Turning the Corner: Romance as Economic Critique in Norris's Trilogy of Wheat and Du Bois's The Quest of the Silver Fleece

In his essay "A Plea for Romantic Fiction" (1901), Frank Norris famously defends the romance against those who conflate it with sentimentalism and argues that the former is not the "conjurer's trick box . . . meant only to amuse," but rather romance is the "instrument with which we may go straight through clothes and tissues and wrappings of flesh down deep into the red living heart of things" (1165). Such a definition not only defends and elevates the romance, but it also opens up and re-imagines naturalism, which has normally been considered this probing instrument used for the examination of the material and cultural forces that act upon individuals. How romance comes to be an instrument of social examination and critique and the effect of such an approach on conventional definitions of naturalism is an issue I will explore by placing Norris's unfinished Trilogy of Wheat (The Octopus, 1900; The Pit, 1902) in conversation with W. E. B. Du Bois's novel The Quest of the Silver Fleece (1911). While these three novels chronicle the devastating effects of economic exploitation, each novel also "fails" in many critical circles because of its reliance on romance. These declarations of failure not only run the risk of narrowly conceptualizing both literary conventions, but they also overlook how the "romance" in these novels is actually a critique of commodity fetishism and reification.¹

In these three novels the romance genre reveals how the forms and objects of commerce invade social relationships and determine human agency, thereby aligning itself with naturalism's focus on the material forces that degrade and demean human relationships, along with the seemingly impossible task of altering and/or reversing these conditions. Only by grounding such critiques in the social realm, which is what romance provides, can we better determine the breadth and scope of the symbolic attribution of power given to wheat and cotton in these novels, the extent to which these commodity values then seemingly strip characters of their agency, and finally, the novelistic conclusions where the characters seem to have no other relation to each other except for the transactions between them; as a result, the romance manifest in these texts comes to achieve naturalist ends.

On the surface, it seems almost antithetical to align the romance with a materialist approach, which in the end will better shape and define the naturalism revealed in these novels. This approach to naturalism—via the lens of romanticism—is one Eric Carl Link pursues in The Vast and Terrible Drama. What makes our projects distinct, however, is that he connects "positive naturalism" with Spencerian utopianism, suggesting that "as evolution progresses and the moral sense develops, evil is slowly but inevitably eradicated" (82). While his approach to Spencer is intriguing, it actually minimizes romanticism's impact because he locates the potential for social critique and improvement as lying outside of this sub-genre.² By contrast, my approach argues the opposite: on the one hand, the humanist potential in the romance—if not romanticism itself—stands in marked contrast with the human degradation we are all too familiar with in Norris' McTeague or Vandover and the Brute. On the other hand, however, these novels constitute but one end of naturalism's spectrum—one that speaks to the manifestation of the "inner beast" rather than the intricate economic webs present in the novels central to this essay. For the romance, it is the individual's imagination that helps him/her constitute reality, because he/she not only perceives the world but also creates it. As an active and dynamic force, the imagination unites both reason and feeling, allowing for the seeming reconciliation of opposites, which is central to the romantic project. This unifying force of opposites underscores Presley's project in The Octopus insofar as he longs to write a great poem of the West: "the great song should embrace in itself a whole epoch, a complete era, the voice of an entire people" (584). Presley's primary lens—if not only...