Monstrosity In Frank Norris's 'Mcteague'

Monstrosity has an effect on the public and the individual that can be difficult to pin down- sometimes it causes fear or resentment, sometimes confusion, and sometimes it even causes desire. As scholars have looked at monstrosity in literature, they have tried to answer how these different emotional responses can be connected together to better understand characters, plots, and themes. Different texts help to show how the negative feelings towards the monster can actually turn into a twisted sort of desire, leaving characters as well as the audience craving more. Frank Norris’s McTeague (1899) is no exception to this, and the relationships between characters in the text show monstrosity’s multiple and entangled layers. McTeague takes its

When McTeague first realizes his feelings for Trina the narrator says, “His whole rude idea of life had to be changed. The male virile desire in him tardily awakened, aroused itself, strong and brutal. It was resistless, untrained, a thing not to be held in leash an instant” (Norris Chapter 2). Readers can see here that desire for Trina was the underlying cause for his monstrosity, creating a domino effect that lasts through all of McTeague. McTeague’s initial feelings for Trina awoke the monster that was within him, and this in turn led to the development of monstrosity throughout their entire relationship. In a sense this turned on a switch that was unable to be shut back off; this side of McTeague was deep, instinctual, and strong. The brutality of McTeague’s feelings towards Trina that the narrator describes display themselves more tangibly as he becomes more and more violent through the progression of the story, and these actions are where his monstrosity is

In “The Tell-Tale Heart”, a first-person narrator describes the obsession that he has with an old man’s eye and the disgust that it causes him. He plots to murder the man so that he does not have to see the eye anymore, and he eventually does kill him. The narrator is trapped in the story because he is the one living it, so the reader must stay with the narrator as he commits this act of monstrosity. This takes out the middleman of a third person narrator in a sense- the reader directly becomes the voyeur who has a perverse interest in what the narrator will do next and what will happen to the man. They should have the fear of the murderer and of the madman, but they also have the desire and need to get to the end of the