Date of Award
1-2025
Document Type
Thesis
Degree Name
Master of Arts (MA)
College/School
College of Humanities and Social Sciences
Department/Program
English
Thesis Sponsor/Dissertation Chair/Project Chair
Melinda Knight
Committee Member
Willard Gingerich
Committee Member
Laura Nicosia
Abstract
During the latter half of the nineteenth century, when railroads were consolidating their control, their executives soon learned their power of controlling rates, and by extension, the entire economy. Dissecting the capitalist machine of the railroad corporations in California, Frank Norris’s 1901 novel The Octopus presents a fictionalized account of the very real circumstances of one fight against the monopoly, the Mussel Slough Tragedy of 1880 in the San Joaquin Valley. This thesis explores Norris’s presentation of the forces that drive humans to lack empathy for those around them as well as the forces that drive others to fight back against a seemingly impenetrable monopoly. The thesis also weighs Norris’s unique interpretation of Naturalism as a synthesis of Realism and Romanticism, as well as Social Darwinism as a vehicle to expose the brutal, unforgiving forces that drive human development.
File Format
Recommended Citation
Miani, Michelle Nicole, ""You Can't Buck Against the Railroad" and the Anarchist Radicals who ceased to be: The Honest, Bleak Portrayal of Social Darwinism in Frank Norris's The Octopus" (2025). Theses, Dissertations and Culminating Projects. 1459.
https://digitalcommons.montclair.edu/etd/1459