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8 Theodore Dreiser, The Bulwark (New York: Doubleday, 1946), pp. 39, vi; hereafter cited parenthetically.
9 Theodore Dreiser, The Financier (1912; New York, Signet, 1967), p. 182; hereafter cited parenthetically.
10 William James, The Principles of Psychology (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1983), p. 279.
11 Simon Nelson Patten, The New Basis of Civilization (1907; Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 1968), p. 139.
12 Neil Harris, Cultural Excursions: Marketing Appetites and Cultural Tastes in Modern America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), ch. 9, pp. 174–
198.
13 On the Chicago architecture of the era, see Carl W. Condit, The Chicago School of Architecture: A History of Commercial and Public Building in the Chicago Area, 1875–1925 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1964), pp. 79–94; Sigfried Giedion, Space, Time and Architecture: The Growth of a New Tradition, 4th edn.
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1965), pp. 366–394; and William
H. Jordy, American Buildings and Their Architects, vol. 4, Progressive and Academic Ideals at the Turn of the Twentieth Century (New York: Oxford University Press, 1972), pp. 1–82.
14 Louis H. Sullivan, Autobiography of an Idea (New York, 1924), p. 314.
15 Paul Bourget, Outre Mer: Impressions of America (1895), quoted by William Jordy, American Buildings and Their Architects, pp. 52–53.
16 Anon., Industrial Chicago, 6 vols. (Chicago: Goodspeed Publishing Co., 1891–6), vol. 1, p. 205.
17 Émile Zola, The Ladies’ Paradise (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), p. 17.
18 Anon., “Zola,” The Literary World, 14 July 1883, p. 228.
19 On the department store, see Susan Porter Benson, Counter Cultures:
Saleswomen, Managers, and Customers in American Department Stores 1890–
1940 (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1986); and William Leach, Land of Desire: Merchants, Power, and the Rise of a New American Culture (New York: Pantheon Books, 1993), chs. 1–8.
20 Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 1, trans. Ben Fowkes (New York: Penguin, 1990), pp. 163–177.
21 Walter Benjamin, “Paris, Capital of the Nineteenth Century” (1935), The
Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge,
Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999), p. 7.
22 Stewart Culin, quoted by Simon J. Bronner, “Object Lessons: The Work of
Ethnological Museums and Collections,” in Consuming Visions: Accumulation
and Display of Goods in America, 1880–1920, ed. Simon J. Bronner (New York: Norton, 1989), p. 231.
23 L. Frank Baum, The Art of Decorating Dry Goods Windows and Interiors
(Chicago: National Window Trimmers’ Association, 1900), p. 86.
24 Anne Friedberg, Window Shopping: Cinema and the Postmodern (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), p. 66.
25 Vachel Lindsay, The Art of the Moving Picture (New York: Macmillan, 1922), pp. 35, 32, 33.
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26 Fredric Jameson, Sartre: The Origins of a Style (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984), p. 84.
27 Elizabeth Wetherell (Susan Warner), The Wide, Wide World, new edn. (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1877), p. 10.
28 George M. Beard, American Nervousness: Its Causes and Consequences (New York, 1881); Michael M. Davis, The Exploitation of Pleasure (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1911), p. 33; Georg Simmel, “The Metropolis and Mental Life”
(1903), trans. Kurt H. Wolff, Simmel on Culture, ed. David Frisby and Mike Featherstone (London: Sage, 1997), pp. 174–185.
29 Theodore Dreiser, American Diaries 1902–1926, ed. Thomas P. Riggio (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1983), p. 182.
30 Robert Henri, the leader of the “school” that called themselves “The Eight,” believed that city streets and urban masses should be the new subject of American art. Like Dreiser, Henri was especially enamored of city snow scenes. An angry
review of Witla’s exhibition repeats the genteel reaction to The Eight: horror at the idea that “ash cans” and “engines and broken-down bus horses” and “heavily exaggerated figures of policemen, tenement harridans, beggars, panhandlers”
should be “thrust down our throats as art” (237). If there is one member of the Ash Can school on whom Dreiser modeled Witla, it is his friend Everett Shinn,
who began his career as an illustrator, who was no less attracted to the rich of New York than to the poor, and whose art was compromised by his attraction
to city high life. Shinn himself relished the idea that Dreiser used him as a model.
See Mahonri Sharp Young, The Eight (New York: Watson-Guptill, 1973), p. 152; and see Helen Dreiser, My Life with Dreiser (Cleveland: World, 1951), p. 81.
31 See George M. Beard, Sexual Neurasthenia (New York, 1884); and see Dreiser’s
“Neurotic America and the Sex Impulse,” in Hey Rub-a-Dub-Dub, pp. 126–
141.
32 William Leach, Land of Desire, pp. 226–230; quotation on p. 227.
33 Richard Lingeman, Theodore Dreiser: An American Journey, 1908–1941 (New York, 1990), pp. 48, 108–112, 123.
G U I D E T O F U RT H E R R E A D I N G
Benson, Susan Porter. Counter Cultures: Saleswomen, Managers, and Customers in American Department Stores 1890–1940. Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1986.
Bowlby, Rachel. Just Looking: Consumer Desire in Dreiser, Gissing, and Zola. New York: Methuen, 1985.
Bronner, Simon J. ed., Consuming Visions: Accumulation and Display of Goods in America, 1880–1920. New York: Norton, 1989.
Condit, Carl W. The Chicago School of Architecture: A History of Commercial and Public Building in the Chicago Area, 1875–1925. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1964.
Culver, Stuart. “What Manikins Want: The Wonderful Wizard of Oz and The Art of Decorating Dry Goods Windows,” Representations 21 (Winter 1988): 97–116.
Leach, William. Land of Desire: Merchants, Power, and the Rise of a New American Culture. New York: Pantheon Books, 1993.
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The matter of Dreiser’s modernity
Livingston, James. Pragmatism and the Political Economy of Cultural Revolution, 1850–1940. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994.
Lutz, Tom. American Nervousness, 1903. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991.
Michaels, Walter Benn. The Gold Standard and the Logic of Naturalism. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987.
Trachtenberg, Alan. The Incorporation of America: Culture and Society in the Gilded Age. New York: Hill and Wang, 1982.
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6
C AT H E R I N E J U R C A
Dreiser, class, and the home
Despite a remarkable decline from middle-class respectability to ignominious
death in a Bowery flop house, George Hurstwood represents something of a
typical figure in the twentieth-century American novel. With the character of
Hurstwood, Theodore Dreiser identified white middle-class male experience
with profound spiritual alienation and located the source of its problems
not in the conventional places of metropolitan modernity – the street, the
department store, the hotel – but rather within the putative bastion against
the destabilizing forces of modernity: the home. Sister Carrie anticipates an important but neglected tradition of domestic writing by and about men, in
which the affluent house owner is understood to possess a material shelter but
to lack a proper spiritual refuge; he is, in other words, effectively “home-
less.” In contrast with the representations of nineteenth-century domestic
alienation explored by feminist literary scholars such as Nina Baym and Lora
Romero, in which masculine identity is understood to depend on the rejection
of the woman-centered domestic ideal, their twentieth-century counterparts
highlight the sense of loss that accompanies the failure of this ideal for the
middle class.1 The most significant of Dreiser’s subsequent novels after Sister Carrie feature aspiring youths who long for something like Hurstwood’s earlier success and stability, and in different ways aim even higher (Clyde
Griffiths in An American Tragedy; Eugene Witla in The “Genius” ), or focus on financial and industrial wizards who far surpass Hurstwood’s more modest achievements (Frank Cowperwood in The Financier, The Titan, and The Stoic; to a lesser extent, Lester Kane in Jennie Gerhardt). Dreiser’s shift from the middle to the ends of the economic and social spectrum suggests how
definitive a portrait he had created with Hurstwood and also perhaps how
limited a type it proved to be. It is, however, a type that has endured in the
American novel. The great literary influence of Sister Carrie may be less the story of Carrie Meeber’s fruitful self-projections in the American landscape
of urban consumer culture than the story of Hurstwood’s unwanted feelings
of domestic detachment and unsuccessful attempt to come home.
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Dreiser, class, and the home
Ideas and anxieties about the home are crucial to Amy Kaplan’s impor-
tant reading of Sister Carrie and of the late-nineteenth-century realist project in general, which she links to writers’ efforts to construct for middle-class
readers “inhabitable and representable” domestic spaces out of unfamiliar
“rented spaces” – hotel rooms, apartments, and lodging houses – that are
“filled with things neither known nor valued through well-worn contact, but
cluttered instead with mass-produced furnishings and the unknown lives of
strangers.”2 The often disorienting world of unfamiliar commodities and
commodified spaces seemed to threaten the centrality of the home as a com-
forting private refuge for the middle-class family, and Dreiser and other
realists strived to make “their readers . . . feel at home” (12) within a new
urban and industrial order. What this account does not address is the an-