Similarly, if she were sufficiently aware and articulate, Carrie could well describe the nature of her experiences in the words of
Page 168
Dreiser’s explicitly philosophical poem, “Protoplast,” from Moods (1926):
My error consists,
If at all,
In seeking in mortal flesh
The Likeness
Of what
Perhaps
Is Eternal.
I have turned to you,
And you are not the one.
And to you,
And within my possession
My very hands,
You have faded,
Or changed. …
…
My error,
If at all,
Has been
In seeking in mortal flesh,
A substance that is not flesh.38
Especially in the crassly commercial world in which Dreiser places her, Carrie’s desire for ideal Beauty must inevitably remain thwarted by the ironic limits of the possibilities presented to her — of the very people and things shadowing it forth to her overly materialistic self.
In the novel’s epilogue, as she still sits “rocking and dreaming,” Dreiser sums up the pattern of Carrie’s experiences against the backdrop of this vision of her pursuing “authentic” possibilities (of an artistic self attuned to Beauty) that are undermined by the material means “inauthentically” defining them for her:
Chicago dawning, she saw the city offering more of loveliness than she had ever known, and instinctively, by force of her moods alone, clung to it. In fine raiment and elegant surroundings, men seemed to be contented. Hence, she drew near these things. Chicago, New York; Drouet, Hurstwood; the world of fashion, 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)
To Carrie herself, the worlds of ‘‘fashion” and “stage” seem quite inseparable — which is essentially why neither of them makes her
Page 169
truly “contented”: because of her divergent desires, she is unable either to enjoy wholeheartedly the former (symbolizing the misguided materialism in her life) or to dedicate herself ascetically to the latter, with an idealism (of devotion to art itself and its value to others) about the “good” actress’ work so troublingly suggested to her by the aptly named Ames. Listening to what finally proves to be the “inauthentic” language of the materialistic world around her, Carrie becomes victimized by that “tragic pattern of inner defeat’’ described by Blanche Gelfant (1954) as the core of experience of the urban dreamer for whom even “success” means failure — a pattern based on mistaken sublimating of desire for beauty into one for wealth, and on the “incompatibility between spiritual desire and materialistic goals.”39 In the last analysis, Carrie is trapped — as the suggestive title nearly given the novel40 underlines — between the conflicting demands of “The Flesh and the Spirit.” And because her “spirit” becomes tainted by her corporeal desires, Carrie’s personal and professional lives unfold (as Heidegger’s ideas have helped to illuminate) in a manner that delimits her relationships, deludes her about her needs, and so finally debases her potential artistry as an actress, and fulfillment as a self.
Notes
1. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (1927; New York and Evanston, Ill: Harper and Row, 1962), p. 21; all subsequent references in this essay (B and T) are to this edition.
2. For information on Dreiser’s reading of philosophical works, the best sources are Robert H. Elias, Theodore Dreiser, Apostle of Nature, rev. ed. (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1970), pp. 27, 38, 80–2, 148, 231, 240, 287; W. A. Swanberg, Dreiser (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1965), pp. 60–1, 109, 444; Ellen Moers, Two Dreisers (New York: Viking, 1969), pp. 73–4, 136–44, 184, 243–4, 259, and 341; and Richard Lingeman, Theodore Dreiser: At the Gates of City, 1871–1907 (New York: Putnam’s Sons, 1986), pp. 52–3, 63, 69, 72, 129, 132–3, 144, 146–7, 235, and 331.
3. John Macquarrie, Martin Heidegger (Richmond: John Knox Press, 1968), pp. 4–5; all subsequent references to this work are cited (MH) from this edition.
4. Among many such recent studies, especially enlightening discussions are to be found in Philip Fisher, “The Life History of Objects: The Naturalist Novel and the City,” in Hard Facts: Setting and Form in the American Novel (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985),
Page 170
which includes material reprinted from his earlier essay cited in note 24 below; June Howard, Form and History in American Literary Naturalism (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1985), esp. pp. 41–50, 99–102, 106–11, and 149–51; and Amy Kaplan, “The Sentimental Revolt of Sister Carrie,” in The Social Construction of American Realism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988). I will return to these studies later in more specific references.
5. Two particularly persuasive arguments establishing this point, which is so central to an understanding of Heidegger’s treatment of “inauthenticity,” are offered by Thomas Langan and John Macquarrie — both highly respected authorities on the philosopher’s work. See Langan, The Meaning of Heidegger. A Critical Study of an Existentialist Phenomenolgy (New York: Columbia University Press, 1959), p. 227, and Macquarrie, p. 26.
6. Eric Sundquist, “Introduction: The Country of the Blue” in his valuable volume American Realism: New Essays (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982), p. 11; emphasis added.
7. This famous phrase occurs in the transcript of an interview with Dreiser conducted by Otis Notman in 1907, reprinted in Donald Pizer, ed., Sister Carrie (New York: Norton, 1970), p. 475. All subsequent page references to the novel in my discussion are cited from this authoritative reprint (SC) of the original edition (1900) of the work, which has by no means been supplanted as the version scholars should study by the new (1981) ‘‘Pennsylvania Edition.”
8. See Michaels, The Gold Standard and the Logic of Naturalism: American Literature at the Turn of the Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987); all subsequent references cited are to this edition (GS).
9. Quoted from Richard Lehan, “Sister Carrie: The City, the Self, and the Modes of Narrative Discourse,” in New Essays on SISTER CARRIE, ed. Donald Pizer (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991), p. 78. Lehan offers a very detailed analysis and critique of Michaels’s entire approach to Dreiser on pp. 77–9.
10. See Kaplan, p. 7, emphases added; all subsequent references to her book are cited parenthetically as (SCAR).
11. Quoted from Laszlo Versenyi, Heidegger, Being, and Truth (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1965), p. 94; all subsequent references to this key work on Heidegger are cited as (H, B, & T).
12. For purposes of my discussion, as I have begun implying but should here make it clear, I am focusing on “language” not as an abstract
Page 171
function of human consciousness or as technical linguistic ability, but as (crucially) an interrelational phenomenon. As Terry Eagleton’s succinct synthesis of key ideas of Mikhail Bakhtin will help quickly to suggest, I am concerned with language — in my whole Heideggerian perspective and my analysis of Sister Carrie — in a Bakhtinian sense. For as Eagleton points out, “Bakhtin shifted attention from the abstract system of langue to the concrete utterances of individuals in particular social contexts. Language was to be seen as inherently ‘dialogic’: it could be grasped only in terms of its inevitable orientation towards another.” In fact, since the Russian philosopher and literary theorist saw all language as involving many values, individuals, social groups, and societal interests in conflict, he reached a conclusion analogous to the implicit view of language’s significance in the human drama that I am seeking to highlight in Dreiser’s novel: “Language … was a field of ideological contention,” for Bakhtin, “not a monolithic system; indeed signs were the very material medium of ideology, since without them no values or ideas could exist.” See Eagleton, Literary Theory: Art Introduction (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983), p. 117.
13. For Heidegger’s extensive comments on this ‘‘language” of everyday Dasein, see Being and Time, pp. 167 ff, 212 ff, and 335 ff.
14. Heidegger discusses the language of “authenticity” in Being and Time, pp. 270 ff.
15. The most concise, accessible account of this aspect of Heidegger’s thought is in Versenyi, p. 133.
16. An especially helpful discussion of this idea is in Versenyi, pp. 99–104.
17. See Julian Markels, “Dreiser and the Plotting of Inarticulate Experience,” The Massachusetts Review II (Spring 1961): 431–48; reprinted in Pizer, ed., Sister Carrie, pp. 527–41. The quotation here is from p. 533 of Markels’ essay in the Norton edition reprint.
18. See Barbara Hochman, “A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Actress: The Rewards of Representation in Sister Carrie,” in Pizer, ed., New Essays on SISTER CARRIE, p. 56.
19. More extensive, intriguing discussions of this theme of the paradoxical search for selfhood through imitation of others in Sister Carrie are presented by Rachel Bowlby, Just Looking: Consumer Culture in Dreiser, Gissing, and Zola (New York and London: Methuen, 1985), pp. 62–3 ff, and Alan Trachtenberg, “Who Narrates? Dreiser’s Presence in Sister Carrie,” in Pizer, ed., New Essays on SISTER CARRIE, pp. 108–9.
Page 172
20. See Sheldon N. Grebstein, “Dreiser’s Victorian Vamp,” Midcontinent American Studies Journal, IV (Spring 1963): 3–12; reprinted in Pizer, ed., Sister Carrie, pp. 541–51. I am quoting here from p. 549 of the reprinted version of Grebstein’s essay.