9. Amy Kaplan, The Social Construction of American Realism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988).
10. Louis Gianetti, Understanding Movies, 3d ed. (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1982).
11. Moby Dick. Dir. Lloyd Bacon. With John Barrymore and Joan Bennett (Warner Brothers, 1930).
12. The Old Man and the Sea. Dir. Jud Taylor. With Anthony Quinn, Gary Cole, and Patricia Clarkson (NBC Television, 1990).
13. Women in Love. Dir. Ken Russell. With Alan Bates, Oliver Reed, and Glenda Jackson (Brandywine Productions, Dist. United Artists, 1970).
14. Greed. Dir. Eric von Stroheim. With Gibson Gowland, ZaSu Pitts, and Jean Hersholt (MGM, 1925).
15. Frank Norris, McTeague (New York: Doubleday, Doran, 1928).
16. Battleship Potemkin. Dir. Sergei Eisenstein. Sailors of the Red Navy, Citizens of Odessa, and Members of the Proletkut Theater, Moscow (First Gosinko, 1925).
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17. Strike. Dir. Sergei Eisenstein. With Maxim Straukh and Grigori Alexandrov (Gosinko, 1924). (Quotation, p. 109.)
18. Sergei M. Eisenstein, “An American Tragedy,” Close Up 2 (June 1933): 109–24.
19. Ivor Montagu, With Eisenstein in Hollywood (New York: International, 1967).
20. Sergei M. Eisenstein, Notes of a Film Director (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1954). (Quotation, p. 98.)
21. The Blue Angel. Dir. Joseph von Sternberg. With Emil Jennings and Marlene Dietrich (UFA, 1931).
22. Theodore Dreiser, The Letters of Theodore Dreiser, 3 vols., ed. Robert H. Elias (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1959). (Quotation, 2:510.)
23. Joseph von Sternberg, Fun in a Chinese Laundry (New York: Macmillan, 1965). (Quotation, p. 46.)
24. Barrie Hayne, “Sociological Treatise, Detective Story, Love Affair: The Film Versions of An American Tragedy,’’ Canadian Review of American Studies 8 (1977): 131–53. (Quotation, p. 148.)
25. Andrew Sarris, The Films of Joseph von Sternberg (New York: Doubleday, 1966). (Quotation, p. 34.)
26. Harry S. Potamkin, “Novel Into Film: A Case of Current Practice,” Close Up 8 (December 1931): 267–79. (Quotation, pp. 272–3.)
27. Robert Penn Warren, Homage to Dreiser (New York: Random House, 1971). (Quotation, p. 166.)
28. Theodore Dreiser, The “Genius” (New York: John Lane Company, 1915).
29. Theodore Dreiser, The Trilogy of Desire (New York and Garden City, N.Y.: Harper and Row, John Lane Company, and Doubleday, 1912, 1914, 1947).
30. Patricia Bosworth, Montgomery Clift (New York: Bantam, 1978). (Quotation, pp. 133–4.)
31. Theodore Dreiser, Sister Carrie (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1981).
32. Theodore Dreiser, Jennie Gerhardt (New York: Harper, 1911).
33. W. A. Swanberg, Dreiser (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1967).
34. Jennie Gerhardt. Dir. Marion Gering. With Sylvia Sidney and Edward Arnold (Paramount, 1933).
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35. Carrie. Dir. William Wyler. With Laurence Olivier, Jennifer Jones, and Eddie Albert (Paramount, 1952).
36. Axel Madsen, William Wyler (New York: Crowell, 1973). (Quotation, pp. 299, 306.)
37. Carolyn Geduld, “Wyler’s Suburban Sister: Carrie 1952,” in The Classic American Novel and the Movies, ed. Gerald Peary and Roger Shatzkin (New York: Ungar, 1977) pp. 152–64.
38. Bosley Crowther, “The Screen in Review,” New York Times, July 17, 1952: 20.
39. Vera Dreiser, My Uncle Theodore (New York: Nash, 1976).
40. Carrie. Dir. Brian DePalma. With Sissy Spacek, Piper Laurie, and William Katt (Paul Monash for United Artists, 1976).
41. Charles Percy Snow, “A Conversation With C. E Snow,” by Robert Moskin, Saturday Review World April 6, 1974: 20ff.
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Carrie’s Library:
Reading the Boundaries Between Popular and Serious Fiction
M. H. Dunlop
Theodore Dreiser’s Sister Carrie (1900), like any other surviving late-nineteenth-century fiction, stands in literary history surrounded by innumerable ghostly presences of now-unread fictions, many of which may once have far outrun the survivor in popularity and sales. Complex evaluative processes that lift one fiction into cultural durability, at the same time relegate dozens of its contemporaries to the rubbish heap. The boundaries between the surviving and the lost exercise continuing historical power even though the real nature of those boundaries loses definition over time — and in fact seems to lose visibility along with the vanished fictions themselves. Any mining operation into the underground world of lost popular literature will reveal numerous substrata: there are levels at which there can be no hope of “rediscovering’’ a text, levels through which no effort at eccentric evaluation can guide an investigator, and levels crammed not only with trash — i.e., readable junk — but with genuinely unreadable discarded objects.
At every level of the search, terminology is a problem. During the last two decades critics and literary historians have attempted to define the boundaries between literary strata; the terms employed in the effort constitute the boundaries drawn but often do so without illuminating them. In his far-ranging study of the popular arts in America, Russel Nye made a series of distinctions between “popular” and “elite” art forms: popular art is “aimed at a wider audience,” is sensitive to sales, and is “more consciously adjusted to the median taste”; it is the product of cultural consensus and further consensus is its target.1
Establishing such a split between the popular and the elite closes off views of what might differentiate the material on either side of the split or of what might connect those materials were there no gulf between them. Moreover, the cultural-consensus
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view has faded, and the remainder of Nye’s distinctions, while still operative in the minds of many critics and historians, are being vigorously denied by others. Gerald Graff, for example, denies the “illusion that mass culture is the democratic expression of the people, as if mass culture were not owned and operated to suit private interests.”2 Finally, the ideas that popular literature can serve as a window opening directly onto a view of “median taste” or that popular fictions can be differentiated from serious fictions on the basis of audience suffer from lack of solid historical evidence about readers. Away from inferences about the audience for popular fiction, the field of popular literature has been internally differentiated by formula — what John G. Cawelti defines as “a combination or synthesis of a number of specific cultural conventions with a more universal story form”3 and connected among themselves on the bases of how they reflect the culture from which and into which they emerged. Considerable significant analysis of popular fiction along these lines already exists.4
It is apparent that of the terms available for defining the subject — ‘‘good,” “art,” “original,” “serious,” “elite,” “durable,” “surviving,” and “canonical” on the one side, and“popular,” “transient,“formula,” “junk,” “trash,” “rubbish,” “noncanonical,” and “lost” on the other — all seem to be misnomers. No pairing of terms can accurately convey the difference between one century-old text that (regardless of its reception at the moment of publication) has remained in print and is studied seriously and another century-old text that (again regardless of its initial reception) is now unread, physically vanished, and historically invisible. In complex fact, the two texts may be divided from each other by certain standards of literary quality, by matters of production and distribution, and by the demands of an ever-changing marketplace for fiction. To attempt to study two or more such texts alongside each other involves not only a struggle with inadequate taxonomic terminology, but also an effort of retrieval whose difficulties should not be overlooked.
The case to be examined here involves just four roughly contemporaneous texts and arises from a single scene in Sister Carrie that assembles a group of lost popular fictions in the context of a work long since established as serious. The difficulties of the retrieval process have been erased by the sharp-eyed Dreiser himself. By embedding specific popular fictions of the time in Sister Carrie, Dreiser opened for questioning the boundaries that divide the lost popular items from the durable text in which they appear as counters in a drama of urban taste exchanging.5
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In Sister Carrie, chapter 32,6 the fashionable Mr. and Mrs. Vance, Hurstwood and Carrie’s New York City apartment house neighbors, invite Carrie, who is alone for the evening, to accompany them to dinner and the theater; also present is Bob Ames, a young engineer from Indianapolis who is cousin to Mrs. Vance. Dining at Sherry’s, whose “gorgeousness and luxury” (223) Carrie has not previously experienced during her two years in New York, the foursome carries on a conversation about money and its uses, which then shifts into remarks on recent fiction. Mrs. Vance judges Albert Ross’s Moulding a Maiden (1891)7 to be “pretty good,” but Bob Ames finds it “nearly as bad” as Bertha M. Clay’s Dora Thorne (1883),8 a novel that Carrie had previously “supposed that people thought … very fine” (236–7).
It is interesting to note that in the University of Pennsylvania’s “restored’’ Sister Carrie,9 Mrs. Vance’s opening topical reference to Albert Ross and his novel is gone, and in its place she mentions E. P. Roe’s The Opening of a Chestnut Burr,10 published in 1874; the rest of the conversation continues unchanged through the comparison to Dora Thorne. Pennsylvania’s editors note the change from Ross to Roe without comment on the effects their “restoration” of the Roe reference have had on the simple sense of the scene, how it relates to the publication dates of the novel mentioned, or whether they are aware of any differentiating boundaries between Albert Ross and E. P. Roe (Penn 334, 569).