Domesticating Naturalism: The Example of The Pit

Abstract

Behind release of new paperback edition of The Pit in summer of 1994 lies a disagreement between editor and publisher over cover art for it. The editor, Joseph McElrath, Jr., originally selected an art nouveau print by graphic artist Alphonse Mucha, perhaps best known for his posters of Sarah Bernhardt. Plate 47 from Mucha's Documents Decoratifs (published in 1902, 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 ornamental border beneath. The woman's breasts are uncovered, one hand rests suggestively on her hip, and she gazes directly at viewer. To left, a bear snarls at viewer (the animal's head is in front of woman's right breast and obscures it). The bear and woman are framed by an ornate, stylized floral pattern which, in lower half, has 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; peacock pattern suggests his narcissistic rival, artist of stained glass, Sheldon Corthell; but focal point is languorous, self-absorbed woman. McElrath selected this image to focus readers of book not on Chicago Board of Trade or Jadwin, but on Laura Dearborn as femme fatale--or so she likes to see herself. Penguin, however, rejected Mucha in favor of a photograph of Chicago Board of Trade. The vintage photograph of the pit is also a vertical composition, top two-thirds showing a vast, hazily-lit room. In bottom third, a huge crowd of men in business suits (and, oddly, at least one child in lower left) look toward camera. Penguin's decision to play up commodities market plot, which I think is unfortunate, encapsulates longstanding critical misjudgment about how The Pit should be read that is 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 place of in naturalist aesthetic is thus--as Penguin's decision illustrates--precarious at best. Turn-of-the-century novels that depict 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 problem with how naturalism has been constructed is that all works of certain authors tend to be interpreted within a framework that is both too broad (in number of novels it seeks to encompass) and too narrow (in issues said to be definitive). Particularly with 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 pages of novels and in events of authors' lives. Because of initial crudeness and startling endurance of critical constructions about gender of naturalism and some of its key players, a number of novels that do not fit mold have been trivialized or ignored.(3) A case in point is reception of The Pit. Frank Norris's final novel has been pronounced a blunder by most of its commentators, but 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. …