9 Fisher, “The Life History of Objects,” p. 132.
10 Jean-Christophe Agnew, “A House of Fiction: Domestic Interiors and the Com-
modity Aesthetic,” in Consuming Visions: Accumulation and Display of Goods
in America, 1880–1920, ed. Simon J. Bronner (New York: Norton, 1989),
p. 135.
11 June Howard briefly discusses “the failure of the family” in Sister Carrie in Form and History in American Literary Naturalism (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1985), p. 178.
12 Richard Lingeman, Theodore Dreiser at the Gates of the City, 1891–1907 (New York: Putnam’s, 1986), p. 84.
13 Theodore Dreiser, The “Genius” , (1915; reprint, London: Constable, 1928), pp. 14, 409.
14 Theodore Dreiser, Jennie Gerhardt (1911; reprint, expanded edition, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1992), pp. 125, 120.
15 On literary representations of the suburban novel, see Catherine Jurca, White Diaspora (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001). I would not categorize Sister Carrie as a suburban novel; the Hurstwoods, for example, live in a town-house in the Lincoln Park neighborhood of Chicago. But Sister Carrie is quite self-conscious about the imminent domestic topography of a rapidly developing
city, as in the “two-story frame houses” that Carrie passes on her way by train to Chicago, in “open fields, without fence or trees, lone outposts of the approaching army of homes” (6). And with Hurstwood, Dreiser establishes a proto-critique
of middle-class culture that he identifies with the explosive commercial and
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residential expansion of the metropolis, which will be relocated in the follow-
ing decades to the modern suburb, to those two-story houses on the outskirts,
one of the products of such expansion.
16 Sinclair Lewis, Babbitt (1922; reprint, New York: Signet, 1991), p. 16.
17 James M. Cain, Mildred Pierce (1941; reprint, New York: Vintage, 1989), p. 4.
18 Sloan Wilson, The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1955).
G U I D E T O F U RT H E R R E A D I N G
Blumin, Stuart. The Emergence of the Middle Class: Social Experience in the American City, 1760–1900. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989.
Broner, Simon J., ed. Consuming Visions: Accumulation and Display of Goods in America, 1880–1920. New York: Norton, 1989.
Brown, Gillian. Domestic Individualism: Imagining Self in Nineteenth-Century America. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1990.
Capetti, Carla. Writing Chicago: Modernism, Ethnography, and the Novel. New York: Columbia University Press, 1993.
Fox, Richard Wightman, and Jackson Lears, eds. The Culture of Consumption:
Critical Essays in American History, 1880–1980. New York: Pantheon, 1983.
Jurca, Catherine. White Diaspora: The Suburb and the Twentieth-Century American Novel. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001.
Kaplan, Amy. The Social Construction of American Realism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988.
Leach, William. Land of Desire: Merchants, Power, and the Rise of a New American Culture. New York: Pantheon, 1993.
Lears, Jackson. No Place of Grace: Antimodernism and the Transformation of
American Culture, 1880–1920. New York: Pantheon, 1981.
Mack, Arien, ed. Home: A Place in the World. New York: New York University Press, 1993.
Ohmann, Richard. Selling Culture: Magazines, Markets, and Class at the Turn of the Century. London: Verso, 1996.
Park, Robert, Ernest W. Burgess, and Robert D. McKenzie. The City: Suggestions for the Investigation of Human Behavior in the Urban Environment. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1925.
Williams, Raymond. The Country and the City. New York: Oxford University Press, 1973.
Wirth-Nesher, Hana. City Codes: Reading the Modern Urban Novel. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996.
Wright, Gwendolyn. Building the Dream: A Social History of Housing in the United States. New York: Pantheon, 1981.
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7
B R U C E R O B B I N S
Can there be loyalty in The Financier?
Dreiser and upward mobility
In his brief but resonant introduction to Sister Carrie, novelist E. L. Doctorow pauses to note that the young Dreiser arrived in Pittsburgh in “the aftermath
of the Homestead strike in which armies of Pinkerton detectives and striking
steelworkers had fought pitched battles.”1 The remark raises an interesting
question about a scene in The Financier when there is another mention of the Pinkertons. Edward Malia Butler, who has been informed that his daughter
Aileen is carrying on an illicit relationship with Frank Cowperwood, reluc-
tantly decides to go to a detective. Seeking one not in Philadelphia but in New York, where he can pass unknown, he nevertheless hesitates to give his name
at the Pinkerton office or “to take anyone into his confidence in regard to
Aileen” (35).2 It’s not hard to see why. In practical terms, all the major players in this novel, Butler included, subscribe to Frank Cowperwood’s motto,
“I satisfy myself.” And in a world of self-satisfiers, why should anyone have
confidence in anyone else, confidence in other words that others will do
anything other than satisfy the urge to make as large a profit as possible, if
necessary at one’s expense?
In seducing Aileen, Cowperwood could certainly be said to have betrayed
the confidence of Butler, whose hospitable patronage helped make Cow-
perwood’s fortune, and his other patrons in Philadelphia’s Republican Party
betray him in their turn. They might have been expected to make some effort
to save him from his financial and legal difficulties, if only in order to spare the party an election-time embarrassment. Instead, they decide to use their
insider knowledge of those difficulties in order to make a financial killing,
buying up Cowperwood’s streetcar holdings cheap while he loses everything
and goes off to prison. Butler has every reason to suspect that someone com-
ing into knowledge of his family’s dishonor would similarly decide, with-
out any personal animosity but simply playing the universal self-satisfaction
game, to use that potentially explosive knowledge to blackmail him or by
some other means turn it to his or her personal advantage.
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Dreiser and upward mobility
It’s something of a surprise, therefore, that as Butler listens to the head of
the Pinkertons’ New York office, he allows himself to be reassured: “so far
as your private affairs are concerned, they are as safe with us, as if you had
never told them to anyone. Our business is built upon confidence, and we
never betray it” (35). And so it comes to pass. Aileen and Cowperwood are
caught in their love-nest, and though this exposure makes little difference in
the end, Butler’s confidence is not betrayed. Like the dog that didn’t bark, this absence of betrayal begs to be treated as a clue within a larger mystery. The
mystery is this: how can the novel account for Butler’s justified confidence in a stranger? The mere fact of paying for services rendered is clearly inadequate
to guarantee such a social bond; Frank has no loyalty whatsoever to his
first employers, though they pay him very well. How then can the novel
account for the existence, within the world of “business,” of loyalty among
non-kin? Unless it is seen as simple masochistic foolishness, which is of
course a possible interpretation, any loyalty that stands firm against the “I
satisfy myself” philosophy, even a loyalty that may not appear to rank very
high on the scale of moral development, would seem obliged to throw an
interesting new light both on Dreiser, whose critics have long puzzled over
the conspicuous absence of moral commentary on Cowperwood’s upward
mobility, and on the literature of upward mobility in general.
Loyalty is of course visible enough in The Financier, even in the world of business. On the novel’s first page we are told that the hero’s father, a
teller at a bank, is “exceedingly grateful” (1) for the promotion that enables
him to move his family into a larger house. Gratitude to his employers is a
sure sign that, unlike his son, he is going nowhere. Gratitude toward those
above you will keep you loyal to them. Loyalty will keep you in or near your
place. There is no evidence in Dreiser of enthusiasm either for conventional
morality or for the immobility that seems to follow from it. For Dreiser both
conventional morality and immobility belong to the domain of the family,
which is a domain of self-sacrificing and self-reproducing stasis. The loyalty
of Cowperwood Senior to his employers, built up over long acquaintance,
seems modeled on his loyalty to his wife and children. As one recent critic
has noted, this circumscribing of individual ambition makes Frank’s father
resemble the heroes of Horatio Alger, while Frank himself, who moves from
opportunity to better opportunity without a qualm or a backward glance,
does not.3 In Frank the vestigial principle of family loyalty, though not totally lacking, is certainly not well developed. Without his care and attention,
he muses, his children “would probably do as well as most children.” In
any case, he will not allow them to stand in the way of “his own personal
freedom . . . to go off and set up a new world and a new home with Aileen”
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b ru c e ro b b i n s