21. The titles of these key chapters in the novel are, respectively, as follows: “Intimations by Winter: An Ambassador Summoned, “ “The Counsel of Winter: Fortune’s Ambassador Calls,’’ “Of the Lamps of the Mansions: The Ambassador’s Plea,” “His Credentials Accepted: A Babel of Tongues,” and “The Ambassador Fallen: A Search for the Gate.” While the title of the first of these chapters pertains to Drouet in his “ambassadorial” value for Carrie, the others trace the course of her relations with Hurstwood — from her discovery of him as the “ambassador” to an experiential realm superior to the one Drouet offered, to her eventual abandonment of the ex-manager in New York. (While not all editions of Sister Carrie preserve the chapter titles Dreiser originally used in writing the novel, the Norton edition that I am using as the basis for my discussion — considered the most authoritative scholarly reprint of the first edition text — contains these thematically suggestive titles.)
22. Quoted from Lehan, p. 69.
23. For Heidegger’s full explanation and analysis of this matter, see Being and Time, pp. 165, 210–24.
24. These ideas are from Fisher’s essay, “Acting, Reading, Fortune’s Wheel: Sister Carrie and the Life History of Objects,” in Sundquist, American Realism: New Essays, p. 263; all subsequent references to Fisher’s excellent, important discussion are cited as (“Acting”).
25. Quoted from the “Introduction” to Lynn’s edition of the novel (New York: Holt, Rinehart, 1957), pp. xiv–xv.
26. For other recent interesting discussions of these and related ideas on Sister Carrie, though from quite different perspectives than mine, see Sundquist, “Introduction: The Country of the Blue,” p. 21; Kaplan, The Social Construction of American Realism, pp. 148–9; and Howard Horwitz, By the Law of Nature: Form and Value in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), pp. 136–7, references to which are hereafter cited as (By the Law). Horwitz explicitly discusses the idea of “emulation” in the novel in relation to Veblen’s concept of the “emulative self,” on pp. 136–8, in a cogent way.
27. This idea is developed in a detailed reading of the scene by Ellen Moers, in her essay “The Finesse of Dreiser,” American Scholar XXXIII (Winter 1963–1964): 109–14; reprinted in Pizer, ed., Sister
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Carrie, p. 565. My viewpoint here is partly indebted to Professor Moers’s fine discussion of the whole episode in the novel on pp. 564–6.
28. See James Joyce, Dubliners (1914; repr. Harmondsworth, England: Penguin Books, 1966), p. 58.
29. This incisive quote is from June Howard, Form and History in American Literary Naturalism, p. 42; all subsequent references are cited as (Form and History).
30. The nature of “authentic” conscience is described fully in Being and Time, pp. 312–48; there is also a helpful comment on this matter in Macquarrie, p. 32.
31. Especially pertinent observations on the significance of mirror symbolism in the novel, can be found in Bowlby, pp. 61–2; and Trachtenberg, p. 108.
32. Several critics have explored this idea of the connection (or odd sense of continuity) of the urban and theatrical worlds in the novel, in their rather different ways. See Bowlby, pp. 62–5; Howard, pp. 149–50; and Fisher, “Acting, Reading, Fortune’s Wheel,” especially pp. 262–5 and 268–70.
33. While many critics have naturally noted the importance of money as power in the fictional world of Dreiser, an interesting view of this theme occurs in Harold Kaplan, Power and Order. Henry Adams and the Naturalist Tradition in American Fiction (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), pp. 85–99.
34. This idea finds further development in Fisher’s Hard Facts: Setting and Form in the American Novel, p. 130, where he intriguingly suggests, “The city mediates between and models the larger society, once that society is understood as an economy, and the individual, once that individual is understood as a career, a self-projection. This world of ambition and possibilities favors a strong capacity for dreaming and often creates a confusion between dreaming and lying since both are forms of impatience with the present.” Seen against the background of the very different sort of self-projection (ontological and utterly personal) exhorted by Heidegger for “authentic’’ Dasein, these ideas on the peculiar “career” and self-exploration in Sister Carrie help cast further light on the distinctly “inauthentic” nature of experience in the work’s world.
35. See Mark Seltzer, Bodies and Machines (New York and London: Routledge, 1992); the former quotation is from p. 30, the latter from p. 186, note 9.
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36. See Martin Heidegger, An Introduction to Metaphysics, trans. Ralph Manheim (1953; repr. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1959); all subsequent references to this work are cited as (An Intro.).
37. Writing on what he calls “Sister Carrie’s Popular Economy,” in The Gold Standard and the Logic of Naturalism, Michaels argues that the crux of Carrie’s story is the quantity of her desires: he asserts that the “model” Ames offers her for dealing with desire most contentedly is “an economy of scarcity, in which power, happiness, and moral virtue are all seen to depend finally on minimizing desire.” In this “model” mistakenly viewed as Dreiser’s, claims Michaels, ‘‘Wringing our hands over far-off things can serve only to perpetuate discontent; the Amesian ideal is satisfaction, a state of equilibrium in which one wants only what one has” (p. 35). But in making this argument, because of his total absorption in his “new historicist” theories on forms of “economy” in turn-of-the-century American society — and his minimal focus on the actual text of Sister Carrie (or on Dreiser scholarship on the work) as fictional art — Michaels completely overlooks or disregards the issue of the quality, the nature of Carrie’s desires. And as my essay as a whole and countless other commentaries on the novel and Dreiser’s worldview suggest, it seems emphatically clear and crucial that Carrie is disillusioned and discontent because she wants the wrong things and expects from them an impossibly idealized state of being and fulfillment, not because she wants what she does not have (in some general respect, as Michaels’ argument implies throughout). As I argue in my discussion and as Michaels conveniently fails to notice, Ames talks with Carrie about the objects of her desire — not the mere fact of its intensity or ongoing presence within her — in their important encounters in the text.
38. This is merely an excerpt from Dreiser’s usefully relevant poem (very straightforwardly didactic like all his poetry) “Protoplast,” found on pp. 247–9 of the original edition of Moods: Cadenced and Declaimed (New York: Boni and Liveright, 1926).
39. See Gelfant, The American City Novel (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1954), pp. 69, 70; for Professor Gelfant’s full, excellent account of this insidious pattern of experience so pertinent to Carrie’s life, see pp. 21–4, 63–94.
40. My sources here are a xerox of the original contract for the novel that I obtained from the Dreiser Collection at the University of Pennsylvania (Van Pelt) Library, and Donald Pizer’s note, on p. 436 in the Norton edition of the novel. It should be noted that the title “The Flesh and the Spirit” appears (from the evidence of the handwriting) to have been suggested by someone at Doubleday, Page
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rather than Dreiser himself. But Dreiser’s own use of the same motif in his chapter titles, several of which stress it — in Chapters XX, XXI, XXII, XXIII, XXVIII, XXXVII, and (by implication) XLVII — highlights this theme as essential to the work, focusing on the crucial split in Carrie’s experience and in her conflicting goals.
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Squandered Possibilities:
The Film Versions of Dreiser’s Novels
Lawrence E. Hussman
No American novelist has excited the interest of so many legendary filmmakers as Theodore Dreiser. Among the directors drawn to his works have been the highly acclaimed “auteurs” D. W. Griffith, Eric von Stroheim, Sergei Eisenstein, Joseph von Sternberg, and William Wyler. George Stevens won an Academy Award for his direction of A Place in the Sun,1 his adaptation of An American Tragedy.2 Yet for all of the attention Dreiser has received from Hollywood’s brightest creative minds, none of the four film projects that finally transferred his work to the screen have satisfied his reading aficionados. Nor is it likely that even Eisenstein’s scenario for An American Tragedy,3 had it actually been filmed, would have made the apologists for the written Dreiser word entirely ecstatic. Is their disappointment and degree of demand warranted or do they expect too much of a medium they just do not understand? Has a first-rate picture authoritatively based on a Dreiser book yet been put on celluloid?
Any attempt at a satisfactory answer to these questions must be prefaced by a working definition of authenticity in adaptation and a suggested evaluation standard for the subgenre. No agreement about these matters exists among novelists, directors, or critics in either art form. Indeed, even the pronouncements of individual commentators are often maddening in their contradictions.
At one end of the spectrum are those writers, literary critics, literature scholars, and readers who insist that any moviemaker adapting a great canonical work must follow that textual source as slavishly as humanly possible. Few opinions rile film critics more than this one. Such a view, by their lights, demeans the art of cinema, denies its differences from other media, and deflates the director’s creative role. In radical response to what they view as the outrageously restrictive view of these arrogant bookworms,