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Norris consistently returns to the animalistic descriptions of McTeague. Early in the story Norris compares him to the likes of a work horse. Such harmless animals focus solely on survival in that they plow the fields so that they can eat. It is this initial description of McTeague as a harmless work horse contrasted with his "abominable" (265) actions in killing Trina that tend to show that violence itself is the inevitable end result of the city's corruptive power.
Before meeting Trina, McTeague is a sexless cart-horse like man among city urbanites, but she awakens the beast inside him in terms of sexuality and obsession. McTeague's foray into sexuality is comingles with a fetishism for gold. Trina conflates sexual pleasure with the possession of money. She often refers to her gold as "beauties" and declares "I love...
Trina spreads the coins between the sheets, strips naked, and sleeps "all night upon the money, taking an ecstatic pleasure in the touch of the smooth flat pieces the length of her entire body" (255). Trina's orgasmic please at the touch of money is intended to appear perverse. The scene marks the culmination of the city's corruptive power to dehumanize its inhabitants, reducing them to nothing more than their material circumstances. The novel links the material reduction in animalistic nature to an insane relationship with the city characterized by self-inflicted imprisonment and violence.
Being that farm animals and refined city life are not often compatible, Norris's description of McTeague as being like a cart horse forshadows his fall from
Stephen Crane: A Great Writer of American Naturalist Fiction and Non-Fiction, and of Local Color Stephen Crane (1871-1900) was an American author of the late 19th century, whose work, in terms of style and sub-genre, was somewhere between American Romanticism and American Naturalism (with some American Realism added). Crane wrote at the end of a century (the 19th), a time when several literary styles and genres are typically blended together until
In Sinclair's novel, the whole vision is altered because it focuses mainly on Bunny's perception of his father and of the broader social concerns of the day. Here the father is less of an individual and more of a representative of the emergent and destructive force of the cruel capitalism. It is not the beastly, inhuman character of a man that is brought into focus, but the inhuman force of
American Landscape and Social Attitudes and Values The relationship between American society and its natural environment has not only been one of rapid social change, it has also been subjected to radical and complex changes in attitudes towards nature. The extent of the this evolutionary change emanates from an earlier view of nature as a Garden of Eden to the contemporary view of nature as a servant of human technological growth In