The Octopus: A Story of California

Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1901

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Summary

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Book 1, Chapters 1-3

Book 1, Chapters 4-6

Book 2, Chapters 1-3

Book 2, Chapters 4-6

Book 2, Chapters 7-9

Book 2, Chapter 10

Character Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

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Symbols & Motifs

The Octopus

The sound of the train haunts the very first sentence of the novel. It displaces time, leaving Presley unsure of the hour. The reverberation stands only as a marker of the train’s presence, but this presence never once relents through the course of the story. By the end of the first chapter, Presley has fully characterized the presence with a roiling list of descriptors that emulates the continual churning of the train, as “the leviathan, with tentacles of steel clutching into the soil, the soulless Force, the iron-hearted Power, the monster, the Colossus, the Octopus” (51).

While an octopus symbolizes the insidious and expansive reach of the Railroad, very little of this depiction has to do with the actual animal or what is known of the animal’s behavior. The symbol likely draws inspiration from the portrayals of the Railroad from a magazine from Norris’s youth: F. Frederick Keller’s 1882 illustration “The Curse of California“ depicts a huge octopus crawling across the land, holding in each of its tentacles farmers, shippers, and growers, while at its head sit the Railroad bosses; the beast is tattooed with the words “RAILROAD MONOPOLY.” Scholars speculate that this image was the original inspiration for Norris’s symbol (Brown, Richard Maxwell. No Duty to Retreat: Violence and Values in American History and Society. Oxford University Press, 1991. p. 219). Norris suggests that the octopus is visually analogous to a rail map as perceived by Lyman while in San Francisco, “the center from which all this system sprang” (289). Pondering the map, Lyman traces the branching routes and imagines that “the red arteries of the monster stood out, swollen with life-blood, reaching out to infinity, gorged to bursting” (289). He envisions the totality of the Railroad as “a gigantic parasite fattening upon the life-blood of an entire commonwealth” (289).

Norris was likely aware that octopi are not parasites, nor do they drink blood, but he seized upon an established depiction of the Railroad that spoke to widespread loathing of the entity. Often, the novel’s depiction of the Railroad more resembles a leviathan—an inexplicably powerful and destructive enemy that cannot be reasoned with. Norris thus applied his inclinations toward poetic Romanticism, mining the popular symbolism of the octopus as Railroad monopoly and conflating it with other threatening figures that lurk in the depths and operate in shadows. The metaphor suggests an all-powerful creature whose unimaginable reach is inescapable and whose unbearable grip will never be broken.

The Wheat Cycle

Equivalent in symbolic weight to the octopus is the wheat cycle. Again, Norris makes use of an established symbol—the life-cycle of wheat signifying the bodily death and resurrection of Christ (and the spiritual death and rebirth of Christians)—before adding his own connotations and situating it squarely within the novel’s over-arching philosophy. Father Sarria, speaking to Vanamee, offers a direct source of Norris’s symbol: 1 Corinthians 15:36-44 (144). Sarria even states, “Your grain of wheat is your symbol of immortality. You bury it in the earth. It dies and rises again a thousand times more beautiful” (144). This regenerative aspect plays a particularly strong part in Vanamee and Angéle’s storyline, in which Angéle and her daughter come to embody the cyclical resurrection of the wheat, while Vanamee acts as the inquisitive human mind, awed and only partially understanding the vast natural force that drives the cycle.

Norris develops the symbol‘s scope beyond the purely secular and explores its significance in the lives of all his characters. After Annixter’s long evening of introspection, in which he comes to accept that he can love others, the morning dawns on a field of budding wheat, whose connotations of regeneration suggest how deeply important this self-awareness is: “The change was not fanciful. The change was real” (369). Presley’s first encounter with the grown wheat (after witnessing the League assault the traitor Lyman) embodies a more cosmic sense as an all-encompassing force of nature. Presley is awed by the sight of “a vast, silent ocean, shimmering a pallid green under the moon and under the stars; a mighty force, the strength of nations, the life of the world” (448).

By the end of the novel, Presley boards a wheat-leaden, India-bound boat on its way to quash a famine in India. This final chapter expands upon Presley’s earlier vision and clarifies that the growing wheat, in its regenerative and sustaining aspects, symbolizes a natural force—pure, indifferent, but ultimately benevolent—that envelops all lives and sustains them through to their various ends.

Homeric Formulas

One of the primary characteristics of Homer’s poetry (also echoed by later Western epic poetry) is the use of formulaic descriptors at each appearance of a character or setting. Epithets, such as “gray-eyed Athena” or the “wine-dark sea,” are regularly employed throughout Homer’s work, and scholars believe this repetition served as a memory aid (also called a “mnemonic device”) for the poets who recited the lengthy poems in their oral tradition. Norris borrows this technique by describing his characters with the same phrases, and in the same order, each time they appear. A notable example is Angéle’s “hair of gold making three-cornered the round white forehead” and her “sweet full lips, almost Egyptian” (152), and there is S. Behrman’s “great stomach” and his “roll of fat, sprinkled with sparse hair, moist with perspiration” (66) on his neck.

Norris also appears at first to use this same motif with characters who don’t play a major part in events, or even the scenes they are in. However, each of these characters—“Garnett of Ruby ranch and Gethings of the San Pablo, Phelps the foreman of Los Muertos, and […] Dabney, silent as ever” (507)—play a part in the final slaughter at Hooven’s ranch. Used thus, the technique imbues these characters with heroic significance and creates an atmosphere evocative of the epic tradition.

Hilma’s Appearance and Angéle’s Reappearance

Norris’s characterizations of Hilma and Angéle symbolize different aspects of the growth cycle of the wheat: Annixter’s shifting perceptions of Hilma trace the physical growth of the wheat, while the progressive story of Angéle and her daughter represents the ethereal, cyclical nature of the wheat.

When Annixter first encounters Hilma, she is described as “radiant of youth” (209), “redolent and fragrant of milk,” and “moving in the glory of the sun,” “joyous as the dawn itself” (210). These characterizations emphasize her youth and correspond to the newly planted crop. Later, at Annixter’s barn dance, as the wheat is on the cusp of breaching the surface of the soil, he notices “Hilma had changed […] she was no longer the young girl upon whom he might look down, to whom he might condescend” (251). Hilma’s new maturity broadens Annixter’s understanding of her, and it encourages him to marry her. After they marry and the fully mature wheat is ready for harvest, Annixter notices “[t]he change that had been progressing in Hilma […] now seemed to be approaching its climax; first girl, then the woman, last of all the Mother” (496). Her new mantle of motherhood ties to the bounty of wheat that grows in the mothering embrace of the earth.

Angéle, herself a mother, similarly evokes the deathless cycle of the wheat. While Angéle is tied, originally, to the symbol of the wheat by Father Sarria, the novel compares her to a seed; there is the image of her in her grave, in which the “jealous” earth refuses to “give up that which had been confided to its keeping” (154). The evening the wheat appears from the soil, Vanamee desperately “calls” Angéle to him, and she appears “from the grip of the earth, the embrace of the grave […] divinely pure” (391). Sarria suggests that the figure who appears is Angéle’s daughter, who is also named Angéle, but the narrative leaves this ambiguous. Still, the mere suggestion of Angéle’s daughter echoes the successive generations of wheat: At last, during Vanamee’s transcendent moment at the end of the novel, “Angéle was realised in the Wheat” (638).