Professional Documents
Culture Documents
No, No— 3 May 1993
Self 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 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
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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 finergrained man” (43). But his allconsuming desire for
possession pushes him to attain his goals, and then grown increasingly disillusioned with them.
The struggle for selfcontrol1 , 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 selfwilled” (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 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
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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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documentation, of social mobility and nobility in the early 20thcentury 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 selfcontrol, 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—selfcontrol” (14).
Despite the words that flow unchecked from his mouth, McTeague lacks selfcontrol
with regard to his professional and personal lives. Consideration of his professional path
illustrates the fullcircle 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 slowminds, 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.
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 typewriting 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
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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 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
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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. “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 (2089).
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, “selfcontrol.” McTeague is in this
case a victim of capitalism and capitalists, who according to Marcus, are “ruining the cause of
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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 whitecollar management class, comprised of intellectual aristocrats, perhaps has grown
topheavy 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
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
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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 and mock
McTeague, but Norris’s “intensely selfwilled” 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. 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
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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.” (2967) 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 telltale 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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