The Tragedy of McTeague: The Destruction of the Subject

Frank Norris is a well-known American writer with a reputation as a naturalist writer. McTeague: A Story of San Francisco is his masterpiece and a representative work of American naturalistic literature. Based on a news report, the novel focuses on the tragic fate of a dentist named McTeague who murders his stingy wife, Trina Sipe. In this paper, two concepts of “the mirror stage” and “symbol” in French philosopher Jacques Lacan’s subjective theory will be used to interpret the protagonist McTeague’s tragic fate. “The Mirror stage” refers to the fact that people always build a “pseudo-self” through the images of others while Lacan’s concept of symbol points out the emptiness and meaninglessness of signifiers and signs that will control human beings. This paper will first use the idea of the mirror stage to analyze how different others affect the formation process of McTeague’s subjectivity, and then use Lacan’s conception of symbols to analyze how signs control McTeague’s behavior and lead him into madness. Lacanian interpretation of this novel can help readers to analyze McTeague’s loss of his subjectivity and trigger modern people’s thinking.