Justification of racism?

Reading Norris, I became more and more flustered. I want to try and look at his writing objectively, but I find the same ideas crossing my mind again and again. I just cannot look past both his base racism, and just how two-dimensional his characters really are. Essentially, all his characters are entirely defined by just a handful of trails, most of which reflect racial stereotypes of the day. Some are more obvious, such as Zerkov, who is repeatedly described as the one Jewish character and also as greedy, shallow, and murderous for gold. In fact, the only characters I found had the tiniest bit of depth were those who were never really give racial traits, or these traits were never emphasized, such as Old Grannis. Even Trina's family can be looked at as cardboard cutouts of stereotypes. We have the German man who has to act like he's still in the military, for example. I can't say much about her mother, because I found Norris's writing of her accent incomprehensible quite often.

McTeague is a rather interesting case in particular, because his racial background is never made entirely clear. We can speculate he is Irish possible because of his name, but it is hard to be entirely sure. Whoever, there is a family trait that defines him. He is a miner. It is all we are told of his father, and later in the book Norris makes it clear that he views mining and dentistry in very similar lights in how the professions work. Furthermore, there is an emphasis on how his work involves either dealing with precious metals, drilling, or (after his marriage to Trina) hunting after gold that is hidden to him in some way. What is most troubling to me about this is it suggests that family profession is a manner of hereditary trait. If your father worked metals, than you are a metal worker by blood. To be honest, I would not be surprised if Norris would have supported a strict caste system. I know we are reading this book because it is supposed to be a notable example of 19th century literature, but that saddens me a bit because of what it means about acceptable viewpoints at the time.

Only shades of black and white

First, let me say that I enjoyed Pudd'nhead Wilson. What I enjoyed most in how deliberate Twain is in his use of little details. Take the illustrations in the book, for example. At first, I thought them completely unshaded, leaving only a world of black and white. While an appropriate commentary for Twain, looking over the images again I realized many of them ARE shaded. That is to say, everything except the characters in the pictures are shaded. Only the characters remain only black and while throughout.

There are only two images where a character has notable shading on any part of them. In both cases, it is "Tom" depicted. The first is the image of Tom in women's clothing robbing his neighbors. Here is depicted in black gloves. This is the only black clothing any character in the entire book a character is illustrated wearing that I noticed. The second is shown immediately after "Tom" decides to rob the judge. The rain in the image covers him, darkening his image significantly. All other depictions of people beyond a handful of slaves are stark white. To me, this seems to signify how both those acts, he gave in to how he expected someone of his heritage would be forced to act. It interests me the subtle commentary hidden in a handful of simple images.