“If Pearles, hir teeth be pearles both pure and round”: Body as Text and Teeth as an Intersectional Metaphor in Two Anglo-American Novels

This article examines two Anglo-American novels through their literary representation of teeth, published a hundred years apart: the American novel McTeague: A Story of San Francisco (1899) and the British novel White Teeth (2000). At first glance, they may not appear to have much in common—one belongs to the American naturalist literary period, the other to the British multicultural (hysterical realist) tradition at the beginning of the third millennium. However, both novels share a strong social and sociological element: a critical turn that addresses relevant social realities—namely, the rise of American capitalism and the somewhat impeded British multiculturalism—at the turn of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, respectively. These two case studies illuminate the metaphor of the body-as-text, with teeth stereotypically representing various social concepts such as power, greed, socially constructed beauty, ethnicity, and affiliation with a particular class, religion, or nation.