Isabella’s Outline

Rather than giving his reader a grandiose, sweeping view of San Francisco, Norris chooses to set his story in the most concentrated urban spaces, shrinking the city into a series of rooms. Almost the entire book happens within a few rooms, and the downward spiral of Trina and McTeague can be traced through their series of ever-smaller and more squalid living quarters. As the walls constrict around them, they become more and more animalistic. Norris’s careful descriptions of walls emphasize how the walls become a cage for the characters, and when characters inflict violence on walls they are rattling the bars of their cage, lashing out against the societal and emotional circumstances that keep them from satisfying their animalistic desires.

For most of the novel, walls are the cage that restricts man’s inner animal. But by the end of the book, McTeague reverses the trope. The brute McTeague escapes his cage (the walls of the city) and unleashes his animal self; the canary he carries is the one glimmer of his “better self,” the caged remnant of his humanity.

  1. THE ORIGINAL DESCRIPTION OF THE WALLS OF THE DENTAL PARLORS
  • There are several windows described, it does not seem too cage-y
  • Lorenzo de Medici print on the wall, which he bought just for the figures
  • One of the first moments McTeague takes concertina out and plays it—canary and man singing together in harmony, no sense of McTeague’s inner conflict between man and animal
  1. TRINA’S CHILDHOOD ROOM IS LIKEWISE A HARMONIOUS PLACE
  • Lots of flowers, very feminine
  • Multiple recurrences of “white” and “tiny” and “little,” also the color green (nature) it’s marrying the natural and the sophisticated/refined
  • Walls “spotted with pink and green flowers”
  • “woodwork gayly painted with knots of bright flowers”
  • described as “his lady’s bower…a little nest” “bower” bauer birdcage, bur dwelling; can mean boudoir but also rustic, woodsy, nature connotations (OED)
  • rather than a cage locking brute nature in, the walls of her room seem to be expressions of comfort with nature, she is at home in nature
  • she also goes on regular excursions into nature (the picnics), no inner conflict between “better self” and animalistic self
  1. THE INTERNAL SPLIT IN MCTEAGUE AND TRINA—IN THEIR FIRST ENCOUNTER, THEY BRING THE ANIMAL OUT IN EACH OTHER. THEIR INTERNAL STRUGGLES BETWEEN THEIR BRUTE NATURES AND THEIR BETTER SELVES WILL ULTIMATELY BE THEIR DOWNFALL
  • This rupture happens for McTeague when Trina comes and is under anesthetic; McTeague’s self splits into the animal and the “better self”
  • This is where he starts acting caged: “gazing bewilderedly about the room” like an animal trapped, looking around its cage
  • Trina also looking around at walls like she’s caged: she’s scared by McTeague, “looked about the room, noticing the stone pug dog, the rifle manufacturer’s calendar, the canary in its little gilt prison, and the tumbled blankets on the unmade bed-lounge against the wall”
  • Wherever there’s a description of a wall, there is almost always also a description of the canary cage (juxtaposition)
  • Described as trapped in love, later as McTeague tries to describe his feelings for Trina to Marcus: “It was like some colossal brute trapped in a delicate, invisible mesh, raging, exasperated, powerless to extricate himself”
  • He’s even uncomfortable/trapped in speech/language, the animal feelings in him strain against articulation
  1. TRINA AND MCTEAGUE’S FIRST ROOMS
  • The framed pictures of the little boy and girl pretending to be grandma and grandpa, mirrors the descriptions of Tina and McTeague as children trapped in their societal/marital roles
  • Their bedroom maintains elements of Trina’s childhood room, again emphasizing that juxtaposition of the child and the marital role:
    • “clean matting” on floor
    • “little black walnut table with spiral legs”
    • melodeon from her childhood home
    • carpet in bedroom: “red and green flowers in yellow baskets on a white ground”
  • wallpaper with hundreds and hundreds of figures (“Japanese mandarins” and ladies, portrayed as “foreign,” “other”) and stork turning away contemptuously (bad sign for fertility)—the walls are ominous, claustrophobic
  1. THE TINY ROOM ON THE TOP FLOOR THAT THEY MOVE TO
  • All color is gone; totally whitewashed walls, no curtains
  • A single window (compare w/ many windows in original dental parlors)
  • The argument about the one room makes them stop talking to each other (emotional walls)
  • Eventually, spots of Trina’s “non-poisonous paint” stain the walls and woodwork, it’s like the room is getting blood-poisoning (as she is, though we don’t know that yet); what’s happening to walls externalizes what’s happening to their bodies
  • Once he loses his job their world seems to be nothing but walls, nothing but obstacles, they’re cramped and trapped in their “hole in the wall” (p. ???) as McTeague describes their room
  • Extremely animalistic description of him as he’s about to hit her
  • His animalism brings out the animal in her: “her ancient terror of him, the intuitive fear of the male, leaped to life”
  • He turns to the wall in his sleep after the fight, it’s at once a turning away from her and they way a caged animal intuitively turns to the bars of its cage, seeking a way out
  • Norris then pays specific attention to the “panes of the single window ran with sheets of water; the eaves dripped incessantly” the window panes—which we have never heard about before—are the human analog to the bars of a cage; Norris plays this up by then immediately describing how “the canary in its little gilt prison chittered feebly from time to time” (juxtaposition of cages again)
  • Further description of degradation of walls, being trapped/confined
  • Constant emphasis of “smallness” of space, McTeague is being “made small of”
  1. CHARACTERS INFLICTING VIOLENCE ON WALLS
  • Marcus throwing knife at wall behind McTeague
  • Zerkow tearing walls down, cutting holes in them searching for gold
  • “They critically compared each other’s bruises, each one glad when she could exhibit the worst” juxtaposed with “Maria showed Trina the holes in the walls and the loosened boards in the flooring where Zerkow had been searching for the gold plate” injuries to bodies juxtaposed with injuries to walls, body of house
  • Residents of apartment building ransacking dental parlors in sale, so only “bare walls… remained”
  1. THE HUSK OF TRINA AND MCTEAGUE’S FIRST HOME WHEN THEY MOVE
  • Trina’s wedding bouquet now dead on wall, echo of the bright flowers she brought to rooms before
  • “barrenness” of walls of dental parlors subtly evokes their childlessness, sense that nothing can grow from them, everything between them dies
  1. MCTEAGUE CAN’T ESCAPE WALLS EVEN AS A MINER
  • On wall of mining office is a telephone, a chromo of Millet’s “Angelus,” and on the same nail a bullion bag and cartridge belt w/ loaded revolver
  • Gold and death hang with the painting, idyllic scene of a couple peasant workers praying over potatoes, the idealized simple life
  • The fact that all three objects hang from the same nail
  • Even the mine is described as having rotting walls
  • Terminus of the road, town called Keeler has a hotel where the objects on the wall include “a chromo with a gilt frame protected by mosquito netting”
  • The chromo itself is in a gilded cage, but now all of a sudden we don’t get a description of what the chromo is whereas we did with Lorenzo de Medici and Angelus
  • The framed—what’s inside the gilded borders—has gone blank and faceless, all focus is on the gilded frame—the cage itself
  1. THE DESERT’S EXPANSIVENESS, WALLESSNESS
  • It’s like a return for McTeague to his original nature
  • The words that have been used to describe him for the whole book are suddenly matched in the landscape
  • His fingers repeatedly described as “prehensile” “brute instinct”
  • Nature as a “vast, unconquered brute of the Pliocene epoch”
  • Sense of returning to ancient instinct, de-evolution, “primeval desolation”
  • We end on the word “prison”

 

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Comments

Isabella:   Yes, Frank Norris is very much a miniaturist,  compressing the lives of his protagonists into just a few rooms.   Your focus casts unexpected light on small details as well as large paradoxes in the novel.   I think you should expand your discussion to include old Grannis and Miss Baker, perhaps dividing the essay between them and Trina and McTeague.   Unlike the latter, this old couple keeps company with a wall between them, united by the wallpaper they share.   They are “walled” characters severely constrained in their conduct, and perhaps surviving because of those constraints.   The canary in the gilded cage, on the other hand, seems almost a mockery of that ideal, as death-haunted as the open expanse of the Death Valley.   I look forward to seeing these different threads being woven together into a meditation on walls and walllessness.       — wd

 

I love the intensity with which you’ve focused on the literal and figurative walls. I think that honing in on this motif is going to be a wonderful way to (forgive the pun) frame the essay. One thing I think is interesting about your outline is how you focus on the contents of the walls–that is, what they hold, and not necessarily what they keep in or out. I think this is an effective way of discussing the walls as individualized metaphors, local to the moment in which we see them, rather than the more general idea of a wall/separation taking the forefront. One question I had after reading through this: What is the implication of Norris’ argument that man can be his true animal self only outside the constraints of the city? Do you see that as a positive? Usually, we think of freedom from constraints as a positive thing–but here, as we can see, it ends in McTeague’s destruction. So is the city a protective force? Does man need to be separated from his animal self? Just a few more philosophical things I’m chewing over. Excited to see this paper!

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