destiny in frank norris' mcteague
TRANSCRIPT
Brown ADMNo, No— 3 May 1993Self Control & Destiny in Frank Norris’s McTeague
“Julien’s eye followed mechanically the bird of prey. Its calm, powerful emotion impressed him, he envied such strength, he envied such isolation. It was the destiny of Napoleon, was it one day to be his own?”
—Stendahl, The Red and the Black
Julien’s strength, like Napoleon’s and like that of all other men, is relative to those
around him. The hawk is powerful only in that it can fly above all other creatures.
Its strength is equivalent to its isolation. Loss of either is loss of both. For Julien,
though, strength must be an expression of his control over his surroundings.
Escape is not an option. Strength, really, is the ability to control that destiny, to
bring it upon oneself without reliance on chance or providence. It is with some
telling irony, then, that Stendahl links isolation, destiny, and strength in his novel,
and it is appropriate that in his afterword to Frank Norris’s McTeague, Kenneth
Rexroth posits The Red and the Black as a “precedent” for Norris’s effort.
McTeague is a text filled with characters trapped in destiny who are too weak to
escape or too brutish to change, or even understand, their fate. Nearly all the
prominent characters eventually lose or are robbed of their ability to reason,
which doubles as their means of comprehension and their one link to free will.
Not surprisingly, Norris’s tale ends not with a romantic vision of a diligent but
slow-minded young man who works himself to prosperity, but with the senseless,
nearly absurd, image of a world gone mad, bedeviled by the love of possession and
the drive for control. The characters seek to be great as Napoleon, to be the
masters of their worlds, but their pursuit of such mastery inevitably fails as a
result of their thoughtless, stubborn greed. Norris binds his characters to their
respective class limitations, and in so doing conflates their social strata with their
human identities, but at the same time he is critical of their misdirected ambition
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and their attempts to alter their destinies as members of a certain class. Because
their wealth originated from chance, and not from labor, Norris dismisses his
characters’ forays into higher culture. Norris’s firm generalizations — the Jew is
born into avarice, McTeague is born into brutish stupidity, the old Englishman is
born into complacence — hinder any attempts the characters make to rid
themselves of their respective constraints until those attempts result in madness.
Although he regularly uses stereotypes such as these to emphasize heredity and
environment’s role in determining the fortunes of his characters, Norris does not
attribute their failure solely to these factors. McTeague, for example, is born into
a lower class, but becomes a dentist of sorts, and manages to marry a woman he
thought was “too good for him, too delicate, too refined” and meant “for some
finer-grained man” (43). But his all-consuming desire for possession pushes him
to attain his goals, and then grown increasingly disillusioned with them. The
struggle for self-control1 , in all meanings of the term, becomes for Norris’s
characters a consuming, but finally futile effort.
This is a fundamentally ironic device, if we are to believe Norris’s synoptic
biographer who writes that “Norris was...intensely self-willed” (Norris,
frontispiece). It is evident from Norris’s language and treatment of his characters
that were they properly motivated (as, perhaps, he was), they could solve most of
their problems. But since, according to Rexroth, Norris employs a
“refreshing...moral earnestness” (341) and since, according to the biographer,
“naturalism was...the foundation of Norris’s artistic credo” (frontispiece), the
reader could somewhat safely assume that Norris intended to portray a group of
people whose intrinsic low class and lack of proper direction lead to its downfall
1 Self-control, for purposes of discussion, will here refer to control both over one’s own behavior in particular circumstances and over one’s general destiny. For McTeague, holding back from kissing a gassed Trina would be an exercise of his self-control, as would have been keeping his dental practice. Involved with the latter is a somewhat nebulous goal called “success,” the meaning of which the reader perhaps can infer from Norris’s own life and his tone towards his characters.
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as a victim of “unconquered....savage...indifferent” (293) nature. They are never
meant to find success, and so the work is not, as the synoptician would have the
reader believe, “unsparing in its objectivity” (back cover). It is naturalism, not
realism, and, if Rexroth is right, Norris’s audience should reap some lesson, or at
least some pointed advice, from the novel. Understanding this is crucial to seeing
the novel as Norris’s fictive interpretation, and not just his scientific or journalistic
documentation, of social mobility and nobility in the early 20th-century America.
The novel indicates Norris believed the most prevalent concern among Americans
was control of one’s destiny, control of one’s self. “The masses must learn self-
control, it stands to reason,” Marcus declares. “Understanding never a word” and
not even in control of his own mental faculties, McTeague responds, “Yes, yes,
that’s it—self-control” (14).
Despite the words that flow unchecked from his mouth, McTeague lacks
self-control with regard to his professional and personal lives. Consideration of
his professional path illustrates the full-circle path McTeague and other
characters follow over the course of the novel, and is emblematic of Norris’s
apparent belief in regression to class. McTeague began his life of labor as a boy
working in the mines. It was, no doubt, physically grueling labor appropriate to
the towering and exceptionally strong young man, and it required little mental
effort. This is the kind of work, Norris suggests, in which McTeague belongs.
Strong, slow-minded men should work in such jobs that require strength and slow-
minds, while those of intelligence but weaker frames should confine themselves to
positions of a less physical nature. Interestingly, Norris suggests not merely that
McTeague’s attempting to leave his “intended” position is a difficult and
dangerous enterprise, but also that it is in large part responsible for his undoing.
Had he remained a miner, had he never bothered with silk hats and expensive
tobacco, McTeague would have lived a happier and more fruitful life.
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From his mining job, McTeague learns the dental trade “mostly by watching
the charlatan operate. He had read many of the necessary books, but he was too
hopelessly stupid to get much benefit from them” (6). This is to say that
McTeague is a dentist in a physical capacity only. He has no degree, no diploma
to symbolize his education or intellectual training. He is, to Norris, as much a
dentist as a type-writing monkey is an author. Worse still, McTeague apparently is
not blessed with the mind necessary to a true dental practice; in fact, Norris’s
language indicates McTeague’s status as a true man. Norris presents his
protagonist as a character barely worthy of the title “man.” He is a man as he is a
dentist, i.e., on the physical plane only. “McTeague’s mind was as his body,
heavy, slow to act, sluggish...Altogether, he suggested the draft horse, immensely
strong, stupid, docile, obedient” (7).
Opening his dental business with money his mother left him (6), allows
McTeague to fancy himself a dentist, and by extension, a “success” (7). It is
immaterial to him that his only qualifications for dental practice are having
watched a fake and coming into a small sum of money. He opened his Dental
Parlors, which was “in spite of the name...but one room” (7). McTeague was, in
spite of the name “Dentist,” but a miner, a draft horse. The one possession that
prevents McTeague from complacence is as meaningless to essence of dentistry as
naming one’s office “Dental Parlors.” McTeague does not feel whole as a dentist
until he realizes his dream of having “projecting from that corner window a huge
gilded tooth, a molar with enormous prongs, something gorgeous and attractive.
He would have it some day, on that he was resolved” (8). This proposition
exaggerates signification to absurdity. McTeague believes he is a dentist because
he has a giant (exaggerated) tooth outside his office. That tooth makes him a
dentist; it is the essential, not accidental, feature of his office. The better his
tooth, the better his practice. Notably, McTeague’s labor as a dentist does not
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gain him the tooth. When he finally obtains his giant molar, it is through means
similar to how he originally opened his practice. Through some chance, his fiance
wins the lottery and bestows upon him his dream. The whole process is, Norris
suggests, unnatural.
When Marcus turns McTeague into the authorities, they shut him down not
because he practices badly, but because he practices illegally. In the minds of the
authorities, he is not really a dentist. McTeague reduces the job of the dentist to
one of brute force, not one of finesse. He pulls teeth with only his fingers, he
performs only “passable” bridge work on Trina. “The letter...informed McTeague
that he had never received a diploma from a dental college, and that in
consequence, he was forbidden to practice his profession any longer” (201).
Believing that behaving as a dentist is tantamount to being a dentist, McTeague
cannot understand this mentality. He can control the way he pulls teeth, the way
he uses his physicality to perform, but the mental part of the job is beyond his
control. Again, he falls back on superficialities to qualify his dentistry. “Ain’t I a
dentist? Ain’t I a doctor? Look at my sign and gold tooth you gave me. Why, I’ve
been practicing nearly twelve years,” he argues (202). The notion of real,
objectively judged work, as indicated by a diploma, does not operate in his
outlook. “What’s that—a diploma?” Trina, afflicted by the same blindness, can’t
answer him. Her husband is a dentist because she gave him a sign that said so,
and she can’t explain beyond its physical aspects, just as McTeague couldn’t
define dentistry beyond a behavioral proscription. “I don’t know exactly,” she
responds. “It’s a kind of paper that—that—oh, Mac, we’re ruined” (202) Lack of
any objective qualification as a dentist “ruins” McTeague, but he sees the diploma
only as “a piece of paper.” “I ain’t going to quit for just a piece of paper,” he
laments (205). The loss of his status as dentist is complete, however, when
Trina’s tears wipe away the remaining appointments. “That’s it,” Trina says.
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“That’s the way to rub it out, by me crying on it...All gone” (208). Instantly,
McTeague reverts to his physical stature, the part of himself he can control, as
consolation. “McTeague heaved himself up to his full six feet two, his face
purpling, his enormous malletlike fists raised over his head...‘If ever I meet
Marcus Schouler—’” he growls (208-9).
Abandoning his practice, McTeague works briefly for a surgical instrument
manufacturing company. In many ways, this job is the elimination of the mental
part of his dental practice. He need concern himself only with the most physical
parts of the trade. The tools that do the work, that scrape, build, slice, are what
he must concentrate on, not on the delicate use of these tools, not on talking and
working at the same time. This kind of manufacturing job, were it not so
grounded in precision, would be exactly with what McTeague should occupy
himself. Again, though, circumstances are beyond his control. He is laid off
because “times were getting hard an’ they had to let [him] go” (224). He, a
member of the labor class — the labor mass — is incapable of exercising his will or
his might to secure himself a job on that level. As a dentist, he had some authority
over himself until Marcus inspired the government to step in. In this case, his
employer may as well be his government, and McTeague cannot learn, as Marcus
suggests he should, “self-control.” McTeague is in this case a victim of
capitalism and capitalists, who according to Marcus, are “ruining the cause of
labor” (14).
It is this small instance of McTeague losing his manufacturing job that
exemplifies the trials of labor and the curses of capitalism better than does
McTeague’s experience as a dentist. The white-collar management class,
comprised of intellectual aristocrats, perhaps has grown top-heavy and must cut
excess away from its bottom tier, rather than eliminate themselves. It is at times
difficult to determine exactly how Norris feels about this situation, since by
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Rexroth’s account Norris was “a California aristocrat if there ever was one” (344).
He could believe that his own class was cruelly hypocritical in victimizing the
laborers, or he may have adopted the naturalistic and social Darwinistic approach
he exhibits in other parts of the novel and reasoned that because of their superior
intelligence, and consequent superior class, the managers are justified in
controlling their own destinies by controlling those of others. This feat is one of
which so many of the lower class characters in the novel are incapable. But the
characters of higher class seem able to control their destinies and those others
only by virtue of their being born into that higher class. In some sense, then, they
cannot control their fate any more than McTeague can control his. The higher
classes are bound into that class as much as McTeague is into his. Like
Steinbeck, Norris, Rexroth notes, chose to write about what he didn’t live, about
what he was not a part of — the lives of the working poor in California. In this
way, Norris through his writing denies higher class as the essence of his
character. He has the advantage of the aristocrats who, unlike the lower classes,
can manipulate those around (or below) them to their own advantage, further
securing their own place in the aristocracy. McTeague, however, cannot
successfully mimic the upper class. He is a miner, not a dentist, and despite his
insistence to the contrary, Norris and other members of a higher class such as
McTeague’s employers, can “make small” of him. He has no control over that.
Having lost his job as a manufacturer, McTeague attempts to find a job in
public service as a police officer. Once again, McTeague’s physical prowess is
sufficient, and his friends help him as much as possible, but McTeague lacks
motivation. “If McTeague had shown a certain energy in the matter, the attempt
might have been successful; but he was too stupid...McTeague had lost his
ambition” (235). It is now that Norris seems to become bitterly unsympathetic
toward his protagonist. Earlier in the story, Norris’s narrative would poke fun at
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and mock McTeague, but Norris’s “intensely self-willed” personality turns against
his character. The reader senses that if there is one trait Norris cannot tolerate, it
is lack of motivation. He seems to feel as though a character who has lost his
ambition has lost his vitality, his life, his self-control. Once McTeague decides
that he “did not want to better his situation” (235) McTeague descends into an idle
malaise and begins returning to his origins. He experiences labor vicariously by
watching others work, he lives by watching others live. The difference between
these circumstances, and when he watched the charlatan perform operations is
that this time around, McTeague is even more idle and has no intention of
translating what he sees into an education. He is not learning from what he sees,
he is not working. He “spent the days with his wife...watching Trina at her work,
feeling a dull glow of shame at the idea that she was supporting him. This feeling
had worn off quickly” (235). Trina, though extreme and perhaps marginally
psychotic, is right in telling McTeague that she is supporting him and therefore
has the right to say where and how they will live. Norris suggests that if
McTeague doesn’t like that fact, he should motivate himself to change it. Instead,
“McTeague found interest and amusement in...watching...a gang of
laborers...digging the foundations for a large brownstone house” (235). He gets to
know the foreman well, but never uses this relationship to procure a productive,
physical job for himself. Instead, he ends the day “with some half dozen drinks of
whiskey at Joe Frenna’s saloon” (235).
This kind of life continues until McTeague kills his wife and flees the law.
He eventually finds brief work as (appropriately) a miner. It is for McTeague, the
return to the beginning. He is back where he started, back to the depths of the
earth in a purely physical job intended and designed for those of great strength
and feeble minds. The painting in the foreman’s office, Millet’s “Angelus,” depicts
monumental peasants in a field, stooped over collecting the offerings of the earth.
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This reflects on the foreman’s image of himself, but is ironic in considering the
naturalistic tone of Norris’s novel. The miners are more victims of the mine than
cultivators of it. There is no abstraction in the mine, it is rocks and hammers, no
diploma necessary. The only requirement, apparently, is good hands, no Cornish
ancestry, and a name. The last needn’t even be real. McTeague, back in his
element, went to work “straight as a homing pigeon and following a blind and
unreasoned instinct...Within a week’s time it seemed to him as though he had
never been away. He picked up his life exactly where he had left it the day when
his mother had sent him away with the traveling dentist.” (296-7) Like all his
other jobs, this one has a developed routine to control him. McTeague does not
establish the routine; it establishes him. From the first line of the novel to this
final job, McTeague is steeped in a routine and procedure that allow him to
sacrifice control of himself. He is swept into the tide of what is already
established, and there is no need for him to ponder it. Swing the hammer, mine.
He leaves the mine only when his “sixth sense” alerts him to the nearing
presence of his pursuers. In Death Valley, his routine vanishes. Nothing is
predictable, nothing is superable. He thoughtlessly wanders from place to place,
toting along his tell-tale canary, a sign of his unwillingness to depart from routine,
to depart from his past. McTeague, the fugitive miner and charlatan dentist, ends
his story with a removal from those around him, with isolation, but there is no
strength in his isolation. It is only a sad, dying destiny over which he has no
control.
3085 words
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