Character guide

McTeague

major

Also known as Doctor McTeague, young McTeague, the dentist, Doc

McTeague is an unlicensed dentist in a Polk Street flat, a man of enormous hands and small horizons whose pleasures are his concertina, his canary, and his beer. When he falls for Trina Sieppe, the feeling arrives like weather he cannot name or stop, and he confesses it to Marcus with the helplessness of a trapped animal. His slow, brute sincerity is exactly what makes his undoing feel inevitable rather than cruel.

Trina Sieppe

major

Also known as Trina, Miss Trina, Mrs. McTeague

Trina enters the flat as a patient with a broken tooth and becomes the still point around which two friends rearrange their lives. Her early married days swing between revulsion at her husband's coarseness and fierce, clinging affection, and she quietly resolves to lift him to her level rather than sink to his. What she does with the money that comes her way will prove the more dangerous transformation.

Marcus Schouler

major

Also known as Marcus, Mark, cousin Mark, Mr. Schouler

Marcus is the dentist's pal and Trina's acknowledged suitor, a restless type who keeps company with many girls and settles on none. When he sees that McTeague's passion outruns his own, he stages a grand renunciation, weeping at his own magnanimity and believing every tear. That performance of friendship, and the resentment it will breed, sets the whole tragedy in motion.

Maria Macapa

supporting

Also known as Maria, Macapa, May

Maria cleans McTeague's rooms, gossips across the building, and thrills at dogfights and small scandals with equal appetite. Her recurring tale of a lost golden service is half memory, half mania, and it lodges in the mind of at least one listener with ruinous effect. She is the flat's chorus, and its most dangerous storyteller.

Old Grannis

supporting

Also known as Grannis, Mister Grannis, Mr. Grannis

Old Grannis keeps to his tiny room, tending a little dog hospital and avoiding the conversation he most wants to have. He and Miss Baker share a wall, a wallpaper pattern, and a mutual, unspoken devotion that neither can bring themselves to name. Their gentle, stalled courtship is the flat's quiet countermelody to the louder hungers around them.

Zerkow

supporting

Also known as the ragman Zerkow, old Zerkow

Zerkow trades in other people's discards, hoarding and scheming in a shop thick with refuse, and he listens to Maria's tale of the gold service with a greed that borders on worship. He wants the story to be true and wants Maria to be the proof of it, which makes his interest in her something between courtship and appetite. His fixation turns a piece of flat gossip into a slow fuse.

Miss Baker

supporting

Also known as Old Miss Baker, Little Miss Baker, Baker

Miss Baker is the flat's resident spinster, a little dressmaker so openly smitten with Old Grannis that she chatters about him to anyone who will listen, oblivious to the gossip she feeds. She invents baronet titles and cruel stepfathers for him out of dim memories of girlhood novels, and treats the matching wallpaper pattern between their rooms as proof of a fated connection. Her harmless, hopeful delusion gives the Polk Street flats their gentlest thread of romance, a soft counterpoint to the harsher appetites gathering around her.

Mr. Heise

supporting

Also known as Heise, Mrs. Heise, Mister Heise

Mr. Heise belongs to the small circle of Polk Street tradesmen and lodgers who orbit McTeague's dental parlors, one of the men the dentist genuinely likes and trusts. As McTeague's life tangles around Trina and Marcus, Heise's steady presence marks the ordinary, uncomplicated male world the dentist is slowly losing. He matters as a measure of what McTeague had before desire and jealousy began to pull him apart.

Mr. Sieppe

supporting

Also known as Mrs. Sieppe, the Sieppe

Mr. Sieppe heads the large, boisterous Sieppe family, whose picnics, outings, and crowded domestic life give Trina her social world and give McTeague his first taste of belonging to a household. He and his wife treat Marcus as Trina's acknowledged young man, so the family's expectations quietly shape the courtship contest between Marcus and the dentist. His immigrant frugality and family pride set the modest, striving backdrop against which Trina's small fortune and McTeague's clumsy passion play out.

Cribbens

supporting

Also known as evening Cribbens

Cribbens is a drifting, hard-luck prospector type who crosses McTeague's path once the dentist's settled life has come apart and he is moving through the world unmoored. He offers the kind of casual, unjudging male company McTeague once had in Marcus, but stripped of Polk Street's comforts and rivalries. His appearance signals how far McTeague has fallen from the dental parlors, and his schemes and talk of gold keep the story's pull toward the mining country alive.

Owgooste

minor

Also known as August, little August

Trina's younger brother, a clumsy and awkward boy.

Uncle Oelbermann

minor

Also known as Oelbermann, Mr. Oelbermann

Trina's wealthy uncle who manages her lottery winnings.

Selina

minor

A young woman who rents a room in the same building as the McTeagues.

Joe Frenna

minor

Also known as Frenna, Joe

A saloonkeeper and acquaintance of McTeague and Marcus.

Alexander

minor

Also known as Alec

A young man briefly mentioned in the narrative.

Mrs. Ryer

minor

Also known as Ryer, Mister Ryer

A neighbor in the apartment building where the McTeagues live.

Lorenzo de' Medici

minor

A historical figure briefly alluded to in conversation.

Vanovitch

minor

A minor character mentioned in passing.

Carter

minor

A minor character in the story.

Napoleon Bonaparte

minor

Also known as Napoleon

A historical figure referenced in the narrative.