Freud and Dreiser share a model of human behavior based on conflict. They show in different ways the myriad implications and essential difficulties lying behind the phrase, “I want.” Put simply, Dreiser’s protagonists do not know what they want or why they want it. Desires assert themselves on the consciousness of Dreiser’s characters, shaping and directing it. Ellen Moers calls Clyde Griffiths “the Everyman of desire,”2 but accepting this description hardly serves to simplify An American Tragedy. Desire has many faces in the work of Dreiser; ultimately, it is responsible for identity, the way that characters see themselves, and the way that we see them. In the following pages I will investigate the engine of desire that drives Dreiser’s novels forward. This complex force gives rise to the psychological depth of characterization and persistent ambiguity that characterizes Dreiser’s best fiction.
This ambiguity of Dreiser’s has been explored in other contexts, but almost never psychoanalytically. Lee Clark Mitchell compares Hurstwood at the safe to Silas Lapham contemplating bankruptcy in William Dean Howells’ The Rise of Silas Lapham and points
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out that the latter seems a moral agent in charge of his fate, while Hurstwood (faced with somewhat similar circumstances) appears out of control. Gordon O. Taylor anticipates this insight in his study of the fictive depiction of thought: “[T]he mental experience which interests Dreiser most is sub- or semiconscious. … ’’3 Mitchell’s analysis of character is based on moral philosophy as it relates to the formation of the self.4 I would argue from a psychoanalytic perspective that the different ways that Lapham and Hurstwood deliberate arise from different views of the self: how Dreiser and Howells define consciousness. For Howells, Lapham exists, and therefore Lapham decides. For Dreiser, the ingredients of a decision are more varied, mixing together into a turbulent, conflicted state of imperfect awareness. To Mitchell, Hurstwood’s inconclusiveness and uncertainty about the source of his intentions result in the lack of “an integrated self.”5 A psychoanalytically oriented response would be, “Who has a perfectly integrated self anyway?”
This brief discussion shows that Dreiser’s model is — despite its partial antecedence to Freud — a thoroughly modern one. His view is grounded in conflict that originates in competing desires. He portrays desire compounded by its own long repression (as seen, for example, in Hurstwood’s deeply unsatisfying life during the years before the action of Sister Carrie begins).
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Given the congeniality of Dreiser’s art to psychoanalytic criticism, it is surprising indeed that there is so little of it, even given the dominant social focus of most naturalist criticism.6 Why has psychoanalysis been so largely ignored in Dreiser’s case? Although Dreiser’s fiction has recently begun to receive some generally based (and valuable) psychological attention, psychoanalytic treatments of his work are still scarce. Excluding studies of historical influence, two Freudian readings stand out from an otherwise sparse field.7 A quick examination of them will shed some light on the question of why there has not been more psychoanalytic Dreiser criticism.
In the first and only psychoanalytic study of The “Genius,” Richard B. Hovey and Ruth S. Ralph see Dreiser’s Eugene Witla in the thrall of the maternal superego, persuasively showing how his nine affairs (three in each section of the novel) reveal a gradually increasing need to be caught and reprimanded by a mother figure.8 The pleasure principle, they say, competes with the desire to be punished. This argument (to which I will return) highlights an important aspect of Dreiser’s characters: they have very active
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unconscious faculties which scheme and speak beneath the often troubled surfaces of the characters’ personalities. Compare Eugene’s conscious and unconscious machinations to those of Frank Norris’s McTeague, for example, where there is only the threat of pain — which is simply at odds with the pleasure principle.
Terry Whalen offers a more comprehensive interpretation of the workings of psychoanalytic ideas in Dreiser’s fiction, suggesting that the author’s sense of tragedy is Freudian in its emphasis on the embattled ego.9 Concentrating on Sister Carrie and An American Tragedy, Whalen sees the basic Freudian image of the ego under siege from social strictures and inner urges as the source of Dreiserian tragedy. To Whalen, Dreiser’s Freudian view holds more than a simply fatalistic or deterministic vision of the human drama. For example, his reading of the safe scene in Sister Carrie focuses on Hurstwood’s embattled, “endangered” ego, whose inefficiency eventually leads him to ruin — a more complex vision, says Whalen, than mechanistic philosophy can provide. Clyde Griffiths, says Whalen, is powerless, caught between status and sex, a “pitiful victim” whose destiny ultimately results from the undomesticated power of his id.
Although a worthy signpost toward rich sources for future inquiry, Whalen’s own argument finally dead ends, for having located the problems of Dreiser’s two most famous tragic protagonists in their weak egos, he “solves” the psychological equation of the characters. However, the simplicity of the solution (the ‘‘poor ego” as the source of all difficulty) contains more than a hint of brute force, of irregularly shaped pegs pushed into perfectly round holes. For example, Whalen sees Clyde as “little more than a blend of id-inspired dreams of sexual bliss and culture-inspired dreams of material success by the time he is working in Lycurgus.”10 This reading finds no place for Clyde’s basic sensitivity (noticed by Pizer and others).
Consider also Clyde’s need for acceptance. His materialistic dreams arise at least partly from this basic desire. As a “soul that was not destined to grow up,”11 Clyde requires the approval that any child does. His dreams of wealth, prosperity that will make him an adult in his own eyes, must flow from his superego as well as from his comfort-loving id. If Clyde were simply a creature of desire, he would have been a far better criminal, more cold blooded in planning and execution. His ineptitude deserves closer study, arising as it does from both his mixed feelings for Roberta and his consciousness of the law, along with its moral basis. Whatever its strength or weakness, Clyde’s ego is at bottom conflicted. He knows the difference between what
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he has and what he wants, but he also knows, both consciously and unconsciously, something of the cost of gaining his desires. There is more to Clyde than first meets the psychoanalytical eye.
With an eye on this critique, I venture an hypothesis to explain the paucity of psychoanalytic criticism of Dreiser’s novels: it is because everything appears so simple at first glance.12 In An American Tragedy, one could put forth an equation for the crime that covers everything neatly, so neatly that it is suspicious. Such an equation starts with Clyde’s unhappy, humiliation-filled childhood and proceeds “inevitably” to its consequences of murder and retribution. Clyde’s Efrit takes its place as a crudely dramatized id that overcomes Clyde’s weak ego. Accenting it all are Clyde’s crudely symbolic dreams. It is a neat package; there does not seem to be much to add. One can break down The “Genius” and Sister Carrie similarly. Hovey and Ralph portray Eugene as a servant alternately of the pleasure principle and the maternal superego: one can say that his ego is no match for these two. Carrie can be viewed in this way as a victorious id trampling her own ego on the way to a success unencumbered by conscience, realizing her dreams of wealth and comfort. And inversely, we have already seen Whalen argue that Hurstwood is an ego at sea without sail.
This little exercise shows how easy it is to see Dreiser’s characters as having strong ids and weak egos. In fact, it is too easy. Because of the enduring critical attention that they have received over the years, it is fair to expect that Clyde, Eugene, Carrie, and Hurstwood be composed of more than elementary oppositions. If Dreiser’s novels were that simplistic, no one in the age of Freud would want to read them.
This kind of formulaic thinking ignores what Shoshana Felman calls “the textuality of the text.”13 Her solution is the “implication’’ of psychoanalysis and literature, offering a wide variety of possibilities “not necessarily to recognize a known, to find an answer, but also, and perhaps more challengingly, to locate an unknown, to find a question.”14 Felman is describing a different kind of psychoanalytic literary criticism, one which celebrates complexity and equivocation rather than reducing the text to one of a few possible variations of Freud’s triadic organization of the mind. Such a task demands a new, or at least altered, methodology, which she finds in the psychoanalysis of Jacques Lacan.
Why complicate the issue by bringing Lacan into it? The attractiveness of Lacan to a project like this lies in Lacan’s focus on the ego, and his deemphasis of the mechanistic aspects
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of Freud’s thinking. By refusing to reduce desires to drives, we can, by adopting a Lacanian perspective, attempt to analyze the conflicting wants and alienations of Dreiser’s characters as a confused (and often confusing) mixture of conscious and unconscious desires that are not the products of biological drives as such. “For Lacan, anatomy is not equivalent to destiny.”15 This pronouncement describes the dynamic between chance and determinism in Dreiser’s work, carried through to the psychological realm.