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there is relevance for a reading of the story of Carrie Meeber in Heidegger’s equation of Being with both ultimate or ideal truth and Beauty. Such disclosure of Being rarely occurs in everyday existence, however, for Dasein is too often caught up instead in “calculative” thought, preoccupied with beings for their own sake. In this mode, explains the philosopher, one sees entities and even other people as things to be mastered or defined — and related to — merely by their practical (“ready-to-hand” or instrumental) use, and thus lives “inauthentically.”
This central aspect of the contrast between “authentic” and ‘‘inauthentic” ways of being — and of discovering the meaning of other beings — immediately relates to part of Heidegger’s view of life that will make it useful in an approach to Sister Carrie. In its everyday state, the human individual, Dasein, responds to the things he/she encounters in terms of what they are “good for” and understands the self and his/her world with reference to practical concerns alone. But (human) Others that Dasein is “with” in the world are to be distinguished sharply from those entities that can be appropriately encountered in this “ready-to-hand” manner. And in the “inauthentic” state Heidegger describes, Dasein loses sight of this — in the process threatening to reduce others and (thus too) the self to the status of “things” — as an especially insidious component of a distorted way of understanding oneself, the world, and relationships. (That this insight in Being and Time has intriguing pertinence to Dreiser’s first novel can be anticipated from the fact that so many recent studies of Sister Carrie have stressed the work’s vision of the commodification of life.4)
Heidegger finds that one crucial, baneful influence causing “inauthentic” Dasein thus to exist in a distorted manner — often misunderstanding its own genuine possibilities, the “meaning” of the world it discovers, and the nature of truth — is its immersion in the values, attitudes, and pursuits of that “crowd” of Others he calls “the They.” Using this expressive term, Heidegger explains at length that “inauthentic” Dasein so surrenders its true selfhood in assuming the viewpoints and values of the many that it fundamentally loses itself (the “I,” as it were) and becomes absorbed in a way of being aptly termed “the they” (B and T 164—6). As we shall see, recognition of a striking parallelism between “the they” described by Heidegger affecting Dasein and the American society (drawn by Dreiser) shaping Carrie’s life as an aspiring individual helps make the philosopher’s ideas a new lens for illuminating the novel.
The Heideggerian analysis of “inauthenticity” in Being and Time is an especially provocatively pertinent source for insights
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into the worldview in Sister Carrie, because the philosopher is tacitly criticizing the way we live now in a modern age of increasing technology and commercialism and of decreasing personal identity. (Although Heidegger asserts that “inauthenticity” is Dasein’s common, everyday state and that his account of it is not meant to be taken pejoratively, distinguished interpreters of his thought have agreed that just as the philosopher’s term “fallen” for this way-of-being suggests, it is unmistakably a sharp criticism of the mode of modern living that “they” foster.)5 Heidegger’s discussion of the everyday world in which “they’’ prevail describes various major facts of life in an industrialized mass society: alienation, anonymity within the “crowd,” an obsession with things (with an attendant tendency to reduce others and oneself to a form of thinghood), an emphasis on appearances, the loss of true self, the dehumanizing advance of forms of mechanization, and — particularly important for the present discussion — the lack of genuine communication and communion among people. Comparably and significantly, in Sister Carrie Dreiser depicts an emerging modern American society, which is ever more marked by the same facts and effects, at a key point in its development (the 1890s) between the Gilded Age and World War I. Radically shaped by the rise of industrial capitalism and urbanization, this society brought forth a way of being, according to Eric Sundquist’s nice summary (1982), in which “the market becomes the measure of man himself” and (as any gap between “inherent values and their external representation … dissolves”) the “inner values of the spirit are drawn outward until they appear at last to merge with the things from which one cannot be distinguished and without which one cannot constitute, build, or fabricate a self.”6
The language of this summation of the world of “American realism” — a world captured in works such as Dreiser’s novel published in 1900 — again clearly points to the potential usefulness of Heidegger’s account of an “inauthentic” state as a critical analogue. Such a parallelism suggests, along with the diverse “facts” in American life at the turn of the century that prompted Dreiser to write what he would describe as “a picture of conditions,”7 a societal context confirming that Being and Time contains a view of human experience that can be instructively compared to the novel’s study of its characters’ ways of being. Of course, in saying this much, I am making some implicit assumptions about the relation between the “real” world (at a given time period in our nation’s history) and fiction “about” it that perhaps need to be addressed explicitly before I proceed. For obviously, many recent literary studies have questioned our traditional assumptions
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about the nature of (supposedly objective) “reality,” about the meanings of literary texts, and about the significance of one’s use of such terms as “realism” or “realistic” to privilege some texts as documents presumed to have socio-historical value. And while the purposes and scope of this discussion clearly do not allow for detailed consideration of these complex, important issues, my attempt to validate the approach to Sister Carrie — as a “reading” based on premises about both Heidegger’s and the novel’s representations of the ‘‘real” modern world, and about Dreiser’s intentions to critique the values of that society in which his heroine seeks selfhood — demands at least a brief response to such challenging questions, abroad in today’s critical climate, that might seem to make my approach problematic.
Among the works of theory and criticism that have raised such questions, presenting very new perspectives on how literary texts in general take meaning and on what specific texts can safely be said to signify, are some of the “new historicist” studies. And since one of these — Walter Benn Michaels’ The Gold Standard and the Logic of Naturalism (1987)8 — has become so influential and controversial, and opens with a discussion of Sister Carrie directly opposed to some of my most emphatic ideas about the novel, it is a work warranting some focus here as a sample (implied) challenge to the bases for my critical enterprise. Michaels had originally written the essay “Sister Carrie’s Popular Economy” (which became his first chapter) not just from “admiration” for the novel, but also (“especially”) “out of irritation with those critics who read it as an indictment of American culture” reflected in the career of Carrie as portrayed by Dreiser (GS 17). Because I affirm and even embrace just that critical stance which Michaels found so irritating (as a mis-reading of the text), it is worthwhile trying to get — briefly yet bluntly — at the origin of our conflicting outlooks on a literary work we both admire. Seeing the story of Carrie through the new historical lens of theories and ideas on capitalism, consumption, and desire, Michaels argues that — quite to the contrary of the view so many readers of the novel, including the present writer, have held — the “power of Sister Carrie … derives not from its scathing ‘picture’ of capitalist ‘conditions’ but from its unabashed and extraordinarily literal acceptance of the economy that produced those conditions” (GS 35). A crucial point behind this assertion is his claim that critics have (misguidedly) “managed to convince themselves of Dreiser’s fundamental hostility to the burgeoning consumer economy he depicts” by mis-taking as the novelist’s own ideas those given to the character Ames, whom Carrie finds so critical of materialistic values and goals just as she achieves what
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most define as “Success” in New York (GS 41–2). But crucial to his argument, too, it seems to me, is Michaels’ own ironic, unexamined tendency to assume that the vision and values of Carrie — so devoted to the “ideals” of consumerism and so certain that happiness will follow from total “desire” for such ideals — are to be taken for, simply identified with, those of her creator! Perhaps this telling trouble with the argument in The Gold Standard results in part from the fact that, as senior Dreiser scholar Richard Lehan has observed (1991), “while Michaels spends a great deal of time talking about capitalism and desire, he spends very little time contextualizing these matters.’’9 Indeed, a careful reading of Sister Carrie supports the assumption shared by so many readers that key distinctions need to be made between Carrie’s view of her experience and Dreiser’s. For as Amy Kaplan has stated (1988) in writing about Dreiser and other artists of “American realism,” they “do more than passively record the world outside; they actively create and criticize the meanings, representations, and ideologies of their own changing culture.”10 Just so, I approach Sister Carrie by assuming that it is a “realist” work with its author’s implicit commentary on his culture and society, and that in ways which Heideggerian ideas on “ inauthenticity” help to reveal, Dreiser in fact dramatizes the dire consequences for the seeking self in a realm of rampant materialism and its gods.