The lodge brothers milling around in the street outside the Avery Hall theater on the night of the Elks benefit create boundaries between themselves and their wives, the city’s working women, and others of the surrounding working-class neighborhoods; between themselves and the homeless as well as other new urban types, that is, European immigrants and African–Americans, whose presence in Sister Carrie, while merely allusive, still helps define the social boundaries and identities of white, middle-class businessmen. The ways these men fraternize, either outside theaters or inside resorts and restaurants, also suggest that social boundaries may be constructed (or dismantled) internally as well; in other words, boundaries formed against types and groups of the external society are often mirrored within the relationship of lodge brother to lodge brother.
To shed light on the boundaries men create to define themselves against other types and groups, while exploring Dreiser’s disease with the proscriptions surrounding nineteenth-century American men, I read Sister Carrie in part through sociologist Georg Simmel’s turn-of-the-century monograph, The Secret Society (1906).4 Simmel sees the secret society, historically and contemporaneously, as constituted by external pressures within societies in transformation. Secrecy itself, Simmel wrote, has an “external” sociological significance; that is, secret gatherings, rituals, and symbols such as those which attracted men to American fraternal societies signify an uneasy “relationship between the one who has the secret and another who does not.’’5
Simmel suggests a useful framework for interpreting intersections of internal and external tensions that give rise to and compose the male world of Hurstwood and Drouet. In the secret society, he remarks, “as everywhere else, the intensified seclusion against the outside is associated with the intensification of the cohesion internally.”6 “Associated” here does not imply a direct proportion,
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per se, but a kind of interpenetration by which a social group’s sense of itself is inextricable from its sense of those from which it secludes itself.
But Simmel’s rendering of the internal/external oppositions that generate and sustain secret societies of men does not account for the entire complex of tensions by which the men in Dreiser’s novel construct themselves, and their relations within and outside the exclusive, at times secret, circle of males-only discourse. Thus, I argue that the internal cohesion of “gentlemen Elks” who lounge about chattering in Hurstwood’s resort is at once intensified and contested by internal tensions of eroticized fellowship and mutual aggression. Finally, although Simmel develops a broad perspective on the social dynamics that attract men to and hold them in groups within changing societies, Dreiser is finely tuned in to the shifting boundaries of urban, white, middle-class male fellowship and, thus, to details of instability marking transformations in American social life.
* * *
In The Secret Society, Georg Simmel noted that the essential purpose of certain secret orders among men in Africa and India was “to emphasize the differentiation of men and women.”7 Without engaging that point specifically, I would nonetheless employ Simmel’s concept to argue that the vast proliferation of fraternal orders in the United States after the Civil War, along with eating and drinking places catering exclusively to men, occurred as part of an increasing separation of the gendered spheres of home and work, and as part of a response to the increased presence of women, outside the home and in the workplace.8
Gunther Barth (1980) has argued that although women’s salaries and working hours were generally oppressive, new forms of employment in the factory and department store “opened up a major female avenue into the male-dominated urban job market. The total effect was to introduce women as a new social force in city life.”9 Still, this new proximity of men and women in the center city tended often to reinforce strictures of segregation, official and unofficial, within both economic and social arenas. For instance, Robert Thorne has shown in his study, “Places of Refreshment in the Nineteenth-Century City’’ (1980), that men could “venture in public where women could not and might, it was supposed, be educated or toughened by contact with the varieties and extremes of urban life. [Men’s] freedom of action offered possibilities of either immorality or improvement, where for women they lay only in disgrace.”10
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Simmel views the secret society’s “flight into secrecy” as a “ready device for social endeavors and forces that are about to be replaced by new ones.”11 To carry that idea through constructions of history, such as Barth’s and Thorne’s, at this point in the history of American cities, when an industrial system had already gone far to isolate work from home and men from women, millions of American men, perceiving a need to reinforce their separation against a complicating presence of women within the spheres of male-dominated work and recreation, enacted a kind of flight into forms of ritual behavior intended in part to preserve ideals of masculinity. For example, calling themselves knights and guards, the Elks, like the Masons upon whom they modeled themselves, through formal, secret rituals conjured up an imaginary medieval manhood.
But reaction to the changing status of women must be understood as having formed only part of the context for a widespread flight of men toward fraternal orders during the thirty years following the Civil War. Indeed, contrasting African and Indian societies, Simmel grounds his explanation of the contemporary secret society — his main Western example is the Freemasons — with a reading of the social consequences of Western industrialism, emphasizing throughout the monograph that the secret society emerges as a consequence of desires to accommodate and to resist extensive cultural change.
To make the argument that male fellowship in Sister Carrie is represented as a response to forces of social and cultural change, it is necessary to demonstrate that such change is also a concern of the narrative. In fact, the narrator is noticeably eager to suggest the transience of the novel’s representations between its opening moment in 1889 and the moment the story is being told in 1899–1900, in view of the rapidity of social transformation. Several examples will serve at this point to indicate the novel’s characteristic qualifying note that social forces and endeavors have either already raced well past the life conditions decribed or that they are about to.
First, the city itself is constantly in flux, constantly looking forward. Chicago’s population, expanding at the rate of 50,000 a year, thrives, the narrator tells us, not ‘‘upon established commerce,” but “upon the industries which prepared for the arrival of others” (12, 16). “Anticipation of rapid growth” has even been inscribed upon future suburbs in the form of streetcar lines which “extended far into open country” (16). A closer perspective indicates that within the city’s central districts, department stores, at the time a brand new institution, and factories have begun
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introducing women by the thousands as both workers and consumers (18, 22) — just as Barth has noted. Looking inside one of those factories, the narrator mitigates his description of the “hard contract” faced by women working in 1889 factories by educating his 1900 reader to the fact that “the new socialism which involves pleasant working conditions for employees had not then taken hold upon manufacturing companies” (39).
Moreover, changes such as these seem to be linked to the disruption and instability of basic social elements such as family life. Hurstwood’s “perfectly appointed” North Side household, the book’s main example of middle-class domestic life, “can scarcely be said to be infused with” a home atmosphere ‘‘calculated to make strong and just the natures cradled and nourished within it” (81). Absent fathers are increasingly alienated from their profligate sons and daughters, ambitious husbands from their desextialized wives (82–3). Although a man in Hurstwood’s position as manager still needs to have “a respectable home anchorage,” the masculine world of the “resort which he managed was his life” (85). Home and family relations are in the process in 1889 of becoming superficial, burdensome, and increasingly separated from men’s interests.
In the suggestion that secret societies formed in reaction to something, Simmel echoes points of view many nineteenth-century fraternal orders had of themselves as settings of seclusion. Historian Carey McWilliams (The Idea of Fraternity in America [1973]) has written that an American man in the “great age of fraternal orders,” the Gilded Age, could find “safe retreat from his daily life of competition, insecurity, and hostility” in a “world of pure affection, a momentary place of romance” promised by the the fraternity.12 According to a 1931 organizational publication, the Benevolent and Protective Order of Elks “was born in the minds and hearts of a small group of devoted friends, whose only selfish desire was for fraternal companionship.”13
Nevertheless, the first order of any secret gathering, Simmel says, is “protection.”14 In fact, the Protective Order of Elks had been founded after the Civil War by a group of social outcasts, white minstrel show performers, performing in blackface. Originally calling themselves the Jolly Corks, after the substance used to blacken their faces on stage, these men, who first met in the corner of a downtown Manhattan saloon, according to another Elks historian,