[In the following essay, Civello discusses the recurrent character-type in Norris's fiction known as the “man's woman.”]

The late nineteenth century was a period of intense ideological struggle—in fact, a period of several struggles that often overlapped and intersected. The well-known clash between evolution and Christianity, for example, has tended to obscure a less conspicuous battle within the evolutionary camp itself that pitted Darwin and his supporters against evolutionary-minded advocates for woman's emancipation. These late nineteenth-century feminists took issue with the conclusions Darwin had reached in The Descent of Man, using the same evidence he had adduced to support his contention that woman was the inferior sex to advance their own arguments that she was in fact equal with or even superior to man. But like most ideological struggles, this “scientific” one over gender took place largely on a discursive battlefield, and therefore incorporated and was incorporated by still other discourses that, on the surface, appeared to have little to do with it—most notably, those of popular romance and the emerging narrative mode that has come to be called literary naturalism. Although locked in their own ideological struggle over literary purpose and value, most writers in these two literary forms embraced the same culturally dominant gender ideology that Darwin had. And so a writer like Frank Norris, a naturalistic writer with a strong sense of literary purpose that expressed itself in rebellion against the genteel tradition and the popular, sentimental romance, found himself in an ideological quandary, a struggle between a rebellious literary and a culturally-sanctioned gender ideology that were at odds with one another. His work, and in particular the recurrent character-type he called the “man's woman,” highlights the complex interactions between competing ideologies and their discursive expressions, becoming a site in which Darwinian, feminist, and popular representations struggle.

In The Descent of Man (1871), Darwin elaborated his theory of sexual selection which he had only sketched in The Origin of Species (1859) and, more important, extrapolated it to human behavior and human biological history. Sexual selection, unlike natural selection, did not involve the struggle for existence, but the “struggle between the males for the possession of the females.”¹ The female, as the passive agent in this process, acted in the same capacity as did the environment in natural selection; she chose or “selected” those males that were most appealing and whose attributes would therefore be passed on to their progeny. Darwin argued that sexual selection, although significantly altered in modern society since the male now acted as the “selector,” played a major role in the differentiation of the sexes. As a result, man, as the sex actively involved in the struggle, had become superior to woman both physically and intellectually. Competition had produced greater variation among men than women—a sign to Darwin of biological superiority—as well as made man stronger, more tenacious, and more cunning. Physical superiority, in other words, was not enough; in the competition for females, Darwin reasoned, “mere bodily strength and size would do little for victory, unless associated with courage, perseverance, and determined energy,” as well as with “the higher mental faculties, namely, observation, reason, invention, or imagination.”² Man, he concluded, is therefore “more courageous, pugnacious, and energetic than woman, and has a more inventive genius” (p. 557). To bolster his argument, Darwin appealed to the “evidence” exhibited in modern civilization: “The chief distinction in the intellectual powers of the two sexes is shewn by man's attaining to a higher eminence, in whatever he takes up, than can woman—whether requiring deep thought, reason, or imagination, or merely the use of the senses and hands” (p. 564).

Darwin did, however, grant a few concessions to woman's worth. He noted that man's competitiveness passed “too easily into selfishness,” and that woman, due to her maternal instincts, possessed “greater tenderness and less selfishness” (p. 563). The nurturing qualities which she extended to her offspring she also extended to her “fellow creatures.” Darwin also admitted that “with woman the powers of intuition, of rapid perception, and perhaps of imitation, are more strongly marked than in man” (p. 563). Needless to say, Darwin's conclusions in The Descent did not sit well with late nineteenth-century feminists. Indeed, the opportunity for woman's emancipation that Darwin had opened with The Origin, an opportunity provided by evolution's implicit challenge to Christian dogma and the patriarchal ideology and Church-sanctioned gender roles encoded within it, appeared to close in his subsequent work. Darwin raised what the modern-day feminist Chris Weedon has called the “spectre of biology,”³ threatening to reinscribe the dominant gender ideology in the far more insidious form of irrefutable, scientific “fact.”

In the late nineteenth century, a group of what we may call “evolutionary feminists” met this threat by seeking to wrest the ideological ground from Darwin through reinterpreting his own theory. Eliza Burt Gamble, in her book The Evolution of Woman: An Inquiry into the Dogma of Her Inferiority to Man (1894), used Darwin's own evidence and argument to draw a far different conclusion about the biological status of women. “The theory of evolution,” she asserted, “as enunciated by scientists, furnishes much evidence going to show that the female among all the orders of life, man included, represents a higher stage of development than the male.”⁴ Gamble based her argument on Darwin's evidence that, in the lower organisms—and thus during the early stages of humanity's evolution—the female acted as the selector in the process of sexual selection. To Gamble, this meant that during the evolutionary process the female had developed her intellect and aesthetic taste—“the power to exercise taste and discrimination” (p. 24) in choosing a mate. The male, on the other hand, dissipated his “vital force” (p. 25) through developing qualities which served only as ornaments to attract females, or as weapons to ward off rivals. Unfortunately for the modern woman, her biological ancestors had chosen physical strength as a desirable quality in the male, and man had since then used this superior strength to subjugate woman and to arrogate for himself the title of the “superior sex.” In sexual selection, Gamble argued,

[the female] represents the intelligent factor or cause in the operations involved. If this be true, if it is through her will, or through some agency or tendency latent in her constitution that sexual selection comes into play, then she is the primary cause of the very characters through which man's superiority over woman has been gained. As a stream may not rise higher than its source, or as the creature may not surpass its creator in excellence, it is difficult to understand the processes by which man, through sexual selection, has become superior to woman.

(p. 29)

Gamble agreed, however, with Darwin's admission of man's selfishness and woman's altruism, and went on to argue that the altruistic maternal instinct further demonstrated woman's superiority. She cited motherhood as “the primary bond by which society was bound together” (p. 60), contending that without it mankind would never have developed those selfless qualities which make society and civilization possible. The social instincts—that is, the conscience and the concern for others—separated humans from the animals, and it was the woman as mother who first acquired and promoted these; the woman, then, was precedent to man in moving humanity up the evolutionary ladder, away from animal selfishness and toward human cooperation. “Since, then, it is observed,” Gamble concluded,

that without an association of interests and the coherence of the tribe the social instincts must have remained weak, and without concert of action the higher faculties, including the moral sense, could not have been developed; and since furthermore, … the influences which have led to this development are those growing out of the maternal instincts, may we not conclude that all of those qualities which make man pre-eminently a social animal—his love of society, his desire for the good-will of his kind, his perception of right and wrong, and, finally, that sympathy which at last gradually extending beyond the limits of race and country proclaims the brotherhood of man and the unity of life on earth—all these characteristics, are but an extension of maternal affections, an outgrowth of that early bond between mother and child, which, while affecting the entire line of development, still remains unchanged and unchangeable.

(pp. 61-62)

Gamble, of course, had her own ideological agenda, and her concern for woman's place in society went hand in hand with her sympathy with the other major social reform movements of her day—particularly those involving economic reform. She blamed the ascendancy of man and male egoism for the tyranny of capitalism and the oppression of the masses, and believed that when women were at last granted equality with men “the species as a whole [would] move into an ‘intellectual age’” (p. vii) of justice and liberty. Woman's maternal instinct would help subdue man's selfishness, replacing aggressive capitalism with economic cooperation:

Under purer conditions of life, when by the higher powers developed in the race the animal propensities have become somewhat subdued by man, we may reasonably hope that the “struggle for existence,” which is still so relentlessly waged, will cease, that man will no longer struggle with man for place and power, and that the bounties of earth will no longer be hoarded by the few, while the many are suffering for the necessities of life.

(p. 78)

The influential sociologist Lester Frank Ward disagreed not so much with Darwin's conclusions concerning women, as had Gamble, but with those of Darwin's followers. In an article entitled “Our Better Halves” (1888), Ward attacked those Darwinists who adduced man's superior strength and intelligence as evidence of his “natural” superiority. Ward claimed that such arguments were in fact pre-Darwinian, for Darwin himself had contended that these “superior” male traits were the result of sexual, rather than natural, selection. Woman, in other words, had chosen strength and intelligence to be desirable qualities in the male, not nature. Like Gamble, Ward concluded that this demonstrated woman's primacy in evolutionary progress. “Woman,” he claimed, “is the unchanging trunk of the great genealogic tree; while man, with all his vaunted superiority, is but a branch, a grafted scion.”⁵

Like Gamble, Ward also advocated woman's emancipation as part of broader social reforms. Although conceding that man had become more intellectually acute due to sexual selection, he believed that now intellectual inequality was perpetuated by social, rather than biological, inequality—particularly in education and employment. He agreed with Gamble that woman's primacy and superiority had been stripped from her when man, with physical force, usurped the role of selector in sexual selection. This arrogation of power was, Ward wrote in Dynamic Sociology (1883), one of “the most extensive and systematic violations of natural laws,” and the root of present inequalities throughout society.⁶ He advocated woman's full entrance into the workforce, believing, with Gamble, that the “feminine” qualities of altruism and sympathy she would bring with her would benefit all society: “A state of society, if it be bad for one class, is bad for all. Woman is scarcely a greater sufferer from her condition than man is. … The equality of the sexes will be the regeneration of humanity. Civilization demands this revolution. It stands in the greatest need of the help which the female sex alone can vouchsafe.”⁷

Charlotte Perkins Gilman, a protégée of Ward's, agreed with him concerning the injurious effect upon women, and upon humanity as a whole, of man's usurpation of the role of sexual selector. In Women and Economics (1898), Gilman went further, adding that man, by becoming woman's “economic environment,” had also displaced natural selection as the primary determinant of “feminine” qualities. Formerly, Gilman argued, natural selection had developed in woman those “superior” attributes which were now considered exclusively male: strength, skill, endurance, and courage.⁸ But since man had forced woman to be economically dependent upon him, since he had made it impossible for her to gain subsistence except through the “sex-relation,” and since he was now the sexual selector as well, he had selected only those qualities in woman which were sexually attractive to him. As a result, woman was marked by what Gilman called “excessive sex-distinction,” including the “inferior” “feminine” qualities of physical weakness and emotion.

Yet Gilman also agreed with both Ward and Gamble that woman was precedent to man in evolutionary progress, that her “natural” qualities of sympathy and altruism, epitomized in motherhood, were the main socializing forces in humanity's development. “Maternal energy,” she claimed, was “the force through which have come into the world both love and industry” (p. 126); as such, woman was both the “source of progress” and “the fountain of all our growth” (p. 177). Gilman contrasted creative maternal energy with destructive male energy and argued that, through her subjugation, woman was able to “elevate” man to her level, to “raise her fierce sex-mate to a free and gentle brotherhood (p. 135). To Gilman, man was originally only “an adjunct,” not “an essential” (p. 130), a “reproductive agent” (p. 131) whose strength and selfishness worked against humanity's collective progress. Maternal energy had to overcome “the destructive action of male energy in its blind competition” so that “human life [could] enter upon its full course of racial evolution” (pp. 126-27). Through her subjugation, then, woman was able to “maternalize,” and therefore “humanize,” man:

The subjection of woman has involved to an enormous degree the maternalizing of man. Under its bonds he has been forced into new functions, impossible to male energy alone. He has had to learn to love and care for some one besides himself. He has had to learn to work, to serve, to be human.

(p. 127)

Gilman, however, concluded that woman's subjugation had by now accomplished all it could, and she therefore advocated the end of the “sexuo-economic” union and, like Gamble and Ward, the full entrance of woman into the workforce. As had Gamble and Ward, Gilman believed that woman's maternal qualities of altruism and sympathy would temper “the brutal ferocity of excessive male energy struggling in the market-place as in a battlefield” (p. 119). Cooperation would supersede competition and excessive individualism, and a new economic era based on the “common interest” (p. 123) would begin. “As women become free, economic, social factors,” she concluded, “so becomes possible the full social combination of individuals in collective industry” (p. 145). Gilman would later reiterate and elaborate these views in her book The Man-Made World, or Our Androcentric Culture (1911), again arguing that the cooperative and cohesive qualities of motherhood would erase present economic injustices if women were allowed full equality in the workforce. The “false ideas of industry and economics,” she would claim, were based “on a wholly masculine view of life,” and she concluded that “a free womanhood inevitably leads to an economic democracy.”⁹

Gamble had accused Darwin of ignoring his own evidence in drawing his conclusions about women, and claimed that cultural prejudices accrued over “thousands of years” were responsible.¹⁰ While this may certainly have been true, such prejudices did not manifest themselves solely in Darwin's work, but pervaded the full range of discourses throughout the broader Anglo-American culture of the late nineteenth century. Darwin himself was far from the nineteenth-century ideal of the detached, objective scientist, and was not free from the dominant gender ideology articulated in the discourses of religion, science, and mass-produced popular literature. It is telling that, unlike The Origin whose persuasiveness was due not so much to the particular theory of evolution it promulgated—after all, there had been several evolutionary theorists who had preceded Darwin with less effect (e.g., Lamarck)—but to the amount and cogency of the physical evidence marshalled in support of it, The Descent appealed more to popular representations of gender roles than to any hard biological evidence. In leaving the plant and animal kingdoms of The Origin for the human world of The Descent, Darwin also left behind any approximation to pure, disinterested science.

In fact, Darwin's interpretation in The Descent of human sexual and gender differentiation and of human evolutionary history reinscribes the dominant gender ideology as expressed in the nineteenth-century popular romance with its stock characterizations of the strong, intelligent male and the weak, emotional female. More specifically, Darwin's concept (we may say trope) of sexual selection—the “struggle between the males for the possession of the females”—rewrites the hackneyed plot of popular romance involving the strong, courageous, and clever hero who outwits and outduels the villain for the possession of the passive maiden, the ultimate prize for the victor in the man-to-man struggle. The hero and maiden subsequently marry, and so begin or continue a long genealogical line of descent.

In addition, Darwin's adducing of man's “higher eminence” in modern civilization as evidence of his innate intellectual superiority, striking as it is in its refusal to acknowledge the historical and contemporary inequalities of opportunity between the sexes, says as much about popular representations of men and women as about real men and women in the world of the nineteenth century. So too do his concessions to women emphasizing self-sacrifice and altruism. In the popular romance, man always achieves a “higher eminence” than woman, even if he begins in a lower station. And woman, as Cathy N. and Arnold E. Davidson have noted in regard to the heroine of turn-of-the-century sentimental romance, “must be self-sacrificing.”¹¹ In The Descent, then, the discourse of science and the discourse of popular romance converge. Rather than writing natural science, Darwin writes what amounts to a “naturalized” romance, set like other romances in a time “long ago and far away.”

The evolutionary feminists, despite their different ideological agenda, were no more free from the pervasiveness of popular discourse than was Darwin. And since their ideology-driven reinterpretation of Darwin's theory met head-on with a scientific discourse that had collapsed into that of popular romance, their reinterpretation necessarily involved a reformulation of romance itself. It should be obvious that the evolutionary feminists wholeheartedly embraced Darwin's and popular romance's representation of woman as self-sacrificing and altruistic. To Gamble, Ward, and Gilman, woman with her maternal instinct was the great socializing force in human history. Yet the rhetoric of these evolutionary feminists also participates in the utopianism of many romances in the late nineteenth century.

James D. Hart has noted that the romance during this era provided “an escape, an antidote to this world through an excursion to another where what was seen was ordered better and what was not seen did not exist.”¹² Perhaps the most representative, and certainly one of the most popular, of these late nineteenth-century romances was Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward (1888), a fantasy of the future in which economic cooperation replaces competition. The evolutionary feminists' vision of an economic utopia brought about by woman's full participation in the workforce—“a free womanhood inevitably leads to an economic democracy”—is a “scientific,” evolutionary reformulation of this type of utopian romance. Like Bellamy's work, it transmits an unexamined ideology operating in a world “as it ought to be” rather than “as it is.” It looks, in other words, toward an impossible future, a world which is capable of being fantasized.

It is, however, equally characteristic of romance to flee to another realm of fantasy—the irrecoverable past. And this type of romance, of course, is the form that Darwin's human evolutionary fantasy in The Descent had taken. In challenging that ideology-laden fantasy, then, the evolutionary feminists reworked a key trope of American popular romance to fit their own ideological position: the movement up the socio-economic ladder by a male commoner capable of demonstrating his “natural” superiority of strength, courage, and intelligence to an aristocratic female who then consents to marry and be governed by him.

Just as Darwin “naturalized” popular romance in his theory of sexual selection—that is, rewrote it in the guise of a scientific discourse concerned with humanity's “natural” evolution—so too did the late nineteenth-century feminists with this trope. Conventionally concerned with socio-economic climbing, the trope was transformed by feminists into one of evolutionary movement throughout human history. They placed man (like the commoner) below woman on the evolutionary ladder, having woman choose or “select” him for his qualities of strength and in doing so lifting him up to her level, where he subsequently usurps the dominant role. However, to the feminists and their gender ideology, this ultimate arrogation of power did not establish the “correct” and “natural” gender order as in the romance marriage, but marked the advent of woman's subjugation—in Ward's words, that “most extensive and systematic violations of natural law” (my emphasis). In other words, it established an “unnatural” order.

Examples of this trope in late nineteenth-century popular romance abound, particularly toward the turn of the century. Charles Major's When Knighthood Was in Flower (1898) is a case in point. The hero, Charles Brandon, a captain of the guard, falls in love with the Princess Mary, sister of Henry VIII. The wide social gap between the two, however, precludes Mary from even thinking of “the possibility of such a thing as a union with Brandon.”¹³ But then Brandon displays his courage and strength in rescuing her from an attack. After the rescue, their roles reverse:

Mary had begun to see the whole situation, and everything changed. She still saw the same great difference between them as before, but with this difference, she was looking up now. Before that event [Brandon's rescue of her] he had been plain Charles Brandon, and she the Princess Mary. She was the princess still, but he was a demi-god.

(p. 167)

The romance concludes with Brandon a duke and in complete domination of the Princess Mary; and the clear implication is that such male dominance and female submission are the correct gender roles: “fair, sweet, wilful Mary dropped out of history; a sure token that her heart was her husband's throne; her soul his empire; her every wish his subject, and her will, so masterful with others, the meek and lowly servant of her strong but gentle lord and master, Charles Brandon, Duke of Suffolk” (p. 358).

Toward the turn of the century, as critics like James D. Hart and Diana Reep have observed, more and more romances began to formulate this trope in nationalist terms, with the man an American democratic commoner and the woman a European aristocrat, thus implicitly affirming the superiority of American democratic ideals over European aristocracy.¹⁴ Examples include Edward Payson Roe's Barriers Burned Away (1872), Mary Johnston's To Have and To Hold (1900), and, perhaps the form's culmination, George Barr McCutcheon's Graustark (1901). The Western, just emerging as a subgenre of romance at the turn of the century, would also concern itself with this trope, demonstrating its pervasiveness and persistence in popular discourse. Owen Wister's The Virginian (1902), for example, involves a love affair between the Virginian and an upper-born lady, and, as in When Knighthood Was in Flower, the woman's admission of love is simultaneously an acknowledgment of her submission, and their former roles are reversed:

By love and her surrender to him their positions had been exchanged. He was not now, as through his long courting he had been, her half-obeying, half-refractory worshipper. She was no longer his half-indulgent, half-scornful superior. Her better birth and schooling that had once been weapons to keep him at his distance, or bring her off victorious in their encounters, had given way before the onset of the natural man himself. She knew her cowboy lover, with all that he lacked, to be more than ever she could be, with all that she had. He was her worshipper still, but her master, too.¹⁵

The complex interaction between evolutionary discourse and popular romance thus marks an ideological struggle over gender identity and power in the late nineteenth century. Darwin's unconscious articulation of prescribed gender roles within his theory of evolution was countered by the evolutionary feminists' ideologically conscious reinterpretation of that theory, a reinterpretation that nevertheless found its utterance in a popular discourse whose gender ideology was inimical to its own. To overthrow Darwin's romance of human evolutionary history, the evolutionary feminists constructed their own romance, superimposing their ideology on the patriarchal discourse of popular romance.

Frank Norris was a writer in an ideological quandary. As the self-proclaimed “boy Zola” in rebellion against the genteel tradition and the sentimental romance, he sought to move away from the hackneyed plots and stock characterizations of the popular forms. Yet as a young man who wholeheartedly embraced the dominant gender ideology of his culture, he had an interest in affirming the same ideology that the popular romance also promoted.¹⁶ Norris's work, then, and particularly the female character type he called the “man's woman,” is a fascinating site of ideological struggle. Norris's literary ideology, as it were, prompted him to adopt (probably unconsciously) the narrative and representational strategies of the evolutionary feminists. Norris's “man's woman” is initially a “natural,” unfettered woman; moreover, she has the power to bring her man into the human community, exhibiting those selfless, socializing qualities that the evolutionary feminists argued were precedent to human evolutionary progress and necessary to move humanity into the future utopian economic age they envisioned. Yet unable, or, more likely, unwilling to abandon the dominant gender ideology, Norris reaffirms it at that point of divergence between the romance trope and the evolutionary feminists' reformulation of it—that is, at the moment of male usurpation of dominance. Like the popular romance, this moment establishes the correct and natural gender roles rather than, as in the feminist version, marking woman's fall into subjugation and humanity's entrance into the dark ages of capitalistic competition.

Norris's Moran of the Lady Letty (1898) is perhaps his most revealing novel in this regard, for it is remarkable in its articulation of the feminist romance of human evolutionary history, all the while affirming the dominant patriarchal ideology. At the outset Moran is far from the weak, passive maiden of the sentimental romance; she is, rather, much like the evolutionary feminists' “natural” woman—that is, woman before her subjugation to man. Gilman in particular had represented the natural woman as woman in possession of those traits now considered exclusively male—strength, skill, and courage—for nature, rather than man, had then operated as selector and had not distinguished between the sexes. When we first see Moran she is unconscious, but soon undergoes the first of two awakenings, this one into her natural state: “She was herself again, savage, splendid, dominant, superb in her wrath at their [Ross Wilbur's, the male protagonist, and the Chinese sailors'] weakness, their cowardice.”¹⁷

She is, moreover, “half-masculine” (p. 98), a woman in a man's clothing, or, more accurately, a representation of a woman in possession of traits the male protagonist—and the male author—can only conceive of as masculine. This struggle between literary representation and gender ideology manifests itself in a different form shortly thereafter when Moran is described as sexless: “As yet she was almost, as one might say, without sex—savage, unconquered, untamed, glorying in her own independence, her sullen isolation” (p. 104). To be “without sex” is to be undifferentiated, as in Gilman's vision of humanity's natural state, but to be so described is, once again, to possess traits that the “one” who “might say”—that is, the male Wilbur or the male Norris—cannot ideologically attribute to women. The struggle will clearly fall on the side of the dominant gender ideology when Wilbur tells Moran, “you ought to have been a man,” and Moran in effect concurs: “at all events, I'm not a girl” (p. 169). Moran is thus a representational fantasy, an oxymoron, a character who is neither man nor girl, for such a woman of “indomitable courage and self-reliance” (p. 104) is to Norris impossible. Wilbur will later pronounce, as if speaking for Norris, that Moran is not only out of his experience, but also “out of even my imagination” (p. 172).

But Moran is only “as yet” without sex, a subtle intimation of her inevitable second awakening. For now, she is still the natural woman, “untouched and unsullied by civilization” (p. 166). In his attempt to represent a natural woman quite unlike the passive, submissive, “civilized” maidens of the popular romance, Norris articulates the feminist romance of human evolutionary history and human gender differentiation, complete with the suggestion of man's usurpation of dominance as a fall: “He [Wilbur] could easily see how to such a girl the love of a man would appear only in the light of a humiliation—a degradation” (p. 166). Indeed, the moment of encounter between the sexes, the moment of sexual encounter when man arrogated to himself the role of sexual selector, had to the evolutionary feminists simultaneously marked the beginning of human gender differentiation and woman's “de-gradation,” her fall into subjugation. Yet again Norris's gender ideology asserts itself, for it only “appears” as such to Moran, and to her eyes only. To Wilbur the inevitable fall is a fortunate fall, for despite her half-masculinity, despite her sexlessness, Moran is, Wilbur muses, “after all, a woman” (p. 167).

The chapter entitled “The Battle” brings the plot to its climax, but it also brings to a head this unconscious struggle between competing ideologies—that is, between Norris's literary and gender ideologies. There are, in fact, two battles. First, there is the battle between Wilbur, Moran, the Chinese “coolies,” on one hand, and the crew of the Chinese junk, on the other; second, there is the battle between Moran and Wilbur, initially a case of mistaken identity, but one which soon develops into a struggle for power and dominance, in which “more than life was at stake” (p. 219), and as such a battle between a man and a woman that suggests the larger struggle between men and women in human history. Norris makes no secret of his symbolic intent: “It was not Moran whom he [Wilbur] fought; it was her force, her determination, her will, her splendid independence, that he set himself to conquer” (p. 218).

Wilbur does more, though, than conquer Moran; in asserting his “masculine” strength, in assuming what Donald Pizer has rightly called his “correct sexual role” within the context of Norris's gender ideology,¹⁸ the once effeminate San Francisco fop also destroys Norris's attempt to create a female character true to “life” rather than “literature.”¹⁹ In asserting Norris's gender ideology, Wilbur undermines his literary one, turning Moran into just another heroine of romance. And as in the romance, and as in the evolutionary feminists' reworking of the popular form, Moran is complicit in her own subjugation. She “selects” strength in the male—“Moran despised a weakling” (p. 219)—and in her capitulation, after Wilbur significantly throws her “fairly on her back” (p. 220), she confesses that, as Wilbur had prophesied, she is indeed, “after all, just a woman”: “But I'm the weaker of us two, and that's a fact. You've beaten, mate [sic]—I admit it; you've conquered me, and, … and, mate, do you know, I love you for it” (p. 221). Moran thus “makes” her man by forcing him to assume the role prescribed by the dominant patriarchal ideology—earlier, Wilbur had told her that “your mate isn't made yet” (p. 172)—and, at precisely that moment, she “unmakes” herself as both a “natural” woman and as a viable literary character. In affirming her own unmaking (“I love you for it,” indeed!), she affirms also that Norris's gender ideology is stronger than his literary.

“The Battle” is followed by a chapter entitled “A Change of Leaders” in which the trope of role reversal appropriated by both the popular romance and the evolutionary feminists is fully articulated, but with the gender ideology of the romance clearly operative:

It was no longer Moran who took the initiative—who was the leader. The brief fight upon the shore had changed all that. It was Wilbur who was now the master, it was Wilbur who was aggressive. … The positions of the two were reversed. It was Wilbur who assumed control and direction of what went forward, Moran taking his advice and relying upon his judgement.

(pp. 222, 229)

Instead of possessing those “masculine” qualities she once had, Moran now acquires the “feminine” traits of sympathy and self-sacrifice appropriate to the romance heroine. She extends her sympathy to the wounded Charlie—who, to the now dominant Wilbur, is only a “Chinaman”—thinking only of him and hoping for his recovery. Her second awakening is complete, and as if Norris had given up on her as a literary ideal, she becomes a transparent mouthpiece for his gender ideology, echoing Wilbur's earlier prophecy:

Mate, great things have happened there [on the shore during the battle]. … It was there that I first knew myself; and knew that, after all, you were a man and I was a woman; and that there was just us—you and I—in the world; and that you loved me and I loved you, and that nothing else was worth thinking of …. I'm not Moran any more. I'm not proud and strong and independent, and I don't want to be lonely. I want you—I want you always with me. I'm just a woman now, dear—just a woman that loves you with a heart she's just found.

(pp. 236-38)

Just a romance heroine, too. No Edna Pontellier is she.

Having been “made” a man, Wilbur is now able to achieve his Darwinian “higher eminence,” filibustering in Cuba. Moran, however, is in a quandary, as is Norris. Clearly unable to carry on with a character who epitomized the romance heroine he abhorred as a serious writer, and unable to return her to a state of nature in which, by his gender ideology, she is “unnatural,” Norris kills off Moran in a scene that rivals for absurdity S. Behrman's death by wheat in The Octopus. The once-mighty Moran, who had formerly taken on a shipload of Chinese sailors, is utterly unable to defend herself against a single one, reduced to vain pleadings for Wilbur to rescue her. Her murder is what Pierre Macherey would call a “magical resolution,” a suppression of ideological contradiction—in this case, between the literary and the gender ideology—that destabilizes the text.²⁰ For Norris, it is the only way out.

Norris's later work, A Man's Woman (1900), recapitulates this same ideological struggle, though resolving it differently than Moran. Once again, Norris attempts to create a heroine who is far different from the hackneyed maiden of popular romance. And, once again, this attempt is threatened by his inability to overcome or transcend the dominant patriarchal ideology. Lloyd Searight, like Moran, is a woman who possesses traits that the evolutionary feminists had attributed to the natural, unsubjugated woman of early human evolutionary history, but that Norris can only represent as “masculine.” Even Norris's choice of first name for his heroine aligns her with masculinity, and her predominant characteristics are stubbornness, independence, and courage. Like Moran, Lloyd as a literary ideal—a female character more like “life” than “literature”—is at odds with Lloyd as a gender representation, and therefore she cannot remain as we initially find her.

Lloyd is a nurse—traditionally a female occupation—but she is neither nurturing nor maternal; rather, she approaches her work as a strong-willed and fearless warrior (again, we think of Moran) in unceasing battle against the “Enemy,” death. Yet the strength and courage she brings to her work are crushed by those same traits in the superior capacity of the arctic explorer Ward Bennett, a McTeague-like atavistic brute whose existence has “ignored two thousand years of civilisation.”²¹ Bennett is an evolutionary caricature, a figure much like the evolutionary feminists' representation of early man—remember Gilman's description of man as woman's “fierce sex-mate” whom she must “maternalize” and therefore “humanize”—facing the “Enemy” death with a “fierce energy,” a “resolve to conquer at all costs” (p. 143), a “bestial determination” (p. 154). Moreover, Bennett is “by nature” “inordinately selfish” (p. 240). Yet such traits in the male Bennett are correct and natural within the context of Norris's gender ideology, and by asserting them Bennett gains ascendancy over the “unnatural” Lloyd. In a scene reminiscent of “The Battle” in Moran, and by extension of the evolutionary feminists' romance of human evolutionary history and man's usurpation of dominance, Bennett breaks Lloyd's will outside the typhoid-ridden Ferriss's sick room, refusing to let her go in to battle the “Enemy.” She now becomes aware of the “inherent weakness of her sex” (p. 140) and, like Moran in defeat, even loves Bennett because of his superior will and strength, “for the very fact that he had been stronger than she” (p. 172). Her fall is, then, as the evolutionary feminists would have it, a fall into subjugation, but as Norris represents it, once again affirming the dominant gender ideology, it is fortunate. She finds her “natural” gender role, and he is elevated to a higher level of humanity.

There is, however, a literary price to be paid for the ascendancy of Bennett and, through Bennett, of Norris's gender ideology, a price that threatens to destroy Norris's literary ideal, as it had in Moran. Norris responds to the threat differently than he had in his earlier work, forgoing the “magical resolution” of death and instead appropriating the evolutionary feminists' strategy for mitigating the popular romance's prescription, and Darwin's reinscription, of woman's role. For Lloyd in defeat, unlike Moran, does not degenerate into just another trite heroine, but exhibits the heroine's “feminine” qualities of sympathy and altruism for purposes broader and deeper than the mere love of one man. These qualities, attributed to the maternal instincts, do not mark her as “just a woman”—that is, as inferior—but signify the superiority that the evolutionary feminists had romanticized: the precedence of woman in human evolutionary progress.

After the first role reversal in which Bennett gains ascendancy, there is a second. Bennett's success turns into a defeat, for he is ruined by his own “maleness,” his “very self's self” (p. 199), driving Lloyd away and thereby rendering himself unable to continue with his arctic explorations—unable, in other words, to achieve his “higher eminence.” The masculine aggression that had served him so well against the “Enemy” and that had crushed Lloyd's will leaves him alone and without the ambition to carry on. And then he contracts typhoid: “Suddenly” he “changed places with the woman he believed he had, at such fearful cost, broken and subdued” (p. 241). Bennett becomes weak and Lloyd strong, and Lloyd nurses him back to health—now, however, in her correct feminine role as nurturing, maternal nurse, rather than as a woman warrior. Bennett's weakness is that of a “child” (p. 241), and Lloyd comes to realize that her love for Bennett is largely maternal. She meditates on her role as woman, and it is a meditation that transcends popular romance's and Darwin's representations, one in fact that articulates the evolutionary feminists' representation of woman as superior to man due to her maternal selflessness, as well as of woman as the primary source of humanity's advancement:

Lloyd was dimly conscious of a certain sweet and subtle element in her love for Bennett that only of late she had begun to recognise and be aware of. This was a certain vague protective, almost maternal, instinct. … She felt that she, not as herself individually, but as a woman, was not only stronger than Bennett, but in a manner older, more mature. She was conscious of depths in her nature far greater than in his, and also that she was capable of attaining heights of heroism, devotion, and sacrifice which he, for all his masculine force, could not only never reach, but could not even conceive of. It was this consciousness of her larger, better nature that made her feel for Bennett somewhat as a mother feels for a son, a sister for her younger brother. A great tenderness mingled with her affection, a vast and almost divine magnanimity, a broad, womanly pity for his shortcomings, his errors, his faults. It was to her he must look for encouragement. It was for her to bind up and reshape the great energy that had been so rudely checked, and not only to call back his strength, but to guide it and direct it into its appointed channels.

(pp. 244-45)

Such a representation works to save Norris's literary ideal—that is, to make Lloyd something more than a shallow romance heroine, while still preserving the dominant gender ideology. Lloyd's superiority, her “larger, better nature,” her depths and heights and strengths, are not ends in themselves, but serve to “bind up,” “reshape,” “call back,” “guide,” and “direct” Bennett's powers.

For all her superiority, in other words, she is still subordinate. In amalgamating the evolutionary feminists' literary representation of woman with romance's, Darwin's, and his own gender ideology, Norris manages, if not a magical resolution, a miracle of rare device: woman as inferior to man, but precedent to “mankind,” for it is only through Lloyd's maternal powers that Bennett can carry out his humanity-advancing work of discovery:

His was the work, for him the shock of battle, the rigour of the fight, the fierce assault, the ceaseless onset, the unfailing and unflinching courage.

Hers was the woman's part. Already she had assumed it; steadfast unselfishness, renunciation, patience, the heroism greater than all others, that sits with folded hands, quiet, unshaken, and under fearful stress, endures, and endures, and endures. To be the inspiration of great deeds, high hopes, and firm resolves, and then, while the fight was dared, to wait in calmness for its issue—that was her duty; that, the woman's part in the world's great work.

(p. 244)

Both Moran and A Man's Woman are minor works; but they are valuable as expressions of Norris's ideological struggle that remains manifest, if rendered more artistically, in his major novels. The Octopus (1901) is a case in point, the character Hilma Tree another “man's woman.” Like Moran and Lloyd, Hilma is a natural woman—strong, courageous, independent. But, more important, she is from the start what Lloyd only becomes toward the end, a maternal force whose love has the power to go beyond its effect upon the beloved man to influence all humanity. As in A Man's Woman, such a representational strategy—articulating as it does the evolutionary feminists' strategy for countering Darwinian and popular representations of women—enables Norris to move beyond romance clichés while preserving his gender ideology. From the beginning, Hilma is represented as a type of pagan goddess of fertility and motherhood, a “milkmaid” whose occupation and last name align her with the earth, that “loyal mother”²² whose maternal, generative force gives birth to the wheat. This association is furthered when she becomes pregnant and is described as a queen on her throne, the “perfect woman” (p. 504) who radiates love that “touched all who came near” (p. 497).

But Hilma's maternal force is not direct in its effect; it must operate through a man, must once again lift him to her level but then relinquish power and control to him so that he may perform “the world's great work” and achieve his “higher eminence,” all in line with the dominant gender ideology. In The Octopus, Annixter is the man whom Hilma's maternal power must elevate and bring into the human community. Before she enters his life, Annixter is much like Bennett in A Man's Woman, self-centered and selfish. He will later describe himself as having been “a machine before,” and adds that “if another man, or woman, or child got in my way, I rode 'em down, and I never dreamed of anybody else but myself” (p. 467). Such a comparison aligns him with that other destructive machine in the novel, the Railroad. Moreover, like the other ranchers who “had no love for their land” but only wanted “to get all there was out of [it]” (p. 298), Annixter also lives by the credo, “After us the deluge” (p. 299).

Hilma, to paraphrase Gilman, “humanizes” Annixter by “maternalizing” him, moving him away from his selfishness and greedy self-sufficiency and into the human community; figuratively, she moves him away from his affinity with the masculine Octopus and toward her own affinity with the maternal earth and the wheat. It is no coincidence that Annixter discovers his love for Hilma while watching the wheat, and that the description of his awakened love parallels almost verbatim the description of the sprouting wheat: both are “little seeds long since planted” which have at last “germinated” (pp. 368-69). Under Hilma's influence, Annixter becomes a social being, realizing that “a fellow can't live for himself any more than he can live by himself” (p. 467). And his new selflessness and altruism, like the beneficent wheat which, once unfettered by man's greed, would roll “like a flood” (p. 651) to the poor and starving masses of the world, expands to embrace his fellow human beings:

Where once Annixter had thought only of himself, he now thought only of Hilma. The time when this thought of another should broaden and widen into thought of Others, was yet to come; but already it had expanded to include the unborn child—already, as in the case of Mrs. Dyke, it had broadened to enfold another child and another mother bound to him by no ties other than those of humanity and pity. In time, starting from this point it would reach out more and more till it should take in all men and all women, and the intolerant selfish man, while retaining all of his native strength, should become tolerant and generous, kind and forgiving.

(p. 498)

Hilma's influence thus goes far beyond its effect upon Annixter alone, and we can begin to see how Norris's own sympathy with economic reform dovetailed with that of the evolutionary feminists', and how his representations in The Octopus are actuated by more than the literary need to move beyond the stock characterizations of popular romance. The primary conflict in the novel between the ranchers and the Railroad—both manifestations of male selfishness carried into the marketplace—is a “struggle for existence” waged within the “masculine” economic system, as Gamble and Gilman had represented capitalism. Hilma's “maternalizing” of Annixter—prompting him to “broaden,” “widen,” and “expand” his human sympathy—articulates the evolutionary feminists' and Norris's mutual economic agenda, promoting what Gamble called “that sympathy which at last extending beyond the limits of race and country proclaims the brotherhood of man and the unity of life on earth.” And Norris's novel, like the evolutionary feminists' romance of a future economic utopia, points toward a future era when the “struggle for existence” between the ranchers and the Railroad would cease, when, due to woman's influence, “the bounties of earth will no longer be hoarded by the few, while the many are suffering for the necessities of life.”

There is an important divergence, however, between Norris's and the evolutionary feminists' utopian romances, and once again it occurs at the fault line of gender ideology. The evolutionary feminists had argued that woman's full entrance into the workforce would bring about economic cooperation and justice; that woman, in other words, would directly effect an economic utopia. As noted, though, in The Octopus Hilma's maternalizing influence must operate through a man, through Annixter. It is his sympathy that will eventually “reach out” and “take in” all humanity, his power that will do the “world's great work” and create that hoped-for economic era. But, of course, Annixter is never able to achieve the “higher eminence” that such an accomplishment would bring him, for he is killed with the other ranchers beside the irrigation ditch. His truncated career as a reformer is dictated in large part by the historical basis of the novel, the Mussel Slough massacre of 1880. But Annixter's death leads to the puzzling and ultimately unsatisfying conclusion to the novel where, in lieu of any real economic reform or even possibility of reform, Norris passes off the tepid philosophical panacea that “all things … work together for good” (p. 652). Without Annixter—that is, without a man—there is no possibility for real, concrete reform. There is certainly no suggestion that Hilma could carry out his good intentions, despite having inspired them. Such is not possible given Norris's gender ideology, and once again it is his gender ideology that supersedes all other considerations, including the literary. Rather than sacrifice the “correct” and “natural” gender roles of his characters, Norris in effect sacrifices his novel.

There are other characters who fit the “man's woman” mold in Norris's work, and they too articulate the intersection of the sometimes competing, sometimes complementary discourses of Darwinism, evolutionary feminism, and popular romance. Norris's work, in fact, may eventually prove most valuable for its articulating powers, for its ability to express the discursive and ideological complexities of his very complex late nineteenth-century era. As compelling as much of his work is as literature, it is ultimately unraveled, or is at least compromised, by the even more compelling ideologies that “struggle for existence” within his fictional world. And, in the case of the “man's woman,” Norris's literary ideology never proved the fittest.

Notes

1. Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species (1859; New York: Penguin, 1968), p. 136.

2. Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex (1871; London: John Murray, 1875), p. 564. All subsequent references are to this edition.

3. Chris Weedon, Feminist Practice and Poststructuralist Theory (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1987), p. 127.

4. Eliza Burt Gamble, The Evolution of Woman: An Inquiry into the Dogma of Her Inferiority to Man (New York: Putnam, 1894), pp. v-vi. All subsequent references are to this edition.

5. Lester Frank Ward, “Our Better Halves,” The Forum (November 1888), p. 275.

6. Lester Frank Ward, Dynamic Sociology, or Applied Social Science, as Based upon Statical Sociology and the Less Complex Sciences (New York: Appleton, 1883), p. 648.

7. Ward, Dynamic Sociology, p. 657.

8. Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Women and Economics: A Study of the Economic Relation Between Men and Women as a Factor in Social Evolution (Boston: Small, Maynard, and Co., 1898), p. 62. All subsequent references are to this edition.

9. Charlotte Perkins Gilman, The Man-Made World, or Our Androcentric Culture (New York: Charlton, 1911), p. 260.

10. Gamble, pp. vii-viii.

11. Cathy N. Davidson and Arnold E. Davidson, “Carrie's Sisters: The Popular Prototypes for Dreiser's Heroine,” MFS 23 (1977), 403.

12. James D. Hart, The Popular Book: A History of America's Literary Taste (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1950), pp. 182-83.

13. Charles Major, When Knighthood Was in Flower (New York: Grosset and Dunlop, 1898), p. 120. All subsequent references are to this edition.

14. See Hart and Diana Reep, The Rescue and Romance: Popular Novels Before World War I (Bowling Green: Bowling Green State Univ. Popular Press, 1982).

15. Owen Wister, The Virginian (1902; New York: Grosset and Dunlop, 1929), p. 386.

16. In his critical essay “Why Women Should Write the Best Novels: And Why They Don't,” Boston Evening Transcript, November 13, 1901, rpt. in The Literary Criticism of Frank Norris, ed. Donald Pizer (Austin: Univ. of Texas Press, 1964), Norris reveals his immersion in and acceptance of the dominant gender ideology. One of the reasons he gives for why women should write better novels than men is that there is a difference in temperament between the sexes, a difference that Norris expresses in the same rhetoric as the popular romance and Darwin: “The average man is a rectangular, square-cut, matter-of-fact, sober-minded animal who does not receive impressions easily, who is not troubled with emotions and has no overmastering desire to communicate his sensations to anybody. But the average woman is just the reverse of all these. She is impressionable, emotional and communicative. And impressionableness, emotionality and communicativeness are three very important qualities of mind that make for good writing” (pp. 34-35). But, for all that, the men—whom Norris refers to as “the razor-using contingent”—are the ones who achieve the Darwinian “higher eminence” in the field of literature, one reason being that, according to Norris, they have more physical stamina: “who shall say how many good, even great, novels have remained half written, to be burned in the end, because their women authors mistook lack of physical strength for lack of genuine ability?” (p. 36).

17. Frank Norris, Moran of the Lady Letty (1898; New York: AMS Press, 1971), p. 91. All subsequent references are to this edition.

18. Donald Pizer, “The Masculine-Feminine Ethic in Frank Norris's Popular Novels,” TSLL 6 (1964), 84-91, rpt. in Critical Essays on Frank Norris, ed. Don Graham (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1980), p. 45.

19. Norris makes this distinction in “Why Women Should Write the Best Novels: And Why They Don't,” arguing that the male writer studies “life,” or experience, and therefore his work conveys authenticity, whereas the female writer studies “literature,” and as a result her work suffers from artificiality.

20. See Pierre Macherey, A Theory of Literary Production, trans. Geoffrey Wall (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1978).

21. Frank Norris, A Man's Woman (New York: Grosset and Dunlop, 1900), p. 105. All subsequent references are to this edition.

22. Frank Norris, The Octopus (1901; New York: Penguin, 1986), p. 369. All subsequent references are to this edition.