Perspectives on Harold Frederic's Market-Place
Joel Thorpe of The Market-Place is Harold Frederic's most complex character. Thorpe is portrayed as the psychological product of two worlds, the type of the financial buccaneer, and a moral double. In a full-length portrait, subjective as well as objective, Frederic renders Thorpe's character in dramatic terms and integrates his behavior in public and private life. Most important, he offers a moral probing of Thorpe's type. Frederic judges him morally both through the remarks of reliable characters and through his own ironic implications. Yet both plots, the terms in which the economic battle is defined, and certain sympathetic aspects of characterization all work against the assumption that Frederic wholly condemns Thorpe. If Thorpe is shown to sin according to traditional moralities by fulfilling his impulses, he is likewise shown to sin according to his own understanding when he ceases to exercise his own peculiar impulse to power. The ambiguity of Thorpe's portrait deepens his characterization but obscures the moral statement of the novel. This ambiguity may be explained in part by autobiographical factors and in part by an ambivalence toward the tycoon that Frederic shared with other nineteenth- century American writers. Specifically, Frederic's preoccupation with the type, his questioning whether self-interest and the public weal may both be served by such a figure, and his failure either to damn Thorpe wholly or to show how coexistence between the buccaneer and society might actually occur may all point to an imaginative source for The Market-Place in Emerson's essay on Napoleon.