Presley’s Pauses: Unearthing Force in California’s Land and Water Regimes and Frank Norris’s The Octopus

Abstract

Considered against the backdrop of California’s pastoral obsession to realize Eden, Frank Norris’s The Octopus: A Story of California (1901) reveals how his respective brand of American naturalism interprets the changes to California’s physical space during the 1880s. Through his preoccupation with the pervasive discourse of force-theory that dominated late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century thought and his penchant for drama and romance, The Octopus becomes much more than an epic tale of struggle between the railroad and the wheat ranchers. Rather it explains the various layers of conquest and imperialist discourse within the text which both promote and explain the drastic reengineering of California’s land and water resources during this period. By reading Norris’s deterministic program through an ecocritical lens, we see how the novel sheds light on California’s past, present, and future environmental transformations revealing a Golden State that is more of a tarnished ideal rather than the earthily paradise so many longed to find.