were made up of the stratum of humanity — the theatrical profession — which for proceeding generations had been stigmatized
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as “vagabonds” — those children of genius who have done so much to beautify and enrich the world. … It has only been in later years that the general public has come to understand the great fraternity which sprang from the loins of this once despised theatrical profession.15
By the turn of the century, however, the Elks had grown so large that their status as a secret society had greatly changed. Indeed, they were now publishing accounts of themselves for the general public and enjoying such publicity as came from local newspaper columns devoted to the activities of fraternities. The nature of Elks protectiveness would change, too, as the society expanded and as its stigmatized theatrical ranks were replaced by a conventional middle class. Once secrecy was no longer necessary for protecting a despised group, once the secrets had been “limited” to the “formalities” of society meetings,16 the need felt by Elks for protection was being influenced by other concerns — to use McWilliams’s terms, other hostilities, new sorts of competition, new insecurities.
McWilliams’s big, unwieldy study, a kind of romance in itself, captures with affection the fraternity’s own expressed dream of creating a “protective order’’ within a threatening or problemridden society, a secret environment for acting out a romance or nostalgic fantasy of ideal social relations. But except in recognizing that there was at one time something other against which a “faint, romantic echo of fraternity,”17 articulated through secret speech and behavior, offered at least momentary seclusion, McWilliams shows little interest in the social tensions themselves which produced desires for exclusive male companionship, or in what Simmel saw as the “association” of those tensions with fraternal companionship.18
In Sister Carrie, Charles Drouet, a typical Chicago salesman of his age and a member of the Benevolent and Protective Order of Elks, identifies with the romantic, somewhat erotic symbol of the wild male animal suspended from his watch chain (5), a symbol chosen originally by the founders of the Elks in 1867 for its attractive physical characteristics and, importantly, for its fidelity with other males. But contrary to the official story that the Elks’ only selfish desire for gathering was companionship,19 as the bearer of that symbol on a gold chain attached to his vest pocket, “a secret sign that stands for something,” Drouet also marks himself eligible to rise “way-up” the social scale (152). For Drouet, then, the secret of the symbol is its association with success and with things that the group associates with specifically male success.
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Merely being among men in certain public places, immersed in the music of what Dreiser calls their “pointless phraseology” (46), connotes for Drouet success and sensory pleasures as indistinguishable. Drouet is virtually seduced by the romance of the carnival-like setting of the restaurant, resort, or theater. He is “lured as much by his longing for pleasure as by his desire to shine among his betters” (47). The most seductive element of the gathering appears to be the nearness of other men: ‘‘here men gather, here chatter, here love to pass and rub elbows” (47).
The many friends [Drouet] met here dropped in because they craved, without perhaps consciously analyzing it, the company, the glow, the atmosphere, which they found. One might take it after all as an augur of the better social order, for the things which they satisfied here, though sensory, were not evil. No evil could come out of the contemplation of an expensively decorated chamber. The worst effect such a thing could have would be perhaps to stir up in the material-minded an ambition to arrange their lives upon a similarly splendid basis. (47)
Moralizing is not this narrator’s descriptive style, though irony often is; considering Hurstwood’s disastrous fate, the “worst effect” of this juxtaposition of influential elements will be, we know, far worse. Auguring a better social order, the image given here for ironic contemplation is one of businessmen glowing within a sphere of gaudy light.
Like other elements of the social world Dreiser imagines, the splendid surface that draws these men toward each other has another side, that is a discourse of business and sexual gain. Drouet’s ability to turn pointless phrases has, in fact, a point when he is talking with the well-connected resort manager. Drouet has
what was a help in his business, a moderate sense of humor, and could tell a good story when the occasion required. He could talk races with Hurstwood, tell interesting incidents concerning himself and his experiences with women, and report the state of trade in the cities which he visited, and so managed to make himself almost invariably agreeable. …
“Come around after the show. I have something I want to show you,” said Hurstwood. …
“Is she a blonde?” said Drouct, laughing.
“Come around about twelve,” said Hurstwood, ignoring the question. (44, 48)
Hurstwood ignores the question because he understands more acutely than his less socially “way-up” friend that certain questions
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need not be asked; that is, the invitation to “come around” must, among initiated men, conceal its secret of illicit sexuality.
This blending of commerce and sexuality, their “chatter,” along with their passing and rubbing of elbows must, the narrator says, “be explained upon some grounds. It must be that a strange bundle of passions and vague desires gives rise to such a curious social institution or it would not be” (47). A term the narrator may have been searching for here to characterize those passions, one which comes out of late twentieth-century feminist theory, is homosocial. That is, these relations are political in nature but they are also sexualized, without being explicitly homosexualized.
I am suggesting that one way to interpret relations in the setting of saloon and fraternal society is to utilize Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s term homosociality, referring to the difference made “when a social or political relationship is sexualized.’’20 Sedgwick’s conception of “the play of desire and identification by which individuals negotiate with their societies for empowerment,” sees an “active congruence” among constructions of gender, heterosexuality, homosexuality, and homosociality.21 Such a congruence is present in Sister Carrie’s Chicago where male bonds are constituted and cemented by relations that value eroticized desire for the physical pleasure of being among men, narratives of sexual exploitation of women told to other men, and sexual and business success acknowledged and advanced by other men.
Of course, in Sister Carrie, women also wield social power which disrupts the restricted homosocial circle of male relations. A very uneroticized wife, Hurstwood’s for example, in the separate sphere of the home, is an outsider, indeed a threat, to male pleasure, who must nonetheless be accommodated within Victorian communal arrangements. Family, a wife and children, to use the terms of Simmel, is associated in Sister Carrie with the internal cohesion of the male group as both a necessity for upward mobility within Hurstwood’s economic class and as a standard of morality within and against which these male relations are formed.
The craving for the type of male relations available within fraternal societies may have resulted from a need either to substitute for something lacking in domestic life or to resist something about American domestic life in the Gilded Age that was in transformation and which threatened male power and autonomy. Moreover, nineteenth-century men in saloons and protective orders, in offering homosocial reinforcement to one another, as a result may have rendered less interesting the companionate, sexual, and parental bonds within the family. In his survey of late nineteenth-century secret societies, W. S. Har-
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wood blames, among other things, a “peculiar fascination in the unreality” of fraternal mysticism and ritual along with “conviviality” associated with drinking, for a deterioration of family relationships.22
When in the company of his family, the Sister Carrie narrator says, a man may visit a Wisconsin resort where he must spend these “stiff, polished days, strolling about conventional places doing conventional things” (85). In Sister Carrie’s male culture, segregated male relationships are sought after because they give a context to the unconventional possibility of unresponsible sexuality, at least in discourse when not in actuality. Such notably secret pleasure is presumably enjoyed by Hurstwood and other men during a so-called “alderman’s junket” to Philadelphia. “Nobody knows us down there,’’ one of the men tells Hurstwood. “We can have a good time” (86). Additionally, the body of Carrie generates for Hurstwood fantasies of sexual abandon, a kind of liminality inconceivable within the family but not within the protective order of fictive brotherhood.
For Dreiser, then, male secrecy becomes a device of unconventional sexuality, a seclusion from the stiff and barren connotations of domestic life. Signing what cannot and need not be spoken aloud, Hurstwood’s friend gives “just the semblance of a wink” to punctuate this invitation to “have a good time” with “several who were his friends” on the ten-day junket (86).
Within the circle of male secrets, an eroticizecl figure like Carrie, who is not a wife, like the “blonde” Drouet anticipates for his midnight liaison with Hurstwood, functions for men to delineate their private and public sexual power. Carrie is the “little peach” Drouet “struck” on a train whom Drouet mentions to Hurstwood, “trying to impress his friend” (49), and whom he eventually shares with Hurstwood, feeling, then, “closer to him than ever before” (95). Here, too, clichés of silent, secret understanding translate the true meaning of Drouet’s invitation to Hurstwood. “I want you to come out some evening,” Drouet says to Hurstwood, who “looked up quizzically, the least suggestion of a smile hovering about his lips” (80).