The Demands of Time in Harold Frederic's The Market-Place

In the 1960s, a group of critics, including Edmund Wilson, Thomas O'Donnell, Hoyt Franchere, Austin Briggs, Jr., and Stanton Garner, sought to rectify the lack of criticism on Harold Frederic. However, forty years later, this previous revival appears to have had limited results. Only Frederic's 1896 novel, The Damnation of Theron Ware, still draws almost all the critical attention, despite the initial popularity of his final and posthumous work, The Market-Place. In this witty, fast paced, fin de siècle novel, Frederic depicts a clash of social orders. As capitalism advances and the market-place gains dominance, the cultural remains of English aristocracy survive in pockets, at once resistant, moribund, and often absurd. The transition to modernity is not a smooth, linear evolution, but rather, as Fredric Jameson argues, an overlay of different realities, not a simple displacement of one mode of production by another, but a patchy subordination in which older vestiges still remain (95). One way Harold Frederic represents this transition is through competing notions of time; for example, the leisure class, with its conspicuous consumption, idles in gardens and, as it attempts to adapt to the new world, founders under the vigorous demands of clock-time that drive the market-place. Moreover, the uneven process of modernization shapes the characters' consciousness, particularly that of Joel Stormont Thorpe. "Does it take deep intuition to comprehend," asks Karl Marx, "that man's ideas, views, and conceptions, in a word, man's consciousness, change with every change in the conditions of his material existence, in his social relations, and in his social life?" (228-29). A lively response can be found in Frederic's novel, in his creation of protean identities whose confused values—despite the English setting—reflect the tensions inherent in American mythology.

The diversity of critical assessment that plagues Frederic in general also plagues The Market-Place in particular. In his 1988 dissertation, William Jolliff deems "unsettling" Everett Carter's dismissal of Frederic's three English novels, the last being The Market-Place, as "scarcely worth mentioning" while Scott Donaldson ranks the novel "alongside Theron Ware as 'still another, first-rate novel'" (283-84). Such assorted, even contradictory, assessments suggest not only the richness of this long-neglected work but also the exciting opportunity to read it afresh, from a contemporary perspective more attuned to notions of decentered subjectivity. Thorpe is "a villain extraordinary!" declare O'Donnell and Franchere (138)—a Nietzschean superman, exercising his will to power and standing beyond good and evil (135-36). Similarly, for Jean Diane Filetti, "Thorpe is by far the most electrifying, the most powerful, and the most pessimistic of Frederic's creations" (106). On one hand, Thorpe's mixture of strength and philanthropy, according to Jean Franz Blackall, represents Frederic's political beliefs; "Thorpe is Frederic's ideal modern leader," adds Susan L. Albertine (209). On the other hand, Jolliff describes Thorpe as a "madman" and "sociopath" who possesses traits, such as anti-Semitism, that Frederic "despised" (295-311).

These contrasting views are not surprising given Thorpe's ambiguous role as both villain and ambitious underdog who climbs from lowly bookseller to power-hungry philanthropist. The novel begins with Thorpe's return to London after twenty years abroad, having repeatedly failed at his attempts to make quick money as a buccaneer and traveler. In London, he puts together a dummy board of directors and sells shares in Rubber Consols, a company that is and does nothing. When the fake business appears doomed, speculators seek to capitalize on Thorpe's failure by selling short on stocks they do not own yet. However, in a twist that is known as a bear squeeze, Thorpe gathers nearly all the stock himself, gets a corner on the market, and squeezes the speculators (out of his thirst for vengeance, his flimsy anti-Semitism, and also his desire to become a country gentleman). Meanwhile, a slighted member on his board, a couple of his squeezed victims, and a drunkard who actually owns the worthless rubber tree plantation in Mexico that Thorpe sold on the market...