McTeague: a novel of ambition and decline

¶ … Naturalist writer, Norris uses his central anti-hero, McTeague to decry the dehumanizing effects of ownership and greed that are founding characteristics of the Gilded Age of America. McTeague's obsession with gold imprisons him, just as the caged canary in his office, and at the end of the story, this obsession with gold destroys him. Norris's destruction of his central character implies a view that the cities of the Gilded Age reduce the humanity of their inhabitants and lead to ultimate destruction.

As a dentist in San Francisco, McTeague's greatest dream is to have "a huge gilded tooth, a molar with enormous prongs, something gorgeous and attractive…projecting from that corner window" (5). The gilded tooth and the cityscape further suggest that the desire to live in a cage is endemic to and produced by the city, for the very things that McTeague and the Polk Street residents employ to attract customers and increase their stature among the neighbors become the "signs" of their imprisonment within the domesticated landscape of city and its middle-class, urban economy. Dentistry is the business of maintaining the urbanite's capacity to consume, as is exemplified by an enormous gilded tooth? So long as McTeague's profession remains connected to consumption, it has the potential to draw him away from the contented feeling that "his life is a success…he could hope for nothing better" and into an urban socio-economy whose unquenchable desires for consumption threaten to, ironically, consume him (4).

McTeague's displacement from his miner's past and the refinement of his brutishness in his marriage to Trina raises the question of whether the city life in the Gilded age has forced an unnatural reaction to take place in McTeagues's fatally violent actions and failed quest for gold, or whether entrenchment in consumerist city life was merely the vehicle by which McTeague's fate was to run its course. Norris consistently returns to the animalistic descriptions of McTeague. Early in the story Norris compares him to the likes of a work horse. Such harmless animals focus solely on survival in that they plow the fields so that they can eat. It is this initial description of McTeague as a harmless work horse contrasted with his "abominable" (265) actions in killing Trina that tend to show that violence itself is the inevitable end result of the city's corruptive power.