer and her friend, Constance Devonshire. Confiding in Gertrude, Constance reveals her feelings for Frank Jermyn, a young artist who works for a local newspaper, and her fears concerning her marriage prospects and her future. Unhappy due to her unrequited love, Constance wonders how to cope and persevere since she is convinced that, because of her wealth, only insincere and opportunistic young men will be interested in her. Reassuring yet tempered in her response, Gertrude comforts her companion, telling her that happiness awaits her yet that women have much to bear in life. Dissatisfaction is inevitable: it their destiny and part of the female condition, according to Gertrude.

This conversation, while short, is significant for it offers, in condensed form, a snippet of the naturalistic philosophy that is at the heart of Levy’s novel. This ethos, as expressed in the book, is that life is challenging precisely because it is tedious and ordinary; nonetheless, strong and high-minded women persist in looking for romance amidst reality, forever attempting to rise above their circumstances as the tide of fate pulls them down. Seeking excitement and adventure as well as security and subsistence, such individuals must constantly adapt and reinvent themselves. Existing scholarship on The Romance of a Shop has focused on the urban landscape and the gendering of space in the city, the depictions of the New Woman in the text, and the phenomenon of the shop girl along with photography as a way for female photographers to reclaim the gaze and to empower themselves.1 There has, however, been a lack of critical attention addressing how Levy’s novel reflects some of the core tenets of naturalism,2 namely the notion of the city as a kind of urban [End Page 75] jungle where people, seeking to survive, must reconcile their beastly and civilized selves.

This essay looks at the Lorimers and other figures in the novel through the lens of literary naturalism, more specifically, American scholarship on literary naturalism. Applying this approach to previously unexamined naturalist prose written outside of the United States—namely Levy’s novel—reveals not only the broader applications of this theoretical paradigm in a transatlantic context, but also the extensive and transnational reach of American naturalism. In addition, this article examines how, on the one hand, the Lorimer sisters cope with their circumstances and adapt to their environment while delving, on the other hand, into the tensions between their animal natures or inclinations and their higher or nobler impulses.3 The constant or unifying thread throughout is the setting, the urban wilderness, where ordinary characters with heroic traits and ambitions attempt to carve out a space for themselves and to fend off the beast within, one forever showing its teeth and threatening to emerge. Finally, this essay also considers the ways in which love and loss are intertwined in the novel: while the “Romance” of Levy’s title represents the fictional or fantastical side of the book that encapsulates both passion and death, the titular “Shop” expresses the factual or pragmatic side of life that manifests itself not only in earning a living or working in the bustling metropolis of London, but also in the business of courtship and marriage. These two categories or seeming opposites merge to produce a text that goes beyond romance and realism,4 fitting more squarely within the tradition of evolutionary naturalism, as propounded by Donna Campbell, Eric Carl Link, and June Howard. This kind of social Darwinian naturalism, for its part, is discernable chiefly in the characterization and in the main themes of Levy’s novel.

In Realism and Naturalism in Nineteenth-Century American Literature, Donald Pizer provides a useful definition and reconceptualization of the typical understanding of naturalism. Although Pizer concentrates on American naturalism, he nonetheless explores naturalism more broadly in relation to realism, offering a practical interpretation of naturalistic prose that I believe...