Henry Adams, Frank Norris

Novelists.

The Muckrakers Era.

Social novelists.

Pragmatism.

Jack London.

Henry Adams, Frank Norris.

Novelists.

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.

Дата добавления: 2014-01-06