From Gift to Commodity: Capitalism and Sacrifice in Nineteenth-Century American Fiction

8. Enigma and Precision: The Golden Tooth and the Horrors of the End of the Gift in Frank Norris’s "McTeague"

208 eight Enigma and Precision The Golden Tooth and the Horrors of the End of the Gift in Frank Norris’s McTeague The gift is the fullest expression of what it means to be human. —Mark Osteen (quoted in Simpson 2008, 3) Fin de Siècle . . . expresses apocalyptic sense of end of a phase of civilization. —From the Tate Glossary (“Fin de Siècle”2011) It seems particularly appropriate to end this book with a discussion of Frank Norris’s 1899 fin de siècle novel McTeague (1981), since no novel could more precisely—or more apocalyptically—envision the conflict between gift and market exchange. Looking back on a century that saw capitalism ’s full development, Norris exposes its impact on American culture not through the depiction of a rising middle class but from its ugly bottom up.Like Jacob Riis in his famous 1890 muck-raking expose How the Other Half Lives, Norris focuses his gaze on the most horrifying results of America’s full-blown capitalist civilization: urban poverty, alienation, and miserable tenement life. But while Riis assumes the voice of reform, Norris enacts, in front of our eyes, the “tipping point” between individual self-interest and communal thinking John Larson (2010, 9) describes and then argues for the inevitable, tragic consequences of this fall.1 Norris singles out the gift as the most important defining factor of our humanity and shows that when we lose the gift to the logic of capitalism we will lose our humanity as well. Norris’s novel not only imagines such a loss in horrifying detail but also argues its occurrence with scientific precision. In Emile Zola’s words, if the “naturalist novelist” is “both observer and experimenter” who sets up the “data” as a “point of departure” before he or she “institutes the experiment”that “sets the characters of a particular story into motion, in order to show that the series of events therein will be those demanded by the determinism of the phenomena under study,” then Norris’s McTeague can be said to put to the test the central question of this book: what Frank Norris’s McTeague 209 is the relation between capitalism and the spirit of the gift (Zola 1963, 166)? And whereas this question brought many writers and their texts to the brink of coherence, reason, and even language itself, Norris’s novel, no less shaped and driven by this question than the other texts, presents an answer that appears more precise and more dreadful than any of the previous writers fully imagined.Depicting an America that has become overwhelmingly instilled with the logic of capitalist self-interest, McTeague portrays in clear and compelling detail the end of the gift and the horrors that must ensue: death, murder, and utter depletion. It might as well be the end of the world, the book warns at the dawn of the next century. Lydia Maria Child,Herman Melville,and William Dean Howells all already had imagined to some degree the frightening possibility that the gift could be exploited,but Norris makes this exploitation,this depletion of the gift,the central theme of his novel, the force that lies at the root of its depiction of bestial violence and murders.2 Reminiscent of Hannah Foster, Child, Howells, Susan Warner, and Melville, Norris structures his novel around several plots of gift exchange that reflect upon each other.3 In three parallel plots,he depicts the fall from gift to commodity exchange; and,moving beyond this fall,he offers us the terrifying,apocalyptic vision of the lethal realm of what I call the “antigift.”This perverse and deathly realm is the opposite of a gift community; here characters, driven solely by self-interest,not only refuse to give but actually deplete the gift cycle by keeping gifts and turning them into profit, or legally stealing, as I call it.This lethal and violent realm of the antigift,the gift’s structural opposite,the novel suggests,is always coexistent with both the gift and the market economy; tragically,it is contained within the logic of both because the former allows and the latter propels and motivates the antigift. All three plotlines in the novel—the dentist McTeague’s relationship to Marcus,the dentist’s marriage toTrina,and the relationship between Maria and Zerkow—are explicitly about this motion from gift to commodity exchange and to the antigift,and as a result,they each end in murder.McTeague’s friendship with Marcus is initiated...