Vandover and the Brute

Vandover and the Brute

More than anything else, Vandover and the Brute resembles a sort of naturalist retelling of The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. The novel has a pretty standard view of the dichotomous nature of humanity: Vandover has a good side, which is appealed to by art, interested in high class women, and must be prodded into action by external forces in society. He also has a bad side, which is activated by alcohol, looks for sex with lower class women, and is waiting at every moment to spring forth and overwhelm him. It does so in one particularly notable moment: Van takes the mid-class girl Ida to The Imperial, which seems to be some sort of oyster bar/brother, where he sleeps with her (79). This is the seed of his ruination: Ida becomes pregnant, commits suicide, Van leaves town but is shipwrecked coming back, his father dies of the shock of the shipwreck, Van fails to take care of his father’s business well, Ida’s father sues Van and Van’s old friend Geary is the lawyer, but swindles Van by pretending to be acting on his interests, and then Van, swindled, loses the rest of his money gambling before being employed by Geary as a cleaner for some slum apartments Geary owns. The novel’s most interesting sequence by far is its last: Van cleans a vacated apartment while a family moves into it; the wife harshly supervises him, the child mocks him, and the father finally takes pity on him and gives him a quarter (340-354). Furthemore, the novel makes it quite clear that Van could have avoided all of this is someone had pushed him in the direction of his better interests – he is a skilled painter – but in the absence of a positive influence, the brute was destined to win.

Some points of interest. First, the brute in Vandover manifests itself in a remarkably strange way: he literally barks like a dog when the brute is uppermost (citation needed). Furthermore, there only seems to be so much room inside Van’s psyche; after his father dies, he goes to work on his masterwork, trying to redeem himself by virtue of his art, but he finds that his ability to make art has left him – not his hands, but his imagination (225). Vandover is very much like Edna Pontellier; the novel makes it clear over and over again that he has no will of his own but his pliable nature adapts to his environment (17, 120, 207). It is this pliability that allows the brute to become dominant: “he, pleasure-loving, adapting himself to every change of environment, luxurious, self-indulgent, shrinking with the shrinking of a sensuous artist-naure from all that was irksome and disagreeable, had shut his ears to the voices that shouted warnings of the danger, and had allowed the brute to thrive” (215). Perhaps there is an important distinction to make, that Edna was seized by whims and impulses while Van simply adapts to his environment; perhaps not.

Finally, Van seems to have a great deal in common with Des Esseintes of Au Rebours. Just I have suggested that McTeague is a creature of sensuous pleasures like Dorian Gray, just in a lower environment, Vandover too seems to be such a creature. Furthermore, we have a sequence straight from Au Rebours when Vandover chooses rooms, obsessed with their light and windows, and then gives us a lengthy list of the furnishings he intends to put in them, to make them suitable (169-172). Of all the American naturalists, Norris seems the one most in line with the European tradition which unites naturalism and aestheticism, and Vandover is clearly the novel that demonstrates that connection most fully.