I have come to the conclusion that WiFi and I will forever be enemies.

I have not read a novel in a while that has made my jaw physically drop from the shock of words I read, but McTeague has given my jaw quite a work out.  The content itself is not really that shocking, but when the first half of the novel is taken into consideration, it does get a bit obnoxious.  

I think more than anything I am shocked by how long Trina is allowed to go on in her miserly-ways while McTeague does not do anything about it until much later--and by then it is very extreme...because he kills her.  Oddly, it almost feels justified (and somewhat relieving) when McTeague kills Trina, which makes it scary as the reader to be okay with actions I know to be wrong.  But before she was killed, I kept wondering when someone was going to do something about Trina's behavior.  It is overwhelming to read about greed of that degree and see how it infects a person.  Their whole marriage looked more like cohabitation rather than a situation where “two become one.”  Trina repeatedly referred to the money as hers, would correct herself, then call it “ours”—but the heart of the issue never changed.  She always saw the money as hers and hers alone. 

Consider how Trina handles herself and then consider how she handles money.  For some time, she physically withheld herself from McTeague before the day of the kiss.  After the kiss, she decides to give herself over in marriage.  But the moment she physically surrenders to him, everything outside of her person becomes an object she must take in to fill what had been lost in physically giving in to McTeague.  The only difference between a prude and a miser is the difference between sex and money.  The motive and result of the action is the same internal decision: to withhold from another person, who in this case is her husband.