Vandover and the Brute: Nature vs. Environment Analysis

Introduction to Vandover and the Brute

Vandover and the Brute is a novel by Frank Norris, a writer who used his characters to demonstrate how they were influenced and affected by outside forces. Written between 1894 and 1895 and first published in 1914, the novel has become a significant text in modern American literature. It follows Vandover, a main character who slowly leads his life toward inevitable destruction. The book is regarded as a rich and entertaining work about an artist who graduates from Harvard University but ends up in poverty due to bad habits and ill-luck. Much like his portrayal of the protagonist in McTeague, Norris paints Vandover as a deeply brutish individual. Throughout the novel, the main character is shaped not only by his environment but also by the author himself — Norris seemingly offers Vandover little room to progress, reinforcing the impression that Vandover is destined to become a brute. This analysis focuses on examining whether we are victims of our nature or our environment, using Vandover as the central case study.

Close Reading and In-Text Analysis of the Novel

Vandover was a talented artist who could have built a successful career from the outset, but instead went to Harvard as expected by his father and peers. From the text, Vandover clearly enjoyed his work as an artist — particularly his ongoing portrait of a wounded soldier fighting his last battle with a lion. Through his art, Vandover pursued the rawer aspects of life with an apparent intellectual curiosity. During his time at Harvard, he reconnects with two friends from high school, Charlie Geary and Dolly Haight. The brutish dimension of Vandover's character begins to emerge at Harvard through the awakening of his appetite for bodily pleasures. He starts to overindulge in food, drink, smoking, and casual encounters with women, though it is not entirely clear whether he derives genuine pleasure from these habits. His Harvard years are dominated by sustained indulgence in vulgar passions — habits that are partly cultivated through the influence of his peer group. He also begins surrounding himself with expensive possessions he cannot afford, and this self-indulgence eventually damages his academic performance.

After graduating, Vandover develops an appetite for loose associations with women while his friends return to San Francisco, where they spend their days sleeping and their nights carousing. Despite being engaged to Turner Ravis, Vandover begins soliciting prostitutes from a club called The Imperial (Norris, p. 105).

Following his graduation, Vandover fails to assume responsibility for his life by securing work as a professional painter. He is unable to build an independent foundation because of his sense of entitlement and his ongoing reliance on his father's financial support while working on his masterpiece. His situation deteriorates sharply when one of the women he has been seeing, Ida Wade, becomes pregnant and commits suicide after he abandons her. Although Vandover vows to change after this tragedy, the resolution does not last long — a clear indicator of his inability to tame the brute within. Ida's suicide marks the beginning of a chain of events that characterize Vandover's decline from a respectable individual to a broken one for the rest of his life. He subsequently succumbs to a gambling addiction that leads him to squander his prized possessions on unprofitable ventures. While his friends continue to progress and prosper, Vandover loses both his social standing and his material security. The culmination of his ruin comes when he loses everything to gambling, loses his employment, and ends up penniless and homeless in the novel's final chapters. Vandover ultimately surrenders his life to cheap pleasures, idleness, and waste.

Are We Victims of Our Nature or Our Environment?

One of the central themes emerging from a close reading of Vandover and the Brute is the impact of nature versus environment on a person's life. Throughout the novel, Frank Norris explores the themes of habit and addiction in relation to both an individual's innate character and the world around him. He employs a heightened naturalistic style to demonstrate how the brute within and the outside environment together contributed to Vandover's fall from a respectable member of society to a beggar who dies consumed by cheap pleasures, idleness, and waste. Based on the text and Norris's writing style, it is difficult to assign blame to Vandover alone for the chain of events that lead to his destruction. Through close reading, one grows sympathetic toward Vandover because he appears to be largely a product of his environment. Answering whether the characters are victims of their own nature or victims of circumstance requires analyzing the role both the brute within and the surrounding environment played in Vandover's eventual ruin.

Through the very title — Vandover and the Brute — the author already plants the idea that Vandover's character is inherently brutish. In doing so, Norris denies Vandover the opportunity to progress, instead reinforcing the notion of his pliable, corruptible nature from the outset. Throughout the story, Norris portrays Vandover's destructive lifestyle as largely attributable to the brute within, suggesting that his behaviors stem from an inability to tame this inner force. Both Vandover himself and others around him use the brute within as a scapegoat for his failure, without critically examining the role the environment played in his destruction. For instance, when Vandover is reluctant to accept the social roots of his poverty, he examines himself and blames the beast — the brute within — as the reason for his decline. The author insinuates that Vandover would have been defeated even had he fully conquered and suppressed that inner beast (Norris, p. 128).

Norris carefully reinforces the notion that Vandover is a victim of the dreadful beast within by attributing his failures to it at every turn. For example, Norris writes that Vandover reached a point where he felt he was no longer human, believing he was continually sinking into some beast (Norris, p. 204). This old enemy — the brute within — generated the stranger sensations and the appetite for vulgar pleasures that ultimately destroyed him. The author thereby suggests that people are as susceptible to their own nature as Vandover was to the brute within, implying that individuals are victims of their inherent character.

However, a more comprehensive close reading of Vandover and the Brute challenges this interpretation. A careful analysis of the text reveals that the characters were victims of the influences and circumstances of their environment, rather than of some innate nature. Several aspects of Vandover's decline can be traced to what he inherited from his surroundings. The sense of entitlement that drove his overindulgence in vulgar pleasures was cultivated by the false impression of wealth in which he was raised. As a lawyer, Vandover's father used the system to project an image of prosperity that enabled Vandover to pursue art without urgency or discipline. In the novel's opening chapters, it is evident that Vandover was genuinely passionate about art and wanted to pursue it immediately. Yet the circumstances of his environment — particularly the false sense of security that came with his father's wealth — blunted that desire and contributed to his eventual destruction. Rather than pursuing art directly, Vandover went to Harvard because of pressure from his father and peers.

Furthermore, Vandover's development of vulgar passions began at Harvard, which strongly suggests that the environment, not an inborn nature, shaped his behaviors. At Harvard, Vandover slowly permitted his desires to be reshaped by the influences he encountered there. He developed new appetites and destructive habits by absorbing what he observed among young men in the city. Out of curiosity, for example, he exposed himself to the other side of life after midnight, especially in the private rooms of fashionable cafes (Norris, p. 21). Through this exposure, he became fascinated with prostitution — a fascination that gradually hardened into a real passion and slowly displaced his strong artistic imagination. This pattern demonstrates the role the environment played in Vandover's decline: his exposure to illicit behavior was not a product of the brute within but of societal influences. Vandover's world was shaped by a culture of cafes, public amusements, cheap sex, and alcohol that flourished alongside increasing industrialization. Given his strong desire to belong to his community, Vandover absorbed these values and overindulged in them to his own ruin.

The characters in Vandover and the Brute were, therefore, victims of the influences and circumstances of their environment. The idea of the brute within as the primary cause of Vandover's failure is ultimately an invention of the author and of the characters around Vandover, rather than an accurate reflection of what the text demonstrates. Vandover was destroyed by the pressures and expectations of the society around him — a society that demanded people live a particular kind of lifestyle without creating the conditions for them to truly thrive.