The Pit (Barnes & Noble Library of Essential Reading)

by Frank Norris, Donna Campbell (Introduction)

Overview

The story of Frank Norriss The Pit could be taken from todays headlines: a businessman begins speculating in the commodities market on a small scale until, overcome by greed, addicted to the art of the deal, and harboring an ever-increasing appetite for power, he gambles recklessly in the market while the fortunes of farmers and small investors hang in the balance. At the same time, his independent-minded young wife, bored with domesticity and feeling abused by his neglect of her, risks her marriage by contemplating an affair with a former suitor. By interweaving the conventions of the business plot and the romance plot in this manner, Frank Norris broke with the traditions of his time and brought a fresh perspective to the American novel.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781411431515
Publisher:	Barnes & Noble
Publication date:	09/01/2009
Series:	Barnes & Noble Library of Essential Reading
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	384
File size:	682 KB
Age Range:	3 Months to 18 Years

About the Author

Benjamin Franklin Norris, Jr., was born on March 5, 1870, in Chicago. Around 1896, Norris joined the staff of the weekly literary and general interest magazine the San Francisco Wave and integrated himself into the local literary community. Besides The Pit, which is part of "The Wheat Trilogy," he is the author of McTeague. 

Introduction

The story of Frank Norris's The Pit could be taken from today's headlines: a businessman begins speculating in the commodities market on a small scale until, overcome by greed, addicted to the art of the deal, and harboring an ever-increasing appetite for power, he gambles recklessly in the market while the fortunes of farmers and small investors hang in the balance. At the same time, his independent-minded young wife, bored with domesticity and feeling abused by his neglect of her, risks her marriage by contemplating an affair with a former suitor. By interweaving the conventions of the business plot and the romance plot in this manner, Frank Norris broke with the traditions of his time and brought a fresh perspective to the American novel. Moreover, in Laura Dearborn and her husband, Curtis Jadwin, Norris created characters at once markedly American and strikingly modern: the late nineteenth-century "new woman" and an equally new figure in literature, the business tycoon. Norris pairs the stress of a winner-takes-all mentality and ruthless Darwinian competition in the marketplace with the inevitable clash of mismatched expectations that both parties bring to a marriage, and, in so doing, raises questions as timely today as they were in 1903: how much must a woman subordinate her identity to that of her husband, and how much must a man preserve the rituals and attentiveness of courtship for the sake of keeping peace in a relationship? Norris's well-researched, intense, and exciting depiction of trading in the Pit is more relevant than ever today when Securities and Exchange Commission rulings on mergers, accounts of insider trading and stock manipulation, and corporate scandals fill the headlines. The Pit provides not only a means of understanding the complexities of such a system but a unique perspective on the intangible toll that it takes on human relationships.

Although Norris' best-known book, McTeague (1899), focuses on a lower-class protagonist, The Pit evokes Norris' own upper-middle-class milieu. Born in Chicago on March 5, 1870, to B. F. Norris, a wealthy wholesale jeweler, and his wife, Gertrude Doggett Norris, Benjamin Franklin Norris, Junior, grew up in the kind of spacious house and privileged surroundings that the book depicts. As his brother, the novelist Charles G. Norris, later confirmed, the characters of Laura and Curtis Jadwin were based on his parents. The Norris family moved from Chicago to San Francisco in 1885, and two years later, Norris traveled to Paris to study at the Académie Julian under Guillaume Bouguereau-the same artist whom Sheldon Corthell, the artist figure in The Pit, dismisses as shallow in chapter 7. Norris' ideas about fiction took shape at the University of California at Berkeley, where he learned evolutionary theory from Professor Joseph LeConte; at Harvard University in 1894-95, where his daily themes for Professor Lewis Gates' composition class later served as raw material for two of his books; and at the San Francisco weekly The Wave, where he worked as a reporter from 1896-1898. Tours as a war correspondent in South Africa during the Jameson Raid in 1895 and in Cuba during the Spanish American War in 1898 provided added experience and allowed Norris to meet other journalists-turned-novelists, such as Richard Harding Davis and Stephen Crane.

It was not until after his return to California, however, that Norris hit his stride as a writer. Recognizing that he had to establish himself before publishing controversial naturalistic tales such as McTeague, he experimented with writing popular adventure stories such as Moran of the Lady Letty (1898) and A Man's Woman (1900), and the courtship novel Blix (1899). The novels on which his reputation rests, however- McTeague, The Octopus (1901), The Pit (1903), and the posthumously published Vandover and the Brute (1914), begun at the same time as McTeague-were written in a more serious vein. With his literary reputation growing, Norris moved to New York, eventually working for the publishing house Doubleday, Page, where he recommended the publication of what would become a classic of American literature, Theodore Dreiser's first novel, Sister Carrie. By 1899, Norris had planned a trilogy of novels, the "Epic of the Wheat," which he thought would be "thoroughly American." As he explained in a letter to the prominent literary critic and novelist William Dean Howells, his trilogy would be "First, a story of California, (the producer), second, a story of Chicago (the distributor) third, a story of Europe (the Consumer) and in each to keep to the idea of this huge, Niagara of wheat rolling from West to East." Always energetic and in the public eye-he also wrote literary essays for the Boston Evening Transcript and World's Work during this period-Norris completed two novels of this ambitious plan: The Octopus (1901), based on the violent conflict between farmers and railroad agents in California that culminated in the Mussel Slough tragedy in 1880, and The Pit (1903), based on Joseph Leiter's cornering of the wheat market and the market's collapse on June 13, 1898, the date of the market collapse and of Laura Jadwin's birthday in chapter 9 of the novel. By 1902, acclaimed as a rising talent in the world of letters, Norris resigned from Doubleday, Page, and moved his wife, Jeannette, and infant daughter back to California to devote himself to writing full time. His plans to research material for The Wolf, the last volume in his epic of the wheat, were cut short when he was stricken with appendicitis, which rapidly turned to peritonitis and caused his untimely death on October 25, 1902.

Appearing serially in The Saturday Evening Post at the time of his death and published in book form in 1903, The Pit was Norris' only best seller, with sales doubtless increased by praise like Howells' tribute "to the excellence of what Norris had done, and the richness of his promise" in The North American Review. Though less well known today than McTeague, the novel enjoyed such wide popularity that a play based on it ran for seventy-seven performances on Broadway in 1904, and Parker Brothers marketed a trading game based on its depiction of the Chicago wheat exchange. Reviewers hailed The Pit as "the skilled work of the mature artist rising at last to fine and triumphant achievement" and declared that "'The Pit' is certainly a great American novel," coming "nearer to setting for the atmosphere of Chicago . . . than anything any other man has written." The claim to realistic representation points obliquely to the literary tradition in which Norris was writing and for which he is chiefly known, literary naturalism. Incorporating into their work scientific advances in the study of genetics and evolution, the naturalists represented human beings in their fiction as experimental subjects, "human beasts" controlled by the laws of heredity and environment. In exploring these principles, naturalistic writers often wrote about lower-class subjects enmeshed in a poverty-stricken environment and acting according to forces beyond their control, including their own passions. During naturalism's heyday from the 1890s to1910, writers like Theodore Dreiser, Stephen Crane, Edith Wharton, and Jack London wrote fiction in this tradition, which had been pioneered by French writers such as Emile Zola. As Donald Pizer has shown, Norris thought of naturalism as a synthesis of the opposing principles of realism and romanticism rather than as a rejection of either. "Terrible things must happen to the characters of the naturalistic tale," wrote Norris in "Zola as a Romantic Writer." "They must be twisted from the ordinary, wrenched out from the quiet, uneventful round of every-day life, and flung into the throes of a vast and terrible drama that works itself out in unleashed passions, in blood, and in sudden death." Norris put these principles into action in McTeague, in which the title character meets his fate through uncontrollable forces such as his limited intellect, an inherited "foul taint" of alcoholism, and an urban environment in which his massive physical strength is a liability rather than an asset; McTeague's wife, Trina, likewise falls through an inherited talent for saving that becomes a pernicious and ultimately fatal form of greed. Norris' achievement in The Pit is to temper naturalistic principles with the trappings of conventional middle-class romance: the novel's naturalism exposes the illusions at the heart of Laura's romantic idealism, yet idealism and the quixotic gestures it inspires help to mitigate the harsh inevitability of the naturalistic environment as when, for example, Curtis tries to help the down-and-out speculator Hargus, whose ruin at the hands of speculators foreshadows his own.

Conditioned to expect naturalism unvarnished by idealism, contemporary critics have been less generous toward the book than early reviewers were, with some mid-twentieth-century critics such as Ernest Marchand finding the love plot, which they saw as sentimental, to be poorly integrated into the business plot, which they viewed as the true focus of the book. More recent critics have seen the two plots as complementary. For example, Clare Eby sees Laura's romantic and humanistic point of view as a necessary corrective to the naturalistic world of business that Jadwin represents, whereas Joseph R. McElrath and Gwendolyn Jones see the self-centeredness in Jadwin and Laura as a "microcosmic embodiment of the macrocosmic malaise" afflicting the American economy. As Bert Bender has shown, when viewed from a Darwinian perspective, both plots also feature natural selection and social competition as central themes. Citing Norris' interest in Darwin's observations of animal courtship rituals and the female's power of sexual selection, Bender discusses these echoes of Darwin in the book, including physical features as the male's strong, prehensile hands and the emotional power of music as factors affecting the female's choice of a mate.

Although the conflict between genres (naturalism and romance) and between genders has fuelled much of the controversy over the novel, other themes and symbols also pervade the work. One central idea governing the entire "Epic of the Wheat" is that the wheat is an uncontainable natural force like Niagara Falls. Norris repeatedly uses river imagery to symbolize the force of the wheat, writing to his friend Isaac Marcosson that the wheat is "benevolent and beneficent as long as it is unhampered, but destroying all things and all individuals who attempt to check or divert it," a sentiment echoed more dramatically in chapter 3:

Wheat, Nourisher of the Nations, as it rolled gigantic and majestic in a vast flood from West to East, here, like a Niagara, finding its flow impeded, burst suddenly into the appalling fury of the Maelstrom, into the chaotic spasm of a world-force, a primeval energy, blood-brother of the earthquake and the glacier, raging and wrathful that its power should be braved by some pinch of human spawn that dared raise barriers across its courses.

In addition to its place as life-giver and life-destroyer, as "Nourisher," "flood," "world-force," and "primeval energy," the wheat also signifies the larger naturalistic concept that human beings cannot control their destinies. For naturalistic writers, the world is composed of uncontrollable forces, whether natural objects, like the wheat, or man-made apparatuses that take on a life of their own, like the railroad in The Octopus or the commodities exchange in The Pit. Indeed, the Chicago wheat pit itself, in reality simply a space for buying and selling wheat futures, also operates on a number of symbolic levels: as the Maelstrom, a violent whirlpool that sucks everything into its destructive spiral; as a hungry animal that demands to be fed "wheat-wheat-wheat"; as an arena of combat where the Bears and the Bulls of the market, in Norris's pervasive animal imagery, fight to destroy each other; as a site of strategic battles for Jadwin, repeatedly seen in military terms as "the Napoleon of La Salle Street"; and as a machine that men set in motion but cannot control as it spits out the husks of those it has ruined, including honest, Lincolnesque men like Laura and Jadwin's friend Cressler.

Norris also fills the novel with allusions to art, music, and drama, all operating on multiple levels of significance. On one level, the motif of drama and performance complements the novel's themes of romance versus realism and illusion versus reality. On another level, the allusions help to establish the conflict between art and business, for, as Donald Pizer observes, Laura's suitors Sheldon Corthell and Curtis Jadwin "symbolize the opposing cultural ideals of 'art' and 'life'-that is, they symbolize the popular myth of the artist as a detached and therefore somewhat feminine observer of experience and the businessman as a vigorous, masculine participator in the struggle for existence." Chapter 1 dramatizes this conflict in the first of the novel's two great crowd scenes, the opening scene at the opera and the scene in the Pit in the novel's penultimate chapter. At the opera, Laura is distracted from the performance by a persistent undercurrent of conversation about a man ruined by trying to corner the market in wheat, a foreshadowing of the end of the novel and of the ways in which real life persistently intrudes on her illusions. After being moved to tears by the beauty of the opera, the symbol of these romantic illusions, she experiences the news of the drama of the Pit in a similar way, as "equally picturesque, equally romantic . . . but more than that, real, actual, modern"-an art of reality that Norris uses to counter the art of romance. Another symbolic use of music, this time with subtle sexual overtones, occurs later as Laura wavers between Corthell and Jadwin. When Corthell skillfully plays the great organ with his "long, slim hands," the organ that Jadwin can operate only mechanically by using paper rolls like those on a player piano, Laura is physically and emotionally transformed, left "quivering and breathless" with tears in her eyes and a new understanding of herself.

Equally sophisticated is Norris' use of dramatic and literary allusions. For example, when Laura dresses up as Athalia from Racine's Athalie to attract Jadwin, the act recalls other instances in which she dramatizes her situation or puts on what her sister calls her "grand manner" to control others. Like Henry James's Isabel Archer in The Portrait of a Lady, Laura sees her life as a process of self-education, yet she shares with Isabel an inability to read the true circumstances of her life and a dangerous lack of self-awareness. Laura's artistic tastes and her talent for self-deception are equally evident in her reading; she admits only reluctantly to reading the popular romances of Ouida and ostentatiously consumes books by fashionably intellectual authors like George Meredith and Robert Browning. She permits herself only occasionally to read a novel by William Dean Howells, whose clear prose and deflation of romantic idealism are, the reader infers, uncongenial to her. Jadwin's tastes, by contrast, are cheerfully pedestrian-he recalls fondly the maudlin temperance ditty "Father, oh Father, Come Home with Me Now"-but he enthusiastically reads Howells precisely because of the realism that Laura disdains: "I know all those people," he tells Laura. The extended allusions at once pay homage to Howells' The Rise of Silas Lapham (1885), another novel that mingles business and romance plots, and suggest Howells' limitations, since Jadwin, no one's idea of an intellectual, is his most ardent fan in the book.

Norris' achievement in The Pit is thus considerable. Although the book eschews the violence and the naturalistic plot of inexorable decline that gives McTeague its power, its incisive treatment of problems in business and human relationships makes The Pit seem both more restrained and more contemporary than its famous predecessor, especially in the treatment of two of Norris' most fully developed characters, Jadwin and Laura. Part naturalistic exposé of business practices and part romance, The Pit looks ahead to other novels ranging from Edith Wharton's The House of Mirth (1905) and The Custom of the Country (1913), Theodore Dreiser's The Financier (1912), and Sinclair Lewis' Dodsworth (1929) to Sloan Wilson's The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit (1956) and Tom Wolfe's The Bonfire of the Vanities (1987). Like these later works, The Pit belongs to a modern literary tradition that explores American business and American marriages as deeply antagonistic yet fundamentally interconnected reflections of one another, a conflict perennially unresolved as men and women still continue to try to keep love alive in a materialistic culture where wealth and power are the measure of success.