McTeague: A Story of San Francisco

Naturalism was a late 19th and early 20th century literary movement that explored determinism, a doctrine in which people do not have free will but are driven by internal and external forces beyond their control. Naturalism sees people through a scientific lens, treating them with objectivity as if they are subjects of a study. Characters in Naturalist novels are often ordinary people who are suddenly faced with a catalyst that brings out their animal instincts. The decisions they make in response are influenced by these inner drives as well as outside circumstances, such as their place in the socioeconomic hierarchy. Naturalist novels ask whether people truly are in control of their decisions.

Naturalistic principles are evident from the first pages McTeague, when Norris describes the everyday routines of the people of Polk Street. McTeague himself is a creature of habit: The first line of the novel explains that “his custom” on Sundays is to eat in his coffee joint, smoke a pipe in his “Dental Parlors,” and play on his concertina. Every Sunday, the bustle of Polk Street follows the same pattern, with different groups appearing at predictable times. Norris’s description of the routines of Polk Street serves two purposes. It demonstrates an instinctive, almost blind inner drive. It also establishes a familiar scene that is about to be disturbed by an extraordinary circumstance. Despite their sunniness—they are exaggerated in their picturesqueness, as if they are too good to be true—these everyday scenes are touched with a grotesqueness that hints at humans’ true bestial nature.

Norris frequently utilizes contrasts to suggest the smallness of his characters. McTeague’s secondhand steel engraving of Lorenzo de’ Medici’s court brings the historical scene to comic lowliness, and the implicit comparison between Lorenzo de’ Medici and McTeague highlights the lowliness of McTeague himself. When resolving to let McTeague pursue Trina, Marcus is brought to tears by the vision of himself as “so good, so magnificent, so heroic” (56). Rather than elevate him, however, his self-admiration makes him appear ridiculous. The comparison of McTeague and Marcus’s friendship to “Damon and Pythias” (56) is a similarly lofty contrast that mocks its subject. Sometimes contrasts are suggested by quotation marks that minimize the authenticity of the object they describe. The quotation marks around McTeague’s “Dental Parlors”—as well as around the objects in his parlor, such as “mats,” “blocks,” and “cylinders” (17)—are a reminder that McTeague, who comes from a poor mining background, is not really a dentist at all, having learned dentistry by apprenticing “a charlatan” (2).

The minimization of the characters establishes one of the novel’s themes, that of social class. Characters struggle to achieve upward mobility. This struggle upward is represented in the unlikely motif of Trina’s hair. A “royal crown” of “blue-black coils and braids,” a “veritable sable tiara,” Trina’s hair is “the coiffure of a queen” (23). Its “shadow[ing] the pale temples of this little bourgeoise” (23) highlights the contrast between her regal hair and her origins. McTeague himself, who practices without any formal training or license, is an imposter, claiming a position to which he is not entitled. Marcus is also “a bungler” in his veterinary profession, having learned his trade “in a haphazard way” (12). Even the shop girls on Polk Street, who are “dressed with a certain cheap smartness” (6), fail to achieve true status. Despite their cheap finery, they are admired by those even further beneath them: Maria Macapa sells junk to Zerkow so she can make enough money to dress like the shop girls, who in her eyes are elegant. Characters’ decisions are influenced by their lowly place in the socioeconomic hierarchy, a force above which they must rise. The novel asks whether they can withstand the forces holding them back or whether the power of these forces will push them down. The minimization of these characters suggests the tenuousness of their positions.

The smallness of the characters is similarly represented in their being depicted as children. Trina is 20 years old yet is described as a little girl. She has the eyes “of a little baby,” “tiny” ears, and “an adorable little line of freckles” (23). She is in McTeague’s office to fix a tooth she broke when she fell off a swing. McTeague is “perplexed” by “young girls,” having “the perverse dislike of an overgrown boy” (23). Trina, too, is “without sex,” for “the woman in her was not yet awakened” (23). Eventually, McTeague proposes to her “with the unreasoned simplicity and directness of a child” (33). Even his handwriting is childlike—“immense, very clumsy, and very round” (15). Old Grannis and Miss Baker—a couple who serve as a counterfoil to McTeague and Trina—are also described as children. Miss Baker treats Old Grannis with “the timidity of a second childhood” (15), and Old Grannis is as shy as “a ten-year-old schoolboy” (37). The infantilization of the characters casts them as small and vulnerable.

This vulnerability is further emphasized by their likeness to animals. McTeague is often described as having brute strength. He is like a “draught horse” who mechanically does his work, “immensely strong, stupid, docile, obedient” (3). He is “[b]ull-like” (5) in his movements and is described as “wagging” his head (41). McTeague’s father is “an irresponsible animal, a beast, a brute, crazy with alcohol” (2), a force McTeague will ultimately succumb to himself. Characters’ likeness to animals shows that not much separates humans and animals and that people are driven by base, animal instincts.

McTeague’s closeness to animals is reflected in what is repeatedly described as his stupidity. His mind, like his body, is “heavy, slow to act, sluggish” (3). He gazes “stupidly” (12) and “vaguely” (24) about him. He possesses “the manual dexterity that one sometimes sees in stupid persons” (17), and he cannot “work and talk at the same time” (19). When something breaks, he must throw it away, for he is “too stupid” to fix it (41).

Nowhere is the line between human and animal more tenuous than in McTeague’s sexual awakening. Norris describes a force being stirred in McTeague, a force that resembles an untamed animal. It is “strong,” “brutal,” and “untrained,” and it is “not to be held in leash an instant” (27). As Trina lies unconscious in his dental chair, “the animal” in McTeague “stirred and woke,” and “the evil instincts in him that were so close to the surface leaped to life” (30). McTeague undergoes a “crisis” against which he “blindly” fights, “moved by an unreasoned instinct” to resist (30). The two McTeagues are “at grapples” as the “better McTeague” attempts to suppress “the sudden panther leap of the animal” (30). As he fights this urge, he suffers “the fury of a young bull in the heat of high summer” (31).

Norris makes clear that McTeague’s struggle is not unique to him but representative of an ancient battle inherent in all humankind: It is “the old battle, old as the world, wide as the world” (30). McTeague is at the mercy of “the foul stream hereditary evil,” of “[t]he vices and sins of his father and of his father’s father, to the third and fourth and five hundredth generation” (32). The image of this battle taking place in the “cheap and shabby ‘Dental Parlors’” (30) suggests that no one is safe from these ancient animal instincts. Trina also exhibits instincts beyond her control: When McTeague proposes, Trina is “suddenly seized with a fear of him, the intuitive feminine fear of the male” (33). Trina’s fear of McTeague is an instinctive aversion to danger, a kind of animal sixth sense that is validated in chapters to come.

McTeague’s assault of Trina despite the good in him suggests we are not strong enough to withstand the basic forces within us. Early in the novel McTeague is described as having “nothing vicious” (3) about him despite his size. McTeague does not want to tell Marcus about his feelings for Trina because they are “pals” (52), telling him, “I don’ want anything to—to come between us” (55). He desperately fights the impulse to kiss Trina, crying, “No, by God! No, by God!” (31). Once he submits, he is horrified “at his weakness” (31). McTeague’s inability to comprehend the “evil of an entire race” that “flowed in his veins”—Norris notes that he “did not desire it”—suggests he is not “to blame” (32). McTeague’s inability to understand his feelings further shows people’s blindness as they are buffeted by ancient, unknowable forces.

In describing this ancient battle and these overpowering forces, Norris makes subtle allusions to Adam and Even’s expulsion from Eden to further suggest McTeague’s fall is inevitable. McTeague muses how he was “perfectly content” with his “little pleasures” (52) until a woman “entered his small world and instantly there was discord” (53). Like in the Eden story, “[w]herever the woman had put her foot a score of distressing complications had sprung up” (53). The comparison of McTeague and Trina with Adam and Eve suggests their own tragic end is similarly preordained.

Gender and class are not the only factors dictating one’s behavior. Zerkow, a “Polish Jew,” lives “in a filthy den” (34) that is “foul with all manner of choking odors” (42). He has the “cat-like lips of the covetous” and eyes that are “keen as those of a lynx” (42-43). He has “claw-like, prehensile fingers—the fingers of a man who accumulates, but never disburses” (43). His obsession with gold manifests physically, making his fingers twitch with “consuming desire” as if the gold is “the blood of his veins” (44). Norris’s description of Zerkow is reminiscent of portrayals of Jews by 19th-century proponents of physiognomy, a pseudoscience connecting physical appearance with moral character, specifically as related to ethnicity. In his book Comparative Physiognomy physician James Redfield theorizes that Jews are related to goats in that both Jews and goats reside in “confined places, or underground passages, where the air is polluted by excretion and putrescence” (290). (Redfield, James. Comparative Physiognomy: Or, Resemblances Between Men and Animals. New York. 1852.) Jews’ and goats’ “love of antiquity […] explains the partiality manifested by these people for trading in cast-off garments, old furniture, and the like” (293). Jews, he argued, lust for gold because they have learned to hoard from their ancestor, the goat: “Look at those eyes: they catch every object that passes, that may be converted into gain” (294). Zerkow cannot help his greed; he is driven by instinctive biological imperatives.

Characters’ habits also show their behavior is dictated by an inner drive that confounds them. Old Grannis “can’t quite say” why he performs his “little habit” of bookbinding (35), which appears to serve no purpose. Miss Baker frequently shakes her little fake curls, and Marcus often uses the phrase “for a fact.” These habits are subtle indications that characters are compelled by little internal urges.

Like many Naturalist novels, McTeague relies heavily on symbols. Readers should note the enormous gold tooth McTeague covets for the sign outside his “Parlors,” the canary in its “little gilt prison” (19), and McTeague’s concertina. The golden tooth is McTeague’s “ambition, his dream” (4). His desire for the prestige this golden object would bestow upon him is represented in the canary, which is literally imprisoned by gilt. Gilt is not real gold—it is a façade, superficial, like so much of what is valued in McTeague. The bird’s imprisonment in a gilded cage is a reminder that McTeague, a miner at heart who learned dentistry from a charlatan, is an unwitting imposter. It also represents the power that gold holds over characters. McTeague’s concertina, on which he plays “six lugubrious airs” that remind him of his time in the Big Dipper Mine, will prove to represent McTeague’s humanity; it is one of few objects that separates him from animals. The dogs fighting behind the flat may suggest that McTeague and Marcus will also come to violence despite their seemingly amiable friendship. They also remind readers that in McTeague, the line between humans and animals is thin.