Frank Norris 연구 = A Study on Frank Norris

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

Norris was born in Chicago and grew up there and San Francisco.
At age seventeen he acquired a serious interest in painting, and his father took him to Europe to study. The experiment did not last long, however, and Norris entered the University of California in 1890. There he read Zola, Kipling, and Richard Harding Davis, and in 1894 when he went on to Harvard he took with him the beginnings of his novel McTeague. Under professor Lewis E. Gates, who recognized his talent, he worked on this and on a second novel, Vandover and the Brute, though neither was published until several years later. After his year at Harvard, Norris traveled, reporting the Boer War for the San Francisco Chronicle and Collier's. Back in California he joined the staff of the San Francisco Wave, and in 1898 published his first novel, Moran of The Lady Letty. He worked briefly for a publisher in New York and the went to Cuba to report the Santiago campaign for McClure's Magazine, an assignment that left him in poor health. McTeague appeared in 1899, followed by a sentimental romance, Blix(1899), and a sensational story, A Man's Woman(1900), heralded a great Naturalistic trilogy on the production and distribution of wheat; but Norris died in 1902 after an operation for appendicitis. The Pit, the second volume of the trilogy, appeared posthumously in 1903.
Norris's reputation as a major naturalist rests on McTeague and The Oetopus. These books embody Norris's debt to Zela, his attempt to tranfer Zola's literary technique to American materials, and his great contribution to the liberation of the American novel from the vapid sentimentalism of the 1890s. McTeague, the eponymous protagonist of the novel, has returned to the mining country of Placer county obeying his own natural instincts. He is a murderer in flight from his pursuers, seeking refuge in his natural habitat.
In his youth he had been a car boy, working in the Big Dipper mine with his father who, Norris tells us in the opening pages of the novel, for thirteen days of every fortnight was a steady, reliable, shift boss, but who every other Sunday became an irresponsible animal, a beast, a brute, crazy with alcohol.
The characteristics of the landscape of Placer County, California, are broadly repeated within the wider context of McTeague. The same, naturalistic emphasis on conflict and violence is everywhere apparent; action and plot, and even characterization, play their parts in the creation of a grimly naturalistic world dominated by blind and irresistible forces over which man has no control.
MeTeague tells of a brutal, stupid dentist who is pushed from his profession, becomes a drunkard, murders his wife, and is trapped fleeing across the California desert toward the hills where he had spent his youth. The plot is sensational, but the story is told with a care for detail and with a fairly successful use of scientific concepts of heredity and environment. It is also true that McTeague produces outsized, grotesque effects, sensational rather than scientific, and in this respect is perhaps more romantic than naturalistic.
But this is the kind of romance that Norris found in Zola.
In the Octopus Norris attempted an epic portrayal of the operation of economic determinism, such as Zola has carried out so triumphantly in Germinal. Norris's story fails to embody a consistent determinism, and the reason for the failure is that his epic is laid on the frontier and his ranchers, who begin the story as free agents possessed of more than the usual amount of force and self-sufficiency and engage in a heroic conflict with the forces of evil represented by the railroad. The evil of the railroad is personified by the figure of S. Behrman, whose villainous deeds are prompted by an evil within him that is not explained as the product of determining economic pressure. The uncertainty of Norris's philosophical position is brought out by the inconsistency of his economic viewpoint. At one moment the railroad is evil, at another the apathy of the voting public is to blame, at another the evils of competition are justified by the ultimate fact that the wheat is somehow grown and distributed, and at still another the wheat is presented as a force in itself that mystically wills to be grown and eaten.
The accomplishments of Norris should not be underrated. He was a ground braker for the great flowering of American fiction that followed him in the 20th century. Beyond that, his best novels remain readable and intelligent.
For Norris, it is naturalism that above all strives hard for accuracy and truth.
As a pioneer of naturalism in America, Frank Norris made considerable contributions to American literature. He attained a considerable amount of success in his effort to depict human life in terms of naturalism.

목차 (Table of Contents)

• Ⅰ. 서 론
• Ⅱ. 생애
• Ⅲ. 작품분석
• A. The Octopus
• B. McTeague : A Story of San Francisco
• Ⅳ. 인생관
• Ⅴ. 결 론