Study Guide to The Octopus by Frank Norris
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Study Guide to The Octopus by Frank Norris

Intelligent Education

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eBook - ePub

Study Guide to The Octopus by Frank Norris

Intelligent Education

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A comprehensive study guide offering in-depth explanation, essay, and test prep for Frank Norris’s The Octopus, a novel based on the Mussel Slough Tragedy of 1880. As a powerful work of fiction, The Octopus tells of the conflict between a railway company and ranchers in a fight for land rights. Moreover, Norris’s novel serves as a great example of romanticism, as he navigates the metaphor between an octopus and monopolization. This Bright Notes Study Guide explores the context and history of Norris’s classic work, helping students to thoroughly explore the reasons it has stood the literary test of time. Each Bright Notes Study Guide contains: - Introductions to the Author and the Work
- Character Summaries
- Plot Guides
- Section and Chapter Overviews
- Test Essay and Study Q&As The Bright Notes Study Guide series offers an in-depth tour of more than 275 classic works of literature, exploring characters, critical commentary, historical background, plots, and themes. This set of study guides encourages readers to dig deeper in their understanding by including essay questions and answers as well as topics for further research.

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Year
2020
ISBN
9781645421313
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INTRODUCTION TO FRANK NORRIS
 
EARLY LIFE
Frank Norris was born in March, 1870, in Chicago. His father was a businessman who provided well for the family and his mother was an actress who retired from the stage when she married. His mother kept alive her dramatic interests by reading to the family from Scott, Dickens, and Stevenson.
As an eight-year-old boy, Norris made his first trip to Europe. When he was fourteen years old the family moved to San Francisco. As he grew older, Norris was expected to follow in the footsteps of his father in business. He was sent to business school where he suffered miserably from lack of interest. He showed some talent at drafting, and finally convinced his family to allow him to attend art school in San Francisco, where he progressed fairly well although he did not evidence great talent.
MIDDLE LIFE
In 1877 his family took him to Paris to study art, as was the custom at that time. He enrolled at the Bouguereau Studio and did rather poorly as an art student. He adventured around Paris with many bohemian characters of the type who converged on the city to study art. He had no responsibilities and no economic problems, giving him great freedom to develop his imagination and exercise his taste for adventure in the exciting surroundings of Paris.
Norris’s father returned to San Francisco soon after the family arrived. Before the year was out, his mother and younger brother, Charles, also returned to San Francisco, leaving the seventeen-year-old Norris in Paris alone to carry on his studies. Led perhaps by a love of romantic literature instilled by his mother, Norris developed a profound interest in medieval literature, notably Froissart’s Chronicles, and in the trappings of the medieval era, armor, costumes, and weapons. His time and effort were divided between adventures with his friends in the city, medieval studies, and a game of lead soldiers, which he had begun with his younger brother before Charles had returned to San Francisco. They invented a war with the soldiers, and Norris became so involved with the medieval game that he named many of the characters and filled in their histories in detail. After Charles left Paris, the game continued by mail. Norris spent little time at the studio, and more time writing. The letters to his brother became very elaborate and he wrote an article on medieval armor which he sent to his mother. It appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle in March 1889.
His father realized that Norris’s art studies were not advancing and ordered the boy back to San Francisco. He arrived in New York with sideburns, spats, walking stick, and all the regalia of a Paris dandy and a trunk full of medieval mementos. In San Francisco he seemed to be at loose ends, having abandoned his war game with Charles. His passion for medieval romance took form in a three-canto narrative poem, Yvernelle.
He attended the University of California at Berkeley for four years, more a social than a scholarly occupation. Having refused to learn algebra, he never received a diploma from the university. He grew tired of medievalism and his interest turned toward contemporary literature. Kipling was his first modern love, and the discovery of Zola followed soon after. He developed a passion for the French naturalist, whom he called a romantic because he selected extraordinary characters and threw them into a terrible environment, full of monstrous powers and influences, with a vague note of terror quivering in the background. He considered naturalism a form of romanticism, a fundamental misunderstanding which he never clarified. He was never able to accept all of the tenets of naturalism, notably its faith in science and the scientific method, and its ultimate acceptance of determinism over free will.
When he left Berkeley, Norris’s family separated, depriving him of his right to his father’s money. He was sobered by the realization that he would have to support himself. In 1894 he went to Harvard to study writing seriously. With few friends and a dislike of the conservative, intellectual atmosphere of the eastern university, Norris found much time to concentrate on writing. He wrote the bulk of two novels simultaneously, Vandover and the Brute, and McTeague.
ADULT LIFE
When he left Harvard, convinced that an hour of experience is worth more than ten years of study, he went to Africa to gain experience. By chance he arrived in Johannesburg just before the Jameson Raid. It was a bloodless revolution, but Norris filled his letters with interesting observations, resulting in a contract with the San Francisco Chronicle to be its correspondent. Suddenly he came down with malaria, and returned to San Francisco to convalesce.
He took a position on the Wave in San Francisco and wrote editorials, reviews, features, sports, and short fiction for it, acquiring a large and useful experience. He took time off to complete McTeague for publication. Moran of the Lady Letty, a short adventure novel based on stories related to him by a local sea captain, appeared in installments in the Wave. As a result of Moran of the Lady Letty, Norris secured a position in New York, working for S. S. McClure.
In New York he had little income and lived in rather uncomfortable circumstances. He met W. D. Howells, the dean of American critics, who praised McTeague, which he read in manuscript.
With the coming of the Spanish American War in Cuba, Norris was sent down to the island as a correspondent, not without a great deal of enthusiasm on his part. After several months in Cuba, Norris was stricken with a recurrence of malaria that sent him to San Francisco to recover his strength. While there he received the first copies of Moran of the Lady Letty, published by Doubleday, McClure, and Company, his first published novel. He set out writing A Man’s Woman, also based on the stories told by his sea captain friend. Much of the horror he experienced in Cuba found its way into this book, and he considered it his worst. In February, 1899, McTeague came out, and another novel, Blix, was accepted for publication. McTeague caused a small tempest, and most reviewers damned the book as immoral and brutal. Howells praised it in his column, and Norris was, in general, pleased with the book’s reception, although it sold poorly.
At this point, Norris conceived the idea for a series of novels “as big as all outdoors.” The first was to be a story of California, which produces wheat, the second a story of Chicago, which distributes it, and the third a story of Europe, which consumes the wheat to avert a famine. Once he had decided on the general direction of his epic trilogy, he began to collect information and incidents. He returned to California to observe and collect data first hand. After selecting the Mussel Slough Affair, an event in the expansion of the Southern Pacific Railroad where seven men were killed over land rights, he researched in newspapers and through interviews until he felt competent to handle the incident as the climax of the first novel in the trilogy. He discovered other characters, like Charles Evans, a train robber, who was metamorphosed into Dyke in The Octopus. He rearranged the geography of California by transferring Tulare to the flat wheat lands in the San Joaquin Valley and calling the town Bonneville. A barn dance and a rabbit hunt occurred while he was there and found their way into two chapters of the book.
After four months of research and note-taking, he returned to New York, where he interviewed Collis P. Huntington, the railroad magnate, to hear the railroad’s side of the controversy. He worked methodically for a year on The Octopus, organizing, summarizing, tabulating, arranging his notes, and creating each of the characters in outline. The great danger, he felt, was to degenerate to propaganda for social change. He wanted to present the truth without bias. It was the drama of the Mussel Slough Affair, the clash between producer and distributor, which attracted him, not its social implications.
Some of the characters he wanted to live, others he wanted to be types, and still others to be symbols. He felt that he must have enough characters to give a cross-section of California in the 1880s, and that their social classes and environments must be shown, along with their motives. The characteristics of many of the characters were drawn from his friends and acquaintances. For example, Mrs. Cedarquist is drawn from the chairman of a woman’s literary society, to whom Norris’s mother introduced him in San Francisco. Angele Varian and her daughter Angele were to be symbolic characters, opposed to Hilma Tree, as moonlight to sunlight, the one mysterious and ephemeral, the other hale and strong.
During the same year, Norris became a reader for Doubleday, Page and Company, which gave him enough income to marry. That summer he read the manuscript of Theodore Dreiser’s Sister Carrie for his company and began a campaign to get it published. His social life became a burden, and he moved to Roselle, New Jersey, for solitude. On December 15, 1900, he delivered the manuscript of The Octopus to his publisher. Immediately on publication of the novel, Norris became famous. For the second volume of the trilogy, Norris moved to Chicago, where he began a study of markets and distribution in much the same way he had researched The Octopus. He found the research difficult and returned to New York without a clear understanding of the business processes. Money was still scarce and he resumed short story writing to pay for his daughter who was born in February, 1902. He also wrote the hasty essays which are collected under the title, The Responsibilities of a Novelist, containing his declaration of faith in literature. After many false starts and painful revisions, he finished The Pit, second novel of the trilogy, and returned to California.
For the third novel, The Wolf, he planned to sail slowly around the world, observing the consumption of wheat, and selecting a small country in which to set the action. Just before they were to leave, his wife came down with appendicitis and submitted to surgery successfully. A month later, Norris felt it. Although his wife and friends feared appendicitis, he refused to go to the hospital. He appeared to improve, but a few days later he was wracked with agony. The doctor operated and found advanced peritonitis, which his body, weakened by malaria, was unable to throw off. He died October 25, 1902, at the age of thirty-two, and was buried in Oakland, California.
NORRIS AND NATURALISM - REALISM - ROMANTICISM
Norris’s understanding of naturalism was faulty and he could never overcome an innate romanticism. In general, naturalism is a school of literature which developed in France with the works of Flaubert, Zola, and others. Zola made the most consistent statement of the objectives of the school in The Experimental Novel. The three basic issues of naturalism are determinism, the influence of environment, and the objective literary style. According to naturalism, all life is governed by impersonal laws, which can be discovered, analyzed, and used in a novel, much the way the laws of physics can be used to repeat experiments, with similar results each time. The great study of naturalists is the environment of man, its influence on the man and his on it. The social milieu is of prime importance, and through close observation of the social milieu and the man, the laws of determinism can be discovered and their effects traced. In the matter of style, naturalism dictates rigid objectivity. Rhetoric has no place. The opinions of the author are superfluous. Only the show of events is important, never the philosophical why. Lyricism is chaotic and untruthful, according to Zola, and a great style is composed of logic and clarity.
In theory, the subjects taken by a naturalist and a realist for a novel are not important, and the literary techniques are very similar. The line of demarcation between the two schools is vague and difficult to trace. In both schools the novelist must not avoid material merely because it is unpleasant to read or to contemplate. Misery and sordidness have their place in life, perhaps even the dominant place. The fundamental difference between the two schools is the philosophic assumption of determinism that underlies naturalism. Determinism removes the element of free will from human conduct and leads to a pessimistic point of view. Realism is a nonphilosophical style that arrives at no conclusion.
Romanticism is opposed to both naturalism and realism by its emphasis on the exotic and unusual, and by its emotional approach toward life. The heightening of emotion found in romanticism is achieved through a literary style which communicates the emotional attitude of the author. The style is consequently opposed to the logic and clarity sought by naturalist and realist alike.
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THE OCTOPUS
AN ESSAY ON NORRIS’S STYLE
DIRECTNESS AND RHETORIC
In his essays on the craft of novel writing, Norris recommends a prose style of simplicity and directness. In The Octopus, he writes a number of passages in a simple and direct style, but very often he slips into a rhapsodic style of rhetorical and “poetic” triteness. His prose style in general suffers from a lack of economy, produced both by his choice of vocabulary and by his typical sentence structure. Very often a simple declarative sentence is weighed down by a string of adjectives, qualifying phrases, oppositions, and modifying clauses. The effect is a piling up of meaning like the building up of earth in front of a bulldozer blade, and the precision of the sentence is sacrificed. Although he is not a consistent originator of striking and clever figures of speech, his prose is occasionally brightened by an especially apt and original figure. He has a tendency to personify massive and powerful forces - and he dearly loves grandeur, like Wheat, Life, People, and so on.
When Norris describes the Wheat, imbuing it with a natural force of its own, he commits the greatest travesty of language. The rhetorical loftiness of those passages is intended to project the grandeur of the natural force, but in general has the reverse effect by tainting the Wheat with a cast of ridiculousness. The over-all accomplishment is trite and repetitious. Norris does not attempt to avoid repetition. Before writing the novel he wrote sketches of the major characters and gave them epithets and mannerisms which he repeats nearly every time the character appears. The purpose of those repetitions is to approach the epic style of Homer, whose characters are always identifiable by a stock epithet. A good example is Osterman’s slit-like mouth.
DIALOGUE
In The Octopus, the dialogue tends to be carefully matched to the charac...

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