Macteaque

The late 19th century in America was a time of technological advances, demographic transformations, and scientific and psychological inquiries of great magnitude. In addition to these new environmental factors, the impact of the publication of Darwin's Origin of Species in 1859 and, later, Freud's writings on human behavior caused disorientation in the sphere of human development. Human beings were now perceived to be subject to many external and internal forces over which they had little control. Indeed, the question of what governs human conduct became centrally important in science, religion, and ethics as well as in psychology.

Such questions were also a major concern for Frank Norris, an American writer of the late 19th century, and especially evident in his 1899 novel McTeague. Throughout the novel, the protagonist repeatedly asks his wife Trina "Who's the boss?" - a question prompted in part by her winning of a $5,000 lottery ticket and played out in McTeague's eventual murder of her. As a Naturalist, and follower of Emile Zola, Norris believed that human behavior could largely be understood in terms of the impact of heredity, environment, and the pressure of circumstance, and that free will or the ability to make choices was limited. What also interested him, in turn, was how such beliefs might affect individuals and/or how such theories might be enlisted to account for the abnormal or pathological in human behavior.

With the question of "Who's the boss?" in mind, my purpose in the following essay is to examine the way that Norris uses this novel as a laboratory for examining the relationship between determinism and responsibility, and how in the process he creates characters who evidence symptoms of what today is known as obsessive-compulsive disorder. In order to foreground both the contemporary relevance and the larger context of Norris's pioneering efforts, I will first briefly...