Abstract

Abstract:

This study offers new evidence that contemporaneous reports of San Francisco "criminal midwife" Belinda Laphame inspired Frank Norris's unlicensed dentist in McTeague (1899). Reading Norris's text with Laphame's exploits in mind allows questions of gender, in addition to those of ethnicity and class already raised by the racialized figure of the autodidact McTeague, to complicate the novel's commentary on professional fitness. However, those complications find resolution in Norris's Blix (1899), a short novel that appeared only months after McTeague. In this autobiographical romance, Norris proposes a new breed of women as ideal physicians. Along with offering a new model of professional fitness, Blix's hybrid form serves as counterpoint to the strict naturalism of McTeague. The formal elasticity of Blix exposes the limits of naturalism as a representational strategy by reminding us of the ways in which McTeague enacts the exclusions that it describes.

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