Naturalism's Toxic Objects

The characters in Frank Norris’s McTeague live in toxic relationships, houses, and neighborhoods. They work with poisonous materials that damage their bodies. They lose, sell, and steal their possessions, and with them... [ view full abstract ]

The characters in Frank Norris’s McTeague live in toxic relationships, houses, and neighborhoods. They work with poisonous materials that damage their bodies. They lose, sell, and steal their possessions, and with them they often lose the fundamental stories of who they are. Naturalism, as many critics have pointed out, is filled with objects that seem to speak to characters, but the naturalist novel is also filled with objects that resist narration and resignification, and that therefore inspire in characters a singular kind of attachment that exteriorizes their psychic lives even as it damages or poisons their bodies. In this paper, I explore naturalism’s toxic objects.  In contradiction to the luminous objects of realism that extend and exemplify the social relations of its characters, I argue that the shoddy objects and commodities of naturalism bear within them the toxic material conditions of their production and circulation, and in turn bear the weight of naturalism’s critique of the material and psychic lives of its damaged subjects.