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represent the great surging feelings and desires which lie behind. When the distraction of the tongue is removed, the heart listens” (SC 88). This authorial viewpoint clearly underlies Dreiser’s presentation of his protagonist and of the other characters in their urban world of desires, from the opening scene onward: here the communication between Carrie and Drouet on the train, like “discourse,” begins (as Heidegger puts it) to “manifest the existential openness of [these] coexistent ontological beings toward each other” as they show an “openness’’ to the discovery of each other that has little to do with their conversation. Even though their “real feelings” are “inarticulate,” they come to an implicit understanding that makes them feel “somehow associated” and that forms the basis for their subsequent relationship (SC 6). Behind the surface of their words, their unvoiced feelings — of material/aesthetic desire on her side, of sexual desire on his — “speak” very eloquently to each other, creating the incipient bond between them. Since Carrie’s “heart listens” with great intensity to her desires, she is especially sensitive to all that apparently communicates “the saying of Essence” in her life. Just a few observations filtered through the alembic of her imagination suffice to “tell” her a volume of things about “who” Drouet is and what he may mean to her: “The purse, the shiny tan shoes, the smart new suit, and the air with which he did things, built up for her a dim world of fortune, of which he was the center. It disposed her pleasantly toward all that he might do” (SC 6).
Now the novel’s opening scene obviously starts the process (linked to her travel to the city and all its new possibilities) of Carrie’s pursuit of self-discovery, realized desire, and essential Beauty. But as I have hinted previously, Dreiser portrays her unfolding quest in a manner to which the Heideggerian perspective may meaningfully be applied, revealing as he does (from the outset) the problem of whether the nature and course of Carrie’s experiences are “authentic” or “inauthentic.” In fact, the novel increasingly discloses that both the particular aims she pursues and the way she relates to others and her world in the process of that pursuit, subvert even the most “authentic” desires and moments she has with key qualities of “inauthenticity.”
Both the reference to the “dim world of fortune” in the opening scene and the scene’s first suggestion of the precise way in which Carrie reacts toward Drouet start conveying this theme. In a well-known essay on her growth through a process (pertinently) of largely “inarticulate” experiences, Julian Markels claimed decades ago (1961) that Carrie’s “consciousness of her identity does not precede, but arises out of, the ebb and flow of her experience. And
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this makes us feel that only by submitting to this ebb and flow, only by being loyal and responsive to each of her facts as it presents itself in turn, may [she] attain her identity.”17 More recently, writing about Carrie’s unique talent for “representation” — of her responsiveness to others and to beauty, and of desire itself — Barbara Hochman has suggested (1991) that in Dreiser’s view, is representation implicitly facilitates not only human interaction but ‘being’ as such.”18 Yet while these observations have some validity — as Carrie’s experiences result in a process that generally enhances and individualizes her “being” — it is much less certain than these critics suggest whether she genuinely “attains” her identity. For many of the “facts’’ to which she is “responsive” in the initial encounters with the city, and the man (Drouet) partly symbolizing it for her, at once distort her sense of her identity and purposes; the “possibilities” toward which it/he points her will ultimately undermine her search for self-realization and fulfillment in their materialistic lure. At the same time, perils for Carrie’s pursuit of “authentic” being and individual fulfillment are implied, from the very start of her quest for “success” in the urban world, by the paradoxical fact that this world’s materialistic values encourage her to achieve selfhood through extreme imitation of others.19
Of course, the aspects of her experience to which she responds are a function of the nature of her longings, and these are summed up well by Sheldon Grebstein (1963):
The only passion or urge which Dreiser does grant Carrie is the urge, as much sublime as sensual, for nice things. Early in the narrative he sets forth Carrie’s chief motivation: ‘she realized in a dim way how much the city held — wealth, fashion, ease — every adornment for women, and she longed for dress and beauty with a whole heart.’ This synthesis of aestheticism and materialism — the yearning for beauty, and the expression of the yearning … is integral to the novel as well as to Dreiser’s total conception of character. …20
Yet it is crucial that we understand the implications of this “synthesis” of motives underlying all of Carrie’s actions, for the “expression of the yearning [for beauty]” that predominates in her life is ultimately incompatible with her “yearning for beauty” (in Heideggerian terms, ideal Beauty) itself. For the “aestheticism” referred to here and most central to Carrie’s theatrical artistry is undermined by the materialistic values her society so strongly encourages her to absorb and to confuse with it. And it is the conflict between the materialistic and artistic facets of her nature
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(I hope to show) that makes Carrie a complex character and finally frustrates her pursuits.
Just as Heidegger’s analysis of “inauthenticity” would make us expect, Dreiser’s depiction of his fictional heroine shows that her distorted aims about what to seek (in Grebstein’s summary, “nice things”) induce her to define others and her relationships with them in a distorted manner. A narrative comment in the novel’s third paragraph immediately makes it clear that Drouet is less a person to Carrie than an initial embodiment of the seductive city that offers so much she desires: “The city has its cunning wiles, no less than the infinitely smaller and more human tempter. There are large forces which allure with all the soulfulness of expression possible in the most cultured human. The gleam of a thousand lights is often as effective as the persuasive light in a wooing and fascinating eye” (SC 1). Here the phrase ‘‘the soulfulness of expression” implies the importance of nonverbal communication of essential meanings that the city and its emblematic “human tempter” have for the seeker after beauty in her discovery of its suggestive “thousand lights.” Yet by the closing portion of the opening chapter, as we have seen, Carrie has begun identifying all of the aesthetic possibilities of the city with the material fulfillments that Drouet’s clothes and money imply, and has thus begun seeing him as a symbolic “center” of “a dim world of fortune.” That is, she responds not to him (as an individual), but to what he represents, which her longings make all-meaningful. This fact foreshadows at once the “ambassadors” motif central to the novel in its dramatization of relationships that, like those described in Heidegger’s account of “inauthenticity,” diminish the human significance of other people, reducing them (as “ready-to-hand” entities) to the status of instruments of one’s selfish, practical purposes. Let us see how Dreiser uses the idea of “ambassadors.”
This “ambassadors” motif, suggestive of a vision of human relationships similar to those marking the “inauthentic” mode of being, is manifestly a key part of Dreiser’s design in Sister Carrie. Not only is it implied or described in various textual passages, starting with the one in Chapter I described above, but also several of the much-maligned chapter titles originally used in the novel focus explicitly on it: the titles of Chapters VIII, X, XII, XIII, and XXVI all refer directly to “ambassadors” or the related concept of “credentials” involved in the progressive pattern of Carrie’s experiences.21 Variations on the theme of “ambassadors” indicated through these titles suggest that her view of Drouet, and later Hurstwood, is fundamentally impersonal: as “ambassadors,” Drouet and Hurstwood represent the experiential
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worlds Carrie wishes to enter. But her way of seeing them makes them not only symbols, but also instruments of power — her means of access to the realm which (as the title of Chapter XXXIII puts it) seems to be “the walled city” of “success.” So from the standpoint implied by the title of Chapter XXIII, the men are the “ladders” (rendered objects or things by an ‘‘inauthentic” outlook) by which she can climb to that place of eminence: once she has accepted Hurstwood’s “credentials” and has quarreled with Drouet, the drummer becomes (merely) “One Rung Put Behind” her. And in a related vein that further widens the significance of the “ambassadorial” theme, the titles of several other chapters (XVI, XVII, XXVI, XXXVII, XXXVIII) imply Carrie’s perception of these men as (equivalent to) “gates” through which she needs to pass to get inside that “walled city.” Both her way of relating to these men and the eventual ironic disillusionment resulting from the pursuits based on it find their final summation in the novel’s epilogue: “Drouet, Hurstwood; the world of fashion and the world of stage — these were but incidents. Not them, but that which they represented, she longed for. Time proved the representation false” (SC 368).