McTeague and the Afterlives of Empire

Abstract:An important Western context for Frank Norris’s McTeague (1899) is the 1846–48 Mexican-American War and its impact on the Mexican population living in Alta California. This context is particularly significant for Norris’s character Maria Macapa, in whose depiction the novel’s racialized contexts are revealed. Norris’s studies exposed him to theories of nativism, evolutionary progress, and racial hierarchies, and his representation of Maria Macapa emphasizes these contexts in relation to the histories of Alta California, her dispossession and death suggesting empire’s brutal afterlives and what is lost with the ending of such stories. I read Maria’s narrative in this context and in relation to the Californio testimonios gathered as part of Hubert Howe Bancroft’s history of California. Finally, attending to Maria’s story highlights contradictions in Norris’s theories of romance, which, even in its representation of a sort of raw and unfiltered “life,” participates in the elision of various kinds of truth.