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These narcissistic portrayals suggest egos that try to be too strong. The characters have in common a lack of fulfillment in love, which — says Freud — creates an emotional need, a space to be filled. The loves of Eugene, Clyde, Carrie, and Hurstwood extend from narcissistic self-love. They all need to love and be loved in return, but their clumsy mishandling of this need helps to account for their defectiveness in other areas.
Lacan’s image of an aggressive, narcissistically motivated ego offers a way into these characters, a means of negotiating their psychic labyrinths. Aggressivity expresses the ego’s unconscious need to unite with the unconscious Other. This need for integration provides insight into the struggles of Dreiser’s protagonists. Carrie, Hurstwood, Eugene, and Clyde are forever lacking and seeking. The result is, among other things, improperly channeled aggressivity, where the unconscious act takes the place of the word in a group of notably nonintrospective personalities.
We can identify aggressivity through the examination of repetition compulsion, which is rife in Sister Carrie, The “Genius,’’ and An American Tragedy. The characters in these novels repeat themselves all the time, and almost never with understanding.27 The frequency of repetition motifs in Dreiser’s fiction makes it an especially rich field for Lacanian exploration. Dreiser’s repetitions nearly always arise fortuitously, but they also owe something to compulsions, or tendencies, in the characters. The doubling in An American Tragedy has already been extensively documented in pursuit of nonpsychological critical goals.28 To cite just two examples, Clyde’s liaison with Roberta parallels the one he has with Hortense Briggs in the first part of the novel, and also echoes the pregnancy and abandonment of his sister Esta. When he refuses to swim to the drowning Roberta, the scene reenacts one from the first section in which he flees from an auto accident. Hovey and Ralph show how The “Genius” splits into three patterned cycles of three affairs each. Eugene’s affair with Suzanne is only the most spectacular and consequential of many such amorous adventures. In Sister Carrie, Carrie’s liaisons with Drouet and Hurstwood have strong similarities, most notably the way she seems to drift into each one. Hurstwood’s courtship of Carrie is the culmination of many such dalliances he has had before the narrative begins.29
Aggressivity in the novels invariably sweeps the performers of the actions along in its destructive wake, giving it a more classically Freudian east. Recall that aggressivity originates “beyond the pleasure principle.”30 Again, the value of this idea to understanding the motivations of Dreiser’s protagonists is estimable. Hurstwood’s theft is a bumbling escapade; we can see in his wavering (and,
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in the police presence in the back of his mind) a desire to be unsuccessful, to correct his course. “I wish I hadn’t done that,” he says to himself after the theft. “That was a mistake.”31 Even so, he goes on to kidnap Carrie. His entire subsequent decline makes his original judgment of his act into a self-fulfilling prophecy that reaches its nadir in his suicide, the ultimate act of self-destruction.
Clyde’s murder of Roberta has self-destructive elements as well. Though not a great intellect (criminal or otherwise), he is hardly such an idiot that we should believe his crude getaway plan is the best that he is capable of. There is a part of Clyde that wants — even needs — to be caught. His conflicted self emerges during the crime. Right after refusing Roberta’s gesture and striking her, he reaches for her, “half to assist or recapture her and half to apologize for the unintended blow’’ — a blow which arose an instant earlier from the momentary surrender to “a tide of submerged hate” (AAT 492). Clyde’s wants cross in cerebral space and get tangled up: his desire for the good life is threatened by Roberta’s pregnancy, which has itself arisen from his sexual desire. Overlaying the situation is his pity for Roberta, in which his desire reaches outside of himself to preserve an essential regard for her.32 The universal, instinctive sense of right that Dreiser describes as Hurstwood ponders the open safe in Sister Carrie is also at work in Clyde, and it cannot allow his criminal inclinations unfettered reign. His Efrit, or “darker self,” is by definition only a part of him. If it held full sway, he would simply have brained Roberta with the camera as he originally planned.
As for The “Genius,” Eugene’s cruelty to his wife Angela stands out as what Lacan would call an imago of aggressive intent. However, Hovey and Ralph show how Eugene repeatedly passes up opportunities to sleep with Suzanne, and how he all but invites her mother and his wife to find out about their affair. Mr. Colfax, Eugene’s sharp-tongued boss, points out to him that it would have been smarter to deflower Suzanne first and negotiate later.33 But Eugene’s refusal to plan, a persistent lapse in his makeup that Colfax is not the first to notice, leads in this case (as in the others) to exposure and defeat. Since the autobiographically inspired Eugene is arguably the most intelligent of Dreiser’s creations, we must question this curious, increasingly self-destructive resistance of his.
It lies, I think, in the death drive itself, which expresses the contradictions and alienations of being. Lacanian psychoanalysis holds that this self-destructive energy comes not from the id, which according to Freud’s metaphor is the seat of instincts, but from a tightly convoluted ego whose energy does not benefit from
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the self-knowledge which might defuse or redirect it. Freud sees a separation between “repressed” and “repressing,” but Lacan brings them together and makes them part of each other.
Repressed material comes into view through repetition. The repetitions I just described are not exactly the same, nor should we expect them to be. Repetition, says Lacan, does not mean reproduction.34 If we study the repetitions as chains of signifiers and look for the differences from one occurrence to the next, we can locate the “unreadable” element, the discourse of the unconscious. Aggressivity, as a correlative of narcissistic identification, is tied from its inception to the original desire for union with the mother. The mirror stage, the “narcissistic moment” of libidinal frustration normally followed by normative sublimation,
allows us to understand the aggressivity involved in the effects of all regression, all arrested development, all rejection of typical development in the subject, especially on the plane of sexual realization, and more specifically with each of the great phases that the libidinal transformations determine in human life, the crucial function of which has been demonstrated by analysis: weaning, the Oedipal stage, puberty, maturity, or motherhood, even the climacteric. (Ecrits 24–5)
We should first recall that all of the Dreiser protagonists under discussion have problems associated with sexual relationships (difficulties in ‘‘sexual realization”).
Now consider all of the trouble that Dreiser’s protagonists have with their mothers. Clyde essentially turns his back on his mother to try and ascend the social ladder, an ascent governed by secular values. After his arrest he does not want to face his mother, and so he wires that she is not needed (AAT 619, 624). When she arrives after his conviction, his feelings are equivocal, even in his own dire need:
his troubled intricate soul not a little dubious, yet confident also that it was to find sanctuary, sympathy, help, perhaps — and that without criticism — in her heart. (AAT 748)
Although Clyde eventually surrenders to his mother completely, it is clear from his feelings before he sees her that he does so with unarticulated misgivings, born of his early alienation from her.
Complicating Eugene’s tangled relations with the mother figures in his life is his avoidance of his own mother, a negligence so complete that his wife is the one who writes the letters to her in Illinois. He visits his home only once, after he has broken down and is clutching at any possibility of rejuvenation. But even that
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one time is more than Carrie sees her mother, who vanishes from Sister Carrie following Carrie’s “gush of tears” at her mother’s parting kiss on the first page of the book. Hurstwood also turns his back on a mother figure (in the form of his domineering wife) in favor of Carrie, who is much younger. Mothers stand out by omission in all three novels. Their children repress them.
But we cannot consider the mother without the father: each is a vertex of the primal triangle. The metaphoric replacement of desire for the mother by identification with the father is Lacan’s linguistic rendering of the first act of repression. Through this process, the father becomes identified with the law, a fact of special significance for the analysis of Clyde and Hurstwood, and also for Carrie and Eugene, who flout social norms, a different kind of law.
Clyde’s father is an unexplained, vague presence in his life. Only Clyde’s mother commmunicates with Clyde after his arrest and attends him after his conviction; the son never asks about his father. The elder Griffiths, with his rigidly fundamentalist notions, is absent. In other words, Clyde has broken the law, and its first symbol has become invisible. In Clyde’s father’s only comment to reporters after Clyde’s conviction, he says “He had never understood Clyde or his lacks or his feverish imaginings … and preferred not to discuss him” (AAT 743). Even when Clyde is in jail, struggling to understand his strong impulses and desires, he considers that his mother, uncle, cousins and the minister attending him do not seem troubled by such urges, but, significantly, he does not compare himself to his father (AAT 785). In place of Clyde’s biological father steps the Reverend MacMillan. MacMillan’s assumption of the paternal role proves disastrous for Clyde, as the cleric denies forgiveness to his surrogate child. Thus, Dreiser literally enacts the identification of the father with the law in the Oedipal equation. MacMillan’s rejection of Clyde is a final defeat at the familiar site of past repression.