(51). Dreiser does not seem very tempted to speak up on behalf of bonds to
one’s offspring.
Like Dreiser himself, his critics have been more interested in Frank’s erotic
bonds, or erotic loyalties: his relationships with Lillian and Aileen, his wife and his mistress. If the proper model of life, as suggested by the famous
allegory in chapter 1, is a lobster and a squid locked in the same tank,
with the lobster biting off piece after piece of the helpless squid, then what is Dreiser suggesting about love? Does the same model apply? And if so, what’s
in it for the squid – let’s say, the woman – who chooses to enter the tank of
her own free will? Is the world divided into those who are smart enough to
satisfy themselves and those who are dumb enough to sacrifice themselves?
Or is love on the contrary an exception to the self-satisfaction rule and
thus perhaps also a compensation for it, offsetting the relentless struggle for survival that would otherwise seem to make life almost unlivable? Here if
anywhere we should be able to test whether Dreiser bestows genuine libidinal
power upon any principle of loyalty (freely chosen rather than pre-defined
by kinship) that might undermine, interfere with, or at least distinguish itself from the inconstant, faithless world of finance capital.
This is another way of phrasing the question of normative judgment that
has never ceased to haunt Dreiser criticism. Does Dreiser suggest that pure
self-interest is a viable life philosophy, that one can live and should live
without any overriding commitment to others, with nothing but such limited,
provisional alliance as is defined by moments of shared self-interest? Or does he judge self-interest from the outside, setting the “I satisfy myself”
philosophy in the context of some higher and countervailing principle?
In his influential reading of The Financier, Walter Benn Michaels answers this last question with a resounding no. Cowperwood’s love life is just the
place to look for such a principle, Michaels suggests, and one seems to find
there precisely what one is looking for: it’s Frank’s sudden valuing of produc-
tivity that makes Lillian seem a stable anchorage amidst capitalist turbulence.
As a principle of value, productivity posits an open, stable relation between
labor (or virtue or payment) and its due reward. It is assumed that the first
can always be exchanged for the second. But if this is the rule for the wife, it does not hold for the mistress. “The difference between a wife and a mistress,
according to Dreiser, is the difference between a woman who gives her love
in a ‘sweet bond of agreement and exchange – fair trade in a lovely contest’
and a woman who loves without thought of return; ‘sacrificial, yielding, so-
licitous,’ she is motivated only by ‘the desire to give.’”4 In courting his wife Lillian during a period of financial panic, according to Michaels, Cowperwood is seeking an “absolute security” (63) outside the aimless fluctuation of
his daily business of securities trading – just such a fixed, normative point as 114
Dreiser and upward mobility
is represented in Thorstein Veblen by efficient industrial production.5 Cow-
perwood’s later attraction to the “vitality and vivacity” of Aileen, however,
presents him in an unconscious form with his attraction to speculation, to
instability, which is the actual source of his profit. Frank’s choice of Aileen and his loyalty to her – a loyalty that is sustained at least through the first third of the Trilogy of Desire, if not much longer – thus becomes evidence that Dreiser is committed not to production but to speculation.
In a bold if questionable move, Michaels associates speculation (seemingly
the epitome of ever-shifting, uncommitted, short-term investment) with what
is usually taken to be the absolute, unwavering relation between parent
and child, which might seem the antithesis of unprincipled money-making.
Speculation, Michaels asserts, means getting something for nothing. That’s
not how husbands love wives, he goes on, but it is how parents love children –
and how mistresses love their lovers; they give without thought of return (75).
In other words, the truth about capitalism is speculation, and speculation
is rooted in the nuclear family, which is to say in nature itself. Speculative
capitalism is nature’s way: not an economy of exchange, but an economy
of the gift, outside of all calculation. Michaels concludes that “there is no
refuge from the instability of the market” (83), but there is also no need for such a refuge. Frank’s most “natural” erotic urges are aimed at just what
“finance capitalism” (83) is already prepared to give him. The loyalty Frank
wants and needs is the loyalty of the mistress, which is both sexier than that
of the wife (because associated with ever-increasing profit) and also stronger
(because irreducible to mere exchange, it cannot be outbid or exceeded). We
are not told whether this is also true of the lover’s loyalty to the mistress.
So yes, there is loyalty within finance capital. But it is a loyalty that ex-
presses nothing but finance capital. It is not a loyalty that might stand against finance capital.
The result of this line of argument is what might be described as a “no
fault” view of upward mobility. Fault would seem intrinsic to the upward
mobility story, for every passage out of the society of origin, even that of
an orphan like Alger’s Ragged Dick, would seem to involve the betrayal of
some prior loyalty. But if loyalties are free gifts, which create no obligation, then there is no betrayal and there is no fault.6 In the world of Horatio Alger, reward for one’s labors was the central moral principle – though one not often
observed by Alger in practice, as many readers have noted. Dreiser pushed
Alger’s practical neglect of this principle to the point where it became theory; readers could no longer miss the glaring fact that the principle of “no labor,
no reward” was no longer functioning. As Doctorow observes, Sister Carrie’s representation of sexuality was less threatening to early readers than its
manifest unhooking of reward from virtue (viii). Like An American Tragedy, 115
b ru c e ro b b i n s
The Financier is centered on a courtroom drama in which the question is whether the protagonist is guilty or innocent, which is to say, generically
speaking, whether his upward mobility is guilty or innocent. In one case the
means to that upward mobility is a perhaps-murder, in the other a perhaps-
swindle, but in both cases what is questioned is “fault” as the key to upward
mobility. Didn’t someone have to be victimized or betrayed? For Michaels,
upward mobility appears to be victimless and thus blameless. In convicting
Cowperwood, Michaels says, the court “is punishing him for something he
never meant to do, making him responsible for events that he did not, in his
own words, ‘create’: ‘I did not create this panic. I did not set Chicago on
fire.’ But to put the argument in this way is, in Dreiser’s terms, to expose
its weakness. For what does the financier create? His ‘harvest’ depends not
on hard work, not even finally on his ‘subtlety,’ but on his happening to be
in the right place when a crisis comes. If the financier has neither earned
nor deserved his success, then the fact that he has not created the conditions
of his failure ceases to count as a mitigating circumstance . . . The court’s
decision reduces the difference between the businessman and the thief to
a matter of ‘accident’” (78). In other words, upward mobility is not an
achievement, but by the same token neither is it an instance of moral lapse
or culpability. Michaels concludes: “In an economy where nature has taken
the place of work, financial success can no longer be understood as payment
for goods or services. It becomes, instead, a gift, and for Dreiser the economy of the gift functions at every level” (78). The “love of a parent or mistress”
should be taken as a gift, and so should the source of “speculative fortunes”
(78).
Now it is important to note that this conclusion, while quite compelling in
a sense I will come to in a moment, is arrived at by a certain sleight-of-hand.
First of all, it involves a serious misunderstanding of the actual nature of gifts.
Gifts are never free. Even someone as notoriously individualistic as Ralph
Waldo Emerson understood this perfectly well. It’s because gifts do create
obligations, allow one to be put at a disadvantage, compromise one’s self-
sufficiency, that Emerson describes himself in “On Gifts” as resenting both
the gift and the giver. “How dare you give me a gift?”7 The anthropologist
Marcel Mauss is credited with establishing Emerson’s insight on a more or
less scientific basis; as Mauss showed, gifts are indeed part of an indirect
system of exchange that is always understood to confer obligations.8 The
phrase “economy of the gift” is thus deeply misleading, for what is asserted