The Bowdlerization of McTeague

UR present impression of McTeague's impact upon Victorian America is referable to the repulsion felt and outrage expressed by individuals such as Edward and Madeline Vaughn Abbot in the Literary World: We can pardon, accept even with intellectual pleasure, loathsome details that are necessary to the artistic progress of [McTeague], but grossness for the sake of grossness is unpardonable. They did not, of course, compound the crime by specifying the offending details. The Boston Evening Transcript, too, would not identify the one bit of realism which transcends anything yet perpetrated by this school; the Outlook as well demurred when it came to material that has place in print. Candidate passages quickly come to mind, for there are many. As the Academy phrased the fact of the matter, no sordid detail is omitted, no revolting episode glossed over, in this tale of nether San Francisco.'1 While could be translated to a less offensive state, the Boy Zola in league with Doubleday & McClure had proven less manageable: the violence, malodorous squalor, overt sexuality, and worse the perversities recorded in the novel were baldly imaged in the terms Norris intended. It remains surprising, then, that of all the moments in the

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