Carrie where we are told that as the heroine “contemplated the wide windows and imposing signs, she became conscious of being gazed upon and
understood for what she was – a wage-seeker.”9 What is characteristic of
Dreiser’s method here is this reversal of perspective, the transposition of the figure in the landscape from a subjective to an objective entity, so that Carrie starts by projecting her surroundings as an aspect of her own imagination
before coming to realize, as she looks at herself in the glass window, how
her identity has been commodified as part of the cycle of economic supply
and demand.
From this point of view, Walter Benn Michaels was right to say that the
“logic of capitalism” becomes an all-pervasive presence in Dreiser’s work.10
As a journalist working in St. Louis, Toledo, Chicago, New York and other
cities during the 1890s, Dreiser witnessed at first hand the exigencies of
local power and the pressures on both individuals and institutions to con-
form. In Newspaper Days (1922), he recalls the obsequious attitude of the Pittsburgh Dispatch toward Andrew Carnegie, whose prepared pronounce-ments were published unchallenged, while the owners of the newspaper
systematically proscribed any “pro-labor news or sympathies.”11 Dreiser’s
novels pride themselves on addressing the less palatable social and economic
facts which vested interests would prefer kept under wraps, and in this sense
it is easy to see why Norman Mailer (another urban intellectual, of course)
considered that Dreiser was a “titan” who “came closer to understanding
the social machine than any American writer who ever lived.”12 This is also
why Dreiser has often been hailed as a harbinger of the New Journalism and
of the fictional works it has spawned; as Clare Virginia Eby has noted, the
Trilogy of Desire featuring the character of Cowperwood – The Financier
(1912), The Titan (1914) and The Stoic (1947) – represents “arguably the most sustained fictional representation of economics written by a United
States author.”13 These sprawling narratives set themselves to represent the
shapelessness of life, reflecting not what should happen in love or finance, but what actually does: “Life cannot be put into any mold,” avows the narrator
in The Financier, “and the attempt might as well be abandoned at once.”14
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At the same time, however, Cowperwood is described as someone who if “he
had not been a great financier . . . might have become a highly individualis-
tic philosopher,” and this conception of finance itself as “an art” serves to
disrupt fixed Victorian oppositions between the harsh world of business and
the more protected domain of polite culture.15 George Santayana’s attack
on “The Genteel Tradition in American Philosophy” was first published in
1913, the year after The Financier, and Dreiser’s achievement as a literary modernizer, someone intent like Santayana upon exposing the blinkers of
the old regime, should not be underestimated.
Dreiser’s style, then, involves more than merely issues of fine writing, since
the problem of what constitutes his mode of aesthetic “realism” is, in theo-
retical terms, an issue that manifests itself dialectically rather than transparently. Stuart P. Sherman was right in his essay of 1915 to suggest that Dreiser’s skill in “creating the illusion of reality” is similar to that of Daniel Defoe, consisting in “the certification of the unreal by the irrelevant,” the putative validation of far-fetched conceits by hedging them round with “all sorts of
detailed credible things.”16 Just as Defoe in A Journal of the Plague Year
(1722) lent his narrative a pseudo-documentary status by filling in all kinds
of details about London hackney-coaches and street-cleaning, so Dreiser
seeks to validate his larger conception of human fate by juxtaposing it with
extensive lists of consumer goods and apparel. In Sister Carrie, for instance, Drouet has dinner with Carrie in a restaurant on Monroe Street in Chicago,
where not only are the items on the menu enumerated but also their prices:
“Half-broiled spring chicken – seventy-five. Sirloin steak with mushrooms –
one twenty-five” (44). This kind of microscopic picture balances out the
novel’s more sententious idiom of moral allegory, a style that presents itself
as early as the third paragraph of the book:
When a girl leaves home at eighteen, she does one of two things. Either she falls into saving hands and becomes better, or she rapidly assumes the cosmopolitan
standard of virtue and becomes worse. Of an intermediate balance, under the
circumstances, there is no possibility. The city has its cunning wiles, no less than the infinitely smaller and more human tempter.
(1)
And so on. This entire paragraph could have been omitted without the reader
feeling that anything crucial to the story was missing. The allegorical chapter titles in Sister Carrie – phrases such as “The Machine and the Maiden: A Knight of To-day” (37) – add to this sense of a dialectic between allegory
and realism, spirit and matter.
It is, then, not surprising that Sherman should have commented ad-
versely on the curious combination of philosophical hypothesis and hard
fact in Dreiser’s literary style. Sherman’s essay, “The Barbaric Naturalism of
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Dreiser’s style
Mr. Dreiser,” subsequently became notorious in the annals of Dreiser criti-
cism because of its blatant ethnocentrism, its attribution of the lack of “moral value” in Dreiser’s works to their emergence “from that ‘ethnic’ element of
our mixed population.” Dreiser’s German background is an issue we shall
address later, but Sherman’s dismissal of the idea of a “photographic” re-
production of reality on Dreiser’s part is an important observation, one that
anticipates much more recent critiques of his writing, from Amy Kaplan
and others.17 If there is any photographic element in Dreiser’s work, it is in
the nineteenth-century sense of photography as a magic lantern, a medium
for the creation of phantasmagoric chemical illusions, rather than the more
typical twentieth-century understanding of it as a means to capture trans-
parently a slice of actuality. Hugh Witemeyer has written of how the motif
of the theatre as a magical “Aladdin’s cave” sets a general tone for Sister Carrie, and the landscape of this novel appears to be permeated with transpositions between different ontological spheres, with the oscillation between
artifice and disillusionment becoming analogous to a reciprocal interaction
between disembodied abstraction and material incarnation.18 It is not sim-
ply the collapse of an attenuated idealism but, rather, the tantalizing points
of transition between one state and another that give this novel its peculiar
impetus. This liminal state is signaled symbolically in the first chapter, when Carrie’s train is approaching Chicago at dusk, described here as “that mystic
period between the glare and the gloom of the world when life is changing
from one sphere or condition to another” (7).
This “mystic” side of Dreiser’s work has generally been an embarrassment
to his critics, particularly to those urban intellectuals who championed him
as an exponent of tough-minded realism. However, an enigmatic dualism per-
meates the entire corpus of Dreiser’s writings, from Sister Carrie through to the novels published posthumously: The Bulwark (1946), where the “psychic religiosity” of the Quaker hero, Solon Barnes, sees “everything in terms of
divine order,” and The Stoic (1947), where the heroine, Berenice Fleming, develops an enthusiasm for Eastern religion and comes to believe that
“Brahma, the Reality, is the total Godhead,” an entity which can “never
be defined or expressed.”19 These kinds of metaphysical shadows also hover
over his drama: in the one-act play “Laughing Gas” (1914), Vatabeel un-
dergoes an operation under ether to remove a tumor with “First Shadow”
expressing doubt “that he can return to the world,” while a character im-
personating “The Rhythm of the Universe” reinforces this sense of fatalism
by continually saying “Om!” Dreiser himself declared the play to be “the
best thing I ever did,” an evaluation which Matthiessen, for one, regarded
as “badly mistaken”; nevertheless, it is true that this conception of an in-
between state, half spirit and half matter, exemplifies the wider sense of
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incongruity that is always integral to Dreiser’s style.20 His earliest creative effort was a comic opera, “Jeremiah I,” in which an Indiana farmer was
magically transported back to the Aztec empire, where the shocked natives
designated him their king; and an equivalent sense of the literary text as a
point of mediation for two fundamentally different kinds of discourse con-
tinues through into his more mature works as well.21 For instance, the novel
Jennie Gerhardt (1911) describes how “the spirit of Jennie” is “caged in the world of the material,” and how “such a nature is almost invariably an
anomaly”; and it is precisely this site of ontological “anomaly,” the point
of intersection between different discursive spheres, that Dreiser’s texts seek to investigate.22 This is the same impetus that drives the author in Sister Carrie to represent characters as insects or animals, casting Hurstwood in ornithological terms – “Since his money-feathers were beginning to grow
again he felt like sprucing about” (222) – and describing his wife as “a