continues to love, Dreiser writes that she “followed it all hopelessly – like
a child, hungry and forlorn, looking into a lighted window at Christmas
time.”3 The image of the child’s futile longing for toys has become the figure
for human longing itself.
Yet the sense and the power of Dreiser’s simile derives from a specifically
American materialism where things have triumphed over the spirit, over ideas and ideals. “Here in America,” he argues elsewhere, “by reason of
an idealistic Constitution which is largely a work of art and not a work-
able system, you see a nation dedicated to so-called intellectual and spiritual freedom, but actually devoted with an almost bee-like industry to the gathering and storing and articulation and organization and use of purely material
things.”4 The idealism of the nation’s founding seems to exacerbate, because
it obfuscates, the materialism that permeates national life.
Ironically yet predictably, then, Dreiser stands out among the American
realists and naturalists as the writer most devoted to things: to the detailed rendering of city streets, hotels and restaurants and office buildings, magnificent mansions and squalid flats, shoes and scarves and jackets and skirts.
About an “apartment house of conventional design” in New York, he writes
in The “Genius” (1915), with unconventional hyperspecificity but with his characteristically cumulative sentence structure (and with obvious relish),
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The matter of Dreiser’s modernity
that “there was a spacious areaway between two wings of cream-colored
pressed brick leading back to an entrance way which was protected by a
handsome wrought-iron door on either side of which was placed an elec-
tric lamp support of handsome design, holding lovely cream-colored globes,
shedding a soft lustere.”5 When, in Sister Carrie (1900), the narrator quotes
“Shakespeare’s mystic line, ‘There are more things in heaven and earth,
Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy,’ ” the concern is with things
on earth, the “dazzling, alluring, or disturbing spectacle” of the city that “is created more by the spectacle than the mind observing it.”6 Like Honoré
de Balzac, the novelist who “impressed” him “violently,” Dreiser devoted
himself to documenting the physical details of his time ( ND, 517). And one can say of Dreiser, as Henry James said of Balzac, that this “passion for
things – for material objects, for furniture, upholstery, bricks and mortar”
grants “the place in which an event occurred” an equal status “with the
event itself”; the place becomes a “part of the action” with its own “part
to play.”7 Chicago, New York, Philadelphia – these cities play magnificent
roles in Dreiser’s fiction. In The “Genius” , Chicago is “a vivid, articulate, eager thing” (37).
Dreiser the journalist tentatively titled his first novel The Flesh and the Spirit, but the title could make no sense of the novel he eventually wrote, where Chicago and New York play commanding roles. “The spirit” has
no role in Sister Carrie, and sexual passion, however much it precipitates Hurstwood’s downfall, never interferes with Carrie’s desire for inanimate
possessions. But the material and the ideal, the physical and the metaphys-
ical, the pragmatic and the mystical – these binary oppositions come to
structure much of Dreiser’s subsequent fiction, where sympathetic charac-
ters like Jennie Gerhardt, the sensitive dreamer, find themselves “caged in the world of the material” (16). The Bulwark, begun in 1914 but not published until 1946, stages such an opposition most schematically, pitting Quakerism,
whose Book of Discipline “condemned an inordinate love and pursuit of
worldly riches,” against the “enormous spirit of change and modernity,” a
spirit that manifests itself in the sensuous and sensual pleasures of urban
life.8 When the Quaker patriarch, Solon Barnes, takes his sons to Philadel-
phia, the boys find “the crowded streets, the moving people, the cars, the
shop windows” all “terribly exciting”; fairytales may be banned from the
Barnes household, but “this mystic, colorful world” is “fairyland enough”
(142).
The Bulwark makes it clear that, despite the materialism that his fiction both describes and enacts, and despite his own materialist fervor, Dreiser
nonetheless struggled to fathom some meaningful alternative to it and thus to
dramatize modernity as a spiritual plight. His politics, always compromised
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b i l l b row n
by his own passions, were unsystematic at best, and his fiction entertains not
political solutions to social problems, but metaphysical answers to individual
crises.
In the pages that follow, I want to show how the material culture of modern
Chicago saturates Sister Carrie, contributing far more than a setting, and then I want to examine Dreiser’s strategies (which could in fact be dubbed
the “flesh” and the “spirit”) for managing the materialism in The “Genius” .
I thus mean to highlight the dynamic of attraction and repulsion that comes
to underwrite Dreiser’s sense of modernity.
Before isolating those novels, though, let me emphasize how ubiquitous
the force of possessing, and of possessions, is throughout Dreiser’s work.
Even Frank Cowperwood, the megalomaniac financier who is the strongest
individual Dreiser penned, and who triumphs over his competition precisely
because he wants money “for money’s sake” not “for what it will buy,” is
no complete exception.9 As the narrator describes how Cowperwood, after
his initial success, took a “keen interest in objects of art, pictures, bronzes, little carvings and figurines for his cabinets, pedestals, tables, and étagères”
(97), he pauses to philosophize about the way objects constitute human
subjects. “The effect of a house of this character on its owner is unmistakable.
We think we are individual, separate, above houses and material objects
generally; but there is a subtle connection which makes them reflect us quite
as much as we reflect them” (97–98). As a paradigmatic figure from nature
(of the sort he repeatedly deploys to naturalize human behavior), Dreiser
offers the image of the spider and its web.
The image could illustrate the point made by William James, in his chapter
on the “The Consciousness of Self” in Principles of Psychology (1890), that
“a man’s Self is the sum total of all that he c a n call his, not only his body and his psychic powers, but his clothes and his house . . . his lands and
horses, and yacht and bank-account.”10 Simon Patten, the economist whose
work registers America’s new culture of consumption most clearly, extended
the point to the working classes. In The New Basis of Civilization (1907), he explains that “the working-man’s home is crowded with tawdry, unmeaning,
and useless objects,” but each “is loved” as “the mark of superiority and
success, and its enjoyment energizes the possessor.”11 It is not the production of objects, but their accumulation and display, that generates the feel of
success. Self-fulfillment resides not in the act of making things, but in the act of buying things. What Patten neglects, though, and what Dreiser’s fiction
exhaustively illustrates, is the extent to which the energized possessor is
hardly satisfied by any mark of success; for the “drama of desire,” as Neil
Harris has called it, is a play without end, a performance where no curtain
falls.12
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The matter of Dreiser’s modernity
When Carrie Meeber secures her first job, she’s not just relieved. She is also, despite being disappointed by her weekly wage ($4.50), somewhat titillated:
“This was a great, pleasing metropolis after all. Her new firm was a goodly
institution. Its windows were of huge plate glass. She could probably do well
there” (29). The apparent non sequitur, where glass seems somehow integral to success, bespeaks Carrie’s anticipation, her naiveté, and her infatuation
with windows, the more evident when, reporting her success to her sister, she
celebrates the fact that “it seems to be such a large company” with “great
big plate-glass windows” (31). Yet the illogic makes considerable sense of
both the character and her context because windows had indeed become
a new measure of an institution’s status in Chicago, and because Carrie’s
own status in the modern city – her embarrassment, her unwitting success
in attracting the attention of Drouet and Hurstwood, and her success on
the New York stage – depends on a visual economy. When Drouet takes
her to dinner, he sits by the window in order “to see and to be seen” (58).
But as Carrie’s peripatetic search for work has established from the outset
of the novel, this reciprocal looking is no mere opportunity; it is also, more
simply, a new urban condition, the condition that humiliates her as she walks
through the wholesale district: “As she contemplated the wide windows and
imposing signs, she became conscious of being gazed upon and understood
for what she was – a wage-seeker” (18). This is a gaze that quickly becomes
ubiquitous, fundamentally internalized. When, through another “window
[she sees] a young man in a grey checked suit,” she can’t determine whether
or not he has “anything to do with the concern,” and yet, “because he
happened to be looking in her direction her weakening heart misgave her
and she hurried by, too overcome with shame to enter” (18). The gaze may