“I shouldn’t care to be rich,” he told her, as the dinner proceeded. … “not rich enough to spend my money this way.”
“Oh, wouldn’t you?” said Carrie, the, to her, new attitude forcing itself distinctly upon her for the first time.
“No,” he said. “What good would it do? A man doesn’t need this sort of thing to be happy.”
Carrie thought of this doubtfully. … (SC 237)
This moment in the episode is an ironic prelude to the last stage of her journey of self-discovery, in which she will ultimately learn from
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experience that money, equated with power in so many ways,33 is powerless to give her true happiness. What Ames communicates to Carrie here, of course, is not just a Veblenesque critique of conspicuous consumption,” but a message meant to guide her way of seeking value and beauty in life. And since Carrie’s stage career subsequently becomes the means by which she pursues those precious goals (conceived as wealth and happiness entwined with the aspiration to “act”), it is apt that the last part of her talk with Ames occurs in the theater to which the Vances take them, hinting at the effect on her “artistic” spirit of her most materialistic aims.
In the final part of the episode, in the theater, Ames’s role as a guide to Carrie’s future is symbolically completed. For after having called her materialistic “ideals” into question, he now helps to inspire anew in her a theoretical artistic idealism. In fact, a few of his words at the theatre imprint an ideal upon her memory that will trouble her long afterward.
During the acts Carrie found herself listening to him very attentively. He mentioned things in the play which she most approved of — things which swayed her deeply.
“Don’t you think it rather fine to be an actor?” she asked once.
‘‘Yes, I do,” he said, “to be a good one. I think the theatre a great thing.”
Just this little approval set Carrie’s heart pounding. Ah, if she could only be an actress — a good one! This man was wise — he knew — and he approved of it. If she were a fine actress, such men as he would approve of her. (SC 238)
Unfortunately, from the very outset of Carrie’s pursuit of selfhood and “success” as an actress, this ideal becomes subverted by her emphasis on her career as a self-projection in economic terms,34 rather than (as the view of Heideggerian “authenticity” would urge) toward true individuality and a “disclosure” of beauty. Thus a few years later, after she has achieved the first “success” of her stage career as a well-paid chorus line leader in a comic “ballet,” Carrie has her memory of Ames’s words jarred by a parallel experience. Accompanying some “friends” from her theatrical company to dinner at Delmonico’s, she suddenly recalls the evening with the Vances and Ames:
It was the Sherry incident over again, the remembrance of which came painfully back to Carrie. She remembered Mrs. Vance … and Ames.
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At this figure her mind halted. It was a strong, clean vision. He liked better books than she read, better people than she associated with. His ideals burned in her heart.
“It’s fine to be a good actress,” came distinctly back. What sort of an actress was she? (SC 293)
She asks herself this question uneasily, for she already knows that she is not what he meant by “a good actress,” despite being “popular” and ‘‘successful.”
Ames’s ideals may “burn” in Carrie’s “heart” (at least in that part of it dedicated to an artist’s desire for transcendent experiences of Beauty), but not sufficiently to cure her of her longing for material “success” and its manifestations of the beautiful. For if, as Mark Seltzer suggests (1992), Carrie becomes a stage star (by the novel’s close) who, “not unlike” Henry Adams’s “Virgin … represents” (as a vehicle of deepest feelings) a “‘medium’ and ‘carrier’ of force,” it is also always sadly true that for her, “the representation of desire” is equated with “the desire for representation in consumer culture. …”35 Thus she unwittingly makes the mistake of letting her desire for money shape the course of her career in the theater. And when she has become rich and famous in her stage role as the frowning Quakeress, her experience illuminates a further ironic sequel to her acceptance of Ames’s ideals. She started her quest for a place on the Broadway stage with the thought that Ames had inspired: “If she were a fine actress, such men as he would approve of her.” Yet during her performances as the frowning Quakeress, it is obvious that the men who “approve of her” are not at all like Ames — and that the approval they offer is very different from the aesthetic appreciation he meant: “As she went on frowning, looking now at one principal and now at the other, the audience began to smile. The portly gentlemen in the front rows began to feel that she was a delicious little morsel. It was the kind of frown they would have loved to force away with kisses. All the gentlemen yearned toward her. She was capital” (SC 326). “On stage Carrie truly is ‘capital,’” as Amy Kaplan shrewdly observes (1988), “for her looks and her sexuality become a valuable commodity” (SCAR 157). But she is so elated by the achievement of her worldly aims of wealth and applause that she fails to see how she is prostituting her talent and distorting the ideals of Ames: “Success had given her the momentary feeling that she was now blessed with much of which he would approve” (SC 354). Only during their chance meeting at Mrs. Vance’s apartment does Carrie (lauded by so many, like “the they”) become truly aware of what Ames thinks
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of a theatrical career like hers: after learning that she still has not gone into serious plays, “[H]e look[s] at her in such a peculiar way that she realize[s] she ha[s] failed” in his eyes (SC 354).
Another way in which this scene shows Ames speaking, in effect, a “language” of values and ideals for the ‘‘artist” that is very unlike Carrie’s — and opposed to hers quite as “authenticity” is to “inauthenticity” in Heidegger — is revealed in his response to her very status as a “star” or celebrity. Dreiser tells us bluntly that “[a]s matter of fact, her little newspaper fame was nothing at all to him. He thought she could have done better, by far” (SC 354). And this idea intriguingly invites connection to Heidegger’s discussion of another effect of “inauthentic” ways of being, in his work An Introduction to Metaphysics (1953).36 A further reason why the “inauthenticity” described by Heidegger (in Being and Time) can usefully be compared to the misguided ways of being Dreiser depicts in Sister Carrie is that it includes a trust in and emphasis on appearances. Both its obsession with the world of things and its faith in the way “they” publicly interpret existence indicate “inauthentic” Dasein’s extreme externality. Analogously, Dreiser’s people live for externals and by the way everything looks to society, as we have seen. Carrie judges her own and others’ identities in terms of the clothes they wear, the possessions they have, the appearance they present in society. To her, as to “inauthentic” Dasein, who one is seems equivalent to what one appears to be. And An Introduction to Metaphysics explains some more implications of these facts in a way that proves pertinent to our understanding of Carrie’s false goals in her acting career.
In this later philosophic work, Heidegger notes that while the difference between Being and appearance initially seems clear — involving “the real in contradistinction to the unreal” — this familiar distinction is actually “another of the many worn-out coins that we pass unexamined from one hand to another in an everyday life that has grown flat” (An Intro. 98–9). He explains that there is a hidden unity of being and appearance which the ancient Greeks recognized, and shows how their thought stressed that inner connection, by giving an etymological analysis of the words for “being” and “appearing” in their language (An Intro. 100–2). Truth and being involve unconcealment, the disclosure of that which manifests itself by appearing, so for the Greeks, who were (in Heidegger’s view) “authentically” attuned to Being, “appearing belonged to being, or more precisely … the essence of being lay partly in appearing” (An Intro. 102–3). After pointing out that Being “gives itself an aspect” when it comes to light, Heidegger demonstrates etymologically that the Greek word for “aspect” or
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“regard” (doxa) also meant “fame” and “glory” when the ‘‘regard” in question was a distinguished one. Thus he establishes the fact that the Greeks equated glory or grandeur with the disclosure of the truth of Being (An Intro. 102–3). And because appearances partly conceal the truth, the Greeks were perpetually compelled to wrest Being from appearance and to preserve it against appearance (An Intro. 105, 109). Indeed, he cites Oedipus Rex as a splendid illustration of the Greeks’ passion for the disclosure of Being: the play dramatizes a struggle between appearance (concealment and distortion) and unconcealment (Being and truth), evincing the protagonist’s (and Sophocles’) persistent will to probe appearances (An Intro. 106–7).