Just after her marriage to Curtis Jadwin, Laura spends her days reading and waiting for Jadwin's return home from work, so they can read together in the evenings (189-90). In the afternoons before her husband's arrival, Laura "rarely—for she had not the least interest in social affairs" attends "teas or receptions" (190). What's curious about this fact is that the narrator has spent the last several pages describing Laura's less-than-satisfied attitude toward the monstrous house bought and remodeled for them by her husband. It is, of course, the remodeling that annoys Laura—and it is only after a trip abroad, in which she acquires some furnishings and art for the new home, that she finally "succeeded in fitting herself to her new surroundings" (188). In this moment, The Pit exhibits for us the class differences between Laura's new-moneyed husband and herself (though she's more petit- than established bourgeoisie). So it's no surprise that immediately after this moment we get a comparative analysis of Laura's and Curtis's tastes in novels. What's less clear is why, since Laura doesn't like to be social or to entertain, she cares what her house looks like. But this subsequent analysis is a reminder that Laura has always been a consumer of bourgeois literature and an indication that the observer for whom Laura must make her house tasteful is herself.
Indeed, when it comes to Laura's taste in novels, we see its seriousness in her attachment to "her beloved Meredith" (190) and her settling for satisfaction in Jadwin's "abiding affinity in Howells." But on the contrary, her husband likes Howells only because he identifies with Silas Lapham. For his part, he prefers adventure stories, even Robert Louis Stevenson as long as, when Laura reads to him, she "skips" to the action scenes.
However, Laura's tastes themselves aren't as "refined" as she'd like. When she and Sheldon Corthell, the independently wealthy artist, tour the Jadwin art gallery, her tastes are exposed as undemanding: Corthell infers that she likes the Bouguereau because "it demands less of you than some others. I see what you mean. It pleases you because it satisfies you so easily. You can grasp it without any effort" (218). Instead, he says, he likes a small painting done by a "Western artist" in the US. What he describes is a painting whose subject's meaning is more abstract. The piece features a "little pool, still and black and sombre," and thus Corthell reads the work as "the tragedy of a life full of dark, hidden secrets. And the little pool is a heart. No one can say how deep it is, or what dreadful thing one would find at the bottom..." (219). This type of judgment and the sense of confidence necessary to express it are precisely the privilege of the bourgeoisie. When Corthell later seduces Laura by playing the organ, he reveals just this fact by noting that music is the most spiritual art form, whereas literature (like Laura with Bouguereau) is easy to grasp (222). This is almost precisely Bourdieu's analysis early in Distinction, when he tries to determine the significance of the difference between working class tastes for popular music and bourgeois tastes for "artistic" music, and furthermore, when he identifies the reason for popular tastes for realist art (including fiction) over the more abstract. The more abstract the art, the more "educated" the taste required to appreciate it. Corthell would agree with this term, but whereas he would argue that education teaches subjects how to have taste, Bourdieu shows us that the "educated" are merely habituated in different, albeit privileged (and dominant) ways.
Nevertheless, what interests me here is not that class and taste explain the "two Laura Jadwins" (221) nor her "psychological complexity" which is comparable to "Flaubert's Madame Bovary or Edna Pontellier in Kate Chopin's The Awakening" (as the Penguin cover tells us)—both of which are true enough—but rather the effect on the reader of this exhibition of tastes. What reader walks away from The Pit thinking George Meredith inferior to Archibald Gunter or Guillaume-Adolphe Bouguereau a superior artist or Tennyson's or any artist's value genuinely up for debate? The Penguin edition's editors are even complicit in this legitimizing of judgment, but certainly Norris does a fine job of repeating and (re)establishing legitimate taste. In other words, in describing Jadwin’s gaucheness and Laura’s relative naïveté in artistic taste, Norris refers to a hierarchy of judgment, a hierarchy that must be assumed to be legitimate for the novel’s observations about Jadwin and Laura to work.
