Trina would be an extraordinarily good housekeeper. Economy was her strong point. A good deal of peasant blood still ran undiluted in her veins, and she had all the instinct of a hardy and penurious mountain race—the instinct which saves without any thought, without idea of consequence—saving for the sake of saving, hoarding without knowing why. Even McTeague did not know how closely Trina held to her new-found wealth.
This is a major league example of foreshadowing. Which is only fitting since Norris belongs to the big leagues of American literature. It may help to keep in mind that when Erich von Stroheim made his epic—and epically mismanaged—film adaptation of the novel, he retitled it Greed. In all honesty, Norris does belong in the big leagues when it comes to title this novel. Titling a big novel after the major character makes sense if he’s got a name that with resonance or if there are essentially no other characters of equal importance. In this case, neither qualification fits. It is a novel about greed that explores the concept of greed from several different perspectives. This description of McTeague’s wife seems to successfully alienate her from traditional concepts associated greed. Which makes it all the more powerful as foreshadowing when the narrative centers upon Trina especially as a victim of a more fetishistic quality.
“Yes, yes, I know I’m a little miser, I know it.”
This becomes Trina’s rote response to McTeague’s complaints about his wife’s increasingly obsessive frugality. At first, the response has some playfulness in it; indeed, so do the remonstrances which stimulate the response. Before too long, however, husband is launching a full out assault on the penny-pitching wife and the accusation of miserliness no longer contains any humor, but is instead spat out routinely during increasing and increasingly violent confrontations. Trina’s economic sense in her marriage begins as almost a complete positive, but gradually moves toward darker and darker places hidden behind locked doors and consuming her reason and rationality.
“without knowing why”
This phrase recurs often enough and for specific purposes to attain the level of a leitmotif. The first appearance is one of three just in second chapter alone. “Blindly, and without knowing why, McTeague fought against it, moved by an unreasoned instinct of resistance.” But it is not just McTeague who is affected by unconscious motivations he cannot hope to understand. That third recurrence in Chapter 2 is handed off to Trina, who: “refusing without knowing why, suddenly seized with a fear of him, the intuitive feminine fear of the male.” As the narrative progresses, both engage in a variety of actions “without knowing why” that includes McTeague suddenly grabbing his wife’s hairbrush and inhaling her aroma, Trina’s hoarding and, finally, the lure of the great outdoors to which McTeague has managed to escape from the prison of his dental office. McTeague is one of the first attempts by an American author writing in the naturalistic vein to incorporate psychological motivation to his character which drives them forcefully to behavior that remains an utter mystery to their conscious awareness.
“What do you call the desert out yonder?”
McTeague, having killed Trina in a frenzied state of intense emotions, has left San Francisco behind, finding work as a miner. The “flat, white desert, empty even of sage-brush” composed of “alkali that stretched out forever and forever to the east, to the north, and to the south” seems ready to become another addition to McTeague’s drive to commit acts “without knowing why.” Soon enough the why behind his fascination with this desert—which he learns is called “Death Valley”—will make sense. A posse has been sent searching for him to hold him accountable for the murder of Trina. And his only possibility of escape is to do what he intuitively understands is an act nobody in the posse would be fool enough to attempt just to capture a fugitive: cross over the desert. Hardly a perfect plan to begin with, of course, but made all the less likely to succeed once he discovers that there is one person in that posse with more than enough reason to risk everything for revenge against him.
