Henry Adams, Frank Norris.

By the mid- 1880s, well-educated world of the Boston Brahmins was dead. Rich businessmen had replaced them. This change deeply saddened Henry Adams (1838-1918), one of the youngest members of the Brahmin group. Both his grandfather and father Presidents oh the US. He hoped to be the president too. He moved to Washington D.C. in order to make a career in politics. But all his political plans failed. Instead he wrote two novels. The first was Democracy (1880), a satire on the political and social life of the nation’s capital. His Esther (1884) was about a cultural education of a young woman. Adams was also good at history. He spent 12 years researching and writing his History of the United States of America during the Administration of Jefferson and Madison. (1889-1891). It is both a work of history and a work of art. The author used a poetic style to help his reader to feel the mood of great events, and he tried to give a scientific interpretation of the forces in human history.

Adams is best remembered for his Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres (1904). On the surface, it is a guide book to two famous religious sites. But it is a deep study of medieval culture. The author examines architecture, poetry and philosophy of the 12^th and 13^th century.

In The Education of Henry Adams (1907) he describes his education as a journey. First he is in a search of a career, then he is in a search of meaning in the modern world. Both searches end in failure.

At the turn of the centuries, words and phrases like “uncontrollable forces”, “energy”, and “evolution” were appearing in other novels. Writers were greatly influenced by Zola’s “scientific” study of man, by Darwin’s theory of evolution and by the ideas of the German philosopher Friedrich Niezsche, which attacked Christianity. Writers at the turn of the century were beginning to think about traditional social morality in a new way. Traditional values were based on the idea of the personal responsibility: the individual can and must choose between good and evil. But now writers were asking whether the individual could really make such a choice. When they looked at the many outside forces influencing a person, the area of individual choice and responsibility seemed quite small. Niezsche suggested that there were also other forces which work inside the individual. Each person, he said, has a “will of power”. This “will” is “beyond good and evil”. It is a force of nature, like hunger, or sex.

The novels of Frank Norris (1870-1902) are clearly influenced by this new way of thinking. His characters are often unable to control their own lives. The whole world, natural and human, is a battlefield between uncontrollable forces.

The Octopus (1901) is a novel about a battle between California wheat farmers and the Southern Pacific Railroad. As in The Mc Teage, we see the conflict between the power of nature (the farmers) and the mechanical forces (the railroad). The farmers are defeated by “inevitable” economic forces. In the octopus and then in The Pit (1903), Norris uses wheat as a symbol of life. He makes it almost a religious symbol. In this sense he is different from the “scientific” naturalists. His writing style is also different from that from the other naturalists. Many of his techniques for description (his repetitious and powerful language) seem closer to such romantic writers as Hawthorne.

Jack London.

Jack London (1876-1916), like Norris, was deeply influenced by Darwin’s ideas of constant struggle in nature and the “survival of the fittest”. Not surprisingly, the heroes of some of his stories are animals. In his famous Call of the Wild (1903) the dog, Buck, is taken from his easy life in California and brought to the frozen environment of Alaska. He survives because he is a “superior individual”. In the end he returns to the world of his ancestors. He became a leader of a pack of wolves. Wolf Larsen, the hero of The Sea-Wolf, is not simply a man, he is a superman. The beautiful poetess Maude Brewster becomes fascinated with him after he rescues her and takes her on board his ship. His knowledge of the sea makes him seem like a master of nature. But in the end, even this superman dies. London himself once explained that this point was that a man like Wolf Larson could not survive in modern society.

The laws of nature govern everything and everybody inside or outside society in London’s novels. Sometimes people are defeated by these laws. In his great story, To Build a Fire (1910) a man stupidly goes out into the terrible cold of an Alaskan storm. Since he has matched, he thinks he can build a fire any time. But in the end Alaskan nature defeats him and he freezes to death.

Pragmatism.

The turn of the century was an exciting moment in American intellectual history. American novelists and poets were no longer copying British and European writers. They were now sharing ideas with the whole world. America was about to become an important contributor to world literature. A similar thing was happening in philosophy and sociology. John Dewey (1859-1952) and William James (1842-1910) developed their philosophy of “Pragmatism”. They believed that there are no fixed truths; and that the ideas are instruments which are useful only when they help change society. William James, Henry James’s elder brother, greatly influenced European philosophers with his Varieties of Religious Experience, and especially his Pragmatism. In sociology, Thorstein Veblen made an important contribution to the growing attack on the capitalist economic and social system with his Theory of the Leisure Class. According to this theory, America’s very rich do not produce the wealth of the nation; they simply use it. American economic system, Velben says, encourages competition in making money rather than in making products. After they have made their money, the rich use it wastefully. They buy expensive things in order to show other people how rich they are.

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