William Rodney Herring

I don't want to beat a horse made dead by Walter Benn Michaels,[1] but in his reading of McTeague (though he never makes this point) it's entirely fitting that the final words of the novel are "little gilt prison" (312), even though they refer immediately only to McTeague's canary's home.[2] Trina's constriction within her obsession for gold may be the most obvious, but to the extent that her obsession is pathological, that it's a disease or a contagion, Mac catches the (gold) bug and dies a slow, painful, and isolated death as a result. But as interesting as the symptoms are, they don't seem to get at the causes of the disease, and for that, curiously, we can look at Trina's and Mac's attraction to each other. Insofar as the McTeagues desire drives them together (and later apart), McTeague is a book that notices how the structure and nature of desire is itself constitutive of subjects--and what it drives these subjects to is death.[3]

I actually have a second reason for finding interest in the role of desire in McTeague. Reading Passing in 309, it became important to stress to my students the limitations of considering Clare's wish "to see Negroes, to be with them again, to talk with them, to hear them laugh" [4] as somehow a symptom of a naturally occurring desire to be with one's own kind. If desire comes from within, then it becomes possible to see Clare's desire to "stop passing" as an unconscious indication of her true race, as though biological truth can only be repressed for so long. But if her desire gets produced externally--if it is caused by an Other--Clare's racial status cannot be read as some transcendental, real category of her (hence, anyone's) existence. As we discussed this in 309, I simultaneously read McTeague and realized how well Norris illustrated my point that desire is contingent upon others and the lack produced by them and their movements.

So I sent my students the following email:

I've just run across the following description of desire. I'm reading Frank Norris's novel McTeague, a naturalist novel that few of you will have much immediate interest in. However, the protagonist, McTeague, is trying to get Trina to marry him, and he's just popped the question. She says no, but not because she's not interested, which seems clear to both. As he urges "Ah, come on," this ensues:

Suddenly he took her in his enormous arms, crushing down her struggle with his immense strength. Then Trina gave up, all in an instant, turning her head to his. They kissed each other, grossly, full in the mouth.

...

The passage of the train startled them both. Trina struggled to free herself from McTeague. 'Oh please! please!' she pleaded, on the point of tears. McTeague released her, but in that moment a slight, a barely perceptible, revulsion of feeling had taken place in him. The instant that Trina gave up, the instant she allowed him to kiss her, he thought less of her. She was not so desirable, after all. But this reaction was so faint, so subtle, so intangible, that in another moment he had doubted its occurrence. Yet afterward, it returned. Was there not something gone from Trina now? Was he not disappointed in her for doing that very thing for which he had longed? Was Trina the submissive, the compliant, the attainable just the same, just as delicate and adorable as Trina the inaccessible? Perhaps he dimly saw that this must be so, that it belonged to the changeless order of thingsÑthe man desiring the woman only for what she withholds; the woman worshipping the man for that which she yields up to him. With each concession gained the man's desire cools; with each surrender made the woman's adoration increases. But why should it be so? (62)

Notice his disappointment--the cessation of his desire--the moment he gets what he wanted (which has to put in the past tense because it--the object of desire--is no longer wanting; it has been obtained). Notice how his reflection on the fluctuation in his desire reveals his lack of control: at some level, he desires not to have his desire change. But in fact, the "lower-level" desire (the one that changes) is uncontrollable by the "higher-level" desire (what he wants to desire).

I don't address the gendering of desire (what Norris calls the "changeless order of things") in my email, but it's important to ask whether Trina's desire (and her subjection to desire) is any different from Mac's desire (and his subjection to desire). The play of desire continues throughout the novel, and Trina's desire seems to work in a slightly different way from Mac's. Certainly, she responds to the forced kiss differently, positively even, and she later wonders why: "Why did she feel the desire, the necessity of being conquered by a superior strength? Why did it please her? Why had it suddenly thrilled her from head to foot with a quick, terrifying gust of passion, the like of which she had never known?" (65). So at first glance, it seems that she responds not to lack, but to excess--to the intrusion of the other. But if instead we conceive of Mac's intrusion as a threat to Trina's control, we can see how her desire for him is caused by the lack of control he causes in her. And indeed, following the wedding, we get a sense of her desire as exactly this phenomenon: "She began to love him more and more, not for what he was, but for what she had given up to him" (134-35). On the one hand, this seems to be the opposite of Mac's desireÑat least in causality: It's not what she already lacks--and hopes to obtain--that causes her to desire him. It's what she lacks because she has cathected him with control (and we should notice her agency in "giving up to him," not in "having it taken") that causes her loss, i.e., that causes her desire for him. In one sense, she's done it to herself. But insofar as McTeague is an object that impels her cathexis, her control of her faculty of control is already subject to the movement and actions of an Other. In other words, Trina's faculty of control is controlled by something/one other than herself, and hence, control--as the object of cathexis--continues to be an object of desire for Trina. To the extent that McTeague already possesses control of Trina's faculty of control, then, she desires McTeague for his possession. Notice it's not that he forces her to give up to him what she doesn't want to give, but rather that he forces her to want to give up to him and to want to love him "for what she had given up."

And so possession of control is precisely what's at issue in the McTeagues' interaction on the night of their wedding. Trina tells Mac, "I'm afraid of you," and McTeague's response is an experience of "immense joy" (130): Is this joy the same as desire? Like the desire--built upon Trina's resistance to him--that first leads Mac to kiss Trina, this joy also leads him to force himself upon Trina. Significantly, this joy is "the joy of possession. Trina was his very own now." But if desire is what we want because we do not yet have it, then the "joy of possession" cannot be exactly the same as desire. Possession can, however, still be the object of desire, in which case the joy of possession--that is, the joy of obtaining what one desires--can still, however fleetingly, be joyful. And indeed, in McTeague's case, the joy is fleeting, something signaled immediately by the words "He loved her. Ah, did he not love her?" The joy may momentarily feel a bit like love, but the doubt involved in questioning whether what he feels is love or "not love" for Trina exposes the transience of the joy, i.e., of the feeling itself. So this is a moment when desire is at play, and it shifts from no one to McTeague to Trina (and possibly back to Mac) in the course of this brief moment. Trina's fear, specifically its articulation--as an explanation of why she has withdrawn from McTeague after the wedding guests depart--creates a flash of desire in him. But as he understands that this fear signals possession, or rather the potentiality of possession, his desire inflects into joy. He then takes possession ("Suddenly he caught her in both his huge arms, crushing down her struggle with his immense strength, kissing her full upon the mouth"), and having staked this claim, he causes desire in Trina: "Then her great love for McTeague suddenly flashed up in Trina's breast; she gave up to him as she had done before, yielding all at once to that strange desire of being conquered and subdued." Which is to say that desire is at play in this scene because the object of desire is at play. They each desire to possess, and each desires possession most when the other seems most to have it--that is, when the subject of desire lacks the object of desire.

So really, Mac and Trina desire the same thing: they share an object of desire. It is seen in this moment to be "possession," and at the last instant, Trina makes one final claim on it when she says, "Oh, you must be good to me--very, very good to me, dearÑfor you're all that I have in the world now." On the one hand, this isn't true at all: she has her $5,000. And it may seem unlikely that she "has" him if he simultaneously possesses her. And yet on the other hand, it is very much true that by the very possession of her $5,000, she has possession, and by virtue of that possession, she has a claim on Mac (because he desires to possess as much as she does). And this is the explanation for him staying with her and capitulating to her demands, even when he seems to get little out of it. He can't make the decisions, even if he could afford to, because Trina possesses more (money) than he possesses. And it doesn't matter whether by "more" we mean "a greater amount" or "something in excess"; the something more still represents lack to Mac. As long as Trina has more possession than he has, she remains cathected with his passion. And then at some point--and I don't see that it's a pivotal instant--Mac realizes (or perhaps the brute in him just instinctually acts--which would explain the lack of the pivotal instant) that he doesn't have to possess her to possess more than her--and thus, to quit desiring her. He can instead possess what she possesses: her money.

Though it becomes clear that Mac doesn't really matter to Trina ("Little by little her sorrow over the loss of her precious savings overcame the grief of McTeague's desertion of her. Her avarice had grown to be her one dominant passion, her love of money for the money's sake brooded in her heart, driving out by degrees every other natural affection" [250]), until he takes the ultimate possession from her, the economy of desire keeps flowing (the question of to what extent this is a result of their unfortunate sado-masochistic game that ultimately costs Trina her fingers, though not unrelated to my response here, must be set aside for another time). And yet one final possession that Trina retains (and, thus, one final irony possessed by the narrative) is the right of defining what McTeague's object of desire will be. For all his power, his brute strength, McTeague is already subject to the McTeagues' economy of desire, and thus, he cannot freely choose his own object of desire. That he desires to possess Trina's possessions is beyond his control, and it is at this level that he, like his canary, is imprisoned in a gilt cage.

[1] See the title essay in Walter Benn Michaels, The Gold Standard and the Logic of Naturalism, Berkeley: U of California P, 1987: 137-80.
[2] Frank Norris, McTeague, New York: Vintage/Library of America, 1990.
[3] I should say that my understanding of desire's function in psychoanalysis and in psychoanalytic reading is not at all sophisticated.
[4] Nella Larsen, Passing, New York: Penguin, 2003: 71.