Frank Norris' McTeague

Glands, Perverts, and Misers: Economies of Dominance and Submission in Relation to Productive and Unproductive Labor in Frank Norris' McTeague

Michael Bryson

What do glands want?
Quoting from Charlotte Perkins Gilman's Women and Economics, Walter Benn Michaels connects human productive activity with glandular secretions: "human beings tend to produce, as a gland to secrete" (The Gold Standard 3). This production, this secretion, is involuntary, as glands, as far as we know, do not "want" to secrete. The notion of "marking" (taken from Gilman's example of the child who demands a pencil and cries out that he wants to mark) adds volition to the mix, complicating, but not essentially altering, the equation Michaels is establishing between production and self-generation. Together, the paradigms of production as involuntary secretion and as voluntary marking form a picture of production-as-self-generation on unconscious and conscious levels. For Gilman, voluntary marking is part of a project of generating and maintaining a self that is recognizably that of the marker; the marker "wants to make a mark that will be identifiably his, for only then does that mark provide the guarantee of identity he is seeking in the first place" (7). In this context, hysteria, which presents "the threat of losing self-control, or of becoming someone else" (7), represents an uncontrollable kind of production-as-secretion, a production of a self not integrated with, and not under the control of, the conscious identity.
If being oneself depends on owning oneself, and if a "self can only legitimately own itself if it has worked for itself" (10), then production, secretion, and marking are the ways in which we not only produce our selves, but are our selves. According to Michaels, "Producing is thus a kind of buying—it gives you title to yourself—and a kind of selling too—your labor in making yourself is sold for the self you have made. There can be no question, then, of the self entering into exchange; exchange is the condition of its existence" (13). This self that depends on exchange, that has its existence within exchange, is the non-hysterical or anti-hysterical self. The marking, the production, the work of this self in the example of Gilman's "normal child," serves to "provide the guarantee of identity" against the threat of the loss of self, or the becoming of another, unrecognizable and uncontrollable self. Thus a scene of continual struggle is established, a scene in which production is a perpetual vigilance against a kind of second self or shadow self, a self which exists apart from the productive efforts of the conscious self, a self against which this conscious self must be continually re-created, remade, and reproduced as a bulwark, an orderly defense against chaos.

What do perverts want?
In trying to discern Kraft-Ebbing's answer to the above question, Michaels cites the sex researcher's distinction between "sexual bondage" and "masochism." While both involve the "unconditioned subjection of the person affected," sexual bondage involves a motivation to submit out of "fear of losing the companion and the desire to keep him content," and masochism is motivated "only by the love of submission" (118). "The woman in bondage puts up with the 'tyranny' of her lover in order to 'obtain or retain possession of him," while the masochist's "only motive is the 'charm of the tyranny'' (118). The appeal of masochism is the appeal of being owned; however, this is not the owning of the productive and producing self by the productive and producing self, but the wholesale transference of the self's title to another. Abandoning the producing self clears the way for the hysterical, second, or shadow self. This is the self that Trina experiences as the "second self that had wakened within her, and that shouted and clamored for recognition" (McTeague 88), the "woman within her [that] suddenly awoke" (88).
In calling McTeague "the first representation of masochism in American literature" (119), Michaels claims that Trina takes "an explicitly erotic pleasure" in McTeague's grinding of her fingertips between his teeth. "In some strange, inexplicable way this brutality made Trina all the more affectionate; aroused in her a morbid, unwholesome love of submission, a strange, unnatural pleasure in yielding, in surrendering herself to the will of an irresistible, virile power" (McTeague 309, 310). While Michaels is right to point to the numerous instances in the novel where Trina's attraction to submission is described, it should be noted that Trina's submission to McTeague is hardly unconditioned in the sense of Kraft-Ebbing's definition of masochism. The question becomes, then, is Trina purely a masochist? Is Trina motivated purely by " a morbid, unwholesome love of submission"? Is the balance of power in this novel simply one of McTeague's dominance and Trina's submission? An attempt to answer these questions requires a return to the issue of production, specifically the ways in which McTeague and Trina produce their selves.

McTeague is introduced to the reader as "a young giant . . . blond . . . immense . . . heavy." He is described in terms of a "draught horse, immensely strong, stupid, docile, obedient" (McTeague 3). The stupidity, docility, and obedience of this blond beast suggest his own tendency to submissiveness, a quality that seems to rule him except in moments of violent passion. McTeague achieves his identity, his self, through his dentistry practice, often being referred to in the novel simply as "the dentist." Still, there is a barely suppressed savagery attributed to McTeague, a bestial quality seen in the numerous theriomorphic images used in describing his movements. After finishing a beer, McTeague "Bull-like . . . heaved himself laboriously up" (5); "the animal in the man stirred and woke" (30) while Trina lay in his dentist's chair. This repressed animality is presented as a struggle between two selves: "Within him, a certain second self, another better McTeague rose with the brute; both were strong, with the crude strength of the man himself. The two were at grapples . . . . It was the old battle, old as the world, wide as the world—the sudden panther leap of the animal, lips drawn, fangs aflash, hideous, monstrous, not to be resisted, and the simultaneous arousing of the other man, the better self that cries, 'Down, down,' without knowing why; that grips the monster; that fights to strangle it, to thrust it down and back" (30). The "better" self, the self that—in Michaels' terms—"can only legitimately own itself if it has worked for itself," is engaged here in a struggle to "provide the guarantee of identity"—McTeague's identity as "the dentist," and, more broadly, his identity as human—against the threat of the loss of this self, the submergence into the barely repressed animal self, the hideous, monstrous panther.
McTeague's work as a dentist, while it allows him to be productive in Michael's sense of labor-as-self-purchase, falls into the category of what Adam Smith refers to as "unproductive labour" (The Wealth of Nations Bk II, Ch 3, p 142):

There is one sort of labour which adds to the value of the subject upon which it is bestowed: there is another which has no such effect. The former, as it produces a value, may be called productive; the latter, unproductive labour. Thus the labour of a manufacturer adds, generally, to the value of the materials which he works upon, that of his own maintenance, and of his master's profit. The labour of a menial servant, on the contrary, adds to the value of nothing . . . . The labour of the menial servant . . . does not fix or realize itself in any particular subject or vendible commodity. His services generally perish in the very instant of their performance, and seldom leave any trace or value behind them for which an equal quantity of service could afterwards be procured. (142, 143)

As a dentist, McTeague is hardly a "menial servant" in the sense Smith describes here. There is, despite his lack of a diploma, and apparent tendency toward bungling—as evidenced by his difficulties with Trina's operation: "He bungled it considerably, but in the end he succeeded passably well" (McTeague 26)—a skill involved in McTeague's labor. His labor does not, however, produce any vendible commodity, in Smith's sense:

The labour of some of the most respectable orders in the society is, like that of the menial servants, unproductive of any value, and does not fix or realize itself in any permanent subject; or vendible commodity . . . . In the same class must be ranked, some both of the gravest and most important, and some of the most frivolous professions: churchmen, lawyers, physicians, men of letters of all kinds; players, buffoons, musicians, opera-singers, opera-dancers, etc. The labour of the meanest of these has a certain value, regulated by the very same principles which regulate that of every other sort of labour; and that of the noblest and most useful, produces nothing which could afterwards purchase or procure an equal quantity of labour. Like the declamation of the actor, the harangue of the orator, or the tune of the musician, the work of all of them perishes in the very instant of its production. (142,143)

As McTeague produces nothing tangible with his labor—in terms of producing something which could afterwards "procure an equal quantity of labour," his hold on self-production, or self-purchase in Michael's sense, seems tenuous even at this early point in the novel.
Trina is introduced as almost selfless, "the woman in her was not yet awakened; she was yet, as one might say, without sex" (23). She has, at best, a weak self in Michaels' and Gilman's terms, because, as yet, she does not produce, she does not mark. The "Woman" that awakes in her is the "second self," that which belongs to McTeague "body and soul, for life or death" (89). Until the day on which her "second self," her submissive self, had awakened, "Trina had lived her life with as little self-consciousness as a tree" (88). Trina thus fits the Kraft-Ebbing definition of masochism to the degree that she submits to being owned, and her submission is, so far, unconditioned. The pictures of McTeague as producer of his own—however tenuous—self and as owner of Trina, and of Trina as submissive and owned self are clear to this point. It is after this point that the pictures become muddled, and Michaels' analysis becomes less cogent than it might have seemed in the beginning.

        The winning of the five thousand dollars immediately changes, however subtly, the balance of power, the relation of owner and owned, between McTeague and Trina. From the beginning, the five thousand dollars is clearly Trina's money, placing that money, as Michaels points out, outside of the already-established dynamic of McTeague as owner and Trina as owned: "The contradiction, then, is that Trina belongs to McTeague but her money doesn't . . . . The simultaneous desires to own and to be owned constitute the emotional paradox Norris sets himself to elaborate in McTeague" (The Gold Standard 123). Michaels, curiously, leaves McTeague at this point, and sets off into an analysis of Uncle Tom's Cabin and Leopold von Sacher-Masoch's Venus in Furs. The dynamic of owning and being owned may indeed be "vividly dramatized in the perverse reading of Uncle Tom's Cabin" (123) with which Michaels begins his essay, but despite the lack of a flashy anecdote describing a reader's urge to masturbate while reading McTeague, Norris's novel sketches a detailed portrait of owning and being owned, of dominance and submission. Contrary to Michaels' reading which seems to argue that the simultaneity of owning and being owned is limited, for Trina, to her self and her money, I argue that while Trina has submitted to McTeague, she also owns McTeague. Trina's ownership goes far beyond the matter of five thousand dollars.
        To demonstrate this point, it is necessary to return to an earlier point: "Producing . . . gives you title to yourself . . . your labor in making yourself is sold for the self you have made." (The Gold Standard 13). Up until Trina's winning of the five thousand dollars, McTeague is the only one of the pair presented as engaging in fiscally productive labor (if unproductive in Smith's sense of producing a vendible commodity); he is "the dentist," a title that both describes his labor and defines his identity. He is lacking, however, the symbol of his labor, of his self—the gilded tooth. This tooth, this simultaneous symbolic and concrete expression of his self, is his "one unsatisfied longing" (McTeague 131). Trina, on the other hand, is presented for the first time as producing, as marking: "Trina's winning would bring in twenty-five dollars a month. But, besides this, Trina had her own little trade. She made Noah's ark animals for Uncle Oelbermann's store" (133). Trina suddenly appears as the fiscally dominant partner; her productivity, her marking, is taking place on two fronts—she is both capitalist investor and wage laborer. Moreover, her labor is "productive" in Smith's sense, as she actually produces a commodity that may "afterwards purchase or procure an equal quantity of labour." McTeague is still just the (unproductive) dentist without the gilded tooth to hang as a sign. McTeague receives the tooth as a birthday present from Trina, and in receiving the tooth, he receives the lacking external symbol of his profession and of his self—not through his own efforts, but through Trina's gift. McTeague often asked Trina whether she had purchased the tooth out of her winnings, but "Trina invariably laughed in his face, declaring that it was her secret" (154).
        At this point the question of the balance of power, the question of who is the owner and who the owned, no longer seems as easily decidable as Michaels would have it. Yes, Trina has submitted to McTeague, McTeague "body and soul, for life or death" (89), but there is, as yet, no indication of the physical abuse of Trina by McTeague upon which Michaels builds so much of his case. Trina seems, at this point, by far the more dominant partner. She may express her fear of McTeague, saying almost inaudibly, "I'm afraid of you" (180), and she may, while kissing him after their wedding, yield "all at once to that strange desire of being conquered and subdued" (180), and she may even have "merged her individuality into his" (183), but she exerts power over McTeague by molding his habits to her liking. "The dentist began to dress a little better, Trina even succeeding in inducing him to wear a high silk hat and a frock coat of a Sunday. Next he relinquished his Sunday afternoon's nap and beer in favor of three or four hours spent in the park with her—the weather permitting" (187). Trina's productive activity is now seen on three fronts, as investor, as molder of wooden Noah's ark figures, and as molder of her husband. Under Trina's influence, McTeague's self, before defined only by his role as dentist, now seems to widen in its scope: "he began to observe the broader, larger interests of life, interests that affected him not as an individual, but as a member of a class, a profession, or a political party" (191). Even McTeague's dreams, at this point, are a result of Trina's shaping: "McTeague began to have ambitions—very vague, very confused ideas of something better—ideas for the most part borrowed from Trina" (191). Who is owner? Who is owned?
        The questions of power, of dominance and submission, of owning and being owned, change dramatically after McTeague loses his dental practice, losing, thereby, his ability to produce, maintain, and own a self (though he has never had, at any point in the novel, a productive capacity like that which Smith describes; instead, McTeague's labors "perish in the very instance of their performance," except in the sense that his labor is carried around in the mouths of his customers, mouths which hardly represent a "vendible commodity"). The rest of the novel is marked by shifting balances of power and a complicated interplay of physical and fiscal dominances that complicate the question of Trina's "submission," presenting her, at least in some ways, as having her own dominance as well.

What do misers want?
        Michaels takes issue with the accounts of miserly behavior offered by William James and George Simmel. Each account explains miserliness in terms of the power of gold. James writes that these men "value their gold, not for its own sake, but for its powers" (Principles of Psychology 726), while Simmel writes that the miser enjoys "the power that money-stored-up represents" (Michaels 140). Michaels prefers to explain Trina in terms of her "endgame" behavior: her "absolute unwillingness to forgo the pleasure of having 'her money in hand,' even if that means paying for it" (141), paying for the money in terms of losing the interest income previously earned through its investment. Michaels does, rightly, analyze Trina's behavior in this situation as an example, not of excessive frugality, but rather of excessive prodigality. In losing the interest income derived by keeping her money invested, Trina is actually spending rather than saving. Her "miserliness" does not seem to make sense, then, from the perspective of James, who explains hoarding behavior as a kind of desperate staving off of the fear of poverty, by actually living in voluntary but unnecessary poverty: "For him, better the actual evil than the fear of it; and so it is with the common lot of misers. Better to live poor now, with the power of living rich, than to live rich at the risk of losing the power" (James 726). Trina does "live poor now," but she reduces her "power of living rich" at an imaginary later date by insisting on physical possession of her gold.
        Trina does not fit neatly into the role of miser, because she does not save, she merely hoards. In an even marginally inflationary economy, her removal of her money from profitable investments does not only result in the loss of interest income, it also reduces the effective exchange value of the principle itself. For Marx the true miser is characterized less by a concern with possession than by a concern with profit: "The more he produces, the more he is able to sell. Hard work, saving, and avarice, are, therefore, his three cardinal virtues, and to sell much and buy little the sum of his political economy" (Capital 62). Trina works hard, and she is easily seen as avaricious, but she does not save in a meaningful—a profitable—way. She hoards money, enjoying, as Simmel suggests, "the power that money-stored-up represents," but the power she enjoys is not strictly economic; Trina fetishizes her no-longer-invested gold as a physical object over which she can exercise control, just as she once exercised control over the now-absent McTeague. The gold, in her possession, has lost its capacity to earn, to produce. McTeague, at the point when he was most fully in Trina's possession—after the loss of his dental practice—had also lost his capacity to earn, to produce. Where Michaels defines the miser as someone who is "always exchanging his money for itself," and the spendthrift as someone who "tries to exchange his [money] for nothing" (144), he opens a crack in his analysis through which Trina slips: Trina neither exchanges her money purely for itself nor purely for nothing; she exchanges it for a feeling of dominance, of ownership, of control.
        In losing his capacity to produce (even in Smith's "unproductive" sense) through losing his dental practice, McTeague loses the ability to produce, and thus own, his self. The power dynamic in the relationship between he and Trina—which had been uneasy at best ever since Trina's winning of the five thousand dollars—changes radically at this point. Trina continues to own herself, because Trina continues to produce economically and thus produce her self. McTeague, having lost his means for economic production gradually loses ownership of his self, and Trina accelerates her already-begun project of producing McTeague, now a new and utterly dependent McTeague who hasn't the economic wherewithal to support the new habits and expectations Trina had previously instilled within him. "Unfortunately, Trina had cultivated tastes in McTeague which now could not be gratified. He had come to be very proud of his silk hat and 'Prince Albert' coat, and liked to wear both on Sundays. Trina had made him sell both" (McTeague 285). Arguments between the pair are settled at the level of fiscal power: "'Who's got the money, I'd like to know?' cried Trina, flushing to her pale lips. 'Answer me that, McTeague, who's got the money?'" (273). Trina makes sure to remind the now-former dentist who is in control, who is producing and who is being produced: "I'm doing the working now. I'm working for Uncle Oelbermann, and you're not lumping in anything now. I'm doing it all. Do you know what I'm doing, McTeague? I'm supporting you" (273).
        The producing of a new, dependent McTeague begins with the divestiture of the trappings of McTeague's dental practice. Bits of his former productive identity are sold at auction, the same auction at which Trina begins selling off the trappings of her now-former identity as the dentist's wife:

Everything went—everything but the few big pieces that went with the suite, and that belonged to the photographer. The melodeon, the chairs, the black walnut table before which they were married, the extension table in the sitting-room, the kitchen table with its oilcloth cover, the framed lithographs from the English illustrated paper, the very carpets on the floors. But Trina's heart nearly broke when the kitchen utensils and furnishings began to go . . . . How she had worked over them! (274)

As Trina now takes control of the process of producing selves for the both of them, McTeague's possessions become increasingly superfluous: "Only little by little did Trina induce him to part with his office furniture. He fought over every article" (275). McTeague fights over every article as if it were a bit of his self, because every article lost is another lost link to a now-defunct productive identity. Even articles McTeague had owned before ever meeting Trina are sold: "A veritable scene took place between him and his wife before he could bring himself to part with the steel engraving of 'Lorenzo de' Medici and His Court' and the stone pug dog with its goggle eyes. 'Why,' he would cry, 'I've had 'em ever since—ever since I began; long before I knew you, Trina" (275,276). The cry is not "I've had 'em ever since I began as a dentist; no, the cry is "I've had 'em ever since I began," which may easily be read as "I've had 'em ever since I began." Objects belonging to both Trina and McTeague are being sold. But it is only McTeague who is losing his self in this sale, and it is Trina who is firmly in control of the process of divestiture.
It is McTeague's loss of self and his now-total economic dependence on Trina that precipitates his turn to domestic violence. With the loss of self, comes a humiliation McTeague is neither willing nor able to tolerate—the walk home in the rain necessitated by Trina's refusal to leave him even enough money for car fare:

All at once a sudden rage against Trina took possession of him. It was her fault. She knew it was going to rain, and she had not let him have a nickel for car fare—she who had five thousand dollars. She let him walk the streets in the cold and in the rain, 'Miser,' he growled behind his mustache. 'Miser, nasty little old miser.'" (291)

This is simply the last straw, the last stripping of his former self that McTeague can tolerate. Immediately after this episode, he steps into a bar, gets drunk, and the old battle between the "better McTeague" and "the brute" is decided—in favor of the brute.
The naked economy of dominance and submission to which the marriage of Trina and McTeague has been reduced is one-sided, right up until the point at which "the brute" returns. It has been this one-sided economy, in fact, that reduced McTeague to brutishness, and summoned from within him a hate for Trina, a kind of hate described by Hobbes (the philosopher of brutishness) as springing from hopeless indebtedness:

To have received from one, to whom we think ourselves equal, greater benefits than there is hope to requite, disposeth to counterfeit love, but really secret hatred, and puts a man into the estate of a desperate debtor that, in declining the sight of his creditor, tacitly wishes him there where he might never see him more. For benefits oblige; and obligation is thraldom; and unrequitable obligation perpetual thraldom; which is to one's equal, hateful. (Hobbes 77)

The physical brutality to which McTeague resorts after this point in the novel is the brutality of a beast, because that is precisely the condition to which McTeague has been reduced, the state of a semi-domesticated animal cruelly treated by the very master upon whom it depends for food and shelter. This animal bites.
This change of state can be seen in McTeague's own admission that he is, now "a different man" (297), and by the quickly-following first instance of physical violence against Trina, as McTeague catches her by the wrists and pulls hard. After this point, McTeague is described—as at the beginning—in bestial images: he is shown "walking back and forth with the restlessness of a caged brute." He finds "a certain pleasure in annoying and exasperating Trina, even in abusing and hurting her" (305). The economy of dominance and submission between Trina and McTeague is now circulating pain and humiliation in both directions, and it is after this point, after the point at which Trina loses control of McTeague—and submits, in my view, to his violence not solely out of "a morbid, unwholesome love of submission" (309) but at least partially out of a calculated sense that the brutish McTeague will be satisfied with physical dominance and leave fiscal dominance to her—that she begins sensually fetishing her gold for the first time:

At times, when she knew that McTeague was far from home, she would lock her door, open her trunk, and pile all her little hoard on her table . . . . she would draw the heap lovingly toward her and bury her face in it, delighted at the smell of it and the feel of the smooth, cool metal on her cheeks. She even put the smaller gold pieces in her mouth and jingled them there. She loved her money with an intensity she could hardly express. (308)

With Trina's passions reduced now to two, "her passion for her money and her perverted love for her husband when he was brutal" (310), McTeague's sudden departure with the gold Trina had been saving in a chamois-skin bag removes both of her objects of passion. Trina has spent so long producing the again-bestial McTeague, and her own self-as-fiscally-dominant-wife that the departure of McTeague with the money leaves Trina with nothing, not even the self she has been producing since the loss of McTeague's dental practice. With no "brute" to do violence to her body, she does violence to herself: "She dug her nails into her scalp, and clutching the heavy coils of her thick black hair tore it again and again. She struck her forehead with her clenched fists" (348). Soon thereafter, Trina's own loss of self is completed; she loses her productive capacity, the ability to continue producing the wooden Noah's ark figures she has been painstakingly coating with "non-poisonous" paint: "'Why, this is blood-poisoning, you know,' [the doctor] told her; 'the worst kind. You'll have to have those fingers amputated, beyond a doubt, or lose the entire hand—or even worse.' 'And my work!' exclaimed Trina." (351). With the loss of her work, the loss of her ability to produce a "vendible commodity" and thus produce and maintain a self, an identity, all that is left to Trina is the money she has invested with he Uncle Oelbermann.
Trina does find work as a scrub-woman, reducing her to the state of a menial laborer whose effort "perishes in the very instant of its production." Having now lost her "productive" labor of making wooden Noah's ark animals (and not having even, as did McTeague before the loss of his dental practice, the distinction of being counted among those whose labor is described by Smith as "of the noblest and most useful" [143] even if "unproductive"), she is left with no meaningfully productive self whatsoever. "Trina" has ceased to exist in any productive sense, just as "McTeague" long ago ceased to exist. She has, however, been dominant too long, and in her way, submissive too long, to have no object upon which she may project her desires for the feelings of ownership and of being owned. The money, as a physical presence, fills this need for Trina. She gives up the interest income she earns on the absent money in order that she might have the satisfaction of taking possession of five thousand dollars in gold—gold which she may, once again, love "with an intensity she could hardly express" (308). Seen in this light, the final confrontation between "Trina" and "McTeague" may be seen as one between ciphers, a brutal—and for "Trina," fatal—encounter between two non-selves, or two hysterical selves, over control, not of productive identities, but of an object which, fetished for itself, neither produces nor marks.

What does Trina want?
In light of Trina's imperfect match with the categories of masochist and miser, perhaps the question of Trina McTeague's character is not one of a submissive woman who is easily "marked"—in Charlotte Perkins Gilman's sense—by a brutish and sadistic husband so much as it is of a strong and dominant woman who "marks." While Trina McTeague may indeed derive pleasure from "a morbid, unwholesome love of submission" (309), she also derives a tremendous satisfaction from the sense of power—not power to spend, but power to dominate—that her five thousand dollars gives her. It is only when she loses this power to dominate that she begins to break down, and it is only when she loses her truly "productive" identity that she wholly submits to her desire to fetish her gold as an object over which control may be exercised—dominating and submitting to her gold coins as she once dominated and submitted to McTeague.
Through the course of the novel, Trina's tendencies toward dominance and submission prove inextricable. Is seems that what she "wants" is someone (in the case of the early McTeague) or something (in the case of her fetishized gold) to dominate thoroughly enough to make indulging in her urge to submission "safe." In both cases, Trina proves to have badly miscalculated. Each attempt toward, and each "economy" of, thorough dominance and safe submission results in loss, loss of income, loss of self, loss of life.

Works Cited

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Norris, Frank. McTeague: A Story of San Francisco. Ed. Kevin Starr. New York: Penguin, 1994
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