But as humanity has forgotten about Being and “fallen” into “inauthenticity,” asserts the philosopher, the meaning of appearance has degenerated into mere seeming and opinion. And Heidegger might well adduce the story of Carrie to show how an “inauthentic” modern age is mirrored in its literature, just as he cites a work of Greek tragic poetry as an expression of experience in an age of “authentic” Dasein. When people form and live by opinions (as “they” do), they are concerned not with the aspect of what shows itself, but with their views of it; in this situation, since a view about appearances may have no support in the thing itself, seeming usurps the place of truth (An Intro. 104). For example, the “glory” which the Greeks associated with an understanding of Being has become for modern man “nothing more than celebrity and as such a highly dubious affair, an acquisition tossed about and distributed by the newspapers and the radio — almost the opposite of being” (An Intro. 103). Thus Carrie becomes a highly publicized “star” (and even ludicrously receives marriage proposals from male admirers, based just on her stage fame and image), but remains uncertain about who she truly is and what real fulfillment means. And Heidegger’s contrast between “appearing” and “seeming” helps to cast light on the reasons for Ames’s indifference to Carrie’s “celebrity” in judging her theater “art,” and — more importantly — for Carrie’s failure to achieve an artistic oneness with a sense of Being (and thus Beauty), amidst the ironic “success” of a career that yields her all the rewards a mass audience (“they”) value. Providing a different helpful analogue pertinent to the causes for Carrie’s unsatisfying “success” in the theaterworld is Howard Horwitz’s account (1991) of Emersonian idealism as a challenge to materialism. Analyzing “The Transcendentalist,” Horwitz finds in Emerson’s essay the idea that the “idealist” manages to avoid “[m]istaking representations of things for the things themselves” and so to avoid victimization by “‘illusions of
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sense’” — contrary to the conduct toward which the “materialist” is prone in apprehending “values.” Instead, the ‘‘idealist, intuiting the true grounding of sensual representations in consciousness, can discern in phenomena ‘the laws of being.’ … ” (By the Law 64–5) This idea further throws into perspective the false premises about value making Carrie a victim of materialist “illusions.”
Most tellingly, Dreiser uses Ames during that character’s last chance encounter with Carrie (when she has become a wealthy stage celebrity) to offer an explicit commentary on the source of her dawning disillusionment as an artist and seeking individual. Prior to the meeting at Mrs. Vance’s, Carrie has already begun to experience the emptiness of her “success”: initially thrilled by her sudden fame and large salary’s fortune, she thought, “The one hundred and fifty! the one hundred and fifty! What a door to an Aladdin’s cave [of all delightful wishes fulfilled] it seemed to be”; yet almost at once, she “conceived of delights which were not” (SC 334) and started realizing, in lonely discontent, “what gold will not buy” (as the title of Chapter XLIV puts it). These incipient feelings of hers serve as an ironic prelude to Carrie’s encounter with Ames (in Chapter XLVI) in which he gives an important analysis of both the origins of her artistic potential and the way she is misusing it in an essentially “inauthentic” manner. While urging her to abandon the popular, profitable realm of stage comedy for more serious theatrical work, Ames tells Carrie of the significance of her sad eyes and mouth:
“Well,” he said, as one pleased with a puzzle, “the expression in your face is one that comes out in different things. You get the same thing in a pathetic song, or any picture which moves you deeply. It’s a thing the world likes to see, because it’s a natural expression of its longing.”
Carrie gazed without exactly getting the import of what he meant.
”The world is always struggling to express itself,” he went on. “Most people are not capable of voicing their feelings. They depend on others. That is what genius is for. One man expresses their desires for them in music; another one in poetry; another one in a play. Sometimes nature does it in a face — it makes the face representative of all desire. That’s what has happened in your case.” (SC 356)
She characteristically interprets this idea in a selfish way, seeing her “look” as a “creditable thing,” until Ames adds incisively: “That [gift from nature] puts a burden of duty on you. It so happens that you have this thing. It is no credit to you — that is, I
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mean, you might not have had it. You paid nothing to get it. But now that you have it, you must do something with it” (SC 356).
As the language of finance (“credit” and “paid”) here hints, Carrie is misdirecting the talent given her by her “face representative of all desire” by using it to desire merely materialistic “success” in superficial comic shows approved by the uncritical crowd. Instead, as he goes on to tell Carrie, she should ‘‘turn to the dramatic field” to make her potential talents truly “valuable to others” (SC 356). And Ames cautions her that only by doing so — by adapting her art to unselfish purposes — will she enable her powers” to “endure”: “You have this quality in your eyes and mouth and in your nature. You can lose it, you know. If you turn away from it and live to satisfy yourself alone, it will go fast enough. The look will leave your eyes. Your mouth will change. Your power to act will disappear” (SC 356; emphasis added). The part Ames plays as analyst in this key passage underscores the novel’s theme of the self-thwartingly insidious implications for Carrie’s pursuit of fulfillment through her “art,” in her selfish, material values. In giving her his crucial advice, Ames tries to be a different sort of “ambassador” for Carrie, pointing her toward a more “authentic,” fulfilling sphere of experience; yet she remains unable to pursue his ideals or take this advice because seductive “success” leads to “inactivity and longing” when so much “comfort [is] about her” (SC 357).
Ames’s comments to Carrie in their encounters heighten the novel’s illumination of the sad irony involved in her pursuit of fulfillment through her “art,” that its very sources — defined by the values motivating the pursuit — are selfish and materialistic, and thus “inauthentically” misguided. One of the basic ideas informing Sister Carrie is that things in the material world have an importance transcending their own particular “values” because ideal Beauty manifests itself (in part) through them. And this very Dreiserian idea clearly underlies the story’s tracing of ways in which Carrie genuinely realizes and develops her self, as well as her “artistic” instincts, by responding to the realm of things. But in the novel as a whole, Dreiser suggests, like Heidegger, that man/woman ought not to be solely or essentially concerned with the realm of money and material objects in which his/her everyday life necessarily (and to a degree, beneficially) involves him/her. Like the account of the “they-self” in Being and Time, the story of Carrie discloses the fact that an excessive interest in appearances and possessions leads the individual astray from an authentic understanding of her being, (distorting her view of Beauty in the process. Just as Heidegger’s ideas on the connection
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(or even oneness) of Beauty and Being emphasize, there are particular perils for self-realization in the “inauthentic” mode for a person motivated by aesthetic desires and aims: the materialistic world in which Carrie finds herself and begins to develop her personality misleads her in ways which steadily corrupt the purity of her nature as an “artist.” Her life on stage, in this regard, expresses the theme of the conflict between the artist’s integrity and commercial motives — a key theme to which Dreiser would return in his highly autobiographical novel, The ‘‘Genius” (1915). At the same time, the philosophical perspective on her experience revealed by Heidegger’s ideas helps to reinforce Dreiser’s vision — contrary to what seems to me the surely mistaken view of the matter in Michaels’ The Gold Standard (1987)37 — that Carrie’s ultimate unhappiness derives not from the depth or insistence of her desires, but from their misdirection toward false ends.
Carrie’s quest is unfortunately destined to leave her sadly unfulfilled — no matter what paths it takes or how outwardly successful she is in it — despite the diverse essential moments of her openness to authentic possibilities for her growth and advancement of self. For in the ironic worldview of the novel, Dreiser depicts a society (analogous to the modern world of excessive materialism and “calculative” thinking described in Being and Time) in which the individual too readily falls prey to the influence “they” have — thus losing herself in “inauthentic” or false possibilities. Likewise, in the world Dreiser portrays, excessive emulation of others’ images of “success” and other possibilities for being makes the “characters always seem to be in pursuit of something that commodities promise but never quite deliver, because they seek in things around them an image of themselves” (SCAR 149). Just so, the Carrie seeking Beauty with an artist’s instincts confuses the means toward partial revelations of it (material possessions, scenes, pleasures) with the end itself: deluded by her world’s distorted values into expecting to find the ideal materialized before her, she is constantly seeking something (to borrow a phrase from Fitzgerald) commensurate with her capacity for wonder: “Every hour the kaleidoscope of human affairs threw a new lustre upon something, and therewith it became for her the desired — the all. Another shift of the box, and some other had become the beautiful, the perfect” (SC 107). But Heidegger’s philosophy makes it clear that Beauty/Being can, in fact, never be fully apprehended, for they are always partly concealed as well as revealed — even in “authentic” moments of illumination.