I found Vandover’s discussion of each event that “destroyed” his purity to be very interesting the beginning portion of the second half of the novel. Essentially Vandover lists each of the external influences (many of which are people) that have somehow contributed to the growing beastly influence inside of him. He blames his loss of innocence from losing his mother, he blames his father’s death for the loss of an influence in his life that “cultivated and fostered his better self, would have made it strong against the attacks of the brute.” Vandover blames the fact that Turner Ravis fell out of love with him as well as the fact that the public ceased to take interest in him anymore and his lack of religion for the further deterioration of his so-called “higher self”. I find it interesting that Vandover is quick to blame every external influence in his life, but never himself or his own actions for the growing force of the brute inside. He also seems to come to the conclusion that he is unable to save himself without any help. The external influences Vandover describes only served to contain the evil within Vandover all of his life. Is Vandover inherently evil? Does this evil only surface when all that was containing the brute ceases to exist? Or is Vandover unwilling to accept his wrongdoings and blames others for the consequences he now suffers because he is selfish and entitled? Perhaps this begs the larger question of how one must decide to cope with their loss of innocence. Vancouver never quite embraces his good sense of self and his independence until he succumbs to his vices later in the novel. Even then, he is a slave to both his addictions and the actions of the brute (which he becomes increasingly unable to control—to the point where he becomes this brute and crawls on all fours in public).
This discussion of Vandover’s loss of innocence and inherent goodness versus evil and the presence of outside influences may be interesting in light of Vandover’s interaction with the young boy in the last few pages of the novel. The young boy gets attention for his rude comment about Vandover and therefore repeats his action. However, he is scorned by his father and goes back to eating his bread and butter very innocently while watching Vandover work. By this point, Vandover is humbled and working for the first time in his life, trying to make purpose of something and this innocent child is just embarking on his own journey of life. The fact that the child gets attention for his cruelty towards Vandover and is scorned by his father may be some sort of a parallel to Vandover’s own story and how he wrestled with the attention he got from outside influences as well as the scorn and what happened when both of these things were lost from him.
I would also like to contribute to the discussion surrounding the very last scene, the moment shared between Vandover and the boy. While I agree with the other responses, I would also like to add that I view this boy as a representation of the life of excess that Vandover once led – the very life that destroyed him. While the boy is on the cusp of good and evil, I think he is also on the cusp of the life of excess and idleness vs. a life of hard work and calculated spending that the novel as a whole speaks to. The boy stares at Vandover, chomping on bread and butter – something that comes full circle from the beginning of the novel in which Vandover tells the reader of his experience sitting and eating bread and apples at his home. At that point, Vandover had no knowledge that the life of idle pleasure that he was leading would ever be lost, just as the boy has no knowledge of the necessity of work or the concept of “doing without.” Thus, this boy has the chance to be just like Vandover – and if he carries on acting the way he is, he is actually staring at his future self.
I agree with Maddie that the ending of the book with the scene between Vandover and the young boy has a lot of interesting elements. For one, we finally see Vandover working – no longer is he doing something simply out of pleasure, but he performs this menial labor out of necessity. Vandover has lived his whole life by following his own whims, but now he is subject to the whims of the family who call him back several times to fix up particular parts of the house. As Vandover cleans the house, several references are made to the way he has to crawl around in the dust and muck, “You’ll have to crawl way in to get at it,” and “Vandover crawled back, half the way under the sink again,” (155). This echoes Vandover’s earlier “dog” behavior when he would crawl around on all fours. The behavior symbolized his “brute” nature and blind pursuit of his base desires. His “dog” behavior, crawling around on all fours, however was received as humorous, something his friends started asking him to do. Crawling around on all fours while cleaning the house has a very different tone. By the time of the scene in the house, Vandover has completed his fall, he has completely deteriorated. While society enjoys some level of corruption and misbehavior (like young men being expected to go to bars and hangout with loose women) Vandover takes it to far. Perhaps the young boy then represents what went wrong for Vandover. The young boy gets attention for his rude comments to Vandover and perhaps Vandover felt he too received attention for his misbehavior throughout the novel. At the very least, the rewards of his misbehavior, the pleasure he derived, were more powerful than any punishment. As Vandover crawls about at his lowest moment, Norris gives us the young boy who is first rewarded for his rude comment and then reprimanded by his father. For the young boy, this is the beginning of his formation into either good or evil, whereas for Vandover it is seemingly the end.
I think it is interesting that Caroline mentions Vandover taking the vices of men in his society “too far.” There is no question that he fares worse than any of his friends or peers, but Norris makes it clear that there are no innocent characters in this story. The growth of the brute in Vandover, and the subsequent decay of all that is good in him, ruins his emotional and material life, and drives him to fits of terror and madness. Vandover is selfish, undisciplined, and lacks an ability to take accountability for his actions, but so do his friends. It could be argued that there are certainly brutes growing in Geary and his other friends. Geary is hardheaded, competitive, and is willing to hurt Vandover for his own personal gain. He has committed his own brutish acts, yet is able to continue to thrive in society, whereas Vandover is tossed away and crushed by it. I think Norris is grimly arguing that people all have the potential to have the brute within them, and that it can flourish without necessarily ruining their day-to-day lives. People who choose to forget their negative actions or rationalize them can stave off an acceptance that they are bad. Norris’s distinction between good and evil is pretty binary, but even if this is not wholly true, it is easy to see how people fail to accept they are not living good lives. Vandover talks about descending into the labyrinth where the brute lives, and leaving clues about the positive aspects of his life to guide him back out. Unfortunately for Vandover, the death of Ida, the rebuke by Turner, the loss of his artistic inspiration, and the suit against him inhibited him from finding his way back out. It took a few critical events in his life for him to be truly lost. I feel that Norris is arguing, again albeit grimly, that this can happen to a lot of people in his society.
Like Maddie and Hannah, I was also interested in Vandover’s tendency to blame his problems on external factors and his constant resignation to his own impulses. I was particularly struck by the following quote in chapter 16, in which Vandover describes the three sides of his personality as he fights against an oncoming “mania”:
“There was himself, the real Vandover of every day, the same familiar Vandover that looked back at him from his mirror; then there was the wolf, the beast, whatever the creature was that lived in his flesh, and that struggled with him now, striving to gain the ascendency, to absorb the real Vandover into its own hideous identity; and last of all, there was the third self, formless, very vague, elusive, that stood aside and watched the strife of the other two.”
When reading this quote, I was immediately reminded of Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalytic theory of the id, ego, and superego. According to Freud’s theory, our psyche is comprised of three independent, yet interacting, components. The id represents our instinctual urges that are centered around pleasure, while the superego provides our sense of morality. The ego serves as the mediator between the two other agents, encouraging rationality. The beast is Vandover’s id – the impulsive, pleasure-seeking side of his psyche. Whenever Vandover partakes in another activity that he claims to be encouraged by the beast within him, he often notes how he’s chasing after pleasure. Based on Vandover’s description of himself, we are led to believe that the “real Vandover of everyday” is his superego, suggesting that his true self is an individual of high moral standards. Finally, the “formless” side of himself appears to be intended as the moderating ego, although in Vandover, this side of him has taken a passive position, essentially standing by as the id conquers the superego. Norris seems to suggest that our id – our desires and impulses – is ultimately the dominant driver of our personality, and that not even rationality is capable of suppressing these impulses.
Freud was a prominent psychologist in the late nineteenth century, and I can imagine that his theories may have been familiar to Norris as he was writing “Vandover.” One of the important features of Freud’s model of the psyche is that the id, ego, and superego exist at different levels of consciousness. While the ego and superego operate at least partially within our conscious thoughts, the id is entirely a reflection of the unconscious. This ties into our discussion from the other day about the influence of early traumatic events, such as the death of his mother. Freud’s theory would suggest that these memories, if repressed, may influence unconscious thought and his behavior. This idea of the id’s position within the unconscious may also suggest that Vandover does not, in fact, have control, at least not conscious control, over his impulsive, pleasure-seeking behavior.
I too am interested in the quote that Hannah brought up about suicide. I agree that Vandover is prone towards self-sabotage, but I think this self-sabotage is just another addition to the narrative of the uncontrollable brute. It seems that Vandover’s interpretation of his life as a continual suicide is related to the fact that he feels he must always kill one side of himself for the other to live.
In thinking about this, I’ve also been pondering the metaphor of his supposed masterpiece, “The Last Enemy,” as evidence of Vandover’s self-sabotage and self-destruction. He describes the image as a soldier and his horse facing death in a Sudanese desert while waiting to be preyed upon by a hungry lion. The narrator’s description of the brute’s animalistic physicality in chapter 14 seems to be a strong parallel to the lion image: “For now at last it was huge, strong, insatiable, swollen and distorted out of all size, grown to be a monster, glutted yet still ravenous…gorged and bloated by feeding on the goods things that were dead.”While the lion symbolizes the brute, perhaps the “good” part of vandover is embodied in the soldier. Vandover consistently speaks of his inner turmoil as a fight to “save himself,” suggesting that killing the brute is necessary for his survival. The narrator states of the painting, “…as to the soldier, he was as yet undecided whether to represent him facing death resignedly, calmly, or grasping the barrel of his useless rifle, determined to fight to the last.” The one weapon that Vandover thinks he has in the fight is his art. He says of art in the pit of despair, “…This was the one good thing that yet survived. It was the strongest side of him; it would be the last to go; he felt it there yet. It was the one thing that could save him.” therefore, the painting is both a representation of his death and the source of his life, a representation of the parts within himself that are simultaneously intent on destroying each other and intent on living.
I think that Maddie is right in pointing out Vandover’s inclination to blame his problems on others or “uncontrollable” circumstances. He even resigns to his own bad impulses, claiming that the brute takes over. Vandover, the good man, is separate from Vandover the brute, and the prior is portrayed as the victim of the latter. Even in this internal struggle, Vandover manages to externalize his negative actions through the imagination of the brute.
However, in the middle of chapter sixteen, Vandover’s agency in his actions is recognized. After his attempted suicide the night before and change of mind that afternoon, the narrator proclaims, “Was there any need of suicide? Suicide! Great God! his whole life had been one long suicide”. I found this quote to be one of the most interesting quotes of the novel because it changed my perspective of Vandover. I had been sucked into this internal tug-of-war between the good and bad Vandover. The earlier parts of the novel had me convinced that he was really trying to be a “good man” but that these insatiable vices wouldn’t let him free. I felt almost like I needed to root for the good Vandover and hope for his victory. This reference to his life as “one long suicide” made me reconsider his actions as potential circumstances of self-sabotage.
Although it is not clear why Vandover would default to this behavior, it may have to do with a desire for attention as Maddie refers to with the young boy. Rather than being victim to the brute, this quote made me see greater agency in Vandover’s actions. There was intentionality in his attempted suicide, planning how he wanted to be found dead. Likewise, his previous actions may have been more intentional than the reader was led to believe. The lifestyle he lived certainly attracted the attention of his father and others in society. While I fully agree with Maddie that Vandover is quick to blame others for his own mistakes, I think this moment gives a glimpse of a different perspective from the narrator.