





































Education, Language and Sociology Research 

ISSN 2690-3644 (Print) ISSN 2690-3652 (Online) 

Vol. 6, No. 2, 2025 

www.scholink.org/ojs/index.php/elsr 

142 
 

Original Paper 

The Tragedy of McTeague: The Destruction of the Subject  

Yongyan Zhang1 
1 School of English Studies, Xi’an International Studies University, Xi’an, China 

 

Received: April 25, 2025         Accepted: May 12, 2025      Online Published: May 27, 2025 

doi:10.22158/elsr.v6n2p142        URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.22158/elsr.v6n2p142 

 

Abstract 

Frank Norris is a well-known American writer with a reputation as a naturalist writer. McTeague: A 

Story of San Francisco is his masterpiece and a representative work of American naturalistic literature. 

Based on a news report, the novel focuses on the tragic fate of a dentist named McTeague who murders 

his stingy wife, Trina Sipe. In this paper, two concepts of “the mirror stage” and “symbol” in French 

philosopher Jacques Lacan’s subjective theory will be used to interpret the protagonist McTeague’s tragic 

fate. “The Mirror stage” refers to the fact that people always build a “pseudo-self” through the images 

of others while Lacan’s concept of symbol points out the emptiness and meaninglessness of signifiers and 

signs that will control human beings. This paper will first use the idea of the mirror stage to analyze how 

different others affect the formation process of McTeague’s subjectivity, and then use Lacan’s conception 

of symbols to analyze how signs control McTeague’s behavior and lead him into madness. Lacanian 

interpretation of this novel can help readers to analyze McTeague’s loss of his subjectivity and trigger 

modern people’s thinking. 

Keywords 

McTeague: A Story of San Francisco, subject theory, the mirror stage, symbol 

 

1. Introduction 

Frank Norris, a novelist and short-story writer, is the first important U.S. author to embrace the literary 

style known as naturalism. In 1899, he published his novel McTeague: A Story of San Francisco which 

established his reputation. It is a naturalist work set in San Francisco. The novel tells the story of a dentist, 

McTeague, who murders his miserly wife, Trina Sieppe, and then meets his end while fleeing through 

Death Valley. In addition to focusing on the theme of greed in this book, it is also meaningful to analyze 

the tragic subject of McTeague. Therefore, this paper will use the subject theory of Jacques Lacan, a 

famous French philosopher and psychoanalyst, to analyze how McTeague’s tragedy is reflected in this 

naturalistic novel and arouse modern people’s thinking on how to maintain subjective clarity and 

independence. 



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Jacques Lacan is arguably the most original and influential structuralist psychoanalysis since Freud. His 

ideas have revolutionized the clinical practice of psychoanalysis and continue to be a major influence in 

fields as diverse as film studies, literary criticism, feminist theory, and philosophy. Under the influence 

and base of people like Hegel and Freud, Lacan’s work constitutes a rebuke to ego and a return to Freud’s 

belief in the power of the unconscious in human life. Yet his work also rewrites Freud in important ways. 

He inserts the self into culture. “The Mirror Stage as Formative of Function of the I as Revealed in 

Psychoanalytic Experience” was a paper delivered at the 16th International Congress of Psychoanalysis, 

Zürich, July 17, 1949. In this paper, the conception of the mirror stage has been called his most famous 

and significant contribution to psychoanalysis. Lacan defines the mirror stage as an identification, the 

transformation in the subject when he assumes an image (Lacan, p. 442). Primarily concerned with 

identity, subjectivity, and fantasy, Lacan claims the mirror stage takes place between the ages of six to 

eighteen months when an infant recognizes its self in connection with the image of the specular self in 

the mirror. The result is a fantasized, fictional self that is unified and made whole via the image in the 

mirror. The child identifies himself through an external image, and once he identifies with that image, he 

feels able to do things he could not do before. But in fact, this self is a kind of misrecognition. It is only 

an imaginary, illusory image in the mirror that gives him a sense of whole and unity. But this does not 

mean that can only infants remember the mirror stage, but it is a philosophical metaphor of Lacan that 

the establishment of the subject is through the other.  

 

2. The False Self Defined by the Other 

The mirror stage can be used to analyze McTeague’s subject formation. In the novel, the appearance of 

several characters profoundly affects McTeague’s fate, namely his father and Trina Sieppe. First of all, 

his father is the person who has the most far-reaching influence on McTeague. McTeague was born in a 

mining area. His father was a miner, and he became a car boy under his father’s guidance. Therefore, in 

his first ten years of life, he was accompanied by the mining area, his father’s alcoholism and violence, 

and in his initial mirror stage, he faced the lower class of the United States in the context of the gold rush 

in the 19th century. The novel tells very little about McTeague’s past in the mining area, but from the 

symbols of concertina and canary that are repeated many times in the text, it can be seen that he identifies 

with the miner’s identity represented by his father. The six lugubrious airs he played on the concertina 

always carried him back to the time when he was a car boy at the Big Dipper Mine in Placer County, ten 

years before (Norris 1). The concertina is a recurring symbol in the novel, a reminder of his life as a 

miner and a preserver of his identity. He cherished it and took solace from it that when Trina sold it, it 

angered McTeague and became the trigger for him to kill Trina. At the same time, the canary he cherished 

most is a relic of a past age. Once carried into the mines in wooden and metal cages to alert miners of 

carbon monoxide, canaries were, according to the Mine Safety and Health Administration, replaced by 

the monoxor CO indicator in the late nineteenth century (McGlynn, p. 27). The canary is a symbol of 

McTeague’s old identity. At the same time, in the book, whether McTeague forcefully kissed Trina, beat 



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Marcus, or escaped, Norris repeatedly uses “the fist of old-time car boy”, “the hands of car boy”, “the 

instinct of old-time carboy” to describe McTeague, which not only proves that the miner’s identity has 

never disappeared from him, but also proves the source of the disturbing violent factors implied in him, 

that is, the miner’s life mirrored by his father, which is masculine and contains violent factors. This is 

McTeague’s initial subject formation.  

The second person who directly influenced his fate is Trina Sieppe. Trina first appeared as a beautiful 

middle-class woman. She and McTeague were attracted to each other and entered into marriage, but 

Trina’s internal force of avarice became stronger and stronger, and eventually their marriage ended in 

tragedy. McTeague murdered Trina in the kindergarten. From the moment they met, their budding love 

was nothing more than a “pseudo-self” in the mirror. Lacan assumes that the mirror stage is a drama 

whose internal thrust is precipitated from insufficiency to anticipation and which manufactures for the 

subject, caught up in the lure of spatial identification, the succession of phantasies that extends from a 

fragmented body-image to a form of its totality (Lacan, p. 444). This means that people with a sense of 

fragmentation are eager to find a sense of completeness in the mirror, so they are tempted by space and 

use the image in the mirror as a reference to fantasize and change their image. The novel begins by 

describing McTeague’s image as follows: His mind was as his body, heavy, slow to act, sluggish. Yet 

there was nothing vicious about the man. Altogether he suggested the draft horse, immensely strong, 

stupid, docile, obedient (Norris 1). At this time, he had left the mining area and lived in San Francisco as 

a dentist. The discovery of gold in California in 1849 attracted 89,000 gold seekers from around the 

world. San Francisco’s population grew from 459 in 1847 to 56,802 in 1860 (Felson and Cundiff, p. 601). 

Although the influx of a large number of people promoted urbanization, the society showed a vulgar, 

violent, and primitive atmosphere because the lower-class gold seekers accounted for most of the city’s 

population. In such a city, McTeague seemed to have escaped from the life of a miner, but in fact, he 

lived in another form of a mining area. He lived a regular but boring life, in which we could not see any 

life force. These were his only pleasures — to eat, to smoke, to sleep, and to play upon his concertina 

(Norris, p. 1). McTeague apparently had no self-awareness about women or love. But after meeting Trina, 

he found her feminine element which enlarged his narrow point of view on women, the whole sex. And 

he saw that there was something else in life besides concertinas and steam beer. The male, virile desire 

in him tardily awakened, aroused itself, strong and brutal (Norris, p. 19). Trina is similar to McTeague, 

whom Norris describes as “lived her life with as little self-consciousness as a tree” (Norris, p. 65). 

Therefore, when McTeague forcefully hugged and kissed Trina more than once, Trina was intoxicated 

by McTeague’s masculine charm and conquering behavior. They identified with each other’s animal 

instincts and created an almost perfect other in their imagination based on each other’s image, one was 

McTeague, a real man with dangerous charm, and the other was Trina, the most delicate and lovely 

woman. They were immersed in such fantasies. When McTeague bit Trina’s finger and used violence, 

the reader can even read the sense of tolerance and affection. The most exaggerated is that Trina and 

Maria discussed the domestic violence of their two husbands with each other, and even took a strange 



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sort of pride in recounting some particularly savage blow (Norris, p. 226). This is not love, but a fantasy 

based on animal instincts. Lacan uses animal experiments to explain the occurrence of the mirror stage. 

It is a necessary condition for the maturation of the gonad of the female pigeon that it should see another 

member of its species, of either sex; so sufficient in itself is this condition that the desired effect may be 

obtained merely by placing the individual within reach of the field of reflection of a mirror (Lacan, p. 

443). McTeague and Trina were attracted to each other, tolerated each other, and developed their own 

selves. They gradually established their own subjectivity based on the image of the other. Trina 

transformed McTeague, making him dress more refined and behave more elegantly; because of Trina’s 

stinginess, a fantasy about McTeague, and desire for submission, McTeague constantly reshaped the 

miner subject of “sluggish and dull man”, promoting and encouraging the release of his violent factors. 

In the end, the marriage went to tragedy. According to Lacan’s mirror theory, McTeague’s subject was 

constantly shaped by the other, first, he was shaped into the image of a miner with his father as the other, 

and then he was shaped into a man of masculinity by Trina as the other. McTeague can be said to be a 

character who never had subjectivity. He had never shown his own thoughts and was a false subject who 

had become through identification with the other. 

 

3. The Self Murdered by the Big Other and the Symbolic 

In addition to the strangulation of the subject by the other, symbols also strangle people. Based on 

Saussure’s research, Lacan reinterprets psychoanalysis with structural linguistics. In the essay “The 

Instance of the Letter in the Unconscious or Reason since Freud”, Lacan uses a new diagram to replace 

Saussure’s tree diagram to express the signifier and the signified. He uses two identical toilet doors as an 

example. If we want to distinguish the two doors, we still have to rely on the different signifiers. 

Therefore, Lacan emphasizes the priority of the signifier. A signifier does not refer to a signified but to 

another signifier. Here Lacan makes a metaphor. He believes that there is a signifying chain which is 

similar to the rings of a necklace that is a ring in another necklace made of rings (Lacan, p. 116). This is 

like when we need to look up the meaning of a word in the dictionary, we need to define it through the 

meaning of another word. The signifier always refers to another signifier, forming a signifier chain. 

Therefore, humans are caught in a continuous process of generating symbols. The emergence of signs 

and symbols also pronounces the death of things. In Lacan’s view, symbolic signs constitute people. Only 

with the symbols created by people can people strive for their goals. Lacan believes that people are 

murdered by symbols from birth to death. In his essay “The Function and Field of Speech and Language 

in Psychoanalysis”, he wrote: Symbols envelop the life of man in a network so total that they join together, 

before he comes into the world, those who are going to engender him ‘by flesh and blood’…so total that 

they give the words that will make him faithful or renegade, the law of the acts that will follow him right 

to the very place where he is not yet and even beyond his death... (Lacan, p. 50) Symbols run through 

people’s lives and hollow out the meaning of people. In this novel, gold is the symbol that runs through 

the entire book. Gold was originally a metal substance without any meaning, but after people gave it 



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signifiers, gold became a symbol. In San Francisco in the mid-19th century, owning gold became people’s 

ultimate pursuit, and gold also represented people’s social status. 

In the novel, there are direct and indirect reasons for McTeague’s tragedy. Both reasons are related to the 

symbol of gold that runs through the whole text. The direct cause is reflected in the character Marcus. 

He and McTeague were good friends who lived in the same apartment building. When he learned that 

McTeague liked Trina, he gave her up to help McTeague. Later, he hated McTeague because Trina won 

a lottery of $5,000, so he reported McTeague for not having a medical license. This move made 

McTeague lose his job and changed Trina’s attitude towards McTeague. In essence, Marcus hated 

McTeague not because he liked Trina, but on the contrary, he objectified her into gold. He hated 

McTeague because he lost $5,000. Marcus was controlled by artificial symbols. He ignored brotherhood 

in pursuit of money, hurting others and ultimately trapping himself. The indirect reason for McTeague to 

kill Trina was Trina herself. When McTeague lost his job, she fell into unprecedented money anxiety, and 

her thrifty instinct reached its peak. She began to dislike her husband who had no job and secretly saved 

money and showed no support and sympathy. When they still had enough savings, she forced McTeague 

to move into a smaller and more dilapidated apartment, abandoning the living conditions that she had 

worked hard to cultivate for McTeague, not letting him drink more expensive beer, and even not giving 

him car fare when he went to find a job in bad weather. Trina’s stinginess and instinct to save money 

gradually angered McTeague, and with the sold concertina as the fuse, McTeague finally killed Trina. If 

Marcus hated McTeague so much because he wanted to get more gold, then Trina was reluctant to throw 

away a little gold, and even reached the point where she had to touch the real gold coins to confirm her 

existence. Trina was also a person who controlled by the symbol of gold. Her heart was empty except for 

this signifier. Her economic oppression of McTeague eventually led him into the symbolic trap of gold. 

Marcus’ betrayal and Trina’s stinginess made the numb and dull McTeague felt more suffocated in this 

golden city every day. Golden images constantly appear in the text. For example, the golden tooth, which 

was the store decoration that McTeague had always dreamed of, represents a further improvement in 

economic status; but when McTeague lost his job and moved into a more dilapidated house, it was only 

used to store dirty dishes, and was finally sold by McTeague to another dentist at a low price. The golden 

tooth here is another signifier of gold, which unconsciously controls McTeague’s pursuit. Another 

example is the canary in McTeague’s cage. Besides being a representation of McTeague’s identity as a 

miner, it also shows that McTeague was in a similar situation as he was imprisoned in the city, stained 

by the symbol of gold without knowing it. McTeague was no exception in this city where everyone was 

chasing gold. Therefore, the symbol is created by the subject but controls the subject and eventually kills 

the subject. Studies have shown that during the gold rush, a large number of gold seekers poured into the 

city, most of whom were not well educated, and brought social customs of alcoholism and fighting to the 

city. Therefore, weak social control and economic motives led to high rates of all types of homicide, but 

particularly high rates of robbery homicide, a predatory offense. Also, there were feuds, vendettas, and 

duels increased during the gold rush (Felson & Cundiff, p. 602). This also confirms that in the novel, 



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McTeague’s plunder of Trina’s money and the life-and-death duel between Marcus and McTeague are all 

under the strong control of gold and capital. There is no winner in this game. McTeague was just an 

innocent individual who was symbolically murdered. 

 

4. Conclusion 

Lacan believes that people are influenced by the image of others in the mirror stage to form a false self, 

and then they are murdered by language signs and symbols in society. Therefore, there is the death of the 

subject of McTeague. McTeague first formed a miner’s identity under the influence of his parents, and 

then identified with animal instincts under the influence of Trina. In a broader sense, he was also caught 

up by the power of symbol which is the gold in the society. His subject is destined to face tragedy. 

Through the Lacanian interpretation of this novel, we can better understand why it is called one of the 

representative works of naturalistic novels, and deeply appreciate the naturalistic thought in it, that is, 

the powerlessness of individuals facing the world and destiny. French novelist Émile Zola wrote in his 

essay “The Experimental Novel”:  

The social circulus is identical with vital circulus; in society, as in human beings, a solidarity exists which 

unites the different members and the different organisms in such a way that if one organ becomes rotten 

many others are tainted and a very complicated disease results. Hence, in our novels, when we experiment 

on a dangerous wound which poisons society, we proceed in the same way as the experimentalist doctor; 

we try to find the simple initial cause in order to reach the complex causes of which the action is the 

result. (Zola, p. 28)  

Zola believes that the responsibility of a naturalist novelist is to find out the disease and then provide a 

treatment plan, just like a doctor. This also echoes what Norris said that a good novelist should weigh 

with the most relentless precision his every statement; in a word, possess a sense of his responsibility 

(Norris, p. 1). Norris used the most direct, cold, and simple words to describe the social appearance of 

San Francisco in the 19th century for readers. 

With such sincere naturalist novelists, we should find inspiration in their works. By focusing on 

McTeague’s individual fate and analyzing it with Lacan’s subject theory, readers can see the victims of 

an era and the subjectivity that never existed. McTeague’s death of the subject is not individual, but 

universal. This also inspires us today, under the influence of others and in a society full of various 

symbols, how we should try our best to stay thoughtful and sober to avoid the death of the subject like 

McTeague. 

 

References 

Felson, R. B., & Patrick, R. C. (2018). The Gold Rush and Afterwards: Homicide in San Francisco, 1849-

2003. Aggressive behavior, 44(6), 601-613. https://doi.org/10.1002/ab.21785 

Lacan, J. (2001). The Function and Field of Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis. Écrits: A Selection 

(pp. 23-87). Trans. Alan Sheridan. London: Routledge Classics. 



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Lacan, J. (2004). The Mirror Stage as Formative of the Function of the I as Revealed in Psychoanalytic 

Experience. In J. Rivkin, & M. Ryan (Eds.), Literary Theory: An Anthology (pp. 441-446). Oxford: 

Blackwell.  

McGlynn, D. (2008). McTeague’s “Gilded Prison”. Rocky Mountain Review, 44(6), 25-44.  

Norris, F. (2006). McTeague: A Story of San Francisco. New York: Barnes & Noble. 

Norris, F. (2011). The Responsibility of the Novelist and Other Literary Essays. New York: Barnes & 

Noble.  

Zola, E. (1893). “The Experimental Novel.” The Experimental Novel and Other Essays (pp. 1-56). Trans. 

Belle M. Sherman. New York: The Classical Publishing Co.  

 


