McTeague: A Story of San Francisco

The subtitle of McTeague is A Story of San Francisco, and Norris offers detailed descriptions of the city’s landscape. The city, as well as its socioeconomic hierarchy, is a force in the lives of its residents. Characters in McTeague are neither poor nor wealthy; they are too low in the socioeconomic hierarchy to enjoy true luxury but high enough to feel they can achieve it, and they exhibit social self-consciousness inspired by class. Norris notes that “[n]o people have a keener eye for the amenities than those whose social position is not assured” (92). As a result, the people of Polk Street “invariably over[do]” their efforts to “preserve their ‘respectability,’” preferring to be “absurdly formal” than to risk being “toughs” (92). For instance, in suggesting that McTeague take Trina to the variety show, Marcus, like other “people of the little world of Polk Street,” is “not sure of himself as regarded certain proprieties” (91) and does not know whether McTeague should also invite Mrs. Sieppe. This self-consciousness is reflected in Marcus’s attempt to impress McTeague with his political tirades, which invariably are “attacking the capitalists” (13). Even in his rampages Marcus shows bumbling insufficiency: He does not have a full understanding of his subject, having “picked up a few half-truths of political economy” (13).

Characters’ struggle to rise in the social hierarchy is represented by McTeague’s golden tooth. When McTeague receives the tooth, he wonders what his nemesis, the Other Dentist—“that poser, that rider of bicycles, that courser of greyhounds” (148)—will say when he sees it. The tooth, which shines “as if with a light of its own” (148) and beside which “everything seemed dwarfed” (147), represents riches and prestige for which the characters hunger. This hunger is evident in characters’ reaction to Trina’s lottery win: “In some way every one of them felt elated. The wheel of fortune had come spinning close to them” (112).

The promise of money serves as a catalyst that brings out characters’ basest instincts. Trina refuses to spend her money, claiming “it’s mine, every single penny of it” (155). Her thriftiness is the result of her disciplined German-Swiss ancestors; her “peasant blood,” which “ran undiluted in her veins,” leads her to hoard “without knowing why” (134). Just as McTeague’s sexual compulsions are reminiscent of the sins of his ancestors, Trina’s compulsion to save is ingrained in her and therefore inescapable. Trina’s winning the lottery also brings Marcus’s instinctive temper to the surface. Already quick-tempered by nature, Marcus is furious that he gave up Trina only for her to win the lottery, telling Heise, a harness-maker who frequents Frenna’s saloon, he’s “been soldiered out of five thousand dollars” (141). Readers should note Marcus’s anger, which will have devastating repercussions later.

Norris continues to use contrast to illuminate the smallness and vulnerability of his characters. Mr. Sieppe, who treats the family’s expedition to the park as a military exploit, reflects “gravely” on which child gets to hold a pair of scissors, a “matter of tremendous moment” (69). As in previous chapters, Norris’s use of quotation marks suggests nothing is as valuable as it appears. This cheapness is best illustrated by the “Made in France” stickers Trina affixes to her Noah’s ark figures. However, this superficiality is evident only to the reader, not to the characters. This reflects how characters are easily duped and places them in a position of vulnerability in relation to readers. Characters resist this smallness by competing for control. Flustered by the theater ticket taker’s questions, McTeague exclaims, “You can’t make small of me” (95). He again objects to being made “small” of when Marcus smashes his pipe. Marcus is enraged by what he sees as McTeague’s tricking him out of his “due,” claiming he’s been “played for a sucker” (142). Characters’ fear of being belittled suggests their instinctive recognition of their smallness.

Norris’s use of contrast is most evident in the variety show McTeague attends with Trina, Mrs. Sieppe, and August. The people’s admiration of these “performers” is similarly dehumanizing. Like an animal, McTeague “roared and shouted” at the physical slapstick comedy, “wagging his head” (100). The audience cries “Ah!” all at once, as if a mindless herd. There is a subtle grotesqueness to the evening, evident in August’s “Fauntleroy ‘costume’” that is “very much too small for him” (96) and to his wetting himself in the theater—a scene that horrified contemporary critics. That McTeague feels as if he is “a man of the world” (97) watching these tawdry performers—he believes that “[a]rt could go no farther” (101)—shows how little of the world he actually knows.

Norris also represents the characters’ smallness by continuing to describe them as children. Walking to the park, Trina and McTeague engage in childlike conversation, asking each other simple questions and lamenting the discomfort of “get[ting] water in your ears” (68). Trina’s bedroom is a “little chamber” with “a little bed” and a “tiny washstand” (77)—a fitting room for a person who, upon winning the lottery, claps her hands with “the gaiety of a child with a new and wonderful toy” (111). McTeague opens the box containing the large golden tooth with “the joyful curiosity of an overgrown boy” (147). Desperate for her mother to stay after her wedding, Trina cries, “Oh, mamma, I’m—I’m ’fraid” (177). McTeague and Trina’s childishness is most conspicuous in the “I’m Grandpa” and “I’m Grandma” paintings hanging in their apartment: Depicting a little boy and a little girl dressed up to impersonate adults, these paintings are perfect representations of adults who act as though they are children.

Further comparisons of characters to animals remind readers of their animal instincts. Trina has “the delicacy of a white cat” (120). She plays with McTeague’s hair “like a little child playing with some gigantic, good-natured Saint Bernard” (135). At the wedding dinner, the children watch with “ox-like” stares (171). That McTeague, the title character, is characterized by his stupidity reinforces the fine line between animal and human.

McTeague and Trina’s sexual relationship further reflects this fine line. Their physical relationship is described in animalistic terms in that their sexual impulses are inexplicable, undeniable, and violent. McTeague physically overpowers her, crushing her with “his enormous arms” and kissing her “grossly, full in the mouth” (84). In response to his dominance, Trina suffers a “terrifying gust of passion,” yearning to be “conquered by a superior strength” (88). She is overtaken by “something that hitherto lain dormant” (88). Incapable of understanding her own behavior, she wonders if she is chasing him “of her own free will” and whether she is “allowed even a choice” (89). Neither McTeague nor Trina is “allowed” a “voice in the matter,” for their destinies are “the sport of chance” (89). Their lack of control of their lives in the face of overpowering forces—Norris writes that “neither of them was to blame” (89)—is a central tenet of Naturalism.

The relationship between Old Grannis and Miss Baker is a foil to that between McTeague and Trina in that it is careful, polite, and chaste. When they are finally forced to speak together the night Trina wins the lottery, they are “awkward, constrained, [and] tongue-tied with embarrassment,” as if they are “two little children” (116). Later, back in their rooms, they take comfort in sitting in “that same room which they shared in common, separated only by the thinnest bad partition” (123). This thin partition represents the figurative wall between them. Unlike McTeague and Trina, Old Grannis and Miss Baker have passed the sexual lustfulness of youth, and without this drive to connect them, they remain trapped in their separate rooms. This is best represented in their sitting next to each other at the McTeagues’ wedding feast where, overcome “with the timidity of their second childhood,” they do not speak, preferring to wordlessly walk “hand in hand” in “a delicious garden where it was always autumn” (172)—a last burst of beauty before the death of the earth in winter.

Readers may have sensed for some time that the mundane routine established thus far is about to be shattered and destroyed. When Trina confesses her love for McTeague, Norris notes, “Never afterward were the two so happy as at that moment” (91). The morning of his wedding, McTeague sings “with strange inappropriateness” a song about being “[l]eft alone in this world’s wilderness” (160). At the wedding, what should be a joyful sing-along of guests sounds more like “a dirge, a lamentable, prolonged wail of distress” (173). Even their hearing street noise during the wedding suggests insignificance, as if life goes on despite the momentous occasions of our lives; indeed, Trina is disappointed after their ceremony, feeling “the whole affair cursory, superficial” (165). These ominous incidents suggest the characters’ destinies are preordained and out of their control.

Readers may feel ambivalent about McTeague, whose physical overpowering of Trina appears horrific and frightening but who, like others, is without control over his actions. Indeed, McTeague has moments of goodness in the novel. When Marcus criticizes him for neglecting to pay back the money he owes him, McTeague promptly pays him. On their wedding night, when Trina is afraid, McTeague puts his arm around her, asking her what she is afraid of and insisting he does “not want to frighten” her (179). Early in the novel McTeague laments that he could never win Trina because “[d]estiny was against him” (72); though it seemed melodramatic at the time, it is a sentiment reiterated later by the narrator, who in musing on McTeague and Trina’s inexplicable lust notes that, upon meeting, “[t]heir undoing had already begun” (89). Though grotesque, characters in McTeague are sympathetic for their helplessness—as, it is suggested, are we.