SOURCE: Michaels, Walter Benn. “The Gold Standard and the Logic of Naturalism.” Representations 0, no. 9 (winter 1985): 105-32.

In the following essay, Michaels draws on characters from McTeague and Vandover and the Brute to examine the portrayal of miserly behavior in Norris's naturalistic fiction.

Democracy is threatened not only by armies but by debt and austerity. We must liberalize the trade of the world and give the world again a money it can rely on, a dollar “as good as gold.”

—Rep. Jack Kemp, in a speech before the Republican Convention, 1984

Why does the miser save? Trina McTeague, writes Frank Norris, saved “without knowing why”—“without any thought, without idea of consequence—saving for the sake of saving.”¹ But to say that Trina saved for the sake of saving doesn't so much explain her behavior as identify the behavior in need of explanation: why would anyone save just for the...