The Octopus and the Corporation

Monstrous Animality in Norris, Spencer, and Carnegie

Bibliographic Data

ID23705032
AuthorsMichael Lundblad (corresponding author)
Year2013
Pages77-91
Publication date2013-02-07
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeCHAPTER
VenueThe birth of a jungle (SOURCE_BOOK)
PublisherOxford University PressNew York (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199917570.003.0015
OpenAlexW2497802396
ISBN9780199917570
LanguageEN
References cited66

This chapter explores new ways of thinking about the marketplace as a jungle at the turn of the twentieth century. While constructions of the corporation were increasingly framed within the Darwinist-Freudian jungle, many texts at that historical moment actually resisted that discourse, even if they simultaneously contributed to survival-of-the-fittest thinking. Herbert Spencer's influence on Andrew Carnegie's The Gospel of Wealth (1900), for example, reveals how a robber baron's ethic could contain residual Christian elements, as well as emergent jungle discourse, within the context of monopoly capitalism, labor struggle, and elite philanthropy. This chapter also focuses on the ways in which corporate exploitation could still be critiqued as monstrous, rather than “natural,” in works such as Frank Norris’s The Octopus (1901). Norris exemplifies an alternative construction of animality, with the central metaphor of the corporation as an octopus, that does not fit within the discourse of beasts fighting to survive in the jungle of the market.

Aesthetics · Archaeology · Capitalism · Context (archaeology) · Corporation · Environmental ethics · Gospel · Jungle · Metaphor · octopus (software) · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Survival of the fittest · Ecocriticism and Environmental Literature · Geographies of human-animal interactions · History · Law · Philosophy · Travel Writing and Literature