McTeague has had its admirers and detractors since its publication, but even those who praise the novel have had little to say in favor of its biological determinism. In such matters as McTeague's inherited alcoholism and brute- like criminality and McTeague and Trina's sexual natures, Norris appears to be simplistically translating a mix of contemporary pseudoscience and folk belief into sensationalistic fiction. I do not wish in this brief paper to tackle the complex issue of the fictional success or failure of this material. I wish rather to note the various ways in which research in the biological and social sciences in our day tends toward at least a partial confirmation of the biological determinism dramatized in the novel.

All three of the major themes of biological determinism are introduced early in McTeague. Two of these— McTeague's inherited alcoholism and his inherited criminality— are interrelated both in their common emphasis on the genetic transmission of behavior and in their common source in the theories of Cesare Lombroso, the late nineteenth- century founder of the field of criminal anthropology. In the opening pages of the novel, we are introduced to the uncontrollable and violent alcoholism of McTeague's father, who, “for thirteen days of each fortnight […] was a steady, hard- working shift- boss of the mine. Every other Sunday he became an irresponsible animal, a beast, a brute, crazy with alcohol.” As his father's son, McTeague exhibits a similar capacity to lapse not only into alcoholic brutality but also into violence on any occasion when his emotions are powerfully engaged. So, in the infamous scene when he responds sexually to the anesthetized Trina, we are told that “below the fine fabric of all that was good in him ran the foul stream of hereditary evil, like a sewer. The vices and sins of his father and of his father's father, to the third and fourth and five hundredth generation, tainted him” (19).

Norris's accounts of McTeague's drunken father and “tainted” genetic heritage contain two strands of belief. He subscribes both to the widely held folk belief that the propensity toward excessive alcohol consumption runs in families and to Lombroso's elaboration of this belief, one which Emile Zola had indeed already exploited to great effect in his novel La Bête humaine.