The Nature of the Beast: Scientific Theories of Race and Sexuality in McTeague

Abstract

The Nature of the BeastScientific Theories of Race and Sexuality in McTeague Rebecca Nisetich (bio) In "The Experimental Novel," Emile Zola defines the "naturalistic novelist" as "both observer and experimenter": The observer in him presents data as he has observed them, determines the point of departure, establishes the solid ground on which his characters will stand and his phenomena take place. Then the experimenter appears and institutes the experiment, that is, sets the characters of a particular story in motion, in order to show that the series of events therein will be those demanded by the determinism of the phenomena under study. (166) In McTeague (1899), Frank Norris adopts Zola's method, creating a literary "experiment" that posits sexual desire as the driving force that sets his characters in motion. A thorough study of manifestations of desire in the novel exposes an underlying threat: the plural and uncontainable nature of sexual desire itself. Desire permeates every aspect of the characters' lives, not simply their perverse sexual behaviors but also their uncontrollable emotions and outbursts of physical violence. Ultimately, it destroys them. As Siobhan Somerville contends, emerging notions of sexuality in the turn-of-the-century U.S. were profoundly influenced by the scientific discourse on race ("Scientific Racism" 4). Norris was firmly committed to the period's "scientific" conceptions of both sexuality and race,1 and in McTeague he configures sexual perversity as both an inherited racial trait and an infectious disease. Like other naturalists, he thus confronts his predominantly white audience with what June Howard terms "the ultimate terror": "the loss of stable personal identity, the collapse of self into Other" (95). In the novel's conclusion in Death Valley, however, he dramatizes a kind of fatal assimilation of the Other into whiteness, allowing readers [End Page 1] to take part in a voyeuristic exploration of deviant, racialized sexualities without the threat of contagion. At the time Norris was composing McTeague, the term race could refer to groups of people defined not only in terms of color but also in terms of genealogy, nationality, class, and religion. The scientific discourse on race effectively placed human beings in a hierarchy of categories that posited the Anglo-Saxon, or "Nordic," race as the highest achievement of human evolution, higher even than other races, or ethnicities, that today would be considered equally white.2 In this milieu, "white" meant "native" (itself an ambiguous and contradictory designation), Anglo-Saxon, and usually middle to upper class. It is easy to see how, in these circumstances, racial categorization became increasingly attractive to so-called "native" Anglo-Americans who needed new ways to distinguish themselves from an increasing influx of immigrants whose skin color might resemble their own but whom they could consider biologically, developmentally, and morally inferior by "racial othering" (Jacobson 7). Out of this milieu grew the field of eugenics. Defined by Francis Galton in his 1883 Inquiries into the Human Faculty and Its Development as "the science of improving [racial] stock" (qtd. in Somerville, "Scientific Racism" 30), eugenics essentially applied Darwin's deterministic theory of natural selection to the artificial selection of human beings. With its explicit mission to strengthen the Anglo-Saxon race through selective sexual reproduction, the eugenics movement in the U.S. merged discussions of race and sexuality.3 Under the logic of biological determinism, those who were less "fit" to survive, such as sexual perverts, should theoretically die out. But the eradication of perverts could not be left entirely to natural selection, for sexual "perversities" were not only racial traits that could be spread through reproduction but also social diseases that threatened to infect the masses. One such perversity treated in McTeague is homoeroticism. In "Reconsidering McTeague's 'Mac' and 'Mark,'" Denise Cruz notes the similarities between McTeague's interactions with Marcus and those with Trina, concluding that "McTeague and Marcus are much more than just 'pals.'" "In the 1890s," she writes, "the word pal referred not just to a friend but also to a 'partner or accomplice in an activity (originally always a criminal one)'" (497). McTeague, of course, will eventually become a hunted criminal after he murders Trina, and Marcus, too, is an accomplice to crime...