McTeague: A Story of San Francisco

Characters in McTeague are often described as animal-like in appearance and behavior, illustrating the closeness between humans and animals and the futility of civilization. Characters’ animal traits reflect their defining characteristics. Trina, neat and careful in appearance and in her housekeeping, is described as having “the delicacy of a white cat” (120); later, when McTeague attacks her in the kindergarten cloakroom, she fights “for her miserable life with the exasperation and strength of a harassed cat” (375). Zerkow is like a “hungry beast of prey” whose “claw-like fingers” (45) show him to be “a man who accumulates, but never disburses” (43). The animosity between Marcus’s dog Alexander and a neighboring dog represents the growing feud between Marcus and McTeague. The likening of humans to animals reflects not only people’s closeness to animals but also their smallness, vulnerability, and thoughtlessness—qualities evident in the depiction of the miners in Placer County as being “like lice on mammoths’ hides” (380).

As the title character, McTeague most clearly represents this connection between humans and animals. McTeague moves in a “[b]ull-like” manner (5) and is often seen “wagging his head” (41). Trina plays with his head as if he were a “gigantic, good-natured Saint Bernard” (135) and frequently calls him her “old bear.” It is suggested that he is animal-like even in his stupidity: Like a “draught horse,” he is “immensely strong, stupid, docile, obedient” (3). In the early months of their marriage, Trina manages “to raise him from the stupid animal life to which he had been accustomed in his bachelor days” (190).

However, McTeague’s rise from animal to civilized human is short-lived. Despite “all that [is] good in him” (32), McTeague, overpowered by “the animal in the man” (30), assaults Trina as she lies unconscious in his dental chair. A fierce battle ensues between “the sudden panther leap of the animal, lips drawn, fangs flash, hideous, monstrous, not to be resisted” and “a certain second self, another better McTeague” (30). McTeague’s failure to “strangle” this beast shows the inevitability of people’s descent into their animal natures. McTeague is often described as an animal in his passions. During their courtship, he overpowers Trina with a “bearlike embrace” (90). When Marcus bites his ear at the picnic, “[t]he brute that in McTeague lay so close to the surface” awakens, and his scream is “the hideous yelling of a hurt beast, the squealing of a wounded elephant” (234). His looking “stupidly” and “helplessly” around as “his bestial fury lapse[s]” (236) indicates how out of control of his animal rage he had been.

As his circumstances decline and the fetters of civilization fall, his animal traits become clearer. Living in Zerkow’s filthy home, he and Trina become “accustomed to their surroundings” (335) which, infested with cockroaches and “invaded” by “[a]ll the filth of the alley” (337), resemble the dwelling of animals. Having given up finding a job, McTeague spends his days fishing outside and eating his catch “without salt or knife or fork” (333). He complains to Trina that they are living in “a rat hole” (299); Trina’s hair, long neglected, becomes “a veritable rat’s nest” (336). The ease with which the McTeagues fall back into animalism illustrates the tenuousness of the social constraints that keep these animal instincts at bay.

McTeague’s most uncontrollable animal drive emerges when he is farthest from civilization, further emphasizing that his natural state is that of a brute. By the end of the novel, when McTeague has left San Francisco and shed the last remnants of his ties to civilization, he is overcome by an “animal cunning,” a “brute instinct” (390) of danger that compels him to flee. As he is chased like “a tracked stag” (413), he finds himself in a landscape with trails that “had been made by cattle, not by men” (417). That the death of the canary, McTeague’s most prized possession, coincides with his own is a final connection between the human and animal worlds.

Characters in McTeague are often driven by class anxiety or by envy of those higher in the socioeconomic hierarchy. Norris frequently uses quotation marks around words that indicate objects that the people of Polk Street value or admire. These quotation marks suggest the cheapness or superficiality of objects characters believe to be “the height of elegance” (226). At the theater McTeague and Trina watch the “artists” and “specialty performers” (97). McTeague and Trina spend their days walking “down town” (195). The superficiality of these items is epitomized in Trina’s “non-poisonous paint,” which is proven to be nothing of the kind when she must have fingers amputated after using it without gloves. It is also evident in the “Made in France” stickers she affixes to her Noah’s ark figures to make them appear more sophisticated than they are.

Norris also demonstrates this unsophistication by establishing contrasts. McTeague’s secondhand Lorenzo de’ Medici engraving appears out of place in his one-room “Dental Parlors.” McTeague and Marcus are imposters in their professions, having “picked up” their knowledge “in a haphazard way” (12). Mr. Sieppe’s treating minor events such as walking to the park as military exploits shows that, despite “taking himself very seriously” (65) as “a leader of vast enterprises” (174), his is a life of small and petty concerns.

Characters’ lowliness is also demonstrated in their unsophisticated tastes. Shop girls are “dressed with a certain cheap smartness” (6); on Sundays, people walk up and down Polk Street “dressed in cheap Sunday finery” (9). McTeague, in awe of the “musical marvels” playing “Home, Sweet Home” at the theater, believes “[a]rt could go no farther” (101). At the sale of the McTeagues’ possessions, buyers mock Trina’s Nottingham lace curtains and the lithographs she hung on the walls. McTeague himself is described as a “poor crude dentist of Polk Street, stupid, ignorant, vulgar, with his sham education and plebeian tastes” (28).

Whether knowingly or not, characters attempt to fight their way upward in the socioeconomic hierarchy. Self-conscious in the eyes of others, they often do so by trying to impress or subjugate them. Though not easily roused to anger, McTeague grows defiant when he feels slighted, repeatedly asserting that people “can’t make small” of him. Despite having only “picked up a few half-truths of political economy” (13), Marcus attempts to prove his knowledge by embarking on long political rampages that are “certain of impressing” McTeague (13). On the boat to the picnic with the other men, he orders a cocktail he feels will “astonish the others” (227). In their desperation not to appear of “the ‘tough’ element” (92), the people of Polk Street become “absurdly formal” (92). Norris notes that “[n]o people have a keener eye for the amenities than those whose social position is not assured” (92).

The desire to rise in the hierarchy is why Trina’s lottery win has such dramatic effects on their lives. Her win awakens Trina’s lust for money. It also inspires jealousy in Marcus, whose belief that McTeague has cheated him out of $5,000 suggests that one man cannot rise without another falling. McTeague himself is lured by the promise of riches, possessing the “old-time miner’s idea of wealth easily gained and quickly spent” (132). That the $5,000 ultimately leads to their demise shows the weight of the forces keeping people in their stations. Though characters are awed by Trina’s lottery win because the “wheel of fortune had come spinning close to them” (112), they never do attain the heights they imagine for themselves.

In McTeague forces that drive women’s behavior indicate an innate subordination to men. Trina’s lust is sparked by “the desire, the necessity of being conquered by a superior strength” (88). She submits “in an instant” when McTeague “conquer[s] her by sheer brute force” (88). When “[t]he Woman” awakens in her, she commits herself to him, “struggle against it as she would” (89). Her inability to deny her draw to McTeague’s dominance is the result of “mysterious instincts as ungovernable as the winds of heaven” (89).

Trina is compelled to submit to McTeague despite the expectation that women be pure. The instincts that attract Trina irrevocably to McTeague are the same instincts that, upon her “submission,” make Trina “seem less desirable” to McTeague (89). McTeague is at the mercy of an instinct to be attracted only to a woman without “the smudge of a foul ordure” (31). Trina herself worries over its implication on her being “a pure girl” (88). That McTeague, like Trina, is “allowed no voice in the matter”—Norris notes that “neither of them was to blame”—illustrates how these drives are inherent and undeniable (89).

Despite her “intuitive feminine fear of the male” and her fear of his “enormous brute strength” (33), Trina continues to find McTeague’s physical strength his most alluring quality, even when it threatens her. When McTeague, after learning Marcus has reported him for practicing without a license, “heave[s] himself up to his full six feet two” (270) and suggests he will assault Marcus, Trina is breathlessly awed by his strength. Later, when McTeague hurts her, Trina is “aroused” by “a morbid, unwholesome love of submission” and is “all the more affectionate” with him (309). Her competition with Maria over whose “husband [is] the most cruel” further suggests women’s inherent submission to men (310).

McTeague’s frustration at how complicated his life becomes after “the feminine element” enters “his little world” is reminiscent of Adam and Eve (27). Overwhelmed at the disruption to his “perfectly content” life (52), McTeague ponders how “[w]herever the woman had put her foot a score of distressing complications had sprung up” (53). The biblical overtone of these passages reiterates the ancient and unavoidable nature of the forces driving women and the men who associate with them.

The internal and external forces that dictate characters’ behaviors make attempts to rise above one’s station futile. Characters are not only prevented from rising but also punished for attempting to do so. The attempts of McTeague’s mother to help McTeague rise in a profession is shown to be futile when McTeague returns to the mine. The quickness with which the McTeagues’ carefully planned life devolves into wreckage suggests the futility of human endeavors. McTeague’s death comes despite his having developed “ambitions—very vague, very confused ideas of something better” (191). Marcus, despite his temporary rise in politics, dies at McTeague’s hands. Even Mr. Sieppe’s upholstery business fails, and the family is forced to move to New Zealand. Dreams of a better future come to nothing, showing humans’ insignificance.

This insignificance is demonstrated in many subtle ways throughout the novel. Those attending the McTeagues’ wedding hear “the noises of the street” (164)—newsboys selling their wares, someone sawing, and other sounds that minimize the events going on inside. The sale of the McTeagues’ personal items and the forgotten wedding bouquet show how an entire life can be gone in an instant; the bouquet, “a melancholy relic of a vanished happiness,” is “a thing that nobody wanted” (283), suggesting the meaninglessness of the happy life Trina had built. This is a sentiment reiterated later, when Trina finds Maria’s dead body in Zerkow’s home: Searching for someone to help her, Trina is horrified that on the street, “people were laughing and living, buying and selling, walking about out there on the sunny sidewalks” (317). Zerkow and Maria’s baby, who dies at two weeks old without a name and without grief from either parent, shows the brevity of human life and how easily people are forgotten.

McTeague’s flight into Death Valley is the final and most dramatic example of human futility. Driven by an instinct he cannot explain, McTeague flees to a land of “primordial desolation” (424) where “an immeasurable scroll” (425) of “inhospitable” landscape (418) reaches infinitely before him, only to meet the nemesis who is doomed to destroy him. That McTeague’s instincts of approaching danger drive him toward his demise shows that he cannot escape his destiny. The novel’s final paragraph, in which McTeague, handcuffed to Marcus’s dead body, sits “stupidly looking around” at the “vast, interminable […] measureless leagues of Death Valley” (442) leaves readers themselves with nothing to look at and no hope of escape, just one last image of the futility of human action.