The Outside World in McTeague

The beginning paragraphs of chapter 20 mark a significant change in the tone of McTeague.  Norris draws a parallel in this first paragraph to the previous scene by focusing on the senses.  His fixation on the smells of the desert and the mountains is supposed to be a pleasant replacement for the smell of the corpse at the end of the previous chapter.  It makes the reader not only transition more easily, but it also makes the reader feel more positively toward this new space than the previous one.  Thus far in the text, Norris has been focused on specific individuals, and the way that those individuals interact with capitalism.  However, McTeague’s story has only been a microcosm of what is happening in the west as a whole.  On page 208, Norris zooms out and we see the West as its own entity with “tremendous, immeasurable Life” (Norris 208).  This passage personifies elements of the landscapes to empower nature, for example, the mountains raise themselves.  In contrast to the housewife that is nature in the east, Norris talks about the west saying, “she is a vast, unconquered brute of the Pliocene epoch, savage, sullen, and magnificently indifferent to men” (208-209).  Not only does this again personify and empower the west as a space, but it brings the complicated question of gender into play.   Interestingly, here it is a female who is considered a ‘brute’ whereas in the earlier text, this word was used to describe McTeague.  The crowning glory of this female is her indifference to men, so perhaps we are supposed to understand that if Trina had been more of a brute, and more like the west, she would not have been killed by McTeague.  However, despite being indifferent, Norris’ western, powerful female space is being destroyed.  His next paragraph describes how men are the parasites on the “mammoth” that is the west (209).  These parasites use machinery to kill and maim the west, which is a not so subtle critique of industrialization.  However, this also connects to mining and once again draws us back to McTeague.  Somehow he is profiting off of destroying the west.  Overall this introduction into the final pages of the novel is supposed to provide the reader with a context for McTeague’s life as a way to broaden Norris’ commentary to encompass the west as a whole and not just Polk Street.