But obviously Carrie has a more complex and important role in the novel than as a sexual object bonding men. As Dreiser’s principal character, she is central to his critique of constructions of male power. Carrie’s performance in the Elks’ theatrical benefit, for example, creates a focus for exposing an intense homosocial contest of two male friends, Drouet and Hurstwood, not only against an external factor, women, as they struggle for control of their privilege to deceive both wives and lovers, but internally be-
Page 86
tween each other — as they struggle to maintain their backslapping fellowship against raging competition from their sexual desires.
Given the occurrence of these tensions, the meaning of the ubiquitous word “friend” in Sister Carrie may be held in place as follows: for a man to be a friend of other men means that he can fit himself into a publicly heterosexual and often commercial discourse and that he feels a strong pleasure based upon physical intimacy with other men among bright objects, including young, unmarried women. Male friendship also means that a man agrees to maintain what Erving Goffman (1959) has called “a veneer of consensus” as to how the situation of his coming together with other men or with women is to be defined and controlled. He agrees, that is, to openly express his affinities with other men and to suppress or conceal his aggressiveness as a desiring economical and sexual being, the “worst effect” (47) resulting from his envy and ambition.23
Dreiser exposes these dynamics of male togetherness most fully through the relationship of Hurstwood and Drouet. Compared with Hurstwood’s social situation, his friend Drouet’s position in the group is marginal. Unaware of Hurstwood’s envy of his relations with Carrie, Drouet looks toward Hurstwood with a kind of narcissistic arousal. When Hurstwood visits the apartment Drouet shares with Carrie, who, to amplify Drouet’s social position, is presented as Mrs. Drouet, Drouet exacts great pleasure from seeing himself being admired and appreciated by another man for his choice of a woman — like the choice of a pair of shoes — and from noting what he takes for an increasing intimacy with the admiring man, actually his rival. On the other hand, in the course of the story Hurstwood’s thoughts, words, and deeds concerning Drouet range from being sympathetic to patronizing to jealous to violently destructive. At one point, Hurstwood “mastered himself only by a superhuman effort,’’ as he wishes for an “end of Drouet” (193).
Meanwhile, the “object of this peculiarly involved comedy,” as Dreiser describes Carrie, her attractiveness and value on the increase, sorely strains the fraternal balance of arousal, shows of comraderie, and rivalry tinged with violence. Nevertheless, both men, in their own ways, are manipulating Carrie, the “little peach” Drouet “struck” on the train (48), in order to have their secret pleasure without sacrificing their fellowship as members of the group or the larger community. To recoup Simmel’s terms, then, Carrie, an outsider to the male community, like the communally sanctioned domestic sphere which she displaces, is associated with both the seclusion against the out-
Page 87
side and the intensification of the group’s internal cohesion. As the excluded “other,” as well as the secret object of desire, she is made to inform much of the novel’s male discourse.
As an outsider to both the fraternity and family, Carrie is linked to several other insidious social types in Dreiser’s late nineteenthcentury American city, with whom the Elks may have felt sharp differences. She is one of the factory workers, for example, whose ubiquitous presence in the city calls into question the affability of the men who manage manufacturing shops and display their Elk medallions. And she is linked to others of the nondominant culture who crowd the expanding city about whom the men of the resort display no apparent awareness.
In a defining scene, when Carrie, Drouet, and Hurstwood are all together one evening, they encounter a ragged man on the street outside a theater begging for the price of a bed. Here the writer juxtaposes three men, two “old friends,” Drouet and Hurstwood, and a gaunt-faced stranger, described as a “picture of privation and wretchedness” (139). The two friends are lodge brothers in Chicago’s Elk’s Club, but the third man, without a home, let alone a club, is wholly outside of any fraternity or Community. He is hardly human; belonging to a mass, he is merely a “picture’’ of his condition. The stranger is someone in whose face these men cannot see the likes of themselves as they see themselves reflected in the resort’s ornate mirrors; he is someone whose desperate phraseology is both foreign and antithetical to their “pointless” chatter. Except for a wholly anomalous moment of discovery by Drouet, the third man seems not to exist at all.
The meaning of friendship among the men of the resort is reinforced here as an agreement not to disrupt the community with social adversity; oblivious of adversity or concealing its existence, male coherence in Sister Carrie is, in Simmel’s terms, associated with its seclusion from all representations of a pathologic national mass of poverty and homelessness.24
But masculine identity and the coherence of male relations are intensified, in the novel, not only by obliviousness to adverse social conditions, but by feeling what Simmel calls the “aristocratizing motive”: the desire of a group to let others “feel their superiority.”25 For a second, Drouet has felt a stranger’s plight, handing over a dime “with an upwelling feeling of pity in his heart” (139). Still, several moments earlier Drouet has been handing over a line to his “little peach” about his plans to marry her, and he has also recently bragged about having lied to “Burnstein — a regular hook-nosed sheeny,” in selling him “a complete line” (135).
Page 88
The “line” Drouet is always selling is his apparent goodwill. But whether he hands it out or sells it, as he does to women and to Jewish merchants respectively, for his commission he gains feelings of social superiority.
At the same time that Hurstwood feels a certain amount of “injustice” (138) about the game he is playing with his Elks brother, the tense dynamic of Drouet’s and Hurstwood’s homosocial politics of male fraternity struts its power in manipulating women, the homeless, and the Jew — another dehumanized figure, whose presence in 1900, resulting from waves of recent immigration, was perceived as threatening to the ‘‘better social order” that middle-class lodge brothers of American cities and towns dreamed they were creating.
The Elks’s own revised history (1931) articulates that social order as “the Order” itself:
Non-Sectarian, non-political, drawing its members from all sections, from all denominations, and from all political parties, the Order was naturally a medium through which those of differing creeds and political affiliations and sectional viewpoints would reach a better understanding of each other.
Organized at a time when the aftermath of the civil war was still apparent in sectional bitterness and prejudice which retarded the healing of old wounds and delayed the restoration of real national accord, the Order of Elks may justly claim a foremost place among the agencies which aided in the final destruction of those barriers and speeded the happy consummation of a truly united people.26
The early twentieth-century membership records of Charles Edward Ellis’s Elks history include photographic images of a post-Civil War new national Order of middle-class men who, based on their names and faces, apparently found neither common ground nor “better understanding” with Jews, African–Americans, or with Catholic immigrants such as Dreiser’s father. Clawson points out that while the major orders never “openly barred admission to members of any ethnic minority,” nevertheless the “changing character of immigration, the increasing articulation of nativist sentiment and the polarization created by the interaction of fraternal anti-Catholicism and Catholic anti-fraternalism led the fraternal movement to abandon the model of cultural pluralism that had characterized its earlier years.”27
“Policies toward race,” Clawson notes, “were much more consistent; indeed, racial exclusion was a hallmark of mainstream American fraternalism throughout its history. This was accom-
Page 89
plished not simply on a de facto basis, but by formally requiring that prospective members must be white.”28
One measure of how the Elks, founded by a group of white showmen who performed in blackface, had changed their position within the changing society, is that the 1931 account referred to above wholly omits mentioning the founders’ line of work.29 In Sister Carrie, when an Elks officer mentions to Drouet that a fellow Elk, Harry Burbeck, “does a fine black-face turn” (153), the burnt-cork mask donned by jolly corks like Harry for comic effect no longer symbolizes by irony the status of the socially despised performer and Elks’ founder. Indeed, the secret of the blackface mask referred to in passing in Sister Carrie is that it mocks and dehumanizes only the real blacks, against whose social degradation, along with that of Jews and women, these. kinds of businessmen-impressionists, like their fraternal forebears, have elevated themselves.