The Yellow Blaze: Naturalism's Response to Gold Economics in Frank Norris's McTeague

Abstract

The Yellow BlazeNaturalism's Response to Gold Economics in Frank Norris's McTeague Todd Spooner (bio) "'It was a yellow blaze like a fire, like a sunset; such a glory, all piled up together, one piece over the other,'" recounts Maria Macapa between swallows of whiskey. "'Why, if the room was dark you'd think you could see just the same with all that glitter'" (Norris 29). Whether Maria's colorful tale of her youth in Mexico is real, or is simply imagined through a haze of dementia and alcohol, matters little in the case of the 1899 novel, McTeague. The transparent reality of Frank Norris's work is that the glorious yellow blaze serves as the predominant image of this entropic novel. McTeague's gold infatuation is not so surprising considering the late nineteenth-century monetary controversy among silver proponents and gold proponents. The prospect of operating exclusively on a single commodity monetary platform instilled fears of money shortages, deflation, and economic depression. The controversy eventually settled on demonetization of silver and sole reliance on the gold standard. As the single standard, gold then assumed a precarious identity as both artificial (money) and natural resource (object). This paradoxical nature enables the predominant tension in McTeague. Both relationships between McTeague-Trina and Zerkow-Maria enact this dichotomy and ultimately lead to adversarial behaviors of consumption (injection) and saving (leakage). Trina and Maria, through gold suppression, represent leakage from the economy. McTeague and Zerkow, through extreme resistance to leakage coupled with McTeague's former career as a gold miner, represent injection. Despite the Progressive Era's socioeconomic transformations of urbanization, industrialization, and domestic territorial expansion, McTeague is arguably more concerned with the monetary controversy pitting monometallism against bimetallism. Bimetallists promoted the continued minting [End Page 142] of both gold and silver while monometalism supporters clung exclusively to gold. When monometalism eventually prevailed, gold appropriated its perplexing dual role of glittering fetishized object as well as single commodity money transferable for goods and services. This ambiguous nature provokes compulsory responses from Norris's severely uncultivated characters. Gold, perceived as the superior element by goldbugs through Darwinian discourse, counters the primitive evolutionary status Norris assigns his ethnic characters. Trina, through hoarding practices, actualizes fears of the silverites of a constricting money supply. McTeague, through his background as a gold miner, exemplifies expansion of the money supply and promotion of gold as the standard. Although interpretations frequently vilify greed as the atavistic flaw of the novel's ethnic characters, it is rather the precarious nature of gold that compels adversarial responses of object-inspiring leakage and money-inspiring injection which ultimately determine the savage actions in McTeague. The examination of gold with respect to monetary economics is not novel interpretive territory for McTeague. It is no mystery that gold serves as the principal symbol of the novel, and its dichotomous nature prompts the question—why does the miser save? In his influential work The Gold Standard and the Logic of Naturalism (1987), Walter Benn Michaels has rigorously examined the natural versus artificial qualities of gold and more broadly the relationship between economics and determinism in McTeague. Michaels's work is more comprehensive than the monetary debate alone, instead leveraging Foucauldian discourse to interrogate the logic of naturalism in what he suggests is a false personification of the economy. Michaels expounds upon the economy's ability to serve as subject and ultimately critiques naturalism on this ground. The focus here is more finite in scope as it portends to examine McTeague through the monetary debate on its own terms. Although the Gilded Age is most frequently characterized as a period of progress and expansion, between 1873 and 1879 it was tormented by an international economic depression. As Alan Trachtenberg has expressed, the work of government during this period "seemed concerned mostly with tariffs and money policy" (165). Monetary policy at the time was myopically focused on commodity-based money or, as Michael O'Malley has conveyed, "insistence on a specie economy and the intrinsic value of precious metal" (370). During the years preceding the publication of McTeague, culminating in 1896, the United States was embroiled in a monetary debate between monometallists and bimetallists. Prior...