Nonetheless, his thinly disguised autobiographical novel, The “Genius” , unevenly untangles those passions. The novel tells the story of a professional and sexual career: Eugene Tennyson Witla’s career as an illustrator
who becomes a celebrated artist, who then gives up his art to become the
well-paid executive manager of a magazine corporation, only to have this
career destroyed by yet another extra-marital infatuation. “He knew that
his whole career was at stake,” Dreiser writes, “but it did not make any
difference. He must get her” (647). Within that trajectory, Dreiser pro-
duces an etiology for Eugene’s neurasthenia that is specifically sexual, not
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cultural, and beyond that trajectory he grants him a spiritual dimension
that works toward resolving the plot through a sudden turn to Christian
Science.
What the novel casts as his overwhelming attraction to women – “the
sheer animal magnetism of beauty” (274) – seems inseparable from the way,
more generally, Eugene is “overawed by the material face of things” (105).
He originally transposes this awe into the power of his illustrations and
paintings, in love with “the thought of making the commonplace dramatic”
(89). The city – or, we might say, the “color of a great city” – appears on
canvases that Dreiser casts within the Ash Can school aesthetic, portraying
“the raw jangling wall of an East Side street,” for instance, “with its swarms
of children, its shabby push-carts, its mass of eager, shuffling, pushing mor-
tals, the sense of rugged ground life running all through it” (230).30 When
he suffers his degrading fall from success, this aesthetic appreciation of the
city still sustains him: “Here were cars rumbling, people hunched in great
coats facing the driving wind. He liked the snow, the flakes, the wonder of
material living. It eased his mind of his misery” (703).
But throughout the novel such an aesthetic appreciation has been compli-
cated by, say, a materialist infatuation: New York’s “spectacle of material
display,” “the carriages on Fifth Avenue, the dinners at the great hotels” –
these convince him that he is “not living at all, but existing” (148). This
existential crisis can only be relieved by abandoning art for a more lucra-
tive career, and in that career Eugene enjoys not “the wonder of material
living” but living in material luxury. In his “imposing office” at the United
Magazines Corporation, he relishes his “great rosewood flat-topped desk,
covered with a thick, plate glass through which the polished wood shone
brightly” (485). He ambitiously decorates his nine-room apartment with
“green-brown tapestries representing old Rhine Castles,” a “grand piano
in old English oak,” a “magnificent music cabinet in French burnt wood-
work,” and a “a carved easel with one of his best pictures displayed” (474).
His painting, once an occupation, increasingly appears as mere decoration.
His aesthetic sensibility has transformed into mere aestheticism.
Though Eugene’s trajectory (his simultaneous rise and fall) can be marked
by this distinction between aesthetic appreciation and materialist possession,
Dreiser explicitly casts his protagonist as a victim of neurasthenia, and a
victim of his own libido. It is not the lust for things, but lust as such,
that the narrator isolates as the source of the artist’s failing talent. Because Eugene’s marriage to Angela is characterized by an “unrestrained gratification” that responds to “his inexhaustible desire,” the narrator pauses
to explain that Eugene “had no knowledge of the effect of one’s sexual
life upon one’s work” (245–246). Unable to restrain his “over-indulgence”
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The matter of Dreiser’s modernity
(within or beyond his marriage), he finally suffers a severe bout of
“locomotor-ataxia which had resulted from lack of self-control” (250, 364).
Although this diagnosis reflects Dreiser’s own fears, just as it reflects well-
known accounts of neurasthenia, within the novel it has the effect of dis-
counting the ramifications of Eugene’s other passions – for corporate success
and its dazzling accoutrements.31 In other words, the kind of mesmerizing
impact that the city has on Carrie Meeber, the shock and weariness provoked
by the “materialized forces” of modernity – these apparently play no role in
Eugene Witla’s affliction, although he himself has been no less mesmerized
by the city. It is as though, within his construction of the novel, Dreiser has sublimated the economic and the cultural dimensions with an exclusively
sexual determinant.
But the novel then exhibits its protagonist’s dilemma spiritually assuaged.
Although Eugene has a “natural metaphysical turn” (694), that turn seems
neither natural nor, at first, metaphysical. He may see “through to something
that was not material life at all, but spiritual, or say immaterial, of which all material things were a shadow” (681), but this is no Platonic idealism. Rather, he senses “great chemical and physical forces . . . at work, which permit-ted, accidentally, perhaps, some little shadow-play, which would soon pass”
(681–682). Still, this unelaborated version of Dreiser’s “chemism” slowly
transforms into an acceptance of Christian Science, where spiritual forces lie
behind the shadow play, where “the dematerialization of the body” becomes
“its chemicalization into its native spirituality” (694). Dreiser’s narrator is adamantly skeptical, declaring that “those who have ever tried to read”
Mary Baker Eddy’s Science and Health “know what an apparent jumble of
contradictions and metaphysical balderdash it appears to be” (693). But he
nonetheless takes the time to summarize his version of the theology: “Matter
[is a] combination of illusions. . . . Deny them – know them to be what they
are – and they are gone” (689). And Eugene works to legitimize the doctrine
by recalling the claims of Kant and Carlyle, the conviction that “matter it-
self – the outer world of matter, was either nothing, or else a product due
to man’s mind” (694). Not only does the spirit triumph over the flesh, but
the material world – that world which Dreiser accumulates for hundreds of
pages – seems to vanish, without a trace. It is as though, writing more auto-
biographically, Dreiser could not bear to leave his protagonist, like Carrie,
absorbed in the culture of things. Or as though he were compensating for
his own Balzacian “passion for things.”
All told, the battle between the flesh and the spirit effectively brackets the
inanimate world of material culture. And yet, in the final pages of the novel –
“L’Envoi” – Dreiser describes the “refuge” of religion as “a bandage that
man has invented to protect a soul made bloody from circumstance” (734).
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Religion is now the “illusion” (734). Though Dreiser himself was genuinely
interested in Christian Science (and in Quakerism), its passing role in the
novel should be read as a measure of his inability to imagine a resolution to
worldly problems within the confines of materialism.
And yet the starkness of the binary is less simple than it appears, for,
as William Leach has argued about Christian Science and other mind-cure
movements of the era, they were fully compatible with America’s business
culture, prescribing modes of self-empowerment and self-fashioning that
were consistent with “ever-expanding material desires” and the “new com-
mercial priorities.”32 Dreiser himself recognized the consistency.33 It hardly
seems surprising, then, that The Genius ends with Eugene Witla returning to his painting, and to women, and to things, as though another cycle of his
life had begun. The idealist answer to American materialism never seems to
challenge consumer desire. In fact, within the fictional world beyond Sister Carrie, Dreiser repeatedly tries to align materialism and idealism. In The
“Genius” itself, what originally matters about the matter of urban culture is its aesthetic dimension: “The sting and appeal of this local life was in its eternal relations to perfect beauty” (22). Even in The Bulwark, one character recognizes that, for the Quaker leader John Woolman, “Spiritual values
were as real” as “material things,” and, indeed, the original problem of the
novel results from the fact that Quaker righteousness is compatible with
wealth (328). Although Dreiser could declare that “the spiritual nature is
overwhelmed by the shock” of “materialized forces,” he repeatedly worked
to render that shock, and that binary, benign.
N O T E S
1 Theodore Dreiser, The Color of a Great City (New York: Boni and Liveright, 1926), p. 280; hereafter cited parenthetically.
2 Theodore Dreiser, Newspaper Days: An Autobiography, ed. T. D. Nostwich (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press), p. 3; hereafter cited parenthetically as ND.
3 Theodore Dreiser, Jennie Gerhardt, ed. James L. W. West III (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1992), p. 382; hereafter cited parenthetically.
4 Theodore Dreiser, “Life, Art and America,” Hey Rub-A-Dub-Dub: A Book of the Mystery and Wonder and Terror of Life (New York: Boni and Liveright, 1920), p. 258.
5 Theodore Dreiser, The “Genius” (New York: Boni and Liveright, 1923), p. 703; hereafter cited parenthetically.
6 Theodore Dreiser, Sister Carrie, ed. James L. W. West III (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1981), p. 78; hereafter cited parenthetically.
7 Henry James, “Honoré de Balzac” (1875), Literary Criticism, Volume Two (New York: Library of America, 1984), pp. 48–50.