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Didacticism in Frank Norris' McTeague

Frank Norris' Mcteague's niche in American Literature has been characterized again and again as strictly Naturalist. The novel does well in this genre. Among other things, it is a scientific, representative, pessimistic study of the common people or lower and middle classes which ultimately ends in tragedy. It is not the purpose of this essay to dispute these qualifications; rather to question the genre itself.
The scientific novel is impossible for a variety of reasons. Practitioners of Naturalism, including Norris, attempted to create representative characters with inherited biological traits (traits which they have no control over), plant these characters in a meticulously defined setting, and produce/predict the resulting behavior. The naturalistic novel relies on the assumption that this behavior is, indeed, predictable. This assumption is, at the very least, questionable.
The Scientific Method, in its simplest form, is......

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Approximate Word Count: 1143
Approximate Pages: 5 (250 words per double-spaced page)

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