McTeague by Frank Norris

First published: 1899

Type of work: Novel

Type of plot: Naturalism

Time of plot: 1890’s

Locale: San Francisco and Death Valley, California

Principal characters

• McTeague, a dentist
• Trina Sieppe, his wife
• Marcus Schouler, McTeague’s friend and Trina’s cousin

The Story:

McTeague, born in a small mining town, works with his unambitious father in the mines, yet his mother sees in her son a chance to realize her own dreams. The opportunity to send him away for a better education comes a few years after McTeague’s father dies. A traveling dentist is prevailed upon to take the boy as an apprentice.

McTeague learns something of dentistry, but he is not smart enough to understand much of it. When his mother dies and leaves him a small sum of money, he sets up his own practice in an office-bedroom in San Francisco. McTeague is easily satisfied. He has his concertina for amusement and enough money from his practice to keep him well supplied with beer.

In the flat above McTeague lives his friend Marcus Schouler. Marcus is in love with his cousin Trina Sieppe, whom he brings to McTeague for some dental work. While they are waiting for McTeague to finish with a patient, the cleaning woman sells Trina a lottery ticket.

McTeague immediately falls in love with Trina. Marcus, realizing his friend’s attachment, rather enjoys playing the martyr, setting aside his own love so that McTeague will feel free to court Trina. He invites the dentist to go with him to call on the Sieppe family. From that day on, McTeague is a steady visitor at the Sieppe home. To celebrate their engagement, McTeague takes Trina and her family to the theater. Afterward, they return to McTeague’s flat and find the building in an uproar. Trina’s lottery ticket has won five thousand dollars.

In preparation for their wedding, Trina is furnishing a flat across from McTeague’s office. She decides to invest her winnings and collect the monthly interest, but McTeague becomes disappointed, for he had hoped to spend the money on something lavish and exciting. Trina’s wishes, however, prevail. With that income and McTeague’s earnings, as well as the little that Trina earns from her hand-carved animals, the McTeagues can be assured of a comfortable life.

Marcus slowly changes in his attitude toward his friend and his cousin. One day, he accuses McTeague of stealing Trina’s affection for the sake of the five thousand dollars. In his fury, he strikes at his old friend with a knife. McTeague is not hurt, but his anger is thoroughly aroused.

In the early months after their wedding, McTeague and Trina are extremely happy. Trina is tactful in the changes she begins to make in her husband. Generally, she improves his manners and appearance. They both plan for the time when they can afford a home of their own. As a result of those plans, they have their first real quarrel. McTeague wants to rent a nearby house, but Trina objects to the high rent. Her thriftiness is slowly turning into miserliness. When McTeague, unknown to her, rents the house, she refuses to move or to contribute to the payment of the first month’s rent, which signing of the lease entails.

Some days later, they have a picnic, to which Marcus also is invited. Outwardly, he and McTeague appear to have settled their differences, but jealousy still rankles in Marcus. Wrestling matches are held, and Marcus and the dentist win their respective bouts. It now remains for the two winners to compete. Marcus is thrown by McTeague, no match for the dentist’s brute strength. Furious, Marcus demands another match. In that match, Marcus suddenly leans forward and bites off the lobe of the dentist’s ear. McTeague breaks Marcus’s arm in his anger.

Marcus soon leaves San Francisco. Shortly thereafter, an order from city hall disbars McTeague from his practice because he lacks college training; Marcus had informed the authorities. Trina and McTeague move from their flat to a tiny room on the top floor of the building, for the loss of McTeague’s practice has made Trina more thrifty than ever. McTeague finds a job making dental supplies. Trina devotes almost every waking moment to her animal carvings. She allows herself and the room to become slovenly, she begrudges every penny they spend, and when McTeague loses his job, she insists that they move to even cheaper lodgings. McTeague begins to drink, and drinking makes him vicious. When he is drunk, he pinches or bites Trina until she gives him money for more whiskey.

The new room into which they move is filthy and cramped. McTeague grows more and more surly. One morning, he goes fishing but fails to return home. That night, while Trina is searching the streets for him, he breaks into her trunk and steals her hoarded savings. After his disappearance, Trina learns that the paint she uses on her animals has infected her hand. The fingers of her right hand are amputated.

Trina takes a job as a scrubwoman, and the money she earns, together with the interest from her five thousand dollars, is sufficient to support her. Now that the hoard of money that she had saved is gone, she misses the thrill of counting over the coins, and so she withdraws the whole of her five thousand dollars from the bank and hides the coins in her room. One evening, there is a tap on her window. McTeague is standing outside, hungry and without a place to sleep. Trina angrily refuses to let him in. A few evenings later, drunk and vicious, he breaks into a room she is cleaning. When she refuses to give him any money, he beats her until she falls unconscious. She dies early the next morning.

McTeague takes her money and returns to the mines, where he falls in with another prospector. McTeague, however, is haunted by the thought that he is being followed. One night, he leaves his companion and starts south across Death Valley. The next day, as he is resting, he is suddenly accosted by a man with a gun. The man is Marcus.

A posse had been searching for McTeague ever since Trina’s body had been found, and as soon as Marcus hears about the murder, he volunteers for the manhunt. While the two men stand facing each other in the desert, McTeague’s mule runs away, carrying a canteen bag of water on its back. Marcus empties his gun to kill the animal, but its dead body falls on the canteen bag, and the water is lost. The five thousand dollars is also lashed to the back of the mule. As McTeague unfastens it, Marcus seizes him. In the struggle, McTeague kills his enemy with his bare hands. Yet, as he slips to the ground, Marcus manages to snap one handcuff to McTeague’s wrist and the other to his own. McTeague looks stupidly around, at the hills about a hundred miles away, and at the dead body to which he is helplessly chained. He is trapped in the parching inferno of the desert that stretches away on every side.

Bibliography

Campbell, Donna M. “Frank Norris’ ’Drama of a Broken Teacup’: The Old Grannis-Miss Baker Plot in McTeague.” American Literary Realism, 1870-1910 26, no. 1 (Fall, 1993): 40-49. Argues that this subplot illustrates the difficulties involved in intersecting three styles of late nineteenth century writing: realism, naturalism, and women’s local-color fiction.

Hochman, Barbara. The Art of Frank Norris, Storyteller. Columbia: University of the Missouri Press, 1988. Discounts naturalism as the organizing principle of McTeague, arguing that fear of loss is the common ground. Shows how various characters struggle to protect themselves from loss through strategies such as habit and obsession.

Hussman, Lawrence E. Harbingers of a Century: The Novels of Frank Norris. New York: Peter Lang, 1999. A reevaluation of Norris’s novels in which Hussman demonstrates how these books “rehearsed” many of the themes that would subsequently appear in twentieth century American fiction. Chapter 3 discusses desire and disillusion in McTeague.

McElrath, Joseph R., Jr. “Beyond San Francisco: Frank Norris’s Invention of Northern California.” In San Francisco in Fiction: Essays in a Regional Literature, edited by David Fine and Paul Skenazy. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1995. A discussion of Norris’s depiction of San Francisco and other Northern California locations in McTeague and other works.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. Frank Norris Revisited. New York: Twayne, 1992. An excellent starting point for students of Norris. The chapter on McTeague discusses novelist Émile Zola and naturalism, Victorian sexuality, and the structure and themes of the novel.

McElrath, Joseph R., Jr., and Jessie S. Crisler. Frank Norris: A Life. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2006. Comprehensive biography providing an admiring portrait of Norris. McElrath and Crisler maintain that Norris remains relevant to and deserves to be read by twenty-first century audiences.

Pizer, Donald. The Novels of Frank Norris. 1966. Reprint. New York: Haskell House, 1973. Claims Norris’s themes are inseparable from the leading controversy of the time: religion versus science. The chapter on McTeague traces the influence of Émile Zola and naturalism, explicates the gold symbolism in the novel, and analyzes the book’s structure, characters, and setting.

Sasa, Ghada Suleiman. The Femme Fatale in American Literature. Amherst, N.Y.: Cambria Press, 2008. Focuses on Trina in McTeague, and women characters in other works of American naturalist fiction, who become aggressors to overcome the world in which they are entrapped.

West, Lon. Deconstructing Frank Norris’s Fiction: The Male-Female Dialectic. New York: Peter Lang, 1998. West contradicts many critics by arguing that Norris was less a naturalist than a Romantic. Focuses on Norris’s representation of the “natural man” and of refined women characters in his fiction, finding connections between Norris’s characters and Carl Jung’s archetypes of the “great and terrible mother” and the “punishing superego-like father.”