I know that in speaking this revered name I’m really speaking of Messrs. Ormond and George Smith of that redoubtable bulwark of American literature and intellectuality, the firm of Street & Smith of New York. But what of it? Are they not her inventors and patentees? We know so. In including her name an asterisk would have to lead to a footnote reading “George and O. G. Smith, inventors. The following writers have written on salary the books credited to this very celebrated name.’’ But still is the name not fully representative of American intellectuality and literary interest and taste? What American author has been more widely consumed? She is certainly “one of our largest authors,” invented and patented or otherwise.20
Between 1876 and 1928, twenty-seven different publishers issued titles under the name Bertha M. Clay. Six novels were translated into other languages. Bertha M. Clays appeared in fourteen different series (“The Primrose Series,” “The Sweetheart Series”) and eleven different “libraries.” One series was named after the long-departed Charlotte Mary Brame, and a series and two libraries were named after Bertha M. Clay. A single Clay might be issued under as many as three different titles; some stayed in print as long as forty-four years. Street & Smith’s New Bertha M. Clay Library, a paperback series begun in 1900, stretched to more than four hundred numbers. Eighty-eight Bertha M. Clays survive — an oeuvre, though whose we do not know; nor does anyone yet know what cultural shifts five decades of Bertha M. Clays might reveal,
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nor what connection they might bear to fiction contemporaneous with them. Liberated from specific authorship and also generally from publication dates, existing under a variety of titles, Bertha M. Clays are nearly free-floating formulas.
It is clear that Dreiser’s decades-long attack on Bertha M. Clay constituted an effort to draw a boundary between his work and that of Clay and Ross. Although it has been suggested that serious literature may “draw nourishment” from the popular,21 such is not necessarily the case; one might just as well see certain levels of popular fiction as drinking at a not-inexhaustible pool of cultural material at least some of which Dreiser himself wanted to draw on: money, emptiness, disconnectedness, affectlessness. And although a mocking Dreiser proposed that in a “democracy” of literature — especially in an American Studies program — Bertha M. Clay could not be ignored, he was nonetheless aware, as is a reader today, that the Clay and Ross fictions he tossed onto the dinner table at Sherry’s are antidemocratic, class conscious, and sentimental, and that their readers were not participants in a web of popular democratic ideas and art but accomplices to profit-making fiction factories. The presence of the Clay and Ross novels in Sister Carrie, however, allows Dreiser to indicate a certain view of his characters’ cultural situation, allows a reader to read his readers, and allows his characters to express subtleties of self-disgust that their situations and communicative abilities would not otherwise allow them.
The available evidence suggests that in Sister Carrie’s dinner scene at Sherry’s, Dreiser was aiming neither at popular taste nor at writers who aim at actual popular taste; his target was instead the role that the fiction factories — whether individual factories like Albert M. Ross or corporate factories like Street & Smith — played in the creation of popular taste for anonymously produced multiples that such naive readers as Carrie Meeber think must be very fine” (237) because they are very ubiquitous. Every waiter in every restaurant scene in Sister Carrie judges every diner’s choices to be “very good”; likewise the fiction factories offered a limited menu of “very good’’ choices to be consumed. From this angle no such thing as “the popular taste in fiction” exists: instead consumers of fiction choose from a limited range of consumable texts and very probably find the choice considerably more troubling than would be the choice of a pair of shoes or a preparation of oysters at Sherry’s. Consuming the bestseller apparently functions not to validate the reader’s taste but to cast doubt on that taste and to cast shadows over the life and real experience of the reader — as Dora Thorne does over Carrie’s experience.22 To eat an oyster is at least to have an experience, but to read a Bertha
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M. Clay is to be alienated from one’s experience and from what might have been one’s own taste. Substituted for that taste is the dubious feeling that one ought to have liked something that one did not much like but that many others have also thought they ought to have liked. It is theoretically possible that no reader ever liked Dora Thorne at all and that nothing whatever can be learned about popular taste from its popularity.
As Theodore Dreiser represents it in Sister Carrie, the function of what is called popular fiction is to form popular taste along the lines of whatever fiction is producible in multiples. The Bertha M. Clay — which always concerns an experience called “love” that effectively ends a woman’s development and binds her forever to a bad choice made early in life — was a formula capable of being continually reproduced by numbers of anonymous writers. Rather than illustrating popular taste, illuminating a historical moment, or defining a sociocultural trend, a Bertha M. Clay locates its special power, as Dreiser shows, in its considerable ability to blow smoke in a reader’s eyes.
Notes
1. Russel Nye, The Unembarrassed Muse: The Popular Arts in America (New York: Dial Press, 1970), pp. 3–4.
2. Gerald Graff, Literature Against Itself (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979), p. 95.
3. John G. Cawelti, Adventure, Mystery, and Romance (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976), p. 6.
4. To note but a few: Will Wright, Six-Guns and Society (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1975) and John G. Cawelti, Adventure, Mystery, and Romance are seminal studies of formula, Janice Radway, Reading the Romance (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1984) studies reader response to formula, and parts of Leslie Fiedler, What Was Literature? (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1982) analyze the long-range influence of a potent formula. Sally Allen McNall, Who Is in the House? (New York: Elsevier, 1981) takes a psychoanalytic approach to popular literature, and Diana Reep, The Rescue and Romance (Bowling Green, Ohio: Popular Press, 1982) analyzes popular conventions. Christopher Pawling, Popular Fiction and Social Change (London: Macmillan, 1984) and Jean Radford, The Progress of Romance (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1986) bring together historical, political, and theoretical approaches to popular forms. These studies tend to treat popular fiction only, to treat it in terms of itself, and to view it in the framework of formula and
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convention found suitable to it. About that framework the studies have little argument with each other. Rarely does one of them mix a durable canonical work into the study or attempt to examine the nature of the boundaries that separate literary strata.
5. Guy Szuberla, “Ladies, Gentlemen, Flirts, Mashers, Snoozers, and the Breaking of Etiquette’s Code” Prospects 15 (1990): 169–96, offers the possibility of considering Sister Carrie’s intersection with the behavior modeling attempted by still another popular literature — street-etiquette fables of the 1880s and 1890s and their stock characters.
6. Sister Carrie, ed. Donald Pizer (New York: Norton, 1970). Page references in the text are to this edition.
7. Albert Ross, Moulding a Maiden (New York: Dillingham, 1891).
8. Bertha M. Clay, Dora Thorne (Chicago: M. A. Donahue, n.d.).
9. Sister Carrie, ed. John C. Berkey, Neda M. Westlake, Alice M. Winters, James L. W. West III (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1981). Page references appear in the text with “Penn” immediately preceding the page number.
10. E. P. Roe, The Opening of a Chestnut Burr (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1874).
11. Cathy N. Davidson and Arnold E. Davidson, “Carrie’s Sisters: The Popular Prototypes for Dreiser’s Heroine,” Modern Fiction Studies 23 (Autumn 1977): 396–407, predates the Pennsylvania edition’s juggling of the popular fictions referred to in the dinner scene at Sherry’s. The Davidsons examine similarities and differences between Carrie and the similarly positioned female characters in the Clay and Ross fictions but do not touch on the other participants in the dinner scene or on the role of popular fiction itself in the world of Sister Carrie.
12. Richard Lehan, “Sister Carrie: The City, the Self, and the Modes of Narrative Discourse,’’ in New Essays on SISTER CARRIE, ed. Donald Pizer (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991) offers further discussions of objections to Pennsylvania’s “restored” Sister Carrie and moves toward the idea of a compromise edition (pp. 81–4). No compromise is possible in the case of the popular fictions examined here: the scene alludes to either one novel or the other, and there is a distinct loss of allusive complexity in the Pennsylvania version.
13. Clare Virginia Eby, “The Psychology of Desire: Veblen’s ‘Pecuniary Emulation’ and ‘Invidious Comparison’ in Sister Carrie and An American Tragedy,” Studies in American Fiction 21 (Autumn 1993): 191–208,