McTeague: A Story of San Francisco

“Every other Sunday he became an irresponsible animal, a beast, a brute, crazy with alcohol.” 

This passage describes McTeague’s father. McTeague avoids whiskey, recognizing that it does “not agree with him” (293). However, as time goes on and his quality of life deteriorates, he begins to drink whiskey with his friends. As it did with his father, the whiskey rouses “the brute in the man” and goads “it to evil” (306). Usually docile and slow, McTeague becomes “vicious,” “active,” and “alert” (305); he becomes “intractable” and “mean,” and he takes “a certain pleasure in […] abusing and hurting” Trina (305). Despite “all that was good in him,” McTeague is “tainted” by “the foul stream of hereditary evil” and by “[t]he vices and sins of his father and of his father’s father, to the third and fourth and five hundredth generation” (32). McTeague’s becoming vicious like his father shows how people’s behavior is influenced by heredity. His succumbing to drinking whiskey despite his wariness of its effect on him shows that people’s destruction by their internal forces is inevitable and unavoidable.

“McTeague’s mind was as his body, heavy, slow to act, sluggish. Yet there was nothing vicious about the man. Altogether he suggested the draught horse, immensely strong, stupid, docile, obedient.” 

McTeague is often likened to animals and especially to a workhorse, which like McTeague is strong and obedient. He moves in a “[b]ull-like” fashion (5) and is described as “wagging his head” (41). He overpowers Trina with a “bearlike embrace” (90), and Trina plays with his hair as if he were a Saint Bernard. McTeague’s stupidity reinforces this comparison to animals. McTeague illustrates the tenuous line between human and animal, a line he crosses at the picnic when Marcus bites his ear. When attacked, the “brute that in McTeague lay so close to the surface leaped instantly to life,” and he releases “the hideous yelling of a hurt beast, the squealing of a wounded elephant” (234). In McTeague, Norris represents how easily the animal urges within humans are released, despite our efforts to restrain them.

“It was his ambition, his dream, to have projecting from that corner window a huge gilded tooth, a molar with enormous prongs, something gorgeous and attractive. He would have it some day, on that he was resolved; but as yet such a thing was far beyond his means.” 

The gold tooth represents characters’ desire to move upward in the socioeconomic hierarchy. When McTeague receives the tooth as a gift from Trina, he is mesmerized by it; it is “tremendous” and “overpowering” (147), and it shines “as if with a light of its own” (148). He wonders what his rival, the Other Dentist, would think of it and imagines him “suffer[ing] veritable convulsions of envy” (148). The tooth is a source of pride to McTeague, and he refuses to sell it to the Other Dentist when he calls on McTeague to inquire about buying it. McTeague telling the dentist he can’t “make small” of him reinforces the tooth’s connection to McTeague’s social standing and the prestige that gold brings. As the McTeagues decline, they bring the tooth with them into their increasingly small and dirty homes, until at last the tooth is forgotten, used only to hold dirty dishes. The tooth’s declining importance in the McTeagues’ lives mirrors McTeague’s own downward slide.

“Trina was very small and prettily made. Her face was round and rather pale; her eyes long and narrow and blue, like the half-open eyes of a little baby; her lips and the lobes of her tiny ears were pale, a little suggestive of anaemia; while across the bridge of her nose ran an adorable little line of freckles.” 

Trina is infantilized, likened to a baby. She is also described as being “without sex,” for “the woman in her [is] not yet awakened” (23). McTeague also has “that intuitive suspicion of all things feminine—the perverse dislike of an overgrown boy” (23). This infantilization is continued later when, after their marriage, the McTeagues occupy an apartment containing two pictures, one of a little boy pretending to be an old man and one of a little girl pretending to be an old woman, titled “I’m Grandpa” and “I’m Grandma.” Old Grannis and Miss Baker similarly act with “the timidity of a second childhood” (15). The infantilization of adults in the novel highlights their vulnerability to, as well as their naiveté of, the internal and external forces that oppress them. It minimizes the characters in readers’ minds, making them appear even more powerless. It also adds a subtly grotesque quality to the world Norris has created.

“Suddenly the animal in the man stirred and woke; the evil instincts that in him were so close to the surface leaped to life, shouting and clamoring.” 

When McTeague is forced to use anesthesia on Trina, he watches her as she lies defenseless in his chair and is suddenly taken by an urge to assault her. The urge is like “the sudden panther leap of an animal, lips drawn, fangs flash, hideous, monstrous, not to be resisted” (30). That the urge is described like that of an animal illustrates a core tenet of Naturalism, that humans are essentially animals and thus are at the mercy of base, animalistic instincts. McTeague’s desperate grapple against this force illustrates how these forces overpower us despite the goodness in us. McTeague endures a “crisis” in which “a certain second self, another better McTeague rose with the brute” (30), and he fights this urge with “the fury of a young bull in the heat of high summer” (31). McTeague’s failure to push back this urge—he kisses Trina “grossly, full on the mouth” (31)—shows the inevitability of our submission to these internal forces. In addition, the battle is cast as almost biblical: It is “the old battle, old as the world, wide as the world” (30). The ancient nature of this battle suggests failure is preordained.

“‘No, no,’ she exclaimed, refusing without knowing why, suddenly seized with a fear of him, the intuitive feminine fear of the male.” 

When McTeague asks her to marry him, Trina instinctively refuses, suddenly fearing his “hands of the old-time car-boy” and his “enormous brute strength” (33). She again shows fear of him when he proposes a second time, telling him, “‘No’ instinctively, in spite of herself” (83). After their wedding, Trina is “seized” by “[a] sudden vague terror” (177) upon being left alone with McTeague; later, she is again struck by “her ancient terror” and her “intuitive fear of the male” (300) when, returning home drunk, McTeague raises his fist to her. Trina’s instinctive fear of McTeague not only foreshadows her murder but is also another animal instinct.

“He had the thin, eager, cat-like lips of the covetous; eyes that had grown keen as those of a lynx from long searching admits muck and debris; and claw-like, prehensile fingers—the fingers of a man who accumulates, but never disburses. It was impossible to look at Zerkow and not know instantly that greed—inordinate, insatiable greed—was the dominant passion of the man.”

Zerkow is a Polish Jew who lives in a junk shop that is “dark and damp, and foul with all manner of choking odors” (42). Defined purely by his obsession with gold, “grudging each piece of money as if it had been the blood of his veins” (44), Zerkow offers a vision of 19th-century antisemitism. Zerkow’s degeneracy is evident in the filthiness of his home and in his visceral reaction to gold. Like many characters in the novel, Zerkow is described in animalistic terms. In Zerkow’s case, however, these animalistic terms are drawn from social literature that cast Jews as descendants of goats and other animals.

“The dogs raged at each other, snarling and barking, frantic with hate. Their teeth gleamed. They tore at the fence with their front paws. They filled the whole night with their clamor.” 

Marcus’s dog Alexander and a neighboring collie bark at each other through the cracks in the fence separating them. Upon hearing this ruckus, Marcus notes how they would fight each other if they were together, suggesting, “Have to try it some day” (61). However, when the dogs finally meet, they merely circle each other and walk away. Irritated by Alexander’s refusal to fight, Marcus states that he will whip and starve the dog. Marcus’s early comment that they should see what happens when the dogs get together foreshadows his own fight with McTeague and how the two men die at each other’s hands. The metaphor once again shows the closeness of humans and animals. That the humans are more violent toward each other than the animals suggests people are crueler than their animal counterparts.

“When McTeague had all at once caught her in his huge arms, something had leaped to life in her—something that had hitherto lain dormant, something strong and overpowering. It frightened her now as she thought of it, this second self that had wakened within her, and that shouted and clamored for recognition.” 

Trina contemplates why she cannot resist McTeague when he overpowers her “with his enormous strength” and why she likes for him “to subdue her, to conquer her by sheer brute force” (88). She wonders why she desires to be conquered, and she is bewildered by this “terrifying gust of passion” (88), which is like “a spell, a witchery” (89). Just as Trina awakens sexual urges in McTeague, he awakens “the Woman” in Trina. She is not “to blame” for her passion because these instincts are “as ungovernable as the winds of heaven” (89). These passages suggest that women’s sexual arousal in response to male strength is instinctive and uncontrollable. This instinct is what makes her love him “with a blind, unreasoning love” (183). It is also what makes her and Maria take pride in bragging to each other about their husbands’ cruelty. The inescapable nature of these instincts suggests characters’ downfalls are preordained, a suggestion that is validated when each woman is murdered by her husband.

“No people have a keener eye for the amenities than those whose social position is not assured.” 

When Marcus suggests that McTeague take Trina to the theater, McTeague is unsure whether he should also take Trina’s mother. He, like “any of the people of the little world of Polk Street” (91), is “not sure of himself as regarded certain proprieties” (91). The workers on Polk Street, those “whose social position was not clearly defined” (92), are anxious about appearing “proper,” and in their attempts to avoid looking “tough,” they “invariably overd[o] the thing” (92). Lower-middle-class anxiety about appearing low on the socioeconomic hierarchy is a theme in McTeague; the social hierarchy is one of the forces bearing down on the characters. Norris frequently illustrates how despite the people’s attempts to rise in the hierarchy, they cannot escape their class. For example, by putting quotation marks around objects or activities the people of Polk Street enjoy, Norris suggests their cheapness or superficiality. This class anxiety is best demonstrated in Marcus who, despite having “picked up” his professional knowledge “in a haphazard way” (12) and not really understanding politics, seeks to impress people with his political diatribes. It is one reason the characters are awestruck when Trina wins the lottery: “The wheel of fortune had come spinning close to them” (112). However persistent their attempts to rise, the greater forces of social structure keep them down. By the end of the novel, Trina’s avarice and hoarding have overcome her, and she becomes “alone, a solitary, abandoned woman, lost in the lowest eddies of the great city’s tide—the tide that always ebbs” (353). The city and its hierarchy, like ocean waves, are vast, powerful, and indifferent. As the tide comes and goes, so do people.

“A good deal of peasant blood still ran undiluted in her veins, and she had all the instinct of a hardy and penurious mountain race—the instinct which saves without any thought, without any idea of consequence—saving for the sake of saving, hoarding without knowing why.” 

Trina’s instinct to hoard is a heredity force, the product of generations of Swiss-German peasant blood, and therefore something she cannot control. This determinism—a belief that events and human behaviors are predestined and that people do not have free will—is a core tenet of Naturalism, which also holds that people’s basest instincts emerge during extraordinary circumstances. Trina’s hoarding is exacerbated by her lottery win, as even she admits, “Since I won in the lottery I’ve become a regular little miser” (210). Trina’s destruction by this force seems inevitable because this instinct runs through her blood.

“She—perhaps McTeague as well—felt that there was a certain inadequateness about the ceremony. Was that all there was to it? Did just those few muttered phrases make them man and wife? It had been over in a few moments, but it had bound them for life. Had not something been left out? Was not the whole affair cursory, superficial? It was disappointing.” 

Trina’s feeling that her wedding ceremony is disappointing illustrates the meaninglessness and insignificance of human activity and life. This meaninglessness is also evident in the fact that during the ceremony, guests hear “noises of the street” (164), such as a cable car, a newsboy, and someone using a saw. The insignificance of their wedding is solidified after the auction of their things, when Trina finds that her wedding bouquet, “a melancholy relic of a vanished happiness” (283), is the only object that does not sell. Finally, after discovering Maria’s body, Trina is horrified to find that people shop in the market, laugh outside Frenna’s saloon, and walk outside “on the sunny sidewalks, while behind her in there—in there—in there—” (317). These passages show how the world is indifferent to humans and how what we see as important is unnoticed by the universe and even by other people. All this suggests that people themselves are small and insignificant, their happiness transient and their treasures worthless.

“‘No, no, no,’ she said. ‘I can’t do it. It may be mean, but I can’t help it. It’s stronger than I.’”

Regretting her refusal to help McTeague by giving him money from her savings, Trina thinks of how she “love[s] her ‘old bear’ too much to do him an injustice” (208). However, despite her intentions, she cannot make amends by giving him the money. This passage shows Trina’s inability to resist her instinct to hoard, her inherent goodness, and her acknowledgement that her hoarding is a problem. Her feeling troubled by her own behavior shows how these base instincts and internal forces are stronger than the good in people. As the novel progresses, Trina’s instinct to hoard develops from “mere economy” to “a panic terror lest a fraction of a cent of her little savings should be touched” (274). Her inability to part with any money despite the deteriorating quality of her life shows the force of this instinct and the inevitability of her demise.

“They—they can’t make small of me.” 

After receiving a notice informing him he cannot practice dentistry without a diploma from a dental school, McTeague tells Trina that no one can stop him practicing medicine and that they “can’t make small” of him. McTeague makes this comment whenever he feels someone is trying to assert power over him. He says this to the ticket taker at the theater who is exasperated by his inability to choose seats; he also says Marcus can’t make small of him after breaking his pipe in Frenna’s saloon. He says it again to the Other Dentist who attempts to buy his gold tooth. He says it to Trina the night he kills her, when she refuses to give him money. McTeague’s fear that someone will “make small” of him shows his awareness of the precariousness of his status and how, in a world of vast, oppressive, and indifferent forces, characters must constantly fight to feel important and significant.

“At first these deprivations angered McTeague. Then, all of a sudden, he slipped back into the old habits (that had been his before he knew Trina) with an ease that was surprising.” 

When McTeague and Trina are first married, Trina manages to “make McTeague rise” to her “level” (187) by teaching him to enjoy finer clothing and food and to refine his manners and opinions. She also convinces him to take walks with her and to visit the art museum. As their situation worsens and they move to a cheaper, smaller room, McTeague is forced to rely on Trina for money and give up the luxuries he has come to enjoy. Trina, always a tidy dresser and a diligent housekeeper, also becomes “coarse” and “dumpy,” and her neglect of housework results in their home being filthy. Both McTeagues become “accustomed to their surroundings” (335). These passages show how quickly a person’s refined tastes and manners—hallmarks of human society—can deteriorate. That McTeague easily slips back into his old habits as if he had never acquired new ones illustrates the tenuous line between human and animal.

“He had sold his happiness for money; he had bartered all his tardy romance for some miserable bank-notes. He had not foreseen that it would be like this. A vast regret welled up within him.” 

Old Grannis regrets selling his book-binding apparatus because now there is “nothing for him to do” (323). Worse, he can never “keep company” with Miss Baker again, as they used to sit by the partition between their rooms as he bound his pamphlets and she had her tea. Old Grannis’s regret at having sacrificed so much that was important to him is one of the few hopeful moments in McTeague. That Miss Baker overcomes her timidity to comfort him similarly shows that happiness is not entirely elusive, even for those in the final stages of their lives. Though both characters have been overwhelmed by their own internal forces—timidity, fear of offending, fixation on what is proper and polite—they manage to break free and find happiness. Their “little Elysium of their own creating” and their metaphorically walk “hand in hand in a delicious garden where it was always autumn” (330) shows how they create an eternal paradise for themselves.

“The instincts of the old-time miner were returning. In the stress of his misfortune McTeague was lapsing back into his early estate.”

Even when a dentist in San Francisco, McTeague is described as having the hands of a car-boy and “[t]he old-time miner’s idea of wealth easily gained and quickly spent” (132). McTeague regresses to his true nature as his ties to civilization fall away. After he commits his greatest act of depravity by killing Trina, his old instincts rear up, and he returns to his room, rolls up his valuables in a blanket, and flees to the mine. He is led by “instinct” to “the exact spot” (381) where the trail starts; with “unreasoned instinct,” he “pick[s] up his life again exactly where he had left it the day when his mother had sent him away with the travelling dentist” (385). McTeague returning to the mine despite his mother’s attempts to have “her son rise in life and enter a profession” (2) suggests the futility of human attempts to rise above their natures. The fact that the mountains take “him back again like a returning prodigal” and that “their immensity, their enormous power, crude and blind,” reflects “his own nature” (387) shows that McTeague, despite his stint in the city, cannot escape his brutal nature.

“One evening she had even spread all the gold pieces between the sheets, and had then gone to bed, stripping herself, and had slept all night upon the money, taking a strange and ecstatic pleasure in the touch of the smooth flat pieces the length of her entire body.” 

Trina’s avarice overpowers her, and she even sees gold pieces in the sunlight that filters into the room. She is now ruled by this “one dominant passion” to the extent that “ever other natural affection” is driven out (354). Her love of her money is described as sexual in nature: She plays with it “in an ecstasy of delight” (356) and “quiver[s] with pleasure” (357); she is frequently taken “all of a sudden” (358) by fits of passion where her face flushes and “her breath came short” (358). Trina losing herself in her passion for money shows both the depravity that results from greed and the lack of control one has over one’s internal forces.

“Now his own concertina was come back to him.” 

McTeague is furious to learn that Trina sold his concertina, one of his most cherished possessions. Throughout the novel McTeague takes great pleasure in playing the “six lugubrious airs” that he knows, songs that “always carried him back to the time when he was a car-boy at the Big Dipper Mine in Placer County” (2). The instrument’s sentimental value and music’s distinctly human nature mark one of the few distinctions between McTeague’s humanity and his brutishness. It is therefore fitting that the evening he learns Trina sold the concertina, he goes to her to extract money to repurchase it and ultimately kills her, committing his most brutal act. In addition, as the concertina reminds him of his days in Placer County, his finding it foreshadows his return to the mine.

“A tremendous, immeasurable Life pushed steadily heavenward without a sound, without a motion. At turns of the road, on the higher points, cañons disclosed themselves far away, gigantic grooves in the landscape, deep blue in the distance, opening one into another, ocean-deep, silent, huge, and suggestive of colossal primeval forces held in reserve.”

This passage describes Placer County, California, where nature “is a vast, unconquered brute of the Pliocene epoch, savage, sullen, and magnificently indifferent to man” (380). This landscape represents the indifferent and powerful universe that human beings are at the mercy of. The ominous language used to describe the landscape—the mountains look like “serrated edges” and “giant lions” (379)—suggests danger. Its “primeval” and “Pliocene” qualities—both terms that suggest ancient, primitive times before civilization—suggest that the battles people have with internal and external forces are as old as time and that the outcomes are predetermined. McTeague’s flight to this landscape, which represents the origin “of colossal primeval forces held in reserve,” reinforces the novel’s argument that human behavior is dictated by these forces. The mine similarly is described as a powerful, all-consuming beast of prey. Emitting “prolonged thunder,” it is an “insatiable monster” that “gnash[es] the rocks to powder with its long iron teeth” and “vomit[s] them out again” (380). It has an “enormous maw” that is “fed night and day with the car-boys’ loads” (380); it “grind[s] the rocks between its jaws, glutted, as it were, with the very entrails of the earth” (380). That McTeague’s time here is spent “in the midst of the play of crude and simple forces” (387) reiterates the landscape’s connection to the forces at the heart of the novel.

“What strange sixth sense stirred in McTeague at this time? What animal cunning, what brute instinct clamored for recognition and obedience? What lower faculty was it that roused his suspicion, that drove him out into the night a score of times between dark and dawn, his head in the air, his eyes and ears keenly alert?”

Though happy at the mine, McTeague is compelled by a “mysterious intuition of approaching danger” (413) to flee eastward. It is a basic, animal instinct, “an unseen hand” that spurs him to “hurry, hurry, hurry” (413) even after he strikes gold with Cribbens. Despite not knowing its source or of what it warns, McTeague cannot ignore the urge. Eventually, deciding the force is stronger than he is, McTeague abandons the site of the gold and moves eastward, turning abruptly into Death Valley to prevent his pursuers from following. The pursuers he escapes are the sheriff and deputies searching for Trina’s murderer and Marcus, who abandons the search party to follow McTeague’s tracks into Death Valley. McTeague’s blind, instinctive drive eastward in this primeval landscape is the ultimate illustration of the animal forces that compel our behavior.

“It was abominable, this hideous sink of alkali, this bed of some primeval lake lying so far below the level of the ocean. The great mountains of Placer County had been merely indifferent to man; but this awful sink of alkali was openly and unreservedly iniquitous and malignant.” 

Described as inhospitable, Death Valley is a landscape of “primordial desolation” (424) in which McTeague gasps for breath “under the merciless lash of the sun’s rays” (419). Even the silence is “vast” and “illimitable,” enfolding McTeague “like an immeasurable tide” (419). The landscape, like the forces it represents, is omnipotent and relentless, swallowing those who dare attempt to penetrate it. That McTeague’s animal instincts bring him to this place where the forces that govern people’s actions are centered illustrates how our destinies are predetermined and inescapable. That “not a twig relieved [the] horrible monotony” of the “immeasurable scroll” (425) suggests the infinite nature of these forces. Here, like in the mountains, there is a “primordial,” ancient quality that further suggests inevitability.

“‘What’s the good of moving on?’

‘What’s the good of stopping here?’” 

After the mule, shot by Marcus, falls over and their remaining water is spilled, McTeague and Marcus argue over what to do next. Without water and surrounded by nothing but “[c]haotic desolation” (439), Marcus does not know why they would even try to move forward, and McTeague does not know why they would merely sit there waiting to die. This scene shows the futility of human action in the face of unrelenting and indifferent forces.