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.