be fictitious; the abjection is real. The city’s vitreous culture has produced a regime of visibility, both real and phantasmatic, that can frighten as intensely as it fascinates. Although Carrie will ultimately succeed within New York’s
theater world, it is the glass-mediated theatricality of everyday life that she enters as, stepping off the train at Chicago, she enters modernity. Indeed, the theater (windowless and darkened) might be said to provide an institutional
containment of vision, where the dynamics of seeing have been regularized,
and where Carrie can capitalize on being the object of visual attention.
In Chicago, she occupies an expanding field of visibility that extends from
the worlds of amusement and consumption to the worlds of production and
circulation. She can see – through the factory windows across the Chicago
river – the “figures of men and women in working aprons, moving busily
about” (17). Portraying the city’s world of glass in these opening chapters,
Dreiser adopts his historian’s mode, at pains to underscore the novelty. “The
large plates of window glass, now so common, were then rapidly coming
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into use, and gave to the ground floor offices a distinguished and prosper-
ous look. The casual wanderer could see as he passed a polished array of
office fixtures, much frosted glass, clerks hard at work, and genteel business
men in ‘nobby’ suits” (16). While windows still had the basic function of
illuminating the workplace with natural light, they also served to exhibit a
concern’s success, made manifest in the floors and ceilings, the desks and
chairs. When Dreiser himself first found the Globe-Democrat building in St. Louis, “a prosperous eight-story brownstone and brick affair,” he stood
and “stared at it in the night, looking through the great plate glass windows
at an onyx-lined office and counter” ( ND 106–107). The scene is repeated over and over in Chicago, where he stares at the “glowing business offices”
that always seem “so far removed from anything to which [he can] aspire”
( ND 5). For Dreiser, for those tenement children, and for his most famous character, the plate glass window has become an optical mechanism that
generates a dialectic of proximity and distance which structures the “drag
of desire” (23), as he calls it in Sister Carrie. The more completely one sees (or sees into) the object world of success the more desperately one feels one’s remoteness from it, and one genuinely wants only what one sees but cannot
touch.
The “large plates of window glass” became considerably cheaper and bet-
ter in the 1890s: more colorless and flawless, more fully transparent. But
the ubiquity of glass in Chicago was really a product of the 1871 fire that
destroyed the city’s center. The task of rebuilding the commercial and indus-
trial districts became an opportunity for experimenting with new building
techniques and thus for accomplishing on a vast scale what no other city
could accomplish: the extensive use of iron and the new Bessemer steel,
meant to protect the buildings from subsequent fire, but also to diminish
the load-bearing function of the masonry walls, which were increasingly
thinned to mere facades. Skeleton construction promoted modular, multi-
story building (the nation’s first skyscrapers), and enabled architects to de-
vote floor after floor to expansive windows, what soon became known as the
“Chicago Window.”13 The introduction of the electric elevator in the late
1880s further liberated vertical ambition: the Manhattan building (1891)
rose to sixteen stories, the Masonic Temple (1892) to twenty-two. As Louis
Sullivan put it, “In Chicago, the tall building would seem to have arisen
spontaneously.”14 Travelers to the city were inevitably in awe of both the
height of the buildings – “they scale the very heavens” – and the expanse
of glass, the “innumerable windows.”15 With the increasing use of both gas
and electric light (Marshall Field introduced electricity to his store in 1882), the new buildings produced a luminous city, which is why, when Carrie and
Drouet walk late in the evening on Adams Street, they walk in a world lit
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The matter of Dreiser’s modernity
up. “The lights in the stores were already shining out in gushes of golden
hue. The arc lights were sputtering overhead, and high up were the lighted
windows of the tall office buildings” (76). The field of visibility had extended not just spatially, but also temporally, far into the night.
Among the innovators who wove this new urban fabric, William Le Baron
Jenney stands out as the “founder” of the Chicago school of architecture that
thrived from the late 1870s until 1893, when the beaux arts tradition triumphed at Chicago’s Columbian Exposition, and when an economic “crash”
retarded new commercial building. Industrial Chicago (1891) celebrated the
“science” of his second Leiter Building (1889) as something comparable
to that devoted to “a steel railroad bridge of the first order”; the “giant
structure” was a “commercial pile in a style undreamed of when Buonarroti
erected the greatest temple of Christianity.”16 Jenney’s design for “The Fair”
(1891), one of Chicago’s new department stores, was a vast (55,000 square
feet), eleven-story steel and iron rectangle (running along Adams Street, be-
tween State and Dearborn), with its first two stories devoted to glass. Built for the renowned sum of three million dollars, “The Fair” drew attention as the
latest example of I-beam construction and tile fireproofing, but it stood out
above all as the latest chapter in the story of Chicago’s commercial ambition –
a monument of and to retailing.
Dreiser’s choice of “The Fair” (1891) as the department store that figures
so prominently in the development of Carrie’s materialist longing (in 1889)
is anachronistic. But its notoriety helped him make much of the novelty of
the retailing phenomenon. “The nature of these vast retail combinations,
should they ever permanently disappear, will form an interesting chapter in
the commercial history of our nation. Such a flowering out of a modest trade
principle the world had never witnessed up to that time” (22).
The air of novelty is somewhat overdrawn, for the Bon Marché (1852)
in Paris is generally considered the first department store, and, based on
the Bon Marché, Émile Zola’s Au bonheur des dames (1883) had already
demonstrated how the grand magasin could become a topic for fiction.17
The first of Zola’s novels to be translated into English (the same year it was
serialized in France), Au bonheur des dames prompted reviewers to explain that “the ‘Bonheur des Dames’ was an immense shop in Paris, like Jordan,
Marsh, and Co.’s in Boston, or Macy’s in New York, where everything is on
sale.”18 Though the novel was read widely (while being criticized severely),
Dreiser hadn’t read Zola when he sat down to write his novel about Carrie.
Nonetheless, his story of a country girl’s arrival in the city rewrites the story of Denise Baudu’s confrontation with the new retail establishment, though
Carrie is a more pitifully impoverished character at the outset of the novel
and Dreiser never indulges in the moralism that prompted Zola to reward
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his virtuous heroine. Zola’s plot pits one store against others, the emerging
conglomerate against small commerce, the grand magasin against the shop, but he contains the complex and contradictory aspirations in his novel with a
love plot. The relation between humans and consumer objects is displaced by
the more familiar relationship between humans. In contrast, Carrie doesn’t
love people; she loves things. Listening to Hurstwood, she hears “instead the
voices of the things which he represented” (118).
This irresolvable desire for things achieves its most famous moment when
Carrie walks through “The Fair.” The “victim of the city’s hypnotic influ-
ence, the subject of the mesmeric operations of super-intelligible forces,”
she is mesmerized foremost by the retail world of the city, overcome by the
merchandise displayed in the department store where she has come not to
shop but to look for work (78). “Each separate counter was a show place of
dazzling interest and attraction. She could not help feeling the claim of each
trinket and valuable upon her personally, and yet she did not stop. There was
nothing there which she could not have used – nothing which she did not
wish to own. The dainty slippers and stockings, the delicately frilled skirts
and petticoats, the laces, ribbons, air-combs, purses, all touched her with
individual desire” (22). The power of Dreiser’s description finally rests in
the ambiguity of “individual desire,” which can be understood as the claim
that each individuated object has on Carrie, or the way that such claims seem
to individuate her. The scene exhibits how the new retail establishments en-
ergized the potent paradox of mass consumption, which is the singularity,
the difference, that every commodity promises, however standardized it is within the ready-made garment industry.
Much of the genius of the department store lay in the invitation to browse
(as opposed to the proscription against loitering), which is the recognition
that the task of the store was not simply to sell goods but also to incite