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Perspectives on Harold Frederic's Market-Place
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 December 2020
Abstract
Joel Thorpe of The Market-Place is Harold Frederic's most complex character. Thorpe is portrayed as the psychological product of two worlds, the type of the financial buccaneer, and a moral double. In a full-length portrait, subjective as well as objective, Frederic renders Thorpe's character in dramatic terms and integrates his behavior in public and private life. Most important, he offers a moral probing of Thorpe's type. Frederic judges him morally both through the remarks of reliable characters and through his own ironic implications. Yet both plots, the terms in which the economic battle is defined, and certain sympathetic aspects of characterization all work against the assumption that Frederic wholly condemns Thorpe. If Thorpe is shown to sin according to traditional moralities by fulfilling his impulses, he is likewise shown to sin according to his own understanding when he ceases to exercise his own peculiar impulse to power. The ambiguity of Thorpe's portrait deepens his characterization but obscures the moral statement of the novel. This ambiguity may be explained in part by autobiographical factors and in part by an ambivalence toward the tycoon that Frederic shared with other nineteenth- century American writers. Specifically, Frederic's preoccupation with the type, his questioning whether self-interest and the public weal may both be served by such a figure, and his failure either to damn Thorpe wholly or to show how coexistence between the buccaneer and society might actually occur may all point to an imaginative source for The Market-Place in Emerson's essay on Napoleon.
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- Research Article
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- Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1971
References
Notes
1 The Market-Place (London: William Heinemann, 1899), p. 51. Parenthetic references are to this edition, which is in the Olin Library at Cornell Univ.
2 See esp. Chs. ii, iv, and xv.
3 “Un-Americanizing American Authors,” The Critic, 40 (June 1902), 551.
4 For an extremely interesting discussion of The Marketplace as representing a social judgment on a decadent British society from an essentially American point of view, see Ernest Earnest's Expatriates and Patriots: American Artists, Scholars, and Writers in Europe (Durham, N. C. : Duke Univ. Press, 1968), pp. 231–36.
5 “The Morals of Power: Business Enterprise as a Theme in Mid-Nineteenth-Century American Fiction,” in Essays on American Literature in Honor of Jay B. Hubbell, ed. Clarence Gohdes (Durham, N. C: Duke Univ. Press, 1967), pp. 90–91. Smith's reference to James is to “The Question of the Opportunities” (1898), in Henry James: The American Essays, ed. Leon Edel (New York: Vintage Books, 1956), p. 202.
6 “Morals of Power,” p. 94.
7 “Background: The Businessman and the Genteel Tradition,” in Mark Twain's Fable of Progress: Political and Economic Ideas in “A Connecticut Yankee” (New Brunswick, N. J.: Rutgers Univ. Press, 1964), p. 11.
8 “Morals of Power,” p. 105.
9 “Businessman and Genteel Tradition,” pp. 19–20.
10 “Businessman and Genteel Tradition,” p. 21.
11 “A Stock Exchange Romance,” The Saturday Review (London), 88 (22 July 1899), 107–08.
12 “A Literary Legacy,” The Bookman (London), 16 (Aug. 1899), 136.
13 E.G., his niece and nephew (p. 129), M. Fromentin (p. 215), Lord Chaldon (p. 221).
14 Thomas F. O'Donnell and Hoyt C. Franchere, Harold Frederic, Twayne's United States Authors Series (New Haven: College and Univ. Press, 1961), pp. 137–38.
15 Austin Briggs, Jr., provides a detailed account of contemporary reaction to the moral character of The Market, Place in The Novels of Harold Frederic (Ithaca and London: Cornell Univ. Press, 1969), pp. 175–79.
16 “A Chapter of Erie,” in Chapters of Erie (Ithaca, N. Y. : Cornell Univ. Press, 1956), pp. 9-10.
17 The Economic Novel in America (Chapel Hill, N. C. : Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1942), pp. 111–12, 114.
18 The American 1890s (New York: The Viking Press, 1966), pp. 216–17.
19 O'Donnell and Franchere (Harold Frederic, pp. 135–39) discern a source for The Market-Place in Nietzsche, as seen in Thorpe's embodiment of the will to power, in his lack of conscience, his treatment of other men either as “ 'a means or a delay or an obstacle,' ” and so forth. They suggest Thus Spake Zarathustra as a source for the title of the novel: “ 'When I went among men for the first time, I committed the anchorite's folly, the great folly: I stood in the market-place.' ” It is altogether plausible that Harold Frederic's ideas for the novel grew out of a complex of contemporary intellectual sources, an assimilative process that is characteristic of his fiction generally. I believe, however, that Emerson is Frederic's primary imaginative source. The O'Donnell-Franchere representation of Thorpe as a character built around the concept of the will to power, who is the consistent object of his author's scorn and satire, does not do justice to the complexity of Thorpe's portrait and to Frederic's ambivalent attitude toward his character, qualities that are inherent also in Emerson's portrait of Napoleon.
References in the text preceded by “E” refer to Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Napoleon; or, the Man of the World,” in Representative Men, Concord Edition of the Complete Works, Vol. iv (Boston: Houghton, 1903).
20 “Morals of Power,” p. 91. The quotation from Emerson is on p. 224 of the edition I cite.
21 “Morals of Power,” pp. 91–92.