The Incongruence of the Individual and Society as the Provenance of Mental Degeneration in Norris’s McTeague
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This paper analyzes the naturalist imagination of human nature evinced in Frank Norris’s McTeague: A Story of San Francisco (1899), which traces man’s dark instincts to the combination of individual, social, and universal factors. Norris processes the predominating scientific discourses on human nature in the nineteenth century into a more complex form of human saga, portraying the steps by which the societal advancement distorts an individual’s fundamental desire for affection and power, which in turn interacts with their inherited or acquired attributes. This chemistry is crystallized in the depiction of the novel’s titular protagonist, whose innately primitive, literal, and coarse-grained bent is continuously put at cross-purposes with the regulations of a civilized society that revolves around Lacanian signifiers. This incongruence between the society and the individual eventuates in the man’s insanity and degeneration until he is literally pushed to his demise in the midst of the savage desert he hails from. With all due acknowledgement of the evident racist and sexist undercurrents pulsating through the narrative, Norris’s naturalist imagination does have the potential to be revisited today as one of the rare novels that strives for a multi-dimensional explication of insanity and degeneration, the cloven hoof of human nature that has to this day been either disregarded or sensationalized as grotesqueries for frissons in the canon of English literature.
Abstract
This paper analyzes the naturalist imagination of human nature evinced in Frank Norris’s McTeague: A Story of San Francisco (1899), which traces man’s dark instincts to the combination of individual, social, and universal factors. Norris processes the predominating scientific discourses on human nature in the nineteenth century into a more complex form of human saga, portraying the steps by which the societal advancement distorts an individual’s fundamental desire for affection and power, which in turn interacts with their inherited or acquired attributes. This chemistry is crystallized in the depiction of the novel’s titular protagonist, whose innately primitive, literal, and coarse-grained bent is continuously put at cross-purposes with the regulations of a civilized society that revolves around Lacanian signifiers. This incongruence between the society and the individual eventuates in the man’s insanity and degeneration until he is literally pushed to his demise in the midst of the savage desert he hails from. With all due acknowledgement of the evident racist and sexist undercurrents pulsating through the narrative, Norris’s naturalist imagination does have the potential to be revisited today as one of the rare novels that strives for a multi-dimensional explication of insanity and degeneration, the cloven hoof of human nature that has to this day been either disregarded or sensationalized as grotesqueries for frissons in the canon of English literature.
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