Although we are not reading McTeague this quarter in class, I couldn't help but think about it when thinking about S.F Literature. The naturalism of the novel really encompasses and captures S.F, and I think the novel even deals with some of the themes we have been discussing this quarter. There is definitely a disparity between the richer classes, and the poor people in the novel, and those people are localized to specific areas of the City, Polk Street, and the wealthier Grand Avenue.
Anyways, after reading the novel, and found out there was a saloon named after it on Polk Street, I had to go check it out, and I thought it was a pretty cool place. It even had the Golden Tooth on the outside of the building and all.
Erin -
ReplyDeleteThis is an interesting novel to bring to bear on the themes we have been discussing in class, but your post in lacking in a critical specificity that would explicitly link these disparate materials. For instance, how could a reading of the final scene, in which McTeague is handcuffed to the corpse of his now-murdered friend Marcus, be seen as a metaphor for gentrification writ large? I encourage you to bring in outside materials to your blog posts, but you need to lay the groundwork to make the connections as clear as possible for myself and your peers. Overall nice work,
- T
Trey,
ReplyDeleteThat is extremely interesting, and I had not thought of the ending of the novel in that way at all, but now it makes a lot of sense to me. McTeague essentially became wealthy in the novel, at the expense of killing his wife, stealing her fortune and running off. Marcus was essentially his best friend that got pushed aside so that McTeague could marry Trina and become wealthy. McTeague killing Marcus was him getting rid of the problem, but him being handcuffed to him serves as a painful reminder that we are still stuck , or responsible for the people we push aside to obtain our status or success.