McTeague: A Story of San Francisco

McTeague’s journey back to the mountains where he was a miner represents a key Naturalist tenet, the inability of people to escape their natures. Looking for the trail toward the mine, McTeague is led by “instinct” to “the exact spot” (381). When talking to the foreman, “[t]he old invariable formula came back” to him “on the instant” (384), and he easily regains miners’ dialogue in asking for a job. Despite his mother’s attempts to make more of her son by “sen[ding] him away with the travelling dentist,” McTeague returns to his old life with “blind and unreasoned instinct,” and “[w]ithin a week’s time it seemed as though he had never been away” (385). McTeague is led by an animal instinct toward home, much like “a homing pigeon” (385).

McTeague’s journey takes him closer to the mine of his youth and farther away from the unnatural social strata of the city. McTeague was an outsider in the city, an observer who watched its goings-on from his upstairs window. Life in the mountains, in contrast, “please[s] the dentist beyond words” (387). This is because the mountains are reflected “in his own nature, huge, strong, brutal” in their “simplicity” (387). The conflation of the mountains with McTeague’s own nature reinforces McTeague’s animalistic natural state. Like McTeague, the mountains are “still” and “colossal,” and they “took him back again like a returning prodigal” (387). That McTeague “yield[s]” to them “without knowing why” (387) shows his lack of free will and his closeness with the brutal forces of nature. In the mine he is amid “the play of crude and simple forces—the powerful attacks of the Burly drills; the great exertions of bared, bent bucks overlaid with muscle” (387). Often described as an ox or a workhorse, McTeague is in his natural habitat in the mine, for like him, it is expansive, mechanic, and driven by a larger power.

The landscape itself is described as vast, powerful, and dangerous. As in many Naturalist novels, the landscape in McTeague represents the awesome and terrifying power of the universe. In the terrain of the mines, “[a] tremendous, immeasurable Life pushed steadily heavenward without a sound, without a motion” (379). The mountains are “ocean-deep, silent, huge, and suggestive of colossal primeval forces held in reserve” (379). The miners themselves are described as small and insignificant in the face of these great forces. Norris writes that here, nature is “a vast, unconquered brute” that is “magnificently indifferent to man” (380). The men who work in the mountains are as small and vulnerable as “lice on mammoths’ hides” (380). This is reinforced by the fact that the miners rise, work, and sleep as one—a faceless mass of drones who are “hauled into the mine” (385).

This ominousness is heightened by the description of the mine as a living being that preys on the lives of the men who work it. As he approaches the mine, McTeague senses the “dull, prologue roar” that “vibrated in the air” (382), which suggests the ubiquity of these forces. It also indicates that McTeague, as he is drawn farther into the landscape, is growing closer to the engine that drives these forces. The “incessant and muffled roar” it emits is like “the breathing of an infinitely great monster, alive, palpitating” (388). It is an “insatiable monster, gnashing the rocks to powder with its long iron teeth, vomiting them out again in a thin stream of wet gray mud” (380). Its “enormous maw” is “fed night and day with the car-boys’ load” (380) until it is “glutted […] with the very entrails of the earth” (380). The mine is a “symbol of inordinate and monstrous gluttony” (380). This comparison between the mine and an insatiable beast reiterates the power of the earth and of nature.

It is no wonder, then, that in the land in which these forces are situated, McTeague is ruled by his most powerful instinct yet, that to flee danger. McTeague’s fleeing despite his inability to identify the source of this “sixth sense” is perhaps the novel’s clearest instance of “animal cunning” and “brute instinct” (390). It is a force that demands “recognition and obedience” (390), determining his actions without his knowing why. It compels him to leave even after he strikes gold with Cribbens, and though he is determined to stay, “the mysterious intuition of approaching danger” is like “an unseen hand” that turns him eastward, crying, “hurry, hurry, hurry” (413). Just as in his battle with the brute nature that made him kiss Trina, McTeague cannot disobey the animal force that spurs him forward. It is fitting that he follows a trail that “had been made by cattle, not by men” (417).

It is also fitting that McTeague’s brute instinct drives him not just anywhere but into the “abominable desolation” (401) of Death Valley, the epitome of an unrelenting landscape. Death Valley represents the maliciousness of the universe that tosses people about, crushing them under its weight. Leaving the site where he and Cribbens strike gold—fittingly called “Last Chance” (409)—McTeague heads into land that is increasingly inhospitable. Gasping for breath, he engages in an epic battle with natural forces that seek to destroy him. The language describing this landscape is violent, suggesting punishment: McTeague bakes under the “merciless lash of the sun’s rays” (419) and the “remorseless scourge of the noon sun” (420). Nature’s indifference to humans is also suggested in the blankness of this landscape. The silence is “vast, illimitable” (419), offering no distraction or rescue, and McTeague is “enfolded” in it, unable to escape.

Throughout McTeague battles, both between and within characters, have been cast as “ancient” (300) or “old as the world” (30). It is therefore fitting that McTeague’s final epic battle with his nemesis Marcus—a battle brought by “ancient hate” (441)—takes place in a land of “primordial desolation” (424). Death Valley is a “bed of some primeval lake” that is “iniquitous and malignant” (425). The heat here is “a thing of terror” that leaves McTeague “scorched and poached from head to heel” (425). When McTeague and Marcus meet here, it is almost biblical, a preordained final battle between creatures driven by ancient animal animosity. This biblical quality is evident even in the description of the alkali itself, which is as limitless as “an immeasurable scroll” (425). The valley’s unending, uninterrupted alkali suggests infinity, a space as unlimited and powerful as time itself. Their battle, and their destruction, is preordained, unavoidable, and predictable.

This predictability is reinforced in the novel’s final paragraphs, in which McTeague, handcuffed to Marcus’s dead body, “remain[s] stupidly looking around him” at the “vast, interminable,” and “measureless leagues of Death Valley” (442). Readers’ last vision of McTeague is as we have always known him: stupid and thoughtless, unable to consider outside the present. Norris does not even offer us McTeague’s thoughts, thus remaining consistent in his portrayal of McTeague in this dramatic final moment. Even as we see him as the familiar McTeague we have followed, however, we are haunted by another vision: that of our protagonist as a small, insignificant speck in an endless, indifferent landscape. The scene is disturbing in its simultaneous familiarity and horror, for in McTeague, whose perspective we have followed throughout the novel, we see ourselves.

McTeague’s death by Marcus’s hand also illustrates the futility of both men’s efforts. In trying to escape danger by running east, McTeague meets Marcus in the most isolated, unlikely place. The irony of McTeague’s urge to run leading him right to his fate once again shows humanity’s inability to escape destiny. This futility is evident in their conversation. Without water, the mule now dead, Marcus asks, “What’s the good of moving on?” (440). McTeague responds, “What’s the good of stopping here?” (440). It matters not what action they take; either course will result in death. Similarly, their fight over the gold on the mule’s back is futile: There is no chance of survival, so who possesses the gold does not matter. Death Valley’s desolate and malignant landscape is a physical manifestation of the universe that makes one’s actions insignificant, and its infinite nature represents the fate they cannot escape.