reconciliation with his family and his class.
For Dreiser, it may be that from the male perspective real domestic pleasure
may only be possible in the absence of a proper domestic union; Lester values
his home precisely because of its necessary fragility. Lester’s affluent subur-
ban neighbors are further down on the social scale and experience another
kind of domestic fragility: the threat to the bourgeois proprieties of Hyde
Park, to the respectability of their homes and so to their social aspirations,
that the unmarried couple represent. They simply cannot afford to live like
or near a misbehaving Kane, and so they spurn the more vulnerable Jennie
in order to discipline him. The disruption of Hurstwood’s home is different.
Like the Hyde Park residents he is bound by the usual conventions and must
be careful of his reputation: “He knew the need of it” (66). Any breath of
scandal would end his lucrative career at Fitzgerald and Moy’s and diminish
his social standing; at one point he wonders at “the middle-class individuals”
who jeopardize their position by “get[ting] into trouble” (66) over a woman,
as he eventually does. Unlike the Hyde Park residents, however, his home is
compromised not by the actions of others but from within; Dreiser notes the
aesthetic and emotional deficiencies before Hurstwood meets Carrie. One
can easily imagine Jennie Gerhardt’s Hyde Park as a community of domestically disgruntled Hurstwoods. But in this neighborhood Dreiser emphasizes
the home’s value, less as a bastion of family warmth and comfort, such as
we see in the illicit Kane household, than as an icon of middle-class privi-
lege and aspiration whose sanctity must be defended when threatened from
without.
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The domestic setting and circumstances from which I have drawn my
account of Hurstwood are narrowly focused but by no means insignificant,
either in terms of his narrative trajectory or as a model for understanding representations of the white male middle-class psyche among a range of novelists
that follow Dreiser. The purchase of a house, one of the foremost privileges
of American middle-class life, is reflexively called homeownership in our belief that the payoff is sentimental rather than material. The estrangement
from the home, or “homelessness,” of Hurstwood and subsequent literary
characters associates this privilege with a failure of sentiment, the absence of the usual emotional connections. The ubiquity of homelessness as a psychic
problem for the white middle class is related to changes in the material shape
of the house and its contents brought on by mass production and standardiza-
tion, which many novelists understood to threaten or to destroy the spiritual
texture of the home. We see an early version of this problem in Sister Carrie.
George Hurstwood is initially valued by the family for his respectability and
steady income, Julia Hurstwood is appreciated as an attractive advertise-
ment for those things, and Jessica’s marital promise is an avenue of upward
mobility for both her and her family, but the commodified interior of the
house is more than a counterpart to instrumental family relations. The de-
piction of the house as a product of “the large furniture houses” already
points to the disintegration of its integrity as an isolated residence. Living
in “the ‘perfectly appointed’ house,” the Hurstwoods occupy a category of
dwelling that is marked by its fidelity to a shared standard, and its absolute
fidelity to the standard is in part, Dreiser suggests, where its imperfection
lies.
The brief lament about domestic standardization in Sister Carrie is barely perceptible, as one might expect for a novel published more than twenty
years before Sinclair Lewis made such complaints part of the American cul-
tural mainstream during a national housing boom. With Babbitt, sustained critiques about standardization of and in the house become a remarkably
constant feature of the suburban novel.15 Following Dreiser’s technique,
Sinclair Lewis announces Babbitt’s homelessness with a lengthy description
of the “standard design” of the Babbitt interior; it ends with the sad pro-
nouncement: “There was but one thing wrong with the Babbitt house: It was
not a home.”16 The rest of the novel explores Babbitt’s strategies for achiev-
ing the spiritual and emotional comfort he lacks. In Mildred Pierce, James M. Cain evokes Dreiser’s critique of the Hurstwood house in his depiction
of Bert and Mildred Pierce’s living room, which they use only for funerals:
“It was indeed the standard living room sent out by department stores as
suitable for a Spanish bungalow.”17 Mildred becomes a successful restaura-
teur because she knows how to cater to men who have been emotionally as
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Dreiser, class, and the home
well as physically dislocated by the Depression. The first sentence of Sloan
Wilson’s The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit proclaims that protagonists Tom and Betsy Rath hate their postwar development house that looks exactly
like everyone else’s; in fifties literature, white middle-class suburbanites are defined by their alienation from the suburban home.18 In these novels and
many others, standardization of houses and interiors compromises the in-
dividuality and privacy that are imagined to make the middle-class home
and the middle class what they are. Their complaints about standardization
in effect disavow the privileges of middle-class life by insisting that white
homeowners are spiritual and emotional victims of their affluence. And by
making the home the focus of loss, this literature further reveals, as Sister Carrie did, a profound investment in the emotional work of the home for men, both as characters and as novelists.
As an important precursor of the alienated, self-pitying house owner,
Hurstwood is nonetheless distinguished from his fellows by the tragic turn
his disaffection takes. In Babbitt and The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit, it is as though thinking of oneself as a victim is the condition for not becoming
one. As the suburban novel has become an ever more popular and criti-
cally acclaimed subgenre of American fiction, a pervasive “fear of falling” is
sometimes translated into actual falling within the class structure – the loss
of a job or the relocation to a smaller, less expensive house – in the work of
such writers as John Updike, Rick Moody, Richard Ford, and David Gates.
But no one actually expires in a slum. It is both surprising and fitting that
Dreiser, who had more than an imaginative relation to poverty, should be
the first and one of only a few novelists to connect spiritual homelessness
and material houselessness. Coming from a family that had once enjoyed a
modest middle-class midwestern life, until his father lost his job as manager
of a mill when Dreiser was a young boy, he demonstrates in his fiction a
powerful understanding of the precariousness of that existence and of the
stabilizing force of a proper “home atmosphere.” He could also imagine the
lengths to which a solid citizen might go to achieve it and how great the costs of failing to do so might be. Which is to say that underlying Hurstwood’s
brutal decline is a strain of sentiment, which is always entailed in the word
home, as great as that which sustains Carrie’s meteoric rise.
N O T E S
1 See Nina Baym, “Melodramas of Beset Manhood: How Theories of American
Literature Exclude Women,” in Baym, Feminism and American Literary History: Essays (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1992), pp. 3–18, and Lora Romero, Home Fronts: Domesticity and its Critics in the Antebellum United States (Durham: Duke University Press, 1997).
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2 Amy Kaplan, The Social Construction of American Realism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), p. 12.
3 Theodore Dreiser, Sister Carrie, ed. Donald Pizer (New York: Norton, 1970), p. 34.
4 See Walter Benn Michaels, “Sister Carrie’s Popular Economy,” in The Gold Standard and the Logic of Naturalism (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1987), pp. 31–58; Philip Fisher, “The Life History of Objects: The Naturalist Novel and the City,” in Hard Facts: Setting and Form in the
American Novel (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), pp. 128–178; Clare Virginia Eby, Dreiser and Veblen: Saboteurs of the Status Quo (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1998), pp. 107–147.
5 Michaels, “Sister Carrie’s Popular Economy,” p. 43.
6 See Georg Simmel, “The Metropolis and Mental Life” (1903), in The Sociology of Georg Simmel, trans. and ed. Kurt H. Wolff (New York: Free Press, 1950), pp.
409–424.
7 See, for example, Robert Park, “The City,” in The City: Suggestions for the Investigation of Human Behavior in the Urban Environment, eds. Robert Park, Ernest W. Burgess, and Robert D. McKenzie (1925; reprint, Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 1967), pp. 1–46, and Louis Wirth, “Urbanism as a Way of
Life,” American Journal of Sociology 44 (July 1938): 1–24. On the relation of Chicago’s urban sociologists to urban novelists such as Dreiser, see Carla Capetti, Writing Chicago: Modernism, Ethnography, and the Novel (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993).
8 Raymond Williams, The Country and the City (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973), p. 150.