The Columbia History of the American Novel

turn of the century. Frank Norris and Jack London were deeply influenced by Rudyard Kipling, and themselves spent time in contested colonial arenas of Europe and the United States (Norris in the Transvaal and Cuba, London in the Pacific, the Klondike, Japan, and Korea). More important, they took up Kipling's 'white man's burden,' not simply in overt racism against Asians, Mexicans, and all nonwhites, but by reconstructing American identity as a biological category of AngloSaxon masculinity. They also projected imperial adventures onto imaginary open frontiers of the 'Wilds,' the open seas, arctic exploration, and the primordial beast within modern man. Norris hardily endorsed American imperialism as he equated the Anglo-Saxon inclination to dominate the world (in his essay 'The Frontier Gone at Last' [1902]) with the definition of masculinity: in McTeague (1899), as the desire to dominate women. If regionalists seek primal origins of American nationality in prenational communities and clans, naturalists invent more distant yet immanent origins in biological conceptions of race and gender. Yet their fiction not only celebrates the ascendancy of the Anglo-Saxon male hero but also permits us to view him less as a biological fact than as a social construction built out of anxieties about the claims of women and im-263- migrants at home and colonized people abroad, who threaten this primacy and against whom he is defined. Anglo-Saxon becomes synonymous with American as both the height of civilized development and a form of primitive regeneration that 'forgets' history and social conflict as the basis of nation building.

Norris's and London's fascination with the primordial power within civilized man must be understood in relation to the imposition of civilizing power over people defined as primitive by the developing social sciences. Obsession with the primitive takes two opposing narrative trajectories of degeneration and regeneration. The same process of shedding the veneer of modern civilization can reveal the debased criminal within (McTeague, Vandover, Wolf Larsen), or can reawaken the ennobling heroic Anglo-Saxon warrior (Ross Wilbur, Van Weyden, Scott Weedon). This doubleness in primitive identity turns social difference into inherited biological fact. Yet the atavistic primitive within is also exposed as a projection of the violence of modern society onto an internalized 'other.' The ambiguity of the 'primitive' as a site of either regeneration or degeneration can reflect critically upon the meaning of the civilized, which its boundary is meant to protect.

London's The Call of the Wild (1903) may seem as far away from a national novel, as De Forest imagined it, as the Yukon is from United States borders, and as dogs are from men. But the novel and its companion piece, White Fang (1906), enact an allegory of national development that unites the double trajectory of the primitive as degeneration and regeneration. The debasing bestiality in Vandover and the Brute (1914), where the hero literally acts like a wolf in his insanity, can be celebrated in real animals, who enact a primal violence that regenerates virility. The romance of dogs and men allows the exclusion of women, so intrusive in the narrative of The Sea-Wolf (1904) where the castaway woman mediates and deflects the powerful homoerotic desire between men as a symbol of national unity.

Buck in the primordial wilderness is homesick not for California but for a deeper memory of a hairy wild man, which posits a Social Darwinian origin of the race. In this primal world of violence and the hunt, the dog can nobly cross the boundary between civilization and the wilderness to become a wolf (so debasing to Vandover). Here is a version of Turner's frontier, an originary space producing real -264- Americans. Projected onto nature is a nationalist fantasy. The first dogBuckkills to assume the position of leader of the pack is the German Spitz, from a nation increasingly threatening to America at the time. As the Yukon becomes crowded and domesticated, Buck is tortured by the incursion of a bourgeois family, dominated by a hysterical woman, who receive their natural justice by falling through the ice, 'the inexorable elimination of the superfluous.' Buck is then rescued by the ideal frontiersman, Thornton, with whom he reconstitutes the perfect American family along with an Irish terrier who mothers him and a huge black dog named 'Nig,' of boundless good nature. Thornton embodies the feminine virtue of tenderness along with his unquestioned virility. After Buck proves his love for Thornton by turning work into play in a sled-pulling contest, they light out for the territory before the rest — this time eastward, in search of a fabled gold mine (the dream of wealth as natural rather than social). While Thornton lives like an Indian, Buck lives a similar frontier idyll by running and hunting with a pack of wolves while returning for perfect civility to the man he loves. The end of the novel reinvents the conquest of America — this time as the invasion of Indians who destroy the primal unity between man and beast in the wilderness. Thornton and Buck are not seen as intruding into the Yeehats' prior history, marked only by an arrow in the body of a moose hunted by Buck. When Buck attacks the Indians for revenge, they shoot one another in confusion. Yet their presence serves the purpose of both cutting Buck's ties to civilization and preserving his memory in their myths, while he represents a 'younger world,' prior to civilization.

White Fang is a more overt allegory of evolutionary origins as the wolf-dog moves up the human developmental scale from brutal Indians only bent on survival who domesticate him through terror, to lower-class whites who exploit him for gratuitous violent entertainment, to the upper-class Scott Weedon, who tames and civilizes White Fang with love, and who, like Thornton, incorporates the civilizing qualities shunned in women. Brought back to California, the wolf reaches the height of his civilized career when he recognizes a criminal intruder about to kill a judge, and when he unleashes his primitive killer instinct to tear out the throat of this lower- class criminal, a degenerate beast. The lower-class degenerate threatens the national class structure, which the primordial beast from the wilderness -265- has been trained to protect. More laborious and less compelling than the immensely popular Call of the Wild, White Fang, through its frame that starts with a search party to recover the body of an aristocrat and ends by leashing primordial violence to protect a judge, exposes the deeply seductive call of 'the wild' as the projection of 'civilized' desire.

Amy Kaplan

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Gender and Fiction

In The Responsibilities of the Novelist (1902) Frank Norris explains in 'Why Women Should Write the Best Novels' that women are much better suited to writing great novels than men. First, 'writing is a feminine — not accomplishment merely — but gift.' Moreover, women have the leisure, the right kind of education, and the temperament for novel writing. So they should surpass men at the task.

That they did not surpass men was an obvious source of relief to Norris. Women may have been writing more novels than men, he conjectured, but they were not writing better, or even equally accomplished, ones. Their lives were too sheltered to allow them the kind of engagement with experience — with 'life itself, the crude, the raw, the vulgar' — that Norris considered essential to the production of great novels. Further, Norris believed that women lacked the physical and psychological strength necessary for the creation of great art. The mental strain of writing quickly debilitated them, resulting in 'fatigue, harassing doubts, more nerves, a touch of hysteria occasionally, exhaustion, and in the end complete discouragement and a final abandonment of the enterprise.'

Norris's wishful thinking about women not being able to write great novels and his construction of literary creativity as a virile activity illustrate how entangled the subjects of gender and novel writing had become by the end of the nineteenth century. In fact, even as Norris argued that women could not write great, or even good, novels, Edith Wharton, Ellen Glasgow, Pauline Hopkins, and Kate -267- were doing just that; and they would be followed by writers such as Willa Cather and Zora Neale Hurston. But in 1902 Frank Norris needed to claim that women could not be great novelists. He, along with many of his white male colleagues, felt extremely nervous about two things. First, the accomplishments of women novelists as artists were becoming increasingly difficult to deny. Second and related, the long-standing anxiety among many white men in the United States about novel writing as an effeminate occupation was, if anything, intensifying rather than abating.

For both men and women in nineteenth-century America, gendered ideas about novel writing grew out of and reflected larger political realities. Even before the Civil War, white women and people of color had embarked irreversibly on asserting their right to define themselves for themselves; and in the decades following the war, they continued, despite setbacks, to make dramatic inroads into social, intellectual, economic, and political territory previously staked out by white men as theirs alone. Change and upheaval were ubiquitous by the turn of the century. Immigrants arrived in large numbers from Italy, Ireland, Eastern Europe, and, before quotas, China. African