work of doing it will bring you as much satisfaction as you will ever get”
( Sister Carrie, 483).
Here, in his first novel (and never again), Dreiser presents an alternative
to restless discontent. Ames is straightforward and sincere, an embodiment
of the plain speech tradition that Veblen and other moralists invoked as
an antidote to the theatrical duplicities of conspicuous consumption. “He
was not talking to hear himself talk,” Carrie realizes. “This was thought, straight from that clean, white brow. She could have kissed his hands in
thankfulness.” Ames sees “there was something exceedingly human and un-
affected about this woman – a something which craved neither money nor
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praise.” When he leaves she feels “very much alone, very much as if she were
struggling hopelessly and unaided, as if such a man as he would never care
to draw nearer. All her nature was stirred to unrest now. She was already
the old, mournful Carrie – the desireful Carrie, – unsatisfied” ( Sister Carrie, 483–484). What Dreiser understood – and it was his deepest insight into
modern American culture – was that the narrative of lack was never
ending.
For Dreiser, in the end, the history of American longings was less about pre-
dictable satisfactions than perverse self-defeat and frustration. To approach
the grand narrative of American progress from the inside out, he discov-
ered, was to recognize its emptiness and fatuity as a description of actual
experience. In Dreiser’s view, the idea of creating a society that could sys-
tematize the pursuit of happiness was a utilitarian delusion. Human beings
were trapped in a cycle of discontent and desire, in a cosmos that increasingly lacked any evidence of coherence or direction. Like Ames, they might escape
that cycle through devotion to a craft; and, like Carrie in her rocking chair,
they might still sustain a sense of wonder. But they might also remain im-
prisoned in the coils of longing, and die – as Clyde does – in bafflement and
frustration at the harsh decrees of fate. Dreiser’s empathy for ordinary hu-
man lives combined with his skepticism toward progressive pieties to make
his narration of history more compelling than many more scholarly versions.
And his effort to capture “the reaching out of the fingers to grasp” led him
to recreate a vanished subculture of commercialized desire – a subterranean
world of bellhops and shop girls, drummers and whores – that no one has
captured as effectively since.
N O T E S
1 Warren Susman, “Introduction,” Culture as History (New York, 1984); William Leach, “Transformations in a Culture of Abundance: Women and Department Stores, 1890–1925,” Journal of American History 71 (September 1984): 319–342; Walter Benn Michaels, “Sister Carrie’s Popular Economy,” in his The Gold Standard and the Logic of Naturalism (Berkeley and London, 1987),
pp. 29–58; James Livingston, Pragmatism and the Political Economy of Cultural Revolution (Chapel Hill and London, 1994), ch. 6.
2 Quoted in Richard Lingeman, Theodore Dreiser: At the Gates of the City, 1871–
1907 (New York, 1986), p. 419.
3 Theodore Dreiser, An American Tragedy [1925] Signet Classic edn. (New York, 2000), p. 225.
4 F. Scott Fitzgerald, “Absolution,” [1925] in Malcolm Cowley, The Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald (New York, 1951), p. 170.
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Dreiser and the history of American longing
5 Theodore Dreiser, Sister Carrie [1900] Penguin Books reprint of Unexpurgated Pennsylvania Edition (New York, 1980), pp. 3, 7, 10. Subsequent page references are cited parenthetically in the text.
6 Thorstein Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure Class (New York, 1899).
7 Richard Lingeman, Theodore Dreiser: An American Journey, 1908–1945 (New York, 1990), ch. 1.
8 Theodore Dreiser, Jennie Gerhardt [1911] Penguin Classics edn. (New York, 1989), p. 127; Dreiser quoted in Lingeman, American Journey, p. 52.
9 Ibid. On the transatlantic worship of force, see Jackson Lears, No Place of Grace: Antimodernism and the Transformation of American Culture, 1880–1920 (New York, 1981), esp. ch. 3.
10 Theodore Dreiser, The Financier [1912] Signet Classics edn. (New York, 1981), pp. 8–9, 42, 77–78.
11 Theodore Dreiser, The “Genius” [1915] Meridian Classics edn. (New York, 1984), p. 34. I discuss the novel at length in Fables of Abundance, pp. 274–282.
12 See Jean-Christophe Agnew, Worlds Apart: Market and Theater in Anglo-
American Thought, 1550–1700 (Cambridge and New York, 1986); Karen Halt-
tunen, Confidence Men and Painted Women (New Haven and London, 1984),
and Lears, Fables of Abundance, esp. chs. 2 and 3.
G U I D E T O F U RT H E R R E A D I N G
Garvey, Ellen. The Adman in the Parlor Magazines and the Gendering of Consumer Culture. New York, 1996.
Leach, William. Land of Desire: Merchants, Money, and the Rise of a New American Culture. New York, 1993.
Lears, Jackson. Fables of Abundance: A Cultural History of Advertising in America.
New York, 1994.
Livingston, James. Pragmatism and the Political Economy of Cultural Revolution.
Chapel Hill and London, 1994.
Michaels, Walter Benn. The Gold Standard and the Logic of Naturalism. Berkeley and London, 1987.
Scanlon, Jennifer. Inarticulate Longings: The Ladies Home Journal, Gender, and the Promises of Consumer Culture. New York, 1995.
Shi, David. Facing Facts: Realism in American Thought and Culture, 1850–1920.
New York, 1995.
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5
B I L L B R O W N
The matter of Dreiser’s modernity
When Theodore Dreiser wrote a sketch about “Christmas in the Tenements”
(1902), he might have written about the persistence, despite the poverty, of
family ritual or religious sentiment. He might have described the simple
pleasures of a holiday. But he wrote instead about the longing for things.
The sketch exhibits a “wealth of feeling and desire,” but both are expressed
“through the thinnest and most meager material forms.”1
The sketch became the penultimate chapter of The Color of a Great City
(1926), a collection of articles written before World War I, before the “splen-
dor” of the “new-world metropolis” had been considerably tamed (vii). That
splendor – Manhattan’s “color” – derived from its diversity, the “meaner”
regions of the Bowery and East Broadway, the ethnic neighborhoods, the
“maidens in orange and green skirts” in Little Italy, for instance, “with a
wealth of black hair fluffed back from their foreheads, and yellow shawls
and coral necklaces fastened about their necks” (268). By the 1890s, in fact,
the “color” of America’s great cities had become almost as marketable as the
“local color” of rural America, which flooded the popular monthlies. For
Dreiser, the “local life” that Eugene Field had written about in Chicago’s
Daily News “moved [him] as nothing hitherto had.”2
In New York, Dreiser’s treatment of the tenements hardly added up to
a plea for change, as had Jacob Riis’s famous New York exposé, How the
Other Half Lives (1890). But his portrait is no less bleak. He describes
“miserable one- and two-room spaces” that “ignorance and poverty and
sickness, rather than greed or immorality,” have transformed into “veritable
pens” (280). The “color” of these narrow streets, then, lined as they are
by somber five and seven story buildings, lies in the vividness of the holiday
season: “carts of special Christmas tree ornaments, feathers, ribbons, jewelry, purses, fruit” (276). Such treats only seem to theatricalize the plight of the
poor, but not without inspiring childhood wonder. “About the shops and
stores,” Dreiser writes, “where the windows are filled with cheap displays
of all that is considered luxury,” hosts of children “peer earnestly into the
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b i l l b row n
world of make-believe and illusion, the wonder of it not eradicated from
their unsophisticated hearts” (282).
Here, just as the sketch promises to close sentimentally, Dreiser works
toward a different conclusion, sharpening the picture while broadening its
caption: “Horses, wagons, fire engines, dolls – these are what the thousands
upon thousands of children whose faces are pressed closely against the com-
monplace windowpanes are dreaming about, and the longing that is thereby
expressed is the strongest evidence of the indissoluble link which binds these
weakest and most wretched elements of society to the best and most success-
ful” (282–283). What binds the poor and the rich is the longing for objects on
display. Dreiser concludes with “evidence” not of the fundamental difference
of the squalid district, and not of its localized “color,” but of an absolute
sameness that defines the human condition within consumer culture.
He presents a world where the material environment we inhabit – above
all, the goods for sale, and their mode of sale – is a culture that dictates desire, a culture from which Dreiser hardly absented himself. He describes himself,
whether suffering from genuine poverty or enjoying relative prosperity, as
one of those mesmerized children at the windowpane, now grown up. In St.
Louis, he would stop “before the windows of shops and stores,” and there he
would stand “staring, always staring” ( ND 491). When, in Jennie Gerhardt (1911), Jennie reads about the marriage of the man she has lived with and