Tensions of inner cohesion intensified through seclusion from insidious social others are subtly articulated the night of the Elks Club benefit, when all the men come together in a carnival scene that magnifies the world of restaurant and resort. In the first place, Dreiser concocts this scene to present a contest between the two male friends; at least one of them, Hurstwood, while watching Carrie’s stage performance is able just “fairly” to maintain “his standard of good fellowship” (188) — to keep in balance, that is, homosocial male fellowship, powerful erotic desires, and an overall communal sense of order. But there are other things happening, particularly outside the theater, that suggest how the better social order organizes the boundaries of its existence.
The scene takes place before Avery Hall. Fallen into disuse, Avery Hall exemplifies the secret society’s penchant for protecting social endeavors and forces in rapid transformation. Avery Hall had once connoted a pastoral escape from the city. Originally, the narrator tells us, it had been built
as part of a larger summer garden, when the ground upon which it was located was not more than a mile from the city limits. The city had grown so rapidly and extended its borders so far that the summer garden idea had been abandoned and the surrounding ground parceled out into one-story store buildings which were largely vacant. The hall itself, like much other Chicago property, was not in demand. (172)
But where no lights have burned for some time, lamps from the “patched and repaired” theater (172) now draw ‘‘the fascinated
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gaze of children and shopkeepers and people living in flats across the way” That gaze is drawn specifically toward
the lights of a certain circle … of small fortunes and secret order distinctions … gentlemen Elks [who] knew the standing of one another … [who] had regard for the ability which could amass a small fortune, own a nice home, keep a barouche or carriage perhaps, wear fine clothes and maintain a good mercantile position. Anyone who did this and belonged to their lodge was quite a figure. (177, 178)
For the occasion, the Elks are animated by their “aristocratizing motive.” The men of the club and resort are basking in the gaze of the shopkeepers and flat dwellers in a blighted, depressed neighborhood. Brightly illuminated at the focal center of shad owed social multiplicity, these men seem to imagine that they form a kind of a colony which, by feeling superior to what surrounds and supports it, asserts a typical colonialist’s prerogative to define a better social order. Nevertheless, the veneer of consensus is penetrated by conflict both from within and from outside the focal center of the carnival.
Some of that conflict is generated by the invasive presence of women. Although convention dictates that wives be present at this gathering, not one of them speaks throughout the scene. Still, the men remain wary of their presence. Dreiser represents the secrecy cloaking what men say to one another by having them whisper or speak in asides. One woman in particular, Carrie, creates an intensification of eroticized tensions within the male group. Erotic desire, resulting from Carrie’s performance in the amateur production, initiates a dangerous fantasy, Hurstwood’s passionate dream of escape from normal communal constraints, including the constraint to be just to a male friend and thus to preserve the unspokenness of an agreement that cements male-to-male relations.
At the same time, the people living in flats and working in shops across the way, or the factory girls whose eyes haunt the borders of other glittering theater crowds, have a quiet, ironic presence in the novel, which penetrates the borders of homogeneous male inclusion. That the modern American city was pluralistic and defined by its class, gender, and race differences, both accounted for and contradicted the professed communal “distinctions” of proliferating middle-class secret orders. Again, in Simmel’s terms, the seclusion against the people gazing in from the flats across the way “is associated with” — it both generates and penetrates — the intensification of the circle’s internal cohesion.
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Expressions of fellowship within this Chicago business community may not, on the surface at least, seem aggressive or even oppressive. Indeed, businessmen in Sister Carrie cling together in a bundle of erotic passions. But taking together everything that the narrator tells us about these men, and in particular their coarse treatment of and language for women and wives, the conditions of work in their factories, their dehumanization of the homeless, Jews, and African–Americans through blackface comedy, and their aggressiveness towards each other, we must ask whether such a represented claim of fraternity, no matter how secluded its enactment, can have been meant to be seen as “benevolent,’’ let alone romantic.
The secret society, Simmel remarked, is above all defined by its consciousness of having a consensus surrounding particular interests, interests which over time change to resist and to accommodate other, at times contradictory, interests.30 From the critical perspective Dreiser developed in his first novel, the representative late nineteenth-century romantic moment of male togetherness is actually a conscious political gathering of an interest group, which in secret and public ways consents to seek protection from and to protect “social endeavors and forces that are about to be replaced by new ones.”31 Dreiser’s scattered allusions to the Elks in the first part of the novel, his images of men in saloons and restaurants, and the relations he depicts between men and between the sexes, may be read together as a narrative of American male culture, dreaming of order as it resists and accommodates breaches and changes in the boundaries of its imagined domain.32
Notes
1. Theodore Dreiser, Sister Carrie (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1981, published by arrangement with the University of Pennsylvania Press). All page references in the text are to this edition of the novel.
2. Amy Kaplan, The Social Construction of American Realism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), pp. 5–7.
3. Mary Ann Clawson, Constructing Brotherhood: Class, Gender, and Fraternalism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989), p. 248. Insight into the fraternal impulses of nineteenth-century American men is most cogently articulated by scholars whose work has come to be labeled as men’s studies. See, for example, in addition to Clawson, Mark C. Carnes, Secret Ritual and Manhood in Victorian America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989); Carnes, “Middle-Class Men and the Solace of Fraternal Ritual” in Meanings for
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Manhood: Constructions of Masculinity in Victorian America
, eds. Mark C. Carnes and Clyde Griffen (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990); E. Anthony Rotundo, American Manhood: Transformations in Masculinity from the Revolution to the Modern Era (New York: Basic Books, 1993). See, also, recent studies such as T. J. Jackson Lears’ No Place of Grace: Antimodernism and the Transformation of American Culture, 1880–1920 (New York: Pantheon Books, 1981) and Carroll Smith-Rosenberg’s Disorderly Conduct: Visions of Gender in Victorian America (New York: Knopf, 1985), which use literary works as textual evidence for criticizing cultures of nineteenth-century manhood. I find the appellation “men’s studies” neither helpful nor descriptive of the critical work I carry out. Recently, men’s studies, seen as a critical movement, has been assailed by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick as a depoliticized compensation for women’s or feminist studies. See Sedgwick, “Gender Criticism,” in Redrawing the Boundaries, eds. Stephen Greenblatt and Giles Gunn (New York: Modern Language Association, 1992) pp. 271–302. However, to support her argument, Sedgwick unjustly totalizes the men’s studies movement as having very limited goals. Although her critique may have bearing in individual instances, especially where efforts have been made to define men as though women were not also in the world, Sedgwick’s dismissal of men’s studies as merely “compensatory” and intellectually ‘‘stultifying” ignores any possibilities that studies of gender focused on men or masculinity can be a necessary angle of inquiry for the larger project of cultural criticism (a project to which Sedgwick has made important contributions, including one I refer to later in this essay).
4. Georg Simmel, The Secret Society, trans. Albion W. Small, American Journal of Sociology, XI (January 1906). The translation I use was made in 1950 by Kurt H. Wolff in an edition intended to reacquaint English readers with the scope of Simmel’s thinking. The Sociology of Georg Simmel (Glencoe, Ill.: Free Press, 1950), pp. 345–76.
The first Dreiser critic to articulate a connection between Simmel’s writing and American realism was Philip Fisher. In Hard Facts: Setting and Form in the American Novel (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), Fisher alludes to Simmel’s characterizations of relationships formed by reactions to what Fisher calls the “too various and demanding” city (p. 136). Giving my attention to writings other than the ones referred to by Fisher, I also examine Simmel’s formulations of reactive social behavior in the city, but use Simmel’s language more directly than Fisher has to frame a reading of Sister Carrie.
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5. Simmel, p. 345. Carnes, Secret Ritual and Manhood in Victorian America, Introduction, emphasizes that secret rituals, above all else, seem to have attracted men to fraternal orders.