conventions carry the authority of moral law. People do not get what they
deserve; they get what they get. Urchins gather loose coal for their freezing
families and get nabbed by railroad cops; adolescent girls fall for itinerant
vaudevillians, then mysteriously disappear for months – or weeks, if they
can find a doctor who will “fix things” – and when they return they are
damaged goods. This is not a world that historians (or literary critics) visit
very often. Its inhabitants’ lives are not amenable to heroic tales of class
struggle or other forms of political strife. They live in a secularized Calvinist cosmos where one false move can bring social damnation.
Appearances are everything, in the new urban culture of smiling self-
display as well as the old rural culture of tight-lipped self-control. But in
the end Dreiser’s narratives revealed that appearances are as tyrannical in
the hotel lobby as in the meeting house. The secular morality of status could
be as unforgiving as any religious morality, and surveillance in the service of sensational journalism could be as intrusive as any small town snoop. (Indeed
Dreiser had a sharp eye for the censorious prurience that came to characterize
65
jac k s o n l e a rs
twentieth-century American mass culture.) Human beings, it seemed, were
fated to live in a prison of their own making – their sentences structured by
status hierarchy and sustained by their own discontent. Suffusing his narra-
tives with this sense of irrepressible yearning, Dreiser transcended the for-
mulas of progressives and reactionaries alike. He became, without intending
it, one of the most perceptive historians of his age.
Dreiser’s historical narrative begins its forward thrust on the afternoon train to Chicago in August, 1889. Carrie Meeber is leaving Columbia City with no
regrets, a cheap imitation alligator skin satchel and “four dollars in money.”
She plans to live with her sister Minnie while she looks for work – after that, who knows? “The gleam of a thousand lights” beckons. So does the smile of
the amiable drummer Drouet, who banters with her on the train. Arriving at
her sister’s, she discovers that Minnie and Hanson, her husband, are locked
in a life of drudgery.5
Carrie wants more. She looks timidly for work, eventually landing a te-
dious, low-paid job in a shoe factory. But she feels surrounded by the allure-
ments of the vast department stores. “The dainty slippers and stockings, the
delicately frilled skirts and petticoats, the laces, ribbons, hair-combs, purses, all touched her with individual desire, and she felt keenly the fact that not
any of these things were in range of her purchase” ( Sister Carrie, 22). The double meaning of “purchase” is significant: Carrie cannot get the social
foothold (or “purchase”) she needs to grasp the things she wants.
Drouet reappears to meet that need. He treats Carrie to a steak dinner
and gives her “two soft, green, handsome ten-dollar bills,” promising more
if she’ll come and live with him. Carrie hesitates before spending the money,
suspended in what Dreiser believed was a delicious erotic uncertainty. “There
is nothing in this world more delightful,” he wrote, “than that middle state
in which we mentally balance at times, possessed of the means, lured by
desire and yet deterred by conscience or want of decision.” ( Sister Carrie, 62, 67) Ultimately she yields, soon shedding her initial uneasiness as a mere
remnant of small town scruples.
Through Drouet Carrie meets George Hurstwood, manager of Hannah
and Hogg’s swank saloon, where local notables gather to see and be seen.
She is fascinated by his effortless worldly manner, and Hurstwood becomes
the focus of her awakening ambition to be more than the girlfriend of a
travelling salesman. These longings are fed by her neighbor Mrs. Hale, who
takes her on long carriage drives to look at mansions neither one could
possibly afford. Gaping at the radiance of the rich, the two women epit-
omize the status emulation anatomized (and anathematized) by Thorstein
Veblen.6
66
Dreiser and the history of American longing
But with Hurstwood, Carrie’s relations are more complex. She is in awe
of him, but for him she is a precious portal of escape from a dead domestic
life. When he makes his feelings known to Carrie, the effect on her is electric:
“the narrow life of the country had fallen from her and the city, with all its
mystery, had taken its place. Here was its greatest mystery, the man of money
and affairs, sitting beside her – appealing to her. Behold, he had ease and
comfort, his strength was great, his position high, his garments rich, and yet
he was appealing to her. It affected her much as the magnificence of God
affects the mind of the Christian when he reads of His wondrous state and
finds at the end an appeal to him to come and make it perfect” ( Sister Carrie, 128–129). Life with Hurstwood seems to offer nothing less than a secular
form of salvation – an earthly paradise more sensuous and palpable than the
pallid Christian version.
Yet Carrie’s dream of salvation remains clouded by doubt. “She wanted
pleasure, she wanted position, and yet she was confused as to what these
things might be.” Her stunning performance in an amateur theatrical reveals
new possibilities, yet on the streets, amid her satisfactions, she is “pained by the sight of the white-faced, ragged men who slipped desperately by her in a
sort of wretched mental stupor.” Like the classical Arcadia, the consumers’
utopia contains a memento mori – a death’s head, in effect, bearing the legend: “Et in Arcadia Ego.” Carrie’s glittering new possibilities cannot conceal the shadows of persistent want.
If the spectre of poverty seems a necessary accompaniment to the spectacle
of plenty, it is also a foreshadowing of Hurstwood’s fate. Impulsively stealing ten thousand dollars from a safe left accidentally open, he tricks Carrie into
fleeing town with him. Eventually they land in New York, where Hurstwood
begins a long slide that ends with his suicide in a flophouse ( Sister Carrie, 145, 305).
But while Hurstwood’s fitful longings for new life lead to a disastrous
denouement, Carrie’s find fulfillment. As Hurstwood grows shabbier and
withdraws into helpless passivity, Carrie rekindles her ambition – for status,
comfort, and something else which she cannot quite name. An upwardly
striving neighbor, Mrs. Vance, fuels Carrie’s social discontent. As she strolls with Mrs. Vance on Broadway, amid the fashionable throng, “Carrie’s wants
were expanding” ( Sister Carrie, 328). Once again she dreams of theatrical success and, driven by necessity, she at length achieves it. Yet she remains
troubled by a vague disquiet – a state of mind that Dreiser’s leading characters seem unable to escape.
During the decade after Sister Carrie, Dreiser himself struggled with debil-itating depression (or “neurasthenia,” in the parlance of the time) and even-
tually swerved out of his downward trajectory with the help of his brother
67
jac k s o n l e a rs
Paul. He developed a reputation as a “magazine doctor,” revitalizing mori-
bund publications with a dose of celebrity journalism, and was eventually
hired as Editor-in-Chief of The Delineator, a women’s sewing magazine.
The irony of a self-styled bohemian holding such a position was not lost on
Dreiser, who succeeded brilliantly at his post until he refused to break off
his pursuit of Thelma “Honeypot” Cudlipp, the eighteen-year-old daughter
of an assistant editor. He was dismissed, a victim of his wayward impulses
and a martyr (in his own mind) to the cause of sexual freedom.7
During his stint at The Delineator, Dreiser resumed work on the book he had been unable to finish during his neurasthenic episode. Jennie Gerhardt
(1911) concerned a woman very different from Carrie Meeber, caught in a
web of conflicting desires rather than animated solely by stirrings toward self-fulfillment. An unwed mother protected (but not married) by two powerful
men, Jennie is more conventionally feminine than Carrie in her capacity for
unselfish devotion, particularly to her daughter. But Jennie is still powerfully resistant to conventional mores; swept away in spite of herself by sensuous
luxury; willing to conduct scandalous but loving relationships – first with a
United States Senator, then with a prosperous carriage manufacturer named
Lester Kane – if they will help to satisfy her own needs or those of her parents or her daughter. Here, as in Sister Carrie, Dreiser showed an unusual power of sympathy with women’s sense of economic vulnerability and dependence
on unreliable men. (He was pretty unreliable himself.)
But he was eager to turn his attention to more explicitly masculine themes.
After a taste of affluence during his Delineator period, Dreiser was becoming obsessed by the attributes of successful men – their insatiable lust for
conquest (as he saw it) in the bedroom and on the stock exchange; their
capacity to refine raw desire into incandescent ambition. He focused The
Financier (1912) on the career of the street-railway magnate Charles Yerkes; the novel would “interpret the American man of affairs and millionaire as