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s n l jp 2 Frank Norris Frank Norris’s racism, which includes one of the most vicious antiSemitic portrayals in any major work of American literature, has long been an embarrassment to admirers of the vigor and intensity of his best fiction and has also contributed to the decline of his reputation during the past several generations. It would be easy in Norris’s case, given the range and consistency of his racial biases, to attribute this aspect of his beliefs to a personal flaw. But although there may indeed be a psychological misalignment in Norris’s deepest nature that contributed to his bigotry, it is both more feasible and productive to examine the sources and nature of his anti-Semitism in relation to his distinctive historical moment. The salient biographical facts bearing on the sources of Norris’s beliefs are that he was brought to California by his parents in his early teens and that he attended the University of California from 1890 to 1894. He was therefore not only Californian in the usual sense of someone responsive to far western regional concerns but also in that he was exposed at Berkeley to ideas that deeply affected and colored his interpretation of these concerns. Readers of Norris are apt to forget, given the frequent and explicit anti-intellectualism of his literary essays, that, unlike most of the major writers of his period, he went to college for four years and that he encountered among several of his most vibrant teachers at Berkeley a shared contemporary view of the history of human development that tended to reinforce local biases. In order to make clear the connection between the racist threads in Norris’s fiction and the beliefs of his time and place, I first discuss one of his important stories, “A Case for Lombroso” (1897), and then trace back its racist ideas to those he i-xviii_1-90_Pize.indd 15 4/10/08 11:37:51 AM s n l jp 16 . american naturalism and the jews encountered and absorbed during his California years. I then examine the most blatant and troublesome manifestation of these ideas, his anti-Semitism, in Vandover and the Brute, McTeague, and The Octopus. “A Case for Lombroso,” which appeared in the San Francisco Wave in September 1897, is one of a series of stories that Norris wrote for the Wave about the mores of the San Francisco younger set of which he was a member.1 Stayne is a San Francisco “thoroughbred.” California bred and Harvard educated, he has matured into a handsome young man who is well-liked by all “because of his genuineness and his fine male strength and honesty and courage” (127). Put into the racial terms that were central to Norris’s beliefs, he represents the Anglo-Saxon strain in America’s racial past. His forefathers had fought their way from northern Europe to England and then to and across America by dint of strength of will and arms, and in doing so had cultivated as well a passion for individual freedom. On the other hand, because Cresencia is of California Spanish descent, her “race was almost exhausted, its vitality low” (128), a deficiency that makes her oversensitive, willfully self-centered, and emotionally unstable. “The red-hot, degenerate Spanish blood of her sang in her veins” (129). She is, Norris repeats several times, a “young girl of degenerate blood and jangled nerves and untamed passions” (130). In a kind of allegory of the dangers of racial mixing, and, more specifically, of the danger of mixing the robust Anglo-Saxon strain with the degenerate Mediterranean, Stayne and Cresencia destroy each other. He initially cultivates her as a possible conquest, but when he realizes that she wishes to claim him permanently and attempts to end the relationship, she unleashes her anger and passion and draws him back despite his mistreatment of her. At the close of the story, they are locked in a sadomasochistic prison of pain. She takes “a strange, perverted pleasure in . . . submitting to his brutalities” (131), and it becomes “a morbid, unnatural, evil pleasure for him to hurt and humiliate her” (132). “A Case for Lombroso” is irretrievably marred as a short story by Norris’s formulaic rendering of a simplistic racial ideology, but it is this very quality that also provides a gateway to his beliefs in this area. The story is permeated with themes and language associated with racial fear. The most dynamic and fruitful racial strain...

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