Vandover and the Brute

by Frank Norris, Warren French

Overview

Posthumously published in 1914, Vandover and the Brute is probably Frank Norris's first complete novel, much of it written when he was a student at Harvard in 1894-1895. The subject matter made it unacceptable to turn-of-the-century taste, and when the book finally did appear one reviewer declared that "it ought to have been issued for private circulation only" (Bookman). The setting of the story is San Francisco in the 1890s. Vandover, fresh out of college and the son of a wealthy owner of slum properties, has dreams of being an artist but lacks the discipline to fulfill them. His seduction of a young woman results in her suicide and the death of his own father. Cheated by false friends of part of his patrimony, Vandover gambles away the rest. Finally, as Warren French writes in Frank Norris, "he becomes a bum reduced to cleaning the offal from the slum houses he once owned. His degeneration has also been marked by attacks of lycanthropy, during which he pads around on all fours, naked, howling like a wolf."

Although present-day critics would agree with one of the few favorable early judgments—that "it is a first novel of which any writer might be proud" (Boston Transcript)—Vandover and the Brute has yet to be established in its proper place in American fiction. Warren French's introduction points out that while the novel is usually considered as an early, unrevised example of American naturalism, it needs to be seen now as a principal example of a "decadent" literature that flourished briefly in the United States in the 1890s as the influence of the genteel tradition was collapsing. It presents the portrait of an artistic young man comparable to the portrait of a young matron in Kate Chopin's now much discussed novel The Awakening.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780803283503
Publisher:	Nebraska Paperback
Publication date:	08/01/1978
Edition description:	1st Bison book ed
Pages:	354
Product dimensions:	5.25(w) x 8.00(h) x (d)

About the Author

Professor of English and Director, Center for American Studies, Indiana University-purdue University at Indianapolis, Warren French has written or edited eleven books, including studies of Steinbeck, Norris, and Salinger, and The Social Novel at the End of an Era.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements
Introduction
Frank Norris: A Brief Chronology
A Note on the Text

Vandover and the Brute

Appendix A: Norris, Naturalism, and the Novel

1. Frank Norris, “Zola as a Romantic Writer” The Wave (27 June 1896)
2. From Émile Zola, “The Experimental Novel,” The Experimental Novel and Other Essays (1893)
3. From Frank Norris, “The Responsibilities of the Novelist,” The Responsibilities of the Novelist (1903)
4. From Frank Norris, “The Novel with a ‘Purpose,’” The Responsibilities of the Novelist (1903)

Appendix B: Gender, Evolution, and Degeneration

1. Frank Norris, “Western City Types: The ‘Fast’ Girl” The Wave (9 May 1896)
2. From Joseph Le Conte,  Evolution: Its Nature, Its Evidences, and Its Relation to Religious Thought (1899)
3. From Max Nordau, from Degeneration (1895)

Appendix C: Visual Contexts

1. Luis Ricardo Falero, Witches Going to the Their Sabbath (1878)
2. Philippe-Jacques Van Bree, The Harem Bath
3. Jean-Léon Gérôme, The Great Bath at Bursa, Turkey (1885)
4. Jean-Léon Gérôme, Thirst (1888)
5. Images of Gibson Girls

Select Bibliography and Suggested Further Reading

Editorial Reviews

I’ve been howling like a wolf for years about the absence of a teachable edition of this amazing, just-on-the-verge-of-modern novel. College boys’ drunken revels over a welsh rarebit? Earnest discussions of the moral complexities posed by ‘modern girls’? Gamblers who start acting like living slot machines? Gobbling chocolates in the tub before scratching yourself for an hour? This one has it all. Thank you, Russ Castronovo, for bringing back a text that has never failed to fascinate undergraduates and PhD students alike.” — Jennifer Fleissner, Indiana University

“An accessible edition of Frank Norris’s outlandish and historically significant novel has been long overdue, and Russ Castronovo has made it happen. An embarrassment of riches, this edition will be of tremendous value to scholars and students. Vandover is an exceptional text, one that demonstrates the intersections of modernity, aesthetics, sexuality, and race in such a way as to make it indispensable in any course on American literature and culture. The critical analysis and historical contextualization Castronovo brings to bear on it serve to enrich our understanding.” — Dana Seitler, University of Toronto

From the Publisher