SOURCE: Eby, Clare. “Domesticating Naturalism: The Example of The Pit.” Studies in American Fiction 22, no. 2 (autumn 1994): 149-68.

[In the following essay, Eby offers a critical overview of The Pit, which was Norris's final novel.]

Behind the release of the new paperback edition of The Pit in the summer of 1994 lies a disagreement between the editor and publisher over the cover art for it. The editor, Joseph McElrath, Jr., originally selected an art nouveau print by the graphic artist Alphonse Mucha, perhaps best known for his posters of Sarah Bernhardt. Plate 47 from Mucha's Documents Decoratifs (published in 1902, the same year as The Pit) is a vertical composition featuring a voluptuous woman with dark hair piled on top of her head. Her torso and legs are covered by a rich-looking teal wrap that spills out in sensuous disarray over the ornamental border beneath. The woman's breasts are uncovered, one hand rests suggestively on her hip, and she gazes directly at the viewer. To the left, a bear snarls at the viewer (the animal's head is in front of the woman's right breast and obscures it). The bear and woman are framed by an ornate, stylized floral pattern which, in the lower half, has the effect of both peacock feathers and stained glass. The iconography of this print is richly suggestive of The Pit. The bear (even if it is a bear rug) evokes Curtis Jadwin, whose stock market strategies alternate between being bullish and bearish; the peacock pattern suggests his narcissistic rival, the artist of stained glass, Sheldon Corthell; but the focal point is the languorous, self-absorbed woman. McElrath selected this image to focus readers of the book not on the Chicago Board of Trade or Jadwin, but on Laura Dearborn as femme fatale—or so she likes to see herself. Penguin, however, rejected the Mucha in favor of a photograph of the Chicago Board of Trade. The vintage photograph of “the pit” is also a vertical composition, the top two-thirds showing a vast, hazily-lit room. In the bottom third, a huge crowd of men in business suits (and, oddly, at least one child in the lower left) look toward the camera. Penguin's decision to play up the commodities market plot, which I think is unfortunate, encapsulates the longstanding critical misjudgment about how The Pit should be read that is the point of departure for this essay.¹

American literary naturalism flourished during a period that historians have described as marking a “crisis of masculinity.”² Not surprisingly, naturalism has generally been seen as hypermasculine, and the place of women in the naturalist aesthetic is thus—as Penguin's decision illustrates—precarious at best. Turn-of-the-century novels that depict the breakdown of families and social relationships or feature “fallen women” are likely to be labelled naturalistic, along with tales of such Strenuous Life pastimes as commodities trading, muckraking, and dog sledding. Literary-historical labels have their necessary uses, but the problem with how naturalism has been constructed is that all the works of certain authors tend to be interpreted within a framework that is both too broad (in the number of novels it seeks to encompass) and too narrow (in the issues said to be definitive). Particularly with the works of Frank Norris and Jack London, and to a lesser degree, Theodore Dreiser, naturalist novels are often read in terms of how they succeed or fail in embodying a masculine code, a code believed to leave its traces on the pages of novels and in the events of authors' lives. Because of the initial crudeness and startling endurance of critical constructions about the gender of naturalism and some of its key players, a number of novels that do not fit the mold have been trivialized or ignored.³

A case in point is the reception of The Pit. Frank Norris's final novel has been pronounced a blunder by most of its commentators, but the grounds for indicting it were initially chauvinistic, and remain rooted in dubious assumptions about gender. Like all of Norris's novels and much of his nonfiction, The Pit is surely concerned with gender issues, but not so as to advertise some juvenile or bellicose idea of its author's masculinity. Rather, in The Pit Norris critically interrogates turn-of-the-century assumptions about gender roles and illuminates connections between realms often seen as separate, such as the public marketplace and private feelings. The Pit is also concerned with naturalism itself, even with how naturalism gets coded as masculine in its author's historical moment. But Norris foregrounds a woman character's perspective in his final novel in an attempt to domesticate naturalism, and the effort deserves more attention than it has yet received. The reissuing of The Pit provides an opportunity to resurrect it from the purgatory designated for naturalist novels that fail to be satisfactorily manly, and to reconsider the complex relations between gender and naturalism.

Norris's sense of masculinity has long been a point of departure for interpreting his fiction. Despite the attempts of several critics to construct a sissified Norris,⁴ most uphold the macho swaggering of The Responsibilities of the Novelist (1903) as the core of his aesthetic. One of the first to see Norris's novels as intrinsically masculine, William Dean Howells believed that Norris wrote “for men rather than women,” and manly rebellion against a domineering mother is a keynote of Franklin Walker's influential biography of Norris. Such legends have helped to underwrite a larger myth, which we might call the manly naturalism paradigm. As Alfred Kazin puts it, Norris was “red blooded, aggressively tough … to the end,” and his fiction typical of “literature of the tough and muscular new men of the new century.” Ernest Marchand likewise finds Norris “by every right the founder of the red-blooded school” of “virile” naturalistic literature. William Dillingham's study of Norris suggests a plausible cause for hypermasculine fictions at the turn of the century: “when the strenuous life ceased to be a necessity, American males began to yearn for it.”⁵

Recent Norris scholarship demonstrates that the manly naturalism paradigm can support a wide range of aesthetic and ideological judgments. Joseph McElrath's recuperative new study argues that Norris progresses from “A Question of Masculinity in the Mauve Decade” to finding a “More Masculine and Contemporary Voice” in his early twenties. But a focus on masculinity also continues to be used to discredit the author, as in Michael Davitt Bell's formulation: “a prominent function of claiming to be a realist or a naturalist … was to provide assurance to one's society and oneself that one was a ‘real’ man,” and “Norris's version [of naturalism] sounds like nothing so much as a prospectus for a body-building course.” Mark Seltzer describes Norris's novels as quintessentially naturalistic in their “promotion of a rivalry between ‘male’ and ‘female’ forces, and the consequent underwriting of what appears as an absolute differentiation of gender powers and ‘principles.’” Seltzer's reading of the “naturalist machine” reveals how sexual “difference itself may be produced and deployed as a strategy of control.”⁶

But the manly naturalism paradigm is useful for Norris's final novel only insofar as one ignores, or denounces, over half of it. The Pit encapsulates a masculine tale of high adventure in the commodities exchange within a story coded as feminine, a story of domestic trials and the eventual triumph of love. The Curtis Jadwin narrative, which most critics take as the core of the novel, is in fact preceded by and framed within Laura Dearborn Jadwin's. Norris does not even provide an extended view of the speculator's consciousness until Chapter 3. In a letter to an acquaintance, Norris explained his intention: “[Laura] occupies the center stage all the time, and I shall try to interest the reader more in her character and career than in any other human element in the book. The two main themes … are the story of Jadwin's corner … and the story of his wife's ‘affair’ with Corthell.”⁷The Pit succeeds in balancing its two main themes, financial and domestic, largely through the consciousness of one central character, Laura. This negotiation between public and private, male and female in The Pit demonstrates Norris's domestication of naturalism.

By keeping Laura at center stage, Norris can use her changing point of view to shape the financial plot as much as the domestic one. Laura's perspective on the commodities exchange thus crucially informs readers' responses to The Pit in much the same way that Presley's perspective on the railroad and the wheat farmers shapes The Octopus (1901). Presley and Laura share aesthetic preconceptions that lead them (at least initially) to look down on the kind of story that most of Norris's critics have identified as manly and naturalistic. Yet more emphatically than he does with Presley, Norris uses Laura's perspective to comment on divisive forces that have competing claims to social and cultural power. In The Octopus, Presley's struggles to write an epic poem about California dramatize the fin de siècle tensions between art and capitalism. The Pit resurrects these tensions, graphing them on top of the competing interests of women and men, and uses Laura's perspective to achieve a vision of capitalism that is naturalistic by Norris's own definition.

Norris foregrounds Laura's views of the male kingdom of finance from the first chapter of the novel, in which the principle characters attend a production of Faust. As Don Graham has argued, a primary method of Norris's characterization involves depicting how individuals respond to art.⁸ Impatiently awaiting the Cresslers' arrival, Laura hears gossip about a spectacular failure in the commodities exchange. “All the city seemed interested” in the attempt of one Helmick to corner the market of corn—all except Laura, who finds that the excited talk distracts her from what she takes to be the main event.⁹ Once seated at the opera and quickly entranced, her aesthetic experience is twice “interrupted” by “that other drama, that other tragedy” involving Helmick (pp. 39, 40). Insofar as Helmick's failure prefigures one of the novel's two plots—Jadwin's attempted corner of the wheat market—it is clear that Laura will not succeed in shutting out the impact of the commodities exchange from her consciousness. Laura, whose aesthetic experience and romantic interests are the ostensible subject of this chapter, occupies the center stage, but there are two shows in town.

Laura's response to the two dramas remains the focus of Chapter 1, allowing Norris to bring his two plots together in ways the character cannot see. Her perspective also lets Norris illustrate how both dramas are heavily gendered. It is “a hoarse, masculine whisper” that interrupts Laura's concentration on Faust, causing her to wonder, “Why could not men leave their business outside?” Growing increasingly irritated, she finally says, “I wish those men would stop talking” (pp. 22, 23, 28, Norris's emphasis). Similarly, the initial interaction between the two main characters emphasizes their confinement within gender roles; recognizing Jadwin as part of their party, Laura wonders about whether to approach him, whether or not it would be “woman's place” (p. 10). He, in turn, responds with “the instinct of the man, no longer very young, to keep out of strange young women's troubles” (p. 12).

Laura's evaluation of the two dramas is also a function of her sense of gender identity. She dichotomizes the worlds of art (suitable for women and effeminate men like the artist, Corthell) and business (the realm of Jadwin and other manly men). Laura considers the latter a violation of both the aesthetic experience that she craves and the physical space of the Auditorium Theatre. She wants to exclude one realm, rather than accommodate both, because she considers her priorities—in effect, her story—in competition with Jadwin's. At this point Laura would prefer to keep the dramas separate, believing that each has its place, and that the place of business is not at the opera.

But the narrative of The Pit as a whole opposes such exclusionary logic. Again using Laura's perspective, Norris makes clear what is wrong with her privileging one drama over the other: “How easy it was to be good and noble when music such as this had become a part of one's life; how desirable was wealth when it could make possible such exquisite happiness as hers of the moment” (p. 20). Laura can't see the contradiction in her position; money is good insofar as it buys women opera seats, but traces of how men make money should be excluded from the cultural event. Norris unequivocally compromises her aesthetic experience, describing Laura as feeling

so soothed, so cradled and lulled and languid. Ah, to love like that! … She wished that she could loose her clasp upon the sordid, material modern life that, perforce, she must hold to, she knew not why, and drift, drift off into the past, far away, through rose-coloured mists and diaphanous veils.

(p. 22)

He quickly moves Laura beyond this narcissistic, regressive, and detached response:

And abruptly, … there came to Laura the swift and vivid impress of that other drama that simultaneously … was working itself out close at hand, equally picturesque, equally romantic, equally passionate; but more real than that, actual, modern, a thing in the very heart of that very life in which she moved.

(p. 34)

This revelation about the “other drama” in which Helmick stars allows Laura to glimpse a previously unfathomable perspective. Suddenly she sees the opera through Jadwin's eyes:

And here he sat, this Jadwin, quiet, in evening dress, listening good-naturedly to this beautiful music, for which he did not care, to this rant and fustian, watching quietly all this posing and attitudinising. How small and petty it must all seem to him!

(pp. 34-35)

Critics have long complained of the narrowness of The Pit, especially in comparison to The Octopus, but moments of suddenly expanded consciousness such as this suggest an alternative kind of breadth: rather than the vast geographical space evoked by the earlier novel, Norris maps the expansions and contractions of spaces that are more interior and psychological.

Laura's perspective on the “equally romantic … but more real” (p. 34) financial drama is especially significant for its structural parallels with Norris's proclamations about naturalism. In The Responsibilities of the Novelist, he calls for a romanticized view of the contemporary social world, asking the naturalist to take Romance “across the street to your neighbor's front parlor … [to] walk with her on Fifth Avenue, or Beacon Street, or Michigan Avenue.” Norris advocates cultivating a romantic perspective on business, certain that “if he only chose he could find romance and adventure in Wall Street or Bond Street.” A person's inability to see romance in contemporary life, a compulsion to seek it only in past artistic accomplishments—precisely like Laura's initial response to “that other drama”—reveals her impoverished imagination. “No romance in it?” chastises Norris, “No romance in you, poor fool. As much romance on Michigan Avenue as there is realism in King Arthur's court.”¹⁰

Initially, Laura resists naturalism as Norris defines it, as shown by her privileging of one drama over the other, by her narcissistic response to the opera, and by her literary preferences. A voracious reader, her taste is “conservati[ve]”; she “refus[es] to acknowledge hardly any fiction that was not almost classic” (p. 55). Ignoring contemporary fiction, she has not yet made it to Jane Eyre, and only occasionally reads Howells (pp. 55, 42). Nor does Laura care for books without love stories (p. 55). Her literary tastes are a distillation of the culturally constructed gender role that she reflects from the first chapter of The Pit. But Norris will not only demonstrate that a female perspective can crucially inform a naturalistic novel, but that his own variant of naturalism welcomes love stories.

Throughout The Pit, Laura's flashes of insight about the commodities market help present the view of business that Responsibilities defines as naturalistic. Notably, this romantic view takes shape in the context of a different sort of romance. As Laura weighs the merits of her two serious suitors, Jadwin and Corthell, she apprehends the naturalistic romance of business:

Then suddenly Laura surprised herself. … Terrible as the Battle of the Street was, it was yet battle. Only the strong and the brave might dare it, and the figure that held her imagination and her sympathy was not the artist, soft of hand and of speech … but the fighter, unknown and unknowable to women as he was; hard, rigorous, panoplied in the harness of the warrior, who strove among the trumpets, and who, in the brunt of conflict, conspicuous, formidable, set the battle in a rage around him, and exulted like a champion.

(p. 65)

Laura has a similar epiphany after Jadwin's proposal, finding herself suddenly “absorbed, interested” in Cressler's explanation of financial speculation. Again demonstrating Norris's aesthetic, Laura's insight into her husband's career also highlights the premise of Norris's ambitious (but never completed) naturalistic trilogy. As Laura “listened intently,” Cressler speaks of western farmers and hungry European peasants, of speculation and the quest for “average, legitimate value” (p. 129). For Laura, “a whole new order of things was being disclosed” by this insight into the capitalist economy. Norris emphasizes her apprehension of the romance of business again late in the novel, when Jadwin has all but deserted her and she must battle with the same forces that consume him:

She alone, one unaided woman, her only auxiliaries her beauty, her wit, and the frayed, strained bands of a sorely tried love, stood forth like a challenger, against Charybdis, joined battle with Cloaca, held back with her slim, white hands against the power of the maelstrom that swung the Nations in its grip.

(p. 360)

The closing image of the novel again affirms the centrality of Laura's perspective to Norris's naturalistic vision of the Pit. The reader's last impression is also Laura's; as she and Jadwin leave Chicago, she turns to look at the “sphinx[like]” Board of Trade (pp. 420, 421).

In much the same way that Norris's autobiographical character, Condy Rivers, wants Travis Bessemer to appreciate his naturalistic writing in Blix (1899),¹¹ Norris seems to want the actual women readers on whose tastes Laura's are modelled to consider what naturalism has to offer them—and what they have to offer naturalism. Significantly, Norris's often-quoted remark, “life is better than literature,” occurs in the context of a discussion of why women should write better books than men, but don't. He claims that because too much “life” is denied women they can't write effective literature (Responsibilities, pp. 286-89). The appeal of Jadwin to Laura is that he promises to open up “life” to her in a manner that parallels Norris's idea of naturalism. As Norris wants to bring romance into naturalism, Jadwin advocates women's participation in the naturalistic drama:

I don't believe [women] were made … to cultivate—beyond a certain point—their own souls, and refine their own minds, and live in a sort of warmed-over, dilettante, stained-glass world of seclusion and exclusion.

(p. 125)

By referring to “stained glass,” Jadwin snipes at his rival. His contempt for Corthell's “exclusive” highbrow art aligns him with Norris's repudiation of literature that lacks what he calls a “purpose.” The only problem with Jadwin's proclamation is that, as is often the case, there is a gap between how he publicly represents gender roles and how he actually constructs them in his private life: unfortunately, he will seclude and exclude Laura for much of the novel. Jadwin's inconsistency demonstrates neither his hypocrisy nor that Norris thinks the ideal of women's full participation is flawed, but that people's actions often lag behind their ideals. Jadwin's behavior will also demonstrate that the socially constructed role for men is inhibiting, as much so as women's role.

Key elements of Norris's aesthetic, such as his description of the Muse of American naturalism in Responsibilities, indicate that he casts his lot with Jadwin's ideal declarations about women's freedom. Norris's muse is “no chaste, delicate, superfine mademoiselle of delicate poses and ‘elegant’ attitudinizings, but a robust, red-armed bonne femme, who rough-shoulders her way among men and among affairs” (p. 275). This description also suggests Norris's ability to conceive of gender differently than many other male novelists of the period. As Elaine Showalter observes, many fin de siècle male authors rewrote the traditionally feminine muse as a male figure, a gesture she reads as symbolic of their attempts to reclaim an assertively masculine fictional territory of the “homosocial ‘romance’ of adventure and quest.” On the American scene, Amy Kaplan points out that most novels published from 1895 to 1902 were not “realistic,” but historical romances showcasing masculinity and nationalism. Like The Octopus, A Man's Woman (1900), and Moran of the Lady Letty (1898), The Pit cashes in on some aspects of the masculine version of romance. But in The Pit, the prominence of Laura's perspective demonstrates Norris's commitment to understanding how women respond to such manly tales and how to combine elements of male and female romance within naturalism. The Pit differs from the pattern Kaplan outlines, in which female characters are merely spectators who function as a “domestic audience” to showcase masculine exploits.¹² Laura is a narrative subject even more than she is its object, and Norris is at least as interested in the domestic as the adventurous realm.

The Pit distinguishes itself from contemporary texts analyzed by Showalter, Kaplan, and others—and further belies the manly naturalism paradigm—in its commitment to showing the fundamental structural parallels in the experiences of women and men. As Barbara Hochman argues, “the central problem for Laura, as for Jadwin, is that of The Pit as a whole: how to integrate or realize a self and a relationship that will be proof against internal and external chaos.”¹³ The primary symptom of this problem—a sense of fragmented, even multiple, identity—is the same for the two main characters. The root cause is also the same: gender roles that destroy the self. Showalter's description of turn-of-the-century “sexual anarchy” explains what I see Norris not as endorsing, but as reacting against, in The Pit:

In periods of cultural insecurity, when there are fears of regression and degeneration, the longing for strict border controls around the definition of gender, as well as race, class, and nationality, becomes especially intense. … If men and women can be fixed in their separate spheres, many hope, apocalypse can be prevented and we can preserve a comforting sense of identity and permanence in the face of that relentless specter of millennial change.

Consequently, many fin de siècle characters have doubles representing dark and libidinal urges that must be repressed in the interest of civilization. Walter Benn Michaels sees dual identity as the crux of naturalist characterization: “double identities … seem, in naturalism, to be required if there are to be any identities at all.” The most familiar examples in Norris's canon are Vandover's brutish side and McTeague's “second self”; in both cases, the doubles express unlicensed sexuality.¹⁴ The battleground depicted in The Pit involves fewer hormonal considerations and more cultural ones, but like Vandover and McTeague, Laura and Jadwin struggle against gender imperatives to achieve coherent identities. The two plots of The Pit illustrate “double identity” on the narrative level, but unlike ideologically conservative texts that reinscribe the dominant gender roles to avoid facing cultural change, The Pit locates the obstacles to achieving identity within the roles themselves.

Not surprisingly, Laura's conflicts over femininity intensify along with the pressures to commit herself to a long-term heterosexual relationship. Laura, who finds “something distasteful in the idea of marriage” and “wished nothing to be consummated,” seems to resist pressures toward socialization as heterosexual and as feminine (p.114). When she is with Corthell, Laura finds she “could not forget her sex a single instant” (p. 136); “her relations with Corthell could never be … any other than sex-relations” (p. 35). Consequently, her interactions with him are marked from beginning to end by “impulse,” by “unreasoned” and “troublous” (p. 136) behavior. Yet she feels “a certain fascination in resigning herself for little instants to the dominion of this daring stranger that was yet herself” (p. 136). The sense of exaggerated femininity that Corthell brings out in Laura contributes to the feeling of dual identity that will plague her through most of the novel.

Jadwin could, remarks Norris, make two of Corthell (p. 33). Representing a different model of manhood than the artist, Jadwin also operates from different assumptions about femininity and heterosexual love:

Between them [Jadwin and Laura] it was a more give-and-take affair, more equality, more companionship. Corthell spoke only of her heart and to her heart. But Jadwin made her feel—or rather she made herself feel when he talked to her—that she had a head as well as a heart.

(p. 33)

But there are signs during Laura's engagement to Jadwin that marriage will not resolve the conflicting models of femininity and heterosexuality she has seen reflected in the eyes of the businessman and the artist. As she puts it, “One minute I am one kind of girl, and the next another kind. I don't know myself these days” (pp. 162, 163). “Laura was never more changeable, more puzzling” than after announcing her engagement to Jadwin (p. 165). The marriage exacerbates her problems. The sudden acquisition of wealth compounds her difficulty in maintaining a coherent identity: “She posed a little, and by so doing found the solution of the incongruity between herself—the Laura of moderate means and quiet life—and the massive luxury with which she was now surrounded. Without knowing it, she began to act the part of a great lady” (p. 213). Conspicuous but nonfunctional, decorative but shallow, she acts as the “vicarious” wife without an identity of her own that Thorstein Veblen portrays in The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899).¹⁵ The “part of a great lady” Laura plays is a cruel reminder of her forsaken professional ambitions: “Surely, surely there were two Laura Jadwins. One calm and even steady, loving the quiet life, loving her home, finding a pleasure in the duties of the housewife” and one “who might have been a great actress” (p. 251). Like other Norris heroines, such as Lloyd Searight and Travis Bessemer, Laura faces the conflict between being a housewife and a professional, creative woman. Not surprisingly, as her husband all but deserts her and Corthell returns to press his suit, Laura feels that she “no longer knew herself” (p. 291).

Many commentators have complained about Laura's tiresome self-absorption and manic tendencies, yet it is remarkable how little rebuke Jadwin has received for precisely the same behaviors. Jadwin experiences his identity fragmenting very much as his wife does, and Norris likewise presents it as a function of socially constructed expectations about gender. One of the earliest extended descriptions of the Pit from a male point of view, describing men on their way to work, foreshadows Jadwin's problem:

At the Illinois Trust the walk became a stride, at the Rookery the stride was almost a trot. But at the corner of Jackson Street, the Board of Trade now merely the width of the street away, the trot became a run, and young men and boys, under the pretence of escaping the trucks and wagons of the cobbles, dashed across at a veritable gallop, flung themselves panting into the entrance of the Board, were engulfed in the turmoil of the spot, and disappeared with a sudden fillip into the gloom of the interior.

(pp. 78-79)

The frantic pace of this self-immolation into the masculine workplace indicates the extinction of individual identity. No wonder Laura will say, “I hate speculation. It seems to absorb some men so; and I don't believe it's right for a man to allow himself to become absorbed altogether in business”—or that she concludes that speculation “is changing” Jadwin (pp. 245, 231).

In Responsibilities, Norris discusses how young American men are funnelled into business (p. 245); The Pit demonstrates how this favored outlet for American manhood splits men in two. “Even Landry Court,” Norris remarks, “so young, so exuberant, so seemingly innocent,” is transformed every time he steps into the Pit (p. 63):

The gentle-mannered fellow, clean-minded, clean-handed, of the breakfast or supper table was one man. The other, who and what was he? Down there in the murk and grime of the business district raged the Battle of the Street, and therein he was a being transformed, case hardened, supremely selfish, asking no quarter; no, nor giving any.

(p. 64)

Jadwin's career exemplifies the dual personality that Norris sees as a function of the male code. The snippets of Jadwin's personal history we receive—poor background, scant formal education, successful at a young age in conducting savvy deals—identify him as an American businessman of the celebrated “self made” variety. But like his wife, Jadwin will play—indeed, overplay—a male role that Norris shows to be neither autonomous nor self-made, but socially constructed and destructive both of the self and his loved ones.

The speculator's self-alienation becomes especially clear when he ceases to be Curtis Jadwin and becomes a mythical animal, “The Unknown Bull.” As Jadwin himself puts it, “from now on Curtis Jadwin spells B-u- double l—Bull” (p. 196). Pre-eminently masculine and a holy terror in the Pit, the Bull is not recognized by his closest associates, as demonstrated by his best friend's suicide—a direct consequence of Jadwin's assumed identity. Furthermore, the bull comes not to know himself. In Chapter 8 he reflects, “at times he remembered the Curtis Jadwin of the spring before his marriage” (p. 281), as if he were looking at someone else's daguerreotypes. He shares many symptoms with his wife: nervousness (“I am touchy these days” [p. 319]), confusion, and an inflated sense of his own importance. He tries to reassure himself by saying, “I guess I'm not a schoolgirl, to have nerves at this late date” (p. 321).

Jadwin's assertion that he is not becoming feminized may seem gratuitous, for his successes in the Board of Trade ought to define him as eminently manly. As Thorstein Veblen observes of the American cult of masculinity, it harbors a “sentimental conviction that pecuniary success is the final test of manhood.”¹⁶ But Jadwin's brilliance as a businessman comes at the cost of something that Norris seems to hold as a more definitive mark of adult masculinity: a permanent, companionate marriage. By consistently invoking the language of seduction to describe the appeal of the Pit, Norris implies that men succeed in business only by sublimating the bodily expression of their sexual drives. Norris emphasizes the tactile, almost sensuous nature of work in the Pit, and the emotional investment necessary to manage it:

[Landry] could feel—almost at his very finger tips—how this market moved, how it strengthened, how it weakened. He knew just when to nurse it, to humor it, to let it settle, and when to crowd it, when to hustle it, when it would stand rough handling.

(p. 100)

Like a mistress in the hands of an unstable lover, the market is alternately nurtured and roughed up. Speculators, described as “keyed to the highest tension, ready to thrust deep into the slightest opening” (p. 96), expend such sexual energy at work that their wives may have cause for jealousy. One of the earliest signs of marital problems between Jadwin and Laura occurs when Jadwin mumbles a complaint that “embarasse[s]” Gretry because it hints at sexual difficulties (p. 201).¹⁷ For an undefined interval of time while Jadwin romances the wheat, he sleeps alone (p. 351; cf. p. 348).

Both Norris's strategic use of Laura to construct a naturalistic perspective on business and his parallel treatment of the husband and wife's identity problems indicate his critical interrogation of stereotypical assumptions about gender and genre. His critique of the businessman mystique further suggests his distance from an American ideal of masculinity that remains popular even today. On both these counts, the manly naturalism paradigm seems inappropriate. For similar reasons, reading The Pit exclusively for what it says about the masculine realm of business simply does not work. But the critical literature has a long history of associating the alleged masculinity of naturalism with the business novel. For example, Ernest Marchand notes in his 1942 study of Norris the coincidence of naturalism's manly qualities with the ideology of turn-of-the-century business enterprise. Because of this association, one of the most perceptive treatments of The Pit is also one of the most incomplete. Larzer Ziff notes the “sexual division of interest” lying at the heart of the novel, which he praises as an incisive commentary on American masculinity. But because he reads The Pit as a “profound business novel” whose “focal point” is Jadwin—despite the fact that “Norris gives a great deal more time to Laura”—Ziff does not extend his analysis to femininity or to the domestic plot.¹⁸

Given these intersecting assumptions about the manliness of naturalism and the business novel, most of The Pit's critics have been even less willing than Laura was in the opening scene to entertain the possibility of simultaneous dramas. Despite the assessment of an early reviewer that The Pit demonstrates how “‘heart interest’ combines as logically and inevitably with business as with the other occupations”—and despite subsequent sympathetic readings by Warren French, Barbara Hochman, and others—the majority of critics have seen The Pit as a half-hearted or failed business novel.¹⁹ A dazzling and contradictory array of criticisms has been levied against the domestic plot: that it is too strong, too weak, that it has insufficient parallels with the business plot, and too many. Most critics who have attempted to look at the novel as a whole have charged the novel with structural problems—a gallant way of saying that a female character should not take center stage in a business novel—or with ideological instability. But the need to patrol the borders of masculinity is more a function of critical constructions about naturalism than of The Pit itself.

Assumptions about what the novel should focus on have led to some remarkable conclusions. It does not take a great deal of interpretive pressure to uncover masculine biases underwriting the more extreme charges. Charles Child Walcutt, for instance, assigns values to The Pit's components:

The most disturbing influence of all upon the structural unity of The Pit is the intrusion of Jadwin's home life and the personality and problems of Laura into the story. She is both important and unimportant. … Her whole role, to be sure, is vitiated by the supreme importance of Jadwin's fight over the wheat. … The story breaks completely in two when Norris devotes considerable time to her connection with Sheldon Corthell.²⁰

The premise that Jadwin's speculations are of “supreme importance” cuts Laura off at the knees. Sheldon Corthell becomes totally expendable, and even Jadwin's domestic affairs become an “intrusion.” And why does “home life” “disturb” this influential critic of naturalism?

The Pit has fared little better with critics who acknowledge the importance of the domestic plot. Even Howells, whom many in Norris's and later generations would criticize as an old maid, found it a “pity” that The Pit was so feminine. The novel, he said, “wants balance”; “it should have toppled, if at all, to the side of the wheat gambler—not the wheat gambler's wife.” Since the novel also violates the sad ending allegedly central to naturalism, Ernest Marchand is particularly harsh about the “anticlimactic, trivial” conclusion: “the mountain labors mightily—and brings forth a mouse. We are invited to epic events. … We see instead the triumph of a vain, self-centered woman.” A champion of naturalism, Donald Pizer, admits that Laura is characterized with “insight and honesty,” that she is, indeed, more believable than any other female character created by Norris, yet concludes that “The love plot … collapses under that burden [of being hackneyed] and pulls down the entire novel with it.” One of the most ingenious of recent readings of The Pit considers Norris's success in uniting the two plots to be the novel's failure. According to Howard Horwitz, “the plots of marriage and speculation should be incompatible.” That they are “harmonious … marks the novel's true failing.” The “sentimentality” long associated with the romance plot infects and destroys the story of Jadwin's corner.²¹

These critiques of the prominence of the domestic and sentimental components of The Pit recall Mencken's complaint that Hurstwood's story breaks the back of Sister Carrie, and are equally revealing of the assumptions that critics bring to naturalist novels. The coexistence of two plots in The Pit demonstrates not structural failure, but Norris's interest in testing the very boundaries around gender and naturalism that he is often said to patrol. His challenge to the dominant ideology of gender is neither a failure nor a structural problem, although it does have parallels with sentimental fiction, a genre whose authorship and readership is primarily female. Thomas Beer's 1926 indictment of The Pit situates the novel within this often-vilified tradition:

“Pit” was worse [than The Octopus]. The gambler and his tiresome wife run off to begin life anew, the last prudent fluctuations of a moving picture. Cheap people were delighted. This was as comprehensible as “Uncle Tom's Cabin.”

Despite Norris's declaration of the opposition between naturalism and sentimental fiction, and the tendency of many critics to see naturalism counteracting the presumed excesses of sentimentalism, The Pit blurs this boundary as well.²²

In preparation for the denouement of the financial drama, for instance, Norris shows Jadwin in a sentimental moment when he decides to ruin one man to avenge the mistreatment of another. His associate is shocked; the gesture hardly belongs in a naturalistic business novel as generally conceived. Jadwin explains the “dirtiest, damnedest treachery” of Scannel, who ruined Hargus, now a mere “scarecrow. And he has a little niece that he supports. … I've seen her, and she's pretty as a picture” (pp. 319-20). Jadwin breaks Scannel and turns his ＄360,000 check over to Hargus. The “account … that has been settled” (p. 343) is moral more than it is financial.

The ending of The Pit also invites comparison with sentimental fiction. As Philip Fisher puts it, sentimental fiction attempts to “excit[e] action toward that part of the public future that is still open to … alternatives.” This therapeutic impulse resembles the cultural work done in The Pit. Laura and Jadwin both experience the “change of heart” that Jane Tompkins sees as a central drive in sentimental fiction—in this case, a change from egoism to self-sacrifice.²³ After Laura wins her husband back, she repeats the words that characterized the earlier, happier, days of her marriage: “A capitulation and not a triumph, and I have won a victory by surrendering” (p. 414; cf. p. 205). Laura resolves her identity crisis in going from experiencing herself as “two [separate] Lauras” to experiencing a cohesive “third … identity ignoring self” (pp. 251, 405). Jadwin's corner fails simultaneously, and in similar terms, signalling his own new beginning. The speculator had embodied self-interest run amok, but he is transformed into a sacrificial hero: “Beaten, beaten at last, the Great Bull! … They themselves saved, saved, saved!” (p. 394). Notably, Jadwin's “big” masculinity is confirmed at the moment the Unknown Bull is broken. His arch-enemy, Calvin Crookes, sneers at the revelling mob in the Pit:

They can cheer now, all they want. They didn't do it. It was the Wheat itself that beat him; no combination of men could have done it—go on, cheer, you damn fools! He was a bigger man than the best of us.

(p. 396)

Jadwin's largeness, like his wife's, is confirmed not by containing multitudes or acting out dramatic roles, but by accepting limits and forsaking a false identity based on selfishness.

Not only does Norris resolve the identity crises of Laura and Jadwin in similar ways, he does so in terms that can be read as simultaneously feminine and masculine. In The Pit Norris constructs a dialogue between femininity and masculinity, between sentimental fiction and the business novel, without giving the last word to either. As the discipline of husband and wife is informed by the values of “feminine” sentimentalism, it also participates in the logic of the “masculine” capitalist marketplace. The resolution of both plots demonstrates the ideal set forth by Adam Smith's “Invisible Hand,” which was believed to regulate individual selfishness. Smith's defense of laissez-faire capitalism on moral grounds was enormously popular in the nineteenth century United States, so popular that the one hundredth anniversary of The Wealth of Nations in 1876 was celebrated along with the nation's centennial.²⁴ Jadwin's fall in the Pit exemplifies the appeal of Smith's theory, according to which “the pressures of the marketplace direct the selfish activities of individuals as if by an Invisible Hand … into socially responsible paths.”²⁵ In Norris's ideal marketplace, as in his ideal marriage, selfish individual desires give way to relationships regulated by mutual dependency.

Unlike his many critics who would like to pry the two plots apart, Norris did not see a conflict in advocating a sentimental, moral viewpoint within a naturalistic novel, any more than he was disturbed by locating a domestic plot within a trilogy intended to depict the economic concepts of production, distribution, and consumption. For Norris no conflict existed, because his conception of economic theory also affirmed a moral, self-regulating universe in which greed and selfishness would be checked. While at Berkeley, Norris was taught that economic principles reinscribed natural law.²⁶ When he speaks of Jadwin's “blasphemous … tamper[ing] with these laws” (p. 374), when he writes that “hell [is] broken loose” (p. 389), Norris is not only inflating his prose (although he does that as well). He really means that Jadwin's attempt to corner the wheat is blasphemous and demonic for, like Milton's Satan, he challenges eternal as well as mortal law.

The Pit sheds light on how some of Norris's contemporaries could see him as a “woman's man” as well as a “man's man,” and backs up Walker's claim that Norris had “exceptionally strong respect for women.”²⁷ Although Norris's view of ideal gender roles in The Pit may be more essentialist than today's readers might wish, it is nevertheless within those terms egalitarian. As Condy Rivers is made into a man by loving “Blix,” so Jadwin confirms his masculinity by walking away from the Pit and returning to his wife. Norris affirms the interdependence of men and women, illustrates connections between realms often seen as separate, and suggests that a successful marriage is more important than an action-adventure plot. He is a traitor to machismo in The Pit. The “failure,” however, lies not in the novel, but in the insufficiency of the manly naturalism paradigm to account for Norris's final novel.

Notes

1. The image is reprinted on p. 105 of Alphonse Mucha: The Complete Graphic Works, ed. Ann Bridges (New York: Harmony Books, 1980). I am most grateful to Joseph McElrath for generously sharing this information with me, and to Donna Danielewski for bringing the dispute over the cover art to my attention. McElrath's coeditor for the Penguin edition of The Pit is Gwendolyn Jones.

2. On the crisis of masculinity, see Peter G. Filene, Him/Her/Self: Sex Roles in Modern America (2nd edition; Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1986), who traces the change from the 1890s, and Michael S. Kimmel, “The Contemporary ‘Crisis’ of Masculinity in Historical Perspective,” in The Making of Masculinities: The New Men's Studies, ed. Harry Brod (Boston: Allen & Unwin, 1987), pp. 137-53, for whom the key dates are 1880-1914.

3. On the misogyny as well as the racism informing theories of literary realism, see Elizabeth Ammons, “Men of Color, Women, and Uppity Art at the Turn of the Century,” ALR, 23, no. 3 (Spring 1991), 14-24.

4. See, for instance, William B. Dillingham, “Frank Norris and the Genteel Tradition,” in Critical Essays on Frank Norris, ed. Don Graham (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1980), pp. 26-31, and Kenneth Lynn, The Dream of Success: A Study of the Modern American Imagination (Boston: Little, Brown, 1955), pp. 160-66.

5. William Dean Howells, “A Case in Point” (1899); repr. in Graham, Critical Essays, p. 13; Franklin Walker, Frank Norris: A Biography (New York: Russell & Russell, 1932); Alfred Kazin, On Native Grounds (San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1942), pp. 102, 97; Ernest Marchand, Frank Norris: A Study (New York: Octagon, 1970), p. 102; William B. Dillingham, Frank Norris: Instinct and Art (Lincoln: Univ. of Nebraska Press, 1969), p. 85.

6. Joseph McElrath, Frank Norris Revisited (New York: Twayne, 1992), pp. 6, 11; Michael Davitt Bell, The Problem of American Realism: Studies in the Cultural History of a Literary Idea (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1993), pp. 6, 119; Mark Seltzer, Bodies and Machines (New York: Routledge, 1992), pp. 28, 25, 29.

7. Quoted in Joseph Katz, “Eroticism in The Pit,” in Graham, Critical Essays, pp. 163-64.

8. Don Graham, The Fiction of Frank Norris: The Aesthetic Context (Columbia: Univ. of Missouri Press, 1978).

9. Frank Norris, The Pit (1902; New York: Grove Press, 1956), p. 18. The Penguin edition was published too late to permit me to use its pagination in this essay. Subsequent parenthetical references are to the Grove edition.

10. Frank Norris, The Responsibilities of the Novelist, in a volume with William Dean Howells, Criticism and Fiction (New York: Hill and Wang, 1962), pp. 280, 201, 200. Hereafter cited parenthetically.

11. Frank Norris, Blix (1899), in Complete Works of Frank Norris, Vol. 3 (Port Washington: Kennikat Press, 1967), pp. 39, 58.

12. Elaine Showalter, Sexual Anarchy: Gender and Culture at the Fin de Siècle (New York: Viking, 1990), pp. 78, 79; Amy Kaplan, “Romancing the Empire: The Embodiment of American Masculinity in the Popular Historical Novel of the 1890s,” ALH, 2 (1990), 660, 677, 678.

13. Barbara Hochman, The Art of Frank Norris, Storyteller (Columbia: Univ. of Missouri Press, 1988), p. 111.

14. Showalter, pp. 4, 106; Walter Benn Michaels, The Gold Standard and the Logic of Naturalism: American Literature at the Turn of the Century (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1987), p. 27; Frank Norris, McTeague (1899; New York: Penguin, 1982), p. 30.

15. Thorstein Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899; New York: Modern Library, n.d.); see especially pp. 354-56.

16. Thorstein Veblen, The Higher Learning in America (1918; Stanford: Academic Reprints, 1954), p. 82.

17. It is notable that after Gretry “shu[ts] his eyes in a knowing fashion,” telling his friend he “understands,” Jadwin immediately says, “Say, look at this organ here. … Here's the thing I like to play with” (p. 201). Also notable is the way Jadwin describes his initial resistance to speculation: “A man gets into this game, and into it, and into it, and before you know he can't pull out—and he don't want to” (p. 86). No wonder that Marchand, Norris, p. 85, refers to business as Laura's “rival.”

18. Marchand, p. 101; Larzer Ziff, The American 1890s: Life and Times of a Lost Generation (New York: Viking, 1966), pp. 271-733. More recently, Eric Sundquist remarks: “The novel of business inevitably raised the issue of sexual roles; its masculine world of finance and production created the world of conspicuous consumption supposedly governed by the habits and tastes of women.” See Eric Sundquist, “Realism and Regionalism,” Columbia Literary History of the United States, ed. Emory Elliot (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1988), p. 523. On sexual politics in business novels, see especially Michaels, pp. 59-84, and Carolyn Porter, “Gender and Value in The American,” New Essays on The American, ed. Martha Banta (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1987), pp. 99-129.

19. Anonymous, “The Pit: A Dispassionate Examination of Frank Norris's Posthumous Novel” (1903), repr. in Graham, Critical Essays, p. 33. The two strongest defenses of The Pit accept the centrality of the love plot while rejecting the naturalistic straightjacket. Warren French, in Frank Norris (New York: Twayne, 1962), comments that the novel's conclusion is “trivial only if domestic relations are less consequential than business deals” and suggests that the Norris canon be read in the context of transcendentalism rather than as a degenerate variant of realism (p. 166 and Preface). Barbara Hochman, who in The Art of Frank Norris considers Norris's alignment with naturalism “dubious” (pp. 127, 124), also sees the importance of Laura's story and makes a strong argument for the unity of the novel. Others who have argued for the importance of the love plot include Katz, p. 164; Dillingham, pp. 200-201; McElrath, Chapter 7.

20. Charles Child Walcutt, American Literary Naturalism: A Divided Stream (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1956), pp. 153-54.

21. William Dean Howells, “The Last Work of Frank Norris,” Harper's Weekly, 47 (March 14, 1903), 433; Marchand, pp. 35, 86, 85; Donald Pizer, The Novels of Frank Norris (New York: Haskell House, 1973), pp. 167, 173 (see also, in Chapter 3, Pizer's discussion of the “masculine-feminine ethic” of Blix, A Man's Woman, and Moran of the Lady Letty); Howard Horwitz, By the Law of Nature: Form and Value in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1991), pp. 215, 216, 224. Significantly, an important essay on a landmark naturalist novel also ridicules the “mellifluous drivel” of the sentimental elements; see Sandy Petrey, “The Language of Realism, The Language of False Consciousness: A Reading of Sister Carrie,” Novel, 10, no. 2 (1977), 101-13.

22. H. L. Mencken, “A Novel of the First Rank” (1911); repr. in Critical Essays on Theodore Dreiser, ed. Donald Pizer (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1981), p. 211; Thomas Beer, The Mauve Decade (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1926), p. 99. On Norris's opposition to sentimentalism, see especially “A Plea for Romantic Fiction” (Responsibilities, pp. 279-82), where he distinguishes between romance and sentimentality. Norris does, however, uphold Uncle Tom's Cabin as an exemplary novel, although he seems to misread Stowe's intent (Responsibilities, p. 205). On the polarization of nineteenth century men's and women's novels see, for example, Susan K. Harris, Nineteenth-Century American Women's Novels: Interpretive Strategies (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1990), p. 114, who finds realist and sentimental novels as much at odds as men and women. Nina Baym, however, in “The Rise of the Woman Author” (in Elliot, Columbia Literary History of America), disputes the alleged distance between the rhetoric of sentimentalism and realism, finding in the former “a practice if not a theory of literary realism” (p. 292).

23. Philip Fisher, Hard Facts: Setting and Form in the American Novel (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1985), p. 90; Jane Tompkins, “Sentimental Power: Uncle Tom's Cabin and the Politics of Literary History,” in Ideology and Classic American Literature, ed. Sacvan Bercovitch and Myra Jehlen (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1986), p. 276.

24. T. Jackson Lears, No Place of Grace: Antimodernism and the Transformation of American Culture, 1880-1920 (New York: Pantheon, 1981), p. 19.

25. Robert. L. Heilbroner and Lester C. Thurow, Economics Explained (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1987), p. 28.

26. Pizer, Novels, p. 142.

27. Joseph McElrath, “Frank Norris: A Biographical Essay,” ALR, 11 (1978), 224, 228; Walker, p. 148.