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into her eyes originates in his own “radiant presence,” and that presence is composed of the clothes and money he displays, the restaurants and theaters he frequents, and the complete optimism he exudes. Thus his rings articulate the meaning of his whole way of being — and tell her, along with his eyes, that his world can be hers as well:
Drouet looked at her and his thoughts reached home. She felt his admiration. It was powerfully backed by his liberality and good-humour. She felt that she liked him — that she could continue to like him ever so much. There was something even richer than that, running as a hidden strain, in her mind. Every little while her eyes would meet his, and by that means the interchanging current of feeling would be fully connected. (SC 46)
Of course, the “hidden strain” in her mind is the idea that she can become his mistress, and would wish to do so in order to enjoy the effects of “his liberality” to the full. For at this first key turning point in her life in the city, Carrie has begun to realize, in Amy Kaplan’s shrewd phrasing (1988), “the absurdity of the notion of ‘earning your bread’’’ in a realm of extreme consumerism, “and the greater importance of having ‘something which the world would buy’” — and that “she has only her self to sell …” (SCAR 143). Thus toward the close of the scene, the narrator states that “the influence [Drouet] was exerting was powerful. They came to an understanding of each other without words — he of her situation, she of the fact that he realised it” (SC 46).
It is at this moment, significantly, that he verbalizes the proposition that had been eloquently implied by his rings and other trappings: he offers to help her with his money. And her brief show of indecision about accepting the offer ends as soon as he strikes the “key-note” by referring to her need for clothes (SC 47): this reference “speaks” to Carrie’s deepest feelings, like the passionate plea of a lover, by reminding her of his crucial “ambassadorial” value. This leaves her completely susceptible to Drouet’s advances — of cash and gifts. And so the luncheon scene (from which she emerges holding the two ten dollar bills she has accepted from him) is a symbolic “seduction” that tacitly confirms Carrie’s (imminent) acceptance of a role as Drouet’s mistress in exchange for the materially enhanced ways of being all his money can give her.
With subtleties of craft of a kind for which he is too seldom given credit, Dreiser suggests the complex implications of this episode in Carrie’s life — merging aspects of “authenticity” and
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“inauthenticity,” so to speak — prefiguring her eventual ironic discontent with “success” in the very moments when it points toward the start of her personal growth and ascent to that golden goal. It is first worth noting that the scene’s significance as a symbolic “seduction” and as implicit commentary on the peculiar nature of human relationships, is underscored by the telling limitation of the physical contact shown. For at the “climax” of this unusual ‘‘seduction” scene, the one sensation Carrie experiences is the feel of Drouet’s greenbacks in her hand.
He pressed her hand gently and she tried to withdraw it. At this he held it fast, and she no longer protested. Then he slipped the greenbacks he had into her palm, and when she began to protest, he whispered:
“I’ll loan it to you — that’s all right. I’ll loan it to you.”
He made her take it. She felt bound to him by a strange tie of affection now. They went out, and he walked with her. … (SC 47)
From a conventional point of view, the “tie of affection” between them is indeed “strange.” But it is a perfectly natural basis for a relationship in the world of Sister Carrie, where material success” is a beacon that guides people as they judge themselves and respond to others — in fact causing the quest for selfhood to become an endless emulation of others and the “things” that define them.26 The fact that Dreiser makes the transfer of money the reason for the only physical contact in the scene, and infuses that transfer with a kind of sexual excitement,27 subtly conveys his intention to suggest how essentially impersonal personal relations become under the influence of modes of being based on false values.
And Dreiser’s depiction of the close of the scene is rich with related, understated meanings. When Carrie walks out of the restaurant with Drouet, clutching the greenbacks she has not yet examined, she has tacitly agreed to become his mistress, yet what concerns her is not her prospective lover himself, but the symbolic nimbus that gives him importance. So as soon as she is alone (the narrative seems to imply), she stops, opens her hand, and looks down at her palm to find out the full meaning of her experience: “The money she had accepted was two soft, green, handsome ten-dollar bills” (SC 47). This fictional moment curiously resembles that of the “epiphany” at the end of James Joyce’s “Two Gallants” (in Dubliners [1914]), in which Corley opens his hand in the lamplight to reveal the shining gold coin that discloses to his “disciple” — and more fully, to the reader — the
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nature of his character and the significance of his meeting with the young woman.28 Like the “epiphany” closing Joyce’s story, the final sentence of Dreiser’s “luncheon” scene directs a sudden, brilliant spotlight on the essential meaning of the whole episode that has been presented, offering a twofold revelation in the process. For Carrie herself, the “discovery” of the money in her hand sums up everything that Drouet has ‘‘told” her about himself and her future “possibilities” with him. The sensuous adjectives suggest the way all her feelings throughout the encounter have been focussed on his expressive surface identity: the good-looking Drouet has proved both his attractiveness and his readiness to act handsomely toward her by giving her the bills that are “handsome” like him and “soft” as the tender emotions he has (thus) aroused. At the same time, the revealing last sentence formally illustrates for the reader the idea of language as a disclosure of “essence” already dramatized by the scene, amplifying the scene’s thematic point with respect to Carrie’s incipient development as a person. For in part, her responsiveness to Drouet’s enticements shows her genuine grasp of both the realm of beauty that he symbolizes and the maturing mode of being toward which his world leads the way. However, too, in picturing her reaction to the money as the episode ends, Dreiser heightens our awareness of the fact that she may too easily mistake the tangible signs of wealth for the inner enrichment she seeks as well. And all the emphasis on externals and material things in this scene marks the very moment providing promise of self-realization for Carrie, with ironic signs of threats to her true selfhood from the seductive realm of “commodity fetishism, of the life of objects that consumes the life of the human, beings who produce and consume them.”29
This idea of the insidiously “inauthentic” elements within the profound communication genuinely (in part) furthering Carrie’s self-discovery and pursuit of her possibilities, is additionally emphasized by a pair of structural devices Dreiser uses to conclude the crucial episode. First, the moment of illumination and apparent promise Carrie experiences at episode’s end (in the final sentences of Chapter VI) is immediately commented on in an ominous way (suggesting her subsequent confusion of values in the search for Beauty) by the title of Chapter VII — “The Lure of the Material: Beauty Speaks for Itself.” And then, revealingly, this new chapter begins with commentary on “the true meaning of money,” in which the narrator notably says of Carrie that a person possessing “her order of mind would have been content to be cast away upon a desert island with a bundle of money, and only the long strain of starvation would have taught her that
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in some cases it could have no value” (SC 48). Here we have clear foreshadowings of the unfulfilled end of Carrie’s quest for self-realization and Beauty at the point of that quest’s seemingly auspicious start.
Once the novel has implied that the “seduction” is complete and that Carrie is sleeping and living with Drouet, Dreiser quickly and carefully intrudes upon the action with the authorial commentary on moral questions (in the opening portion of Chapter X) aimed at influencing the reader’s response to this unconventional picture of a perhaps-not-pure-enough maiden. And parts of this commentary so pivotal to the design behind the controversial “picture of conditions” in Sister Carrie are very pertinent to my interpretive purposes. Dreiser begins this much-discussed section of the novel by stating, “In the light of the world’s attitude toward woman and her duties, the nature of Carrie’s mental state deserves consideration. Actions such as hers are measured by an arbitrary scale. Society possesses a conventional standard whereby it judges all things’’ (SC 68). In the ensuing passages, he begins developing from a different “scale” and an un-conventional “standard” of “judgment” a perspective on the “moral” import of Carrie’s actions — a perspective which (however upsetting it was to the “genteel” readers who initially later made the novel a notorious failure) crucially contributes to our awareness of the work’s Heideggerian outlook. Having announced his intent to seek “to evolve the true theory of morals” (SC 69), the narrator depicts his protagonist facing a dilemma with serious philosophical implications: “She looked into her glass and saw a prettier Carrie than she had seen before; she looked into her mind, a mirror prepared of her own and the world’s opinions, and saw a worse. Between these two images she wavered, hesitating which to believe” (SC 70). What is at stake here in Carrie’s self-assessment, after she has exchanged her feminine “virtue” for pretty clothes and other comforts, is not only the “moral” status of her behavior, but also — as the subsequent references (by the narrator) to the conflicting messages within her of “the voice” of “conscience” and the “voice of want” suggest — the meaning of her experience with regard to the “language” of “authenticity” or “inauthenticity” it involves.