McTeague: A Story of San Francisco

Trina, a young woman of Swiss-German descent, is infantilized from her earliest appearance in the novel. She is “very small and prettily made” (22), and she has “the half-open eyes of a little baby” (23). She has “tiny ears” and “an adorable little line of freckles” (23). Her most distinguishing feature is her hair, which sits in “[h]eaps and heaps of blue-black coils and braids” (23). It is “a royal crown of swarthy bands, a veritable sable tiara,” and the “coiffure of a queen” (23).

Like McTeague, Trina’s behavior is driven by instincts she cannot explain. When McTeague proposes marriage, Trina, “suddenly seized with a fear of him, the intuitive feminine fear of the male,” refuses (33). Her fear of his physical size—she grows “more and more frightened at his huge hands” and his “enormous brute strength” (33)—foreshadows his beating her to death later in the novel. Though she and McTeague enjoy a pleasant courtship, Trina is also frightened of her desire to submit to his assaults. When McTeague overpowers her, Trina is overwhelmed by “the necessity of being conquered by a superior strength” (88). She is “frightened” by her “terrifying gust of passion, the like of which she had never known” (88). Like McTeague, she cannot understand these internal forces. Trina is thus pulled by two competing animal instincts: instinctive sexual urges and the instinctive fear of the object of her urges. Just as McTeague is driven eastward only to meet his destiny at the hands of Marcus, Trina is driven toward her murderer, stating she loves him even when he abuses her.

However, Trina’s most prominent internal force is her avarice. After her marriage to McTeague, she is adamantly against spending any of her lottery winnings or her savings. Though at first her carefulness with money appears to be merely good “economy,” the result of the “peasant blood” that “ran undiluted in her veins” (134), as time goes on it becomes clear Trina’s hoarding is out of her control. When she feels troubled by her stinginess, she justifies her avarice by acknowledging that it’s “stronger” than she is. Trina is led by an “[i]nstinct which saves without any thought, without idea of consequence—saving for the sake of saving, hoarding without knowing why” (134). The guilt she feels for withholding money from her loved ones is evidence that her goodness is overpowered by her internal forces.

Trina’s avarice leads to the rapid decline of the McTeagues’ lifestyle. When McTeague is ordered to stop practicing dentistry, Trina moves them to increasingly uninhabitable rooms. As their quality of life declines, so does Trina’s fastidiousness. Once a tidy, enthusiastic housekeeper, Trina no longer cleans her wood shavings from the floor or airs out the smells of cooking and paint. Their room is “abominably dirty” (336) and acquires “[a]ll the filth of the alley” (337). Trina’s own appearance mimics that of the room. She loses “her pretty ways and her good looks” (335), and even her hair becomes “an unkempt, tangled mess, a veritable rat’s nest” (336).

Trina’s passion for her money is almost sexual in nature. When McTeague is not home, Trina plays with her money, even burying her face in it and putting the pieces in her mouth. Later, when living alone above the kindergarten, Trina fondles her lottery winnings “in an ecstasy of delight” (356) and sleeps with the gold pieces in her bed, stripping naked and “taking a strange and ecstatic pleasure in the touch of the smooth flat pieces the length of her entire body” (361). The physical reaction Trina has to her money is, like McTeague’s drinking, evidence of an uncontrollable internal force.

Just as McTeague meets his destiny in Death Valley, a desolate wasteland representing the forces within him, Trina meets her own destiny while at her lowest point. After losing several fingers to blood poisoning, the result of McTeague’s biting her fingers and her use of “non-poisonous” paint, Trina works as a scrubwoman in a kindergarten. Still insistent on saving, denying “herself light and fuel in order to put by a quarter or so,” Trina’s passion for money is now “a veritable frenzy” (355), and she sees money everywhere, even finding the image of gold in the sunlight. When she is murdered by McTeague in the kindergarten cloakroom, she is “alone, a solitary, abandoned woman, lost in the lowest eddies of the great city’s tide—the tide that always ebbs” (353). Trina is collateral damage in the movement of socioeconomic forces that are indifferent to individual struggles.

Like McTeague, Trina is a good person who is led to despicable acts by a force she cannot control. Her inability to overpower this force leads to her ultimate destruction, and readers watch her downfall until she finally meets her fate.

McTeague’s “pal,” Marcus Schouler is a fiery, excitable veterinary assistant who lives in an apartment in McTeague’s building. He is quick to anger, once “quiver[ing] with rage” (11) as he tells McTeague about how he almost “knifed” a bicyclist with whom he had an argument. Marcus’s anger is his most defining feature. When his dog refuses to fight a rival dog, Marcus threatens to “cut him in two with the whip” (219). When Maria runs to his apartment for safety from Zerkow, Marcus is “ready to fight—he did not know whom, and he did not know why” (245). He is a man whose “promptness to face danger could not for a moment be doubted” (221). Marcus’s compulsion to fight is like Trina’s avarice or McTeague’s drinking: It is a force that lays dormant, emerging fully when triggered.

In Marcus, Norris offers a picture of a man who feels the full weight of the socioeconomic hierarchy above him. Like McTeague, Marcus’s professional knowledge has “been picked up in a haphazard way” (12). He was hired by Old Grannis only because he was able to “impress” the old man “with a torrent of empty phrases that he delivered with fierce gestures and with a manner of the greatest conviction” (12). This is not the only area in which Marcus makes up for his lack of knowledge with bluster: He frequently delivers passionate political diatribes using “half-truths of political economy” that he had “picked up” (13). As the novel progresses, despite his reliance on stock words and phrases, he gains “a reputation as a maker of speeches delivered with fiery emphasis” (199). The fact that his bluster so easily fools people is a comment not only on Marcus but also on the people themselves.

Marcus demonstrates insecurity at his own lack of knowledge. Like other workers on Polk Street, whose “position [was] not clearly defined,” Marcus is “not sure of himself as regarded certain proprieties” (91-92). He overdresses to visit Selena, wearing a “white lawn ‘tie’ (for him the symbol of the height of elegance)” (226). At the picnic he orders a drink that will impress the other men. He also attempts to impress McTeague with his talk of “[o]utraged constituencies,” “cause of labor,” and “wage earners” (13). Marcus’s actions are influenced by his recognition of his own smallness or insufficiency. That Marcus spends his political rants primarily “attacking the capitalists” (13) suggests that socioeconomic insecurity is behind Marcus’s behavior.

Marcus has a fanciful image of himself, seeing “himself in an entrancing vision involving silver spurs and untamed broncos” (175). When McTeague confesses that he is in love with Trina, Marcus decides to let McTeague pursue her, reveling in the vision of himself as “very noble, self-sacrificing,” feeling so overwhelmed by his own heroism “that he almost sobbed” (56). Later, he will achieve his “vision of himself, booted, sombreroed, and revolvered” by moving to Modoc in Placer County, where “[t]o his intense satisfaction he even invoked himself in a gun fight” (430) in which he loses two fingers.

Like other characters in McTeague, Marcus’s downfall is the result of a complex series of events beginning with Trina’s winning the lottery. Marcus privately gripes about how the money could be his and that he has “thrown five thousand dollars out of the window” (129). Believing he has been “soldiered” out of the money and that he would have it if he had his “rights,” Marcus throws a knife at McTeague one night at Frenna’s. Through Marcus, Norris depicts a disenfranchised man whose insecurity is triggered by anyone who threatens or minimizes him. The connection between Marcus’s anger over the lost $5,000 and his socioeconomic status is reiterated by Marcus’s “quickness of temper and passionate readiness to take offence,” which pass “among his class for bravery” (221).

Like the dogs who growl at each other from afar, McTeague and Marcus appear destined to fight each other, though unlike the dogs, they meet their destinies at each other’s hands. In a final act of revenge before leaving for his ranch, Marcus reports McTeague for not having a license to practice dentistry, thus triggering the McTeagues’ downward spiral. In Modoc, upon seeing McTeague’s wanted poster, Marcus insists on joining the sheriff’s search, veering off into Death Valley to follow McTeague’s trail while the others take the safer route around to the mountains. Despite his persistence to thwart McTeague, Marcus is killed by McTeague in the middle of Death Valley. Their final battle there suggests their interconnectedness and the inability to escape one’s fate.

Old Grannis is an Englishman who lives in a small room in McTeague’s building. His defining characteristic is his timidity, and his desire to escape notice is almost humorous. He is easily embarrassed, feeling mortified if slightly unprepared or slightly inconveniencing someone. In addition to being a dog surgeon, he is an amateur book binder; he enjoys sitting in his room with “[h]is little binding apparatus” (35), which he uses to bind pages from various pamphlets. His binding books “almost solely for the pleasure he took in binding them” (35) suggests a certain doddering futility of old age, which is reinforced by the fact that he is called simply “Old Grannis.”

Old Grannis is described as having an innocent, almost childlike goodness. When Old Grannis is “genuinely pained” by the idea that Marcus could report McTeague for not having a dental license, Trina tells him, “That’s because you’re so good yourself, Mr. Grannis” (279). His belief in people’s goodness makes him gullible: He “never for an instant doubt[s]” the truth of Maria’s implausible story of the golden service (122). Later, he purchases the McTeagues’ wedding photo at the auction of their things to give them as “a present” (282).

Like Miss Baker, Old Grannis has missed the opportunity for a youthful romance. The two for years have passed each other on the stairs but never spoken; they often leave their doors open so they can hear each other, believing this to be “keeping company.” Old Grannis enjoys sitting by the partition that separates their rooms so he can better hear Miss Baker making her tea, but he is mortified when they are forced to speak. Though interested in love—Old Grannis tells McTeague how the institution of marriage is “noble” because “[i]t is not good that man should be alone” (156)—Old Grannis is beyond the passion of McTeague and Trina. His and Miss Baker’s being described as timid children suggests a stunted adulthood, a rite of passage never achieved.

Despite his innocence, Old Grannis is perhaps the novel’s wisest character. After selling his book-binding apparatus, he is devastated looking at the table where he will never bind books again. The sale of his apparatus leaves “something out of his life” (323). He laments that he and Miss Baker will never be able to “keep company,” that their romance is over and that he “had sold his happiness for money” (323). Unlike other characters in the novel, Old Grannis recognizes that money is a force that overpowers and destroys. Old Grannis is a vision of hope that is rare in McTeague.

In Old Grannis, Norris offers a picture of both the beauty and tragedy of old age. That he finds the strength to invite Miss Baker into his room and to admit his loneliness suggests that one can, in fact, overcome internal forces that threaten to keep us from our happiness. That Miss Baker needs to knock on his door first suggests that one can overcome these forces, but one cannot do it alone.

Miss Baker, who lives in the room adjacent to Old Grannis’s room, has “false curls” and “withered cheeks” (15). She is given to worry over being proper and ladylike. She and Old Grannis are largely believed to be in love with each other, even though they have never spoken, only passing each other with embarrassment on the stairs. Just as Old Grannis appears, despite his bachelorhood, to admire the idea of love, Miss Baker, though painfully timid with Old Grannis, shows signs of being romantic in nature when she concocts a story to tell McTeague about Old Grannis being “the younger son of a baronet” (18). She also wistfully imagines what her children would be like if she had any.

Like Old Grannis, Miss Baker shows one can overcome internal forces and that sometimes, internal forces are not so malignant. Sensing that Old Grannis needs a cup of tea, she shakily brings him a cup even though she cannot “understand how she had brought herself to do this thing” (324). Her acting with “the courage of the coward,” a courage “greater than all others” (324-25), illustrates that one does have power against these forces and that even those least likely to gather strength can do so. Miss Baker’s realization that the wallpaper in their rooms is the same, indicating that their separate rooms were once one, suggests that sometimes people are connected even when apart.

Maria Miranda Macapa is “the Mexican woman who took care of the lodgers’ rooms” (16). She irritates residents by coercing them into giving her unwanted items, which she sells to Zerkow so she can afford to dress like the ladies of Polk Street. She also takes advantage of McTeague’s slowness by stealing gold pieces from his office. Maria sells Trina the lottery ticket that wins her $5,000, triggering a chain of events that leads to characters’ downfalls.

Maria is characterized by quirks that make her the subject of gossip among the apartment residents. She also speaks frequently of a golden service her family once owned. Though the story is unbelievable, it entrances Zerkow, who pleads with her to retell the story continuously and whom she ultimately marries. She has a child with him, but the unnamed child dies within two weeks. The birth of the child cures Maria of “her dementia” (240), and she forgets all about the gold service. She is eventually killed by Zerkow, who grows increasingly frustrated by her inability to tell him where to find it.

Despite her attempt to fit in with the women of Polk Street, Maria, described as being not “quite right in the head” (214), is never considered part of the group of residents. Her marriage to Zerkow is seen as her acknowledgment of the fact that Zerkow is her “only chance for a husband” (214). It is only when Trina’s own situation deteriorates that she becomes friendly with Maria, despite Maria’s being “common and vulgar” (295). Maria’s befriending Trina only when the latter falls shows the impossibility of rising in the socioeconomic hierarchy.