Abstract Sexuality is not a central theme in Frank Norris's novel "McTeague". So although sexuality does have a role to play in "McTeague", it is a comparatively minor one. The most important part for sexuality and the way Norris portrays it is as a sort of signpost or illumination to the grander passions of avarice and revenge that drives the central narrative.
Abstract This paper compares and contrasts the representations of female insanity in Frank Norris? ?Mcteague? and Charlotte Perkins Gilman's ?The Yellow Wallpaper specifically looking at Trina and the narrator and how such characters fit in to the stereotypes that women were faced with at the turn of the twentieth century.
From the paper:
?The end of the nineteenth century represented a time of turmoil for the American female. There was conflict about what a woman's role was in society. Many believed that women should be a kind of angel in the house, or a true woman, one that was a virtuous and passionless moral agent. On the other hand, there was a growing movement that promoted the transition into the new woman, or a woman that had a career and could express her sexuality.?
From the Paper "In literary terms, the period at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries was marked by a growing sense of realism. The beginnings of Naturalism as a literary movement came in the 1890s and extended realism with a new emphasis. The realists had insisted on detailing the world in a realistic fashion and to do so by creating reality: "Art's task was not to record but to make life; reality was a constructed, not a recorded, thing" (Bradbury 8). Naturalism took a different view in its origins, and now the task of the novelist was to undertake a scientific study by recording facts, living conditions, and behavior:
Naturalism was thus realism scientized, systematized, taken finally beyond realist principles of fidelity to common experience or of humanistic exploring of ..."
