Perkins is an associate professor of English and American literature and film at Prince George's Community College and has published several articles on British and American authors. In this essay, she examines Flaubert's exploration of naturalistic themes in Flaubert's novel.

[The wind-tower] was a giant, standing with its back
to the plight of the ants. It represented in a degree . . .
the serenity of nature amid the struggles of the individual
—nature in the wind, and nature in the vision
of men. She did not seem cruel to him then, not beneficent,
not treacherous, not wise. But she was indifferent,
flatly indifferent."

This famous passage from Stephen Crane's short story "The Open Boat," which focuses on four men in a small dinghy struggling against the current to make it to shore, is often quoted as an apt expression of the tenets of naturalism, a literary movement that emerged...