19 Here I am drawing on the theory of triangulated desire developed by René Girard in Deceit, Desire, and the Novel: Self and Other in Literary Structure, trans.
Yvonne Freccero (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1965).
G U I D E T O F U RT H E R R E A D I N G
Eby, Clare Virginia. Dreiser and Veblen, Saboteurs of the Status Quo. Columbia and London: University of Missouri Press, 1998.
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b ru c e ro b b i n s
Horwitz, Howard. By the Law of Nature: Form and Value in Nineteenth-Century America. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991.
Michaels, Walter Benn. The Gold Standard and the Logic of Naturalism: American Literature at the Turn of the Century. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987.
Micklethwait, John, and Adrian Woolridge. The Company: A Short History of a Revolutionary Idea. New York: Modern Library, 2003.
Pitofsky, Alex. “Dreiser’s The Financier and the Horatio Alger Myth,” Twentieth-Century Literature 44:3 (Fall 1998): 276–290.
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8
M I L E S O RV E L L
Dreiser, art, and the museum
To many commentators of the early twentieth century, American culture
seemed to have divided between, roughly speaking, the high and the low –
between the high arts and popular culture, between spiritual values and ma-
terialistic ambitions, between the world of art and the world of business.
Accepting for the moment this formulation, we could say that few modern
writers lived as deeply in both realms as Theodore Dreiser. Dreiser was, to begin with, intimately connected with the art scene in New York City, having
written many feature articles on leading artists during the 1890s, based on
his visits to their studios. Yet in the next decade, following the publication
of Sister Carrie (and its disappointing promotion and sales), Dreiser worked with great success in the publishing business, rising eventually to direct three popular women’s magazines for the Butterick Publishing Company. The two
worlds of art and commerce came together in Dreiser, and they come to-
gether, from different directions, in the personalities of two major heroes
in the fiction written after 1910: Frank Cowperwood ( The Financier, The Titan, The Stoic), imperious as both a businessman and as an art collector; and Eugene Witla ( The “Genius” ), an immensely gifted artist who becomes editorial director for a major publisher.
While the two opposing worlds of art and commerce meet in the person-
alities of Dreiser’s two heroes, they also meet, more generally, in one of the
most rapidly growing cultural institutions of the time, the museum. Not sur-
prisingly, therefore, the museum – and the associated worlds of the artist’s
studio and the collector’s gallery – figures importantly in both the Cow-
perwood trilogy and The “Genius” . Dreiser’s concentration on the nexus between art and business was a way of exploring the ambitions of American
culture during the transitional years of the late nineteenth and early twen-
tieth centuries, when a national culture was being formulated somewhere
between the creative imagination and the marketplace. It was Dreiser’s great
insight, worked out through these novels, that the texture of our civiliza-
tion was being defined by the compromises effected between the artist and
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the world of business. What, Dreiser seems to be asking, are the limits of
compromise? One cannot help reading into Dreiser’s work at this time the
subtext of the writer’s own struggle to create an American literature that
could speak frankly of the darker motivations of sexuality and ambition, yet
that could still find its place in the cultural marketplace.
As a writer for newspapers and magazines, beginning in the early 1890s
and extending through to the early years of the twentieth century, Dreiser
was himself frequently in the cultural marketplace, writing for such news-
papers as the St. Louis Globe-Democrat and the Chicago Daily Globe, and for such major periodicals as Munsey’s, Demorest’s, Cosmopolitan, Ainslee’s, Metropolitan, Harper’s Monthly, Truth, and Success.1 A great many of these articles are biographies of well-known figures in the arts – painters, sculptors, musicians – with an occasional portrait of someone outside that world,
such as Thomas Edison. Many were written for the popular Success mag-
azine, which ran profiles of successful figures from across the spectrum of
cultural, political, and business achievement. And in most of the biographi-
cal sketches, Dreiser is mediating between the world of genius and the world
of the common reader, contributing to a mode of analysis and description
that would eventuate in the ubiquitous celebrity stories of the later twenti-
eth century that populate the television and print media. Gaining privileged
access to these famous figures, Dreiser – unknown but hugely ambitious –
takes the opportunity to pose questions that must reflect his own as well as
his readers’ interest in the income-producing power of art: to William Dean
Howells, the greatly respected novelist and the most influential editor of his
day, Dreiser asks, “You were probably strongly fascinated by the supposed
rewards of a literary career?” And Dreiser the future Butterick editor asks,
“Were you ever tempted and willing to abandon your object of a literary life
for something else?”2 To Amelia E. Barr, the popular novelist and author of
thirty-two novels, Dreiser asks, “The royalties on all the novels of yours that have been successful ought to make a handsome income by this time?” To
which he receives the seemingly disappointing answer, “Well, they don’t.”
But what Mrs. Barr goes on to explain is that she prefers to receive a single
lump sum ($5,000, no small figure in those days) rather than the trickling
of royalties. Investing in bonds and property, Mrs. Barr now “has a tidy
income and a dignified position in the world of finance” ( Art, Music, 258, 259). Soon after the interview, Dreiser would commence his own literary
career, beginning seriously to write Sister Carrie.
To say that Dreiser had little luck with that novel in the marketplace would
be an understatement. The story of the “suppression” of Sister Carrie by his publisher has been told many times and does not concern us here, except
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that his novel’s failure to gain the recognition and financial rewards Dreiser
expected (or at least hoped for) led, indirectly and eventually to his career
in publishing, where he would, within the decade, attain a position of au-
thority and distinction at Butterick’s, along with the commensurate financial
rewards. Dreiser would use his experience in the world of business in many
ways, not least in the autobiographical novel, The “Genius” , published in 1915.3 The eponymous hero of that novel, Eugene Witla, has literary talent,
but he achieves his success as a painter and illustrator. The novel allows
Dreiser the opportunity to explore genius in both aesthetic and moral terms,
and it also gives him the occasion to explore the conflicts between art and
business, between the artist and the gallery, with his hero eventually achiev-
ing distinction, however short-lived, working for a publisher as editorial
director. The novel also allows him to dramatize a moment in America’s
cultural history when the claims of realism were at stake, when the whole
nature of “American” art was being redefined vis- à-vis European models.
The “Genius” is about a painter and about the fate of realist art; but it is also, indirectly, about a parallel moment in American literature.
Dreiser portrays his artist as a sensitive and talented youth, who moves
from the Mid-west to New York City in order to advance his career to
the center of the art world. Yet when he arrives, he is overwhelmed by the
wealth and luxury of the city. “What was he?” Witla asks himself. “What
was art? What did the city care? It was much more interested in other things,
in dressing, eating, visiting, riding abroad.”4 The city is a vast and moving
spectacle, with streets filled with crowds, shoppers, carriages; it is also, as Witla sees it, a center of display, of show, and his sense of exclusion is all
the more acute as he wanders the streets, “looking in the shop windows,
the libraries, the museums” (103). In one of these museums – the Natural
History Museum – Witla contemplates the skeletons of prehistoric animals,
a lesson to him that all things earthly pass away, including our brief human
lives. Characteristically, he turns this into what will become his working
philosophy of carpe diem, making him “all the more eager to live, to be loved while he was here” (157).
In The “Genius” , Dreiser explores the possibility of “American” art in a marketplace dominated by European taste. Translating his attitudes into
aesthetic perceptions, Witla tries to capture the life around him in the city,
and he paints raw sketches of “factory architecture . . . scows, tugs, engines, the elevated roads in raw reds, yellows and blacks” (223). These are, we