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Frank Norris's McTeague: Naturalism as Popular Myth

from Vandover and the Brute and McTeague

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 June 2018

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Summary

Almost all readers of Frank Norris's McTeague bring away from the novel a lasting impression of Norris's depiction of McTeague as a kind of human beast. To cite only several of the most prominent of his animal- like characteristics, McTeague is huge, dumb, slow, prone to violence and immensely strong. Critical attention to this central element of the novel has generally proceeded along three lines.

The first, identified primarily with Lars Ahnebrink in his The Beginnings of Naturalism in American Fiction, names Zola's fiction as the source of Norris's depiction of man as beast. Norris, Ahnebrink argues, adapts in McTeague Zola's theme in the Rougon- Macquart series as a whole— and La Bête humaine in particular— that hereditary defects may cause aberrant behavior, including retrogression to the animalistic. The second approach to the theme, which I myself pursue in my study The Novels of Frank Norris, is to identify the criminal anthropology theories of Cesare Lombroso as an additional source. Based on his studies of violent and professional criminals, Lombroso cited a number of physical characteristics he considered indicative of the born criminal type and located their origin in a damaged genetic background, usually in the form of an alcoholic parent. Criminals, therefore, were an example of atavistic regression in human evolution and exhibited the “stigmata” of their atavism in a number of striking ways, several of which Norris adhered to closely in his depiction of McTeague. A more recent approach to the bestial in McTeague is that of June Howard in her Form and History in American Literary Naturalism. For Howard, the source of Norris's depiction of McTeague as a beast is the fear felt by late- nineteenthcentury middle- class Americans of the lower class and of immigrants. Both groups, she believes, are associated in the middle- class mind with aggressive animalistic qualities because they threaten middle- class values of social stability and order.

My point in this fresh inquiry is not to deny the relevance of these earlier approaches but rather to suggest a wider and broader dimension to Norris's concentration on the bestial in the novel.

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Publisher: Anthem Press
Print publication year: 2018

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