33 Andrew Delbanco, “Lyrical Dreiser,” New York Review of Books, 23 November 1989, p. 32.
34 Thomas P. Riggio, “Theodore Dreiser: Hidden Ethnic,” MELUS, 11, 1 (Spring 1984): 53–63.
35 Larzer Ziff, The American 1890s: Life and Times of a Lost Generation (New York: Viking Press, 1966), pp. 340–341.
36 Randolph Bourne, “The Art of Theodore Dreiser,” The Dial, 14 June 1917, p. 509.
37 Alex Pitofsky, “Dreiser’s The Financier and the Horatio Alger Myth,” Twentieth Century Literature, 44 (1978): 285.
38 Azade Seyhan, Writing Outside the Nation (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), pp. 151–153.
39 Matthiessen, Theodore Dreiser, pp. 190–191.
40 Joseph Karaganis, “Naturalism’s Nation: Toward An American Tragedy,” American Literature, 72 (2000): 154; Theodore Dreiser, An American Tragedy (New York: New American Library – Signet, 2000), p. 779. Subsequent page references
to this edition are cited in the text.
41 Karaganis, “Naturalism’s Nation,” p. 174.
42 Richard Lehan, “Dreiser’s An American Tragedy: A Critical Study,” College English, 25 (1963): 191.
43 Ford, “Portrait of Dreiser,” p. 29.
44 Thomas Strychacz, Modernism, Mass Culture, and Professionalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 84.
45 Donald Pizer, “Dreiser and the Naturalistic Drama of Consciousness,” Journal of Narrative Technique, 21 (1991): 209.
46 Matthiessen, Theodore Dreiser, p. 189.
47 Richard Poirier, A World Elsewhere: The Place of Style in American Literature (1966; reprinted London: Chatto and Windus, 1967), pp. vii, 238–240.
G U I D E T O F U RT H E R R E A D I N G
Baguley, David. Naturalist Fiction: The Entropic Vision. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990.
Matthiessen, F. O. Theodore Dreiser. London: Methuen, 1951.
Petrey, Sandy. “The Language of Realism, The Language of False Consciousness: A Reading of Sister Carrie.” Novel 10 (1977): 101–113.
Pizer, Donald. “Dreiser and the Naturalistic Drama of Consciousness.” Journal of Narrative Technique 21 (1991): 202–211.
Poirier, Richard. A World Elsewhere: The Place of Style in American Literature. 1966; reprint, London: Chatto and Windus, 1967.
Trilling, Lionel. The Liberal Imagination: Essays on Literature and Society. 1950; reprint, London: Secker and Warburg, 1951.
62
4
J A C K S O N L E A R S
Dreiser and the history of
American longing
Theodore Dreiser had one story to tell, and he never tired of telling it. A young man or woman from the American hinterland flees from provincial boredom
or (sometimes) moral disgrace, seeking a new life in the city; the consequences range from exaltation to destruction. Dreiser gave this archetypal form a
specific social, historical, and geographical locale. He wrote (repeatedly) the history of the urbanizing United States between the Civil War and World
War I, not from any Olympian perspective but from the inside out, from the
perspective of clerks and shopgirls striving to do more than merely survive
in a baffling new world of threats and opportunities.
Dreiser implicitly recognized the emotional dimension long missing from
textbook accounts of “the rise of the city” – the dimension of desire: for
sensuous pleasure and luxury, for the intense experience that seemed lacking
in everyday life, or at least for some fleeting facsimile of ecstasy. Though in his philosophical asides Dreiser traced human behavior to cosmic forces, his
narration of history subverted that sort of determinism. For him, the basic
energies of historical change arose from human longings – perverse, unpre-
dictable, and sometimes self-defeating, but powerful, persistent, and never
more apparent (he thought) than during the transition to urban modernity.
The city fed dreams of release from village privation, but also created
new forms of discontent. Dreiser came to this conclusion after years of peer-
ing through the windows of department stores and opulent hotel lobbies, an
awkward outsider at the gates of the gilded city. His writing, however clumsy,
bore powerful witness to want. He took seriously and rendered honestly de-
sires that other authors dismissed as beneath contempt, including the desires
of women: Carrie Meeber’s for kid gloves, steak with hash browns, a chance
to explore the “mysteries” of the city; Jennie Gerhardt’s for warmth, secu-
rity, respectability for herself and her illegitimate daughter. Men’s wants he
took a little too seriously, sometimes lapsing into sonorous vacuity when he attempted to describe them: the financier Frank Cowperwood wants money
for the cosmic “Force” it will bring him; the artist Eugene Witla wants
63
jac k s o n l e a rs
“Life” – which at first means gritty urban experience, later accumulation and
display; and the status-striving Clyde Griffiths wants to walk through “the
Gates of Paradise” – which lead to the lake resorts and other playgrounds of
a vacuous small-town elite. Yet while Dreiser’s earnest identification with his characters could turn self-parodic, he nevertheless groped toward a fundamental perception. He saw that apparently intimate feelings, far from being
beneath the historian’s notice, could become the engine of historical change.
The feelings he most often aimed to explore were erotic in the fundamental
etymological sense – they expressed feverish yearning (for sex, for status, for possessions, for power), rather than fulfillment.
In part this insight was a projection of Dreiser’s own adolescent experi-
ence: his restless urge to escape the shame and deprivation of life on the
margins of midwestern towns; his mounting contempt for his father’s rigid
Catholicism, indeed for all forms of religious morality; his determination to
cast off the constraints of provincial Christianity and embrace a “pagan”
life of sexual fulfillment and sensuous ease. The conflict in recent American
history (as in his own biography), Dreiser thought, was the struggle between
the custodians of a conventional moral code and the rebels whose yearnings
destabilized it. Dreiser’s obsessive assault on Victorian conventions made
him a hero to subsequent generations, for whom the cultural history of the
modern United States was a story of progressive disentanglement from the
withered hand of the past. This perspective has united bohemian and bour-
geois, self-styled cultural radicals and advertising executives. Indeed Dreiser’s academic renaissance in the Reagan era stemmed in part from his reveren-tial descriptions of department stores, which historians (in tune with the
Zeitgeist) transformed into agencies of personal liberation.1
But to see Dreiser as merely a prophet of progress – or a poet of consumer
desire – distorts his narration of American history. To be sure, much in
Dreiser’s novels reflects the world view expressed at staff meetings of the
J. Walter Thompson Company in the 1920s, the belief that Americans were
ascending from a repressive rural existence to an exciting new metropolitan
civilization. Yet this was not the whole story. Dreiser was never very good at
bringing the big picture into focus. When he descended from the aerial view
to the street level, though, things became more interesting. “I simply want
to tell about life as it is,” he told an interviewer in 1907. “Every human life is intensely interesting . . . the personal desire to survive, the fight to win, the stretching out of the fingers to grasp – these are the things I want to write
about – life as it is, the facts as they exist, the game as it is played!”2 Peel away the pieties of realism (“life as it is”), and you are left with the heart of the matter: the stretching out of the fingers to grasp, the erotic yearning to
fill a lack.
64
Dreiser and the history of American longing
By focusing relentlessly on what he called the “stinging sense of what
it was to want and not to have,” Dreiser shifted the narration of history
away from clanking deterministic schemes and toward the terrain of human
emotion.3 Sympathetically recreating the longings of his characters, Dreiser’s
narrative resisted reduction to an account of progress or decline. It provided
a map of desire for the fluid, status-anxious United States, where the hope
of self-transformation hovered over the social landscape. In Dreiser’s world,
the pursuit of happiness beckons to everyone, but some are more easily
satisfied than others. While secondary characters are content with maintain-
ing a particular status niche, protagonists are filled with perpetual longing.
Carrie Meeber’s sister Minnie is resigned to a dreary existence that Carrie
herself rejects. Edward Butler, a self-made Irish paving contractor, is ap-
palled by Cowperwood’s insatiable ambition. And as long as the bellhops
at the Green Davison hotel (in An American Tragedy) can knock back tum-
blers of whiskey and consort with first-class whores from time to time, they
are content with their lot – while Clyde Griffiths feels somehow entitled to
more. Dreiser’s chief characters, like the old priest in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s
“Absolution” (1925), all seem to sense that “ ‘in the best places things go
glimmering all the time,’ ” and all crave admission to those magical precincts
of pleasure.4
Setting his desirous characters in motion, Dreiser created a fabric of inter-
woven stories, a complex social world where bad things happen to people
who are neither good nor bad but confused – intermittently generous and
self-absorbed. It is, as Dreiser would often say in his fits of philosophizing, a world of chance, bereft of any providential order, where arbitrary social