Frank Norris's common sense: finance as theatre in The Pit

This article reexamines the meaning of the environment in literary naturalism via an analysis of Frank Norris's final novel, The Pit. Rather than leading to the characters' predictable degeneration, the different locations in industrial Chicago that the novel portrays - including the theatre, the home, and the trading floor - are instrumental in helping or hindering their ability to imagine the new utopian category of a global, rather than a national, 'people'. This aspect of The Pit can be traced to an interest Norris shared with many at the turn of the century in reconciling the Kantian and Schillerian sublime with new information emerging from psychology and physiology about the malleability of the embodied mind. Norris's preoccupation with the way environment restructures sense perception emerges in the text most forcefully in his portrayal of Chicago's Auditorium Theater as a beneficially disorienting space where sound and sense mix together - for instance, in the whispered discussions about speculation overheard but not understood there by the main character, Laura Jadwin. Laura's struggle for mental unity in the face of the sublimity of both theatre and global finance throughout the novel allows Norris to portray speculation as rooted in Kantian 'common sense'. He therefore suggests, in a Schillerian adaptation of the political aesthetics of theatre to the psychophysics of reading, that the broader destructive effects of global finance might be ameliorated by naturalism's 'staging' of a radical equality between producers, speculators, and consumers.