Chance, Positivism, and the Arctic in Frank Norris’s A Man’s Woman

Introduction

While scholars of American literary naturalism of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries have successfully broadened readers’ understanding of the role of determinism in naturalist works, lists of naturalism’s definitional traits often pool together three determinisms: environment, heredity/instinct, and chance. For example, Donald Pizer suggests that characters in naturalist works often appear “as though they are conditioned and controlled by environment, heredity, instinct, or chance” (“Nineteenth” 3). Donna Campbell notes that naturalist characters’ “fates were the product of their heredity, their environment, and chance circumstances” (499). Mary E. Papke summarizes naturalism as having “characters whose acts were profoundly conditioned by environment, heredity, biological drives, and chance” (299). Richard Lehan also acknowledges what Joseph R. McElrath and Jesse S. Crisler call this “triumvirate of determinisms” (24): “The naturalistic hero is usually . . . the product of his biological makeup and immediate environment, and the victim of . . . mechanistic forms of chance” (66). In this environment-heredity-chance formula, chance tends to trail behind the other determinisms, falling on the far side of the “and,” or on the other side of the “or.” Perhaps this is because—while environment, heredity, and chance all limit choices and are each variables in Darwin’s theory of natural selection—chance doesn’t quite share the same degree of affinity with heredity and environment as those two determinisms do with each other.¹ Environment and heredity are more frequently concrete and readily recognizable in naturalist works, while chance, on the other hand, can be difficult to locate; environment and heredity are more discernably deterministic, while what Jason Puskar calls “the nonnecessity of chance” can at times make it appear antithetical to mechanistic determinism (41). In short, chance can resist inevitability while environment and heredity seem to assure it.

The first aim of this essay is to investigate the relation of chance to the other two determinisms that commonly define naturalism. I read the Arctic scenes of Frank Norris’s novel, A Man’s Woman (1900), for their illustration of the ways in which chance can both produce and distort environment in a naturalist work.² A Man’s Woman is Norris’s least read and least loved novel, and Norris himself didn’t like it (McElrath and Crisler 332). But Norris must have found its theme of Arctic exploration compelling since he rewrote his short story of polar peril, “The End of the Beginning” (1897), as the first two chapters of the novel.³ As Pizer noted in 1966—a year that saw the Space Race at fever pitch with the last of the Gemini missions and with just one year until the start of the Apollo missions—“Norris could not help being aware of Arctic exploration, which was as much a matter of public interest in the late nineteenth century as space exploration is today, and which involved much the same combination of national rivalry and personal heroism” (Novels 103; see also Mansfield). For A Man’s Woman, Norris borrowed heavily from Arctic expedition accounts he read, including George Washington De Long’s The Voyage of the Jeannette (1884), Adolphus Greely’s Three Years of Arctic Service (1886), and Fridtjof Nansen’s Farthest North (1897) (Sherwood 248; Oehlschlaeger 93). Closely mimicking the fate of the USS Jeannette, A Man’s Woman opens just after the Arctic expedition vessel, Freja, has been crushed by ice and sunk, at 76° 10′ North latitude, stranding Captain Ward Bennett and his crew on an ice floe. Norris portrays the Freja expedition’s grueling retreat south across hundreds of miles of shifting ice floes to escape the Arctic’s double threat of starvation and exposure, all the while being carried farther northward by the current, the same circumstances which the Jeannette’s crew endured.

In the first part of this essay, I suggest that Norris’s image of the Arctic sea-ice as a chaotic environment constitutes what Eric Carl Link calls a “romantic symbol” for the way that environment, and even heredity, are rooted in chance. Romantic symbols, Link has argued, can help identify a text as being a...