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COPYRIGHT 2004 Southern Illinois University
Our marriages are only saved from disaster--when they are saved at
all--by a readjustment from the fictive romantic basis on to something more stable, but change is usually painful, troublesome, and imperfect, generally leaving the feeling on both sides of disillusionment. --Havelock Ellis, "The Future of Marriage" But I believe in companionship, I believe that between man and woman that is the great thing--companionship. --Page to Landry in The Pit
Published posthumously in January of 1903, Frank Norris's last novel became an instant success. During the first year alone, The Pit went through five editions, selling a total of 95,914 copies. The book's critical reception was equally enthusiastic. Reviewed in all major newspapers and every important literary magazine, The Pit was not merely compared to the best of Emile Zola's works but hailed as "the real American Novel" (McElrath and Knight 181). If The Octopus had established Norris as "the American Zola," a reviewer for the New York Herald mused, "in The Pit [sic] he is more the prophet of a new dispensation" and "becomes distinctly the founder of a new school, which may preclude a French Norris" (192). Though primarily praised for the "strong lights" The Pit "throws" on the workings of the Chicago Board of Trade, critics also noted that "the love story is a vital and engrossing part of the book" and commended "the skill with which these themes are developed and brought to a smashing climax" (189, 191). In Norris's The Pit, another reviewer wrote, "[h]eart interest combines as logically and inevitably with business as with the other occupations" (188).
Since the late 1940s, however, the critical contention that The Pit "is more convincing than the Octopus, more pleasing than McTeague, more dramatic than any of Mr. Norris's other works" has undergone a sharp reversal (189). Unlike most earlier readers, who had seen Jadwin and Laura Curtis's marital struggles as an important aspect of Norris's "philosophical study of certain phases in American life," formalist New Critics have argued almost unanimously that the marriage plot "seems unrelated to the novel's epic theme of nature's power and benevolence" (McElrath and Knight 197, Pizer 175). (1) For Charles Walcutt, the major ".aw" of The Pit lies in Laura's disturbing presence, which somehow upsets the novel's structural and thematic unity. "Obviously," Walcutt states,
she is there merely as a foil to set off the great struggle in the Pit to show the other side of Jadwin's public failure. Thus the story breaks completely in two when Norris devotes considerable time to her connection with Sheldon Corthell, the understanding artist to whom she goes for comfort when Jadwin is deserting her more and more for the Pit. (153-54)
And not only does Norris attempt to unite the disparate themes of love and business, Ernest Marchand complains, but he actually "allow[s] the love story to gain the upper hand" (120). What ultimately accounts for "the failure of The Pit," Donald Pizer concludes in The Novels of Frank Norris, "is not a crudely attached 'happy ending'" but the novel's inability "to rise above the Laura-Jadwin relationship" (177). Further, "concurring with most critics of Frank Norris's last work" that "the plots of marriage and speculation should be incompatible," Howard Horowitz maintains that "the novel's true failing" is marked by its "search for harmony" (215-16).
Though many critics still seem to agree "that the imaginative vitality of The Pit cannot compare with that of either McTeague or The Octopus," several more recent studies, influenced by feminist scholarship, have begun to emphasize the novel's domestic plot (Hochman 99). Rather than reading The Pit as a failed attempt to reveal "the inherent dynamics of a capitalist economy"(Mitchell 539), Barbara Hochman discerns beneath Jadwin's and Laura's marital troubles an anxious search for stable identities. "[T]he central problem for Laura as for Jadwin," Hochman asserts, "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" (111). In a similar vein, Joseph McElrath and Gwendolyn Jones, stressing what Pizer has identified as the "humanistic strain" in literary naturalism, (2) claim that "the Laura-Curtis relationship was for Norris the microcosmic embodiment of the macrocosmic malaise in the American economy, and its 'cure' was seen in the modification freely made in their relationship" (xxv). (3) Focusing more specifically on the construction of gender roles in late nineteenth-century America, Clare Virginia Eby contends that 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 obstacles to achieving identity within the roles themselves" (158).
Aside from questions of purely aesthetic merit, what seems most striking about the reception of The Pit is that modern critics tend to foreground either the novel's "naturalistic" representation of public business relations or the novel's "sentimental" depiction of private domestic relations. Thus, whereas critics such as Pizer, Mitchell, and most of all Horowitz contend that the Curtis-Laura relationship steers The Pit away from a strictly naturalistic analysis of unbridled stock market speculation until it eventually turns into pure escapism, (4) critics such as Hochman, McElrath, and especially Eby stress that it is precisely through the depiction of Jadwin's and Laura's domestic relations that Norris manages both to assert "notions of freedom of choice" and to "critically interrogate[] turn-of-the-century assumptions of gender roles" (Eby 150).
That contemporary reviewers had apparently fewer problems accepting the novel's representation of Laura's fight to strip herself of outdated notions about romantic love before the backdrop of Jadwin's heroic yet disastrous endeavor to corner the wheat market points to the need for a more historicized interpretation of Norris's project in The Pit. For read within the socio-economical context of the early twentieth century--most notably the progessivist critique of capitalist individualism and what Christopher Lasch has called "the crisis of the family"--it becomes apparent that naturalized "notions of freedom of choice," normalized "ethical responsibility," and an acute sense of "cultural change" underlie the marriage as well as the business plot (3, 21). To cursorily dismiss "Norris' idea of woman as a self-sacrificing helpmate to a man of action" as a regrettable structural weakness would mean to overlook The Pit's political function within the larger progessivist discourse of early twentieth-century America (Pizer 178). By the same token, to valorize Norris's liberal progressivism on grounds that The Pit "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" would mean to disregard the extent to which "early twentieth century culture co-opted many feminist issues by linking personal identity and fulfillment with companionate marriage, [monogamous] heterosexual pleasure, motherhood as a career, and consumerism" (Eby 167, Laslett and Brenner 395).
The novel's alignment with early muckraking works such as Henry Demarest Lloyd's Wealth against Commonwealth (1894), which castigated the socially counterproductive selfishness of so-called "robber barons," becomes perhaps most obvious in chapter IV, when Charles Cressler exposes Laura to "the workings of political economy," elucidating in no uncertain terms that "the food of hundreds and hundreds of thousands of people [is] at the mercy of a few men down there on the Board of Trade" (115-16). Of course, in the end the moralist Cressler himself is dragged to the bottom of the swirling pit. Yet, Cressler's fatal involvement in stock manipulation does not so much bespeak the destructive power of man's gambling instinct as his personal failure to adhere to the new social tenets of political economy and to lead what social reformers of the day called "a sober-satisfying everyday life" (Lasch 6). Furthermore, Calvin Crookes's sneering remark that "it was the wheat itself that beat" Jadwin notwithstanding, Landry Court's assessment that Jadwin "could have won if they all hadn't turned against him that day" clearly anticipates J.P. Morgan's public announcement in 1908 that "old-fashioned economic competition had given way to the spirit of co-operation" (347, 365, italics added). In other words, the primitive naturalistic contention of the "defeated Bull" that "the wheat cornered [him], not [h]e the wheat," is just as obsolete and delusional as his wife's erstwhile hope to attain pure romantic bliss with the effeminate artist Sheldon Corthell (368).
Not coincidentally, the economic "spirit of co-operation," which had originated in the populist movement and began to gradually supplant "classic individualism" at the turn of the century, also undergirds the novel's redefinitions of both woman- and manliness as well as its endorsement of modern companionate marriage (Filene 84). (5) As will be shown in greater detail below, The Pit actively intervenes in contemporary debates concerning the proper, socio-economic relationship between the...
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