and generalize consumer desire. Whereas shopping once included the rit-
ual of bargaining, the department store’s fixed prices transformed the act
of consumption into a relation between the consumer and the merchan-
dise, between people and things.19 And the things themselves, theatricalized
within display cases and shop windows, assumed the rhetorical burden of
persuasion. “Fine clothes to her were a vast persuasion,” Dreiser writes,
“they spoke tenderly and Jesuitically for themselves. When she came within
earshot of their pleading, desire in her bent a willing ear. The voice of the
so-called inanimate! Who shall translate for us the language of the stones?”
(97). It is tempting to read such animation as the phenomenal illustration of
Marx’s notion of commodity fetishism, where things assume lives of their
own.20 But Marx’s point is about the deceptively autonomous value that
seems to inhere in objects (a value that in fact depends on their relation to
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The matter of Dreiser’s modernity
other objects, and that derives from human labor). The scene is more expli-
cable according to Walter Benjamin’s translation of “commodity fetishism”
into a visual, erotic fascination with the material object world, the “sex ap-
peal of the inorganic.”21 But the elaborate personification of things in Sister Carrie most simply enacts the very achievement sought by the new window dressers who managed the exhibition of objects. Stewart Culin, the exhibit
coordinator for John Wannamaker’s department store in Philadelphia, wrote
of “trying to coax and arrange” objects so they would tell their “story to
the world.”22 For Frank Baum, author of The Wizard of Oz (1900) and one of the nation’s foremost window dressers, the fundamental goal of window
displays was to make objects “come alive.”23 One may say of Dreiser what
he said of the Quaker children in The Bulwark, that the window world is
“fairyland enough.” Within a realist register he makes it clear that moder-
nity, far from disenchanting the material world, has re-enchanted it by other
means.
The prominence of the show window within the history of this re-
enchantment has prompted analysts of film to argue that the cinema screen,
the genuinely new cultural phenomenon of 1900, “incorporated and dis-
placed” the shop window as the frame that energized objects before the cap-
tivated spectator.24 Among its other accomplishments, then, Sister Carrie
reads as a discursive transition between the shop window and film, prefigur-
ing what Vachel Lindsay called film’s power to transform a “non-human
object” into a “hero,” to grant furniture a personality, to render things
human.25 But suggestive as it is to imagine how Dreiser figures an emergent
moment of mass culture, it is no doubt more important to sense how Carrie
herself, notoriously passive and insubstantial, assumes something of the dou-
ble character of glass, if not transparently disclosing the culture around her
(rather than some inner self ), then merely reflecting, with her “innate taste
for imitation” (157), the taste of others. It may be true, as Fredric Jameson
has suggested in a reading of Sartre’s fiction, that “glass is a kind of figure for consciousness in that it cannot exist by itself but must show its surroundings through itself,” but there are few characters in fiction whom one sees through so completely as Carrie, who have so little opacity of their own.26
If the medium of glass prompts the dialectic of proximity and distance
that perpetuates the desire in Sister Carrie, and if glass, no less, seems to figure Carrie’s own consciousness, then it is hardly surprising that one of the novel’s most memorable scenes locates Carrie, within her boarding house at
Ogden Place (where Dreiser himself had lived), gazing out a window, full
of the materialist desire provoked by a drive through the wealthy sections
of Chicago: At her window, “rocking to and fro and gazing out across the
lamp-lit park toward the lamp-lit houses on Warren Avenue and Ashland
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Boulevard . . . She longed, and longed, and longed” (87). On the one hand, the
image invokes (consciously or unconsciously) one of the best-known scenes
in American sentimental fiction, in which the anguished Ellen Montgomery,
at the opening of The Wide, Wide World (1851), sits “glued to the window as if spell-bound,” staring out at the carriages and pedestrians in the gloomy
streets of New York, where a lamplighter performs his routine in the rain.27
On the other, it differentiates itself from such a scene by recalling Carrie’s
own longing before the display cases and shop windows, modernity’s wide
world of material pleasures. Indeed, the scene might be said to mark a cultural transition from a despair provoked by human loss to the despair provoked
by unattainable things. Still, this act of looking out, not in (and not within), exemplifies Carrie’s effort to satisfy what is in fact a metaphysical longing
with physical objects – an effort that leaves her, as the novel draws to its
close, gazing out the window of her Waldorf suite.
As readers of Dreiser often regret, he was given to writing sociological, philosophical, and scientific disquisitions that interrupt his plots without enlightening them. In Jennie Gerhardt, though, a superfluous passage has its own poignancy as an overview of modernity:
We live in an age in which the impact of materialized forces is well-nigh ir-
resistible; the spiritual nature is overwhelmed by the shock. The tremendous
and complicated development of our material civilization, the multiplicity and
variety of our social forms, the depth, subtlety and sophistry of our mental cog-itations, gathered, remultiplied and phantasmagorically disseminated as they
are by these other agencies – the railroad, the express and post-office, the telegraph, telephone, the newspaper and, in short, the whole art of printing and
distributing – have so combined as to produce what may be termed a kaleido-
scopic glitter, a dazzling and confusing showpiece which is more apt to weary
and undo than to enlighten and strengthen the observing mind. It produces a
sort of intellectual fatigue by which we see the ranks of the victims of insom-
nia, melancholia and insanity recruited. Our modern brain-pan does not seem
capable of receiving, sorting and storing the vast army of facts and impressions which present themselves daily.
(125)
The passage recites technological changes (advances in the media) with a
rhetoric of sensation (“kaleidoscopic glitter”) that renders material forces
inseparable from their phenomenal effects. Within Dreiser’s fiction, this is a
signal instance where, beneath or beyond the urban phantasmagoria, he
points to the infrastructural systems that support it, and thus combines
a socioeconomic and a phenomenological (or psychological, or neurolo-
gical) conception of modernity. He participates here in a well-known and
widespread (American and European) discourse describing the ramifications
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The matter of Dreiser’s modernity
of the new metropolis on mental life. The passage encapsulates the cultural
etiology for “neurasthenia”; it shares the rhetoric of those who decried “the
mental disintegration induced by the kaleidoscopic stimuli of New York
life”; and it converges with the sociological description of modernity as a
sensory overload, the psychic life of the individual suffering city life as a
sequence of shocks.28 And yet, to the degree that these “materialized forces”
manifest themselves in urban sensations, Dreiser the city-dweller (himself a
neurasthenic) recounts them as a source not of shock but of exhilaration. He
found Chicago “symphonic”: “It was like a great orchestra in the tumult of
noble strophes. I was like a guest at a feast, eating and drinking in a delir-
ium of delight” ( ND 22). Although Georg Simmel and others understood
the very thirst for sensation to be the inevitable result of the blunted sen-
sory apparatus, Dreiser, outside his set-piece on modernity, welcomed the
hyperstimulation as sheer pleasure.
His pleasure, though, was hardly confined to the culture of things: “if I
was wrought up . . . [by] varying facets of the city,” Dreiser writes, “I was
equally so about the delights of love” ( ND 22). Indeed, his “thoughts were always on the other sex” ( ND 11). Still, by repeatedly rendering a sexual desire aroused by physical form – “the arch of an eyebrow, the color of an
eye, the flame of a lip or cheek” ( ND 129) – he folds his philandering into the material culture of the city. Or, more to the point, the women he meets
become part of the culture of things, objectified and sought, one after the
other, as objects of possession, the one most desired being the one just out
of reach. In his diaries, Dreiser relentlessly compiles his sexual adventures:
“We get in bed at 1:30 and don’t get up until 5. The delicious animality
of it all!”29 When he turns his hand instead to autobiography, he conflates
his sexual passion with his other aspirations: “My body was blazing with
the keen sex desire I have mentioned, as well as a desire for material and
social supremacy” ( ND 128). Dreiser occupies his place as America’s great novelist of desire because a host of passions – for success, for art, for power, for things – converge, and each is expressed with something like the physical ache of sexual desire.