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offers a most interesting rereading of Ames as a character who, far from encouraging Carrie not to desire, encourages her to stimulate desire in others. “The only engineering that we see Ames do,” writes Eby, “is to lubricate the wheels of the economy of desire” (p. 196).
14. James D. Hart, The Popular Book (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1963), p. 183.
15. Lord Chumley, a drawingroom comedy, offers an American version of the English upper class beset by problems of love and debt. Class differentiation is accomplished by a variety of comic dialects. The play, a vehicle for the actor E. H. Sothern, had four separate runs at the Lyceum during the 1880s and 1890s.
16. Thomas R. Riggio, “Carrie’s Blues,” in Donald Pizer, ed., New Essays on SISTER CARRIE (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991), points out that the stunning unfolding of Hurstwood’s psychology could occur only under the conditions of the naturalistic novel and only in a context of inevitability (p. 24).
17. Barbara Hochman, “A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Actress: The Rewards of Representation in Sister Carrie,” in New Essays on SISTER CARRIE, ed. Donald Pizer (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991), discusses the artist’s “need for encouraging feedback’’ (p. 58) in the context not only of Carrie’s career as an actress but also in the career of Dreiser himself as writer. This need is absent from Moulding a Maiden’s view of the artist; in Dora Thorne it is represented as a need for a high-class social circle that offers not feedback but prurient interest and cash.
18. Houston A. Baker, as quoted by Joseph Berger, “U.S. Literature: Canon Under Siege,” The New York Times, January 6, 1988, p. 12.
19. See Frank Luther Mott, Golden Multitudes (New York: Macmillan, 1947); Quentin Reynolds, The Fiction Factory (New York: Random House, 1955); and Raymond H. Shove, Cheap Book Production in the United States, 1870 to 1891 (Urbana, 1937), for further detailed information on nineteenth-century fiction factories and their operations.
20. Theodore Dreiser, “Why Not Tell Europe about Bertha Clay,” New York Call 24 (October 1921): 6.
21. Lawrence Buell, “Literary History Without Sexism? Feminist Studies and Canonical Reception,” American Literature 59 (1987): 102–14. (Quotation, p. 112.)
22. Philip Fisher, Hard Facts: Setting and Form in the American Novel (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), develops the idea that the world of Sister Carrie is an “anticipatory world” that “has as its
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consequence a state of the self preoccupied with what it is not” (159). If Dora Thorne functions as one version of what Carrie is not, Dora Thorne assumes by that fact even greater depressive and alienating power in Carrie’s life.
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Sister Carrie’s Absent Causes
James Livingston
In one of the original manifestos of the new literary history — of what has become the “new historicism” — Hans Robert Jauss distinguishes between literature as an invented order of ideas and history as an inherited order of events: “In contrast to a political event, a literary event has no lasting results which succeeding generations can avoid. It can continue to have an effect only if future generations still respond to it or rediscover it… ”1 If he is correct, as I think he is, then we need to ask how and why certain generations respond to or rediscover past “literary events.”2 We need, that is, to ask what circumstances enable these discoveries, these “acts of historical solidarity,” as Roland Barthes calls them; otherwise we have removed readers and critics (ourselves included) from the historical time in which we have already situated the textual objects of our inquiry.3
In this essay, I address the question of historical solidarity by asking a simpler one about Sister Carrie, Theodore Dreiser’s first novel: why did the author situate a realist style within the apparently archaic form of romance? I suggest that as the political–economic groundwork of the modern subject, the ‘‘natural individual,” seemed to dissolve in the 1890s, with the completion of industrialization and the emergence of a “credit economy,” the finished characters posited by realism (and required by liberalism) became problematic if not unintelligible. The rediscovery of romance — the literary form in which the line between self and society cannot be clearly drawn — accordingly became possible, and perhaps necessary. In effect I claim that, when reworked by Dreiser and the other naturalists, the romance form accommodated the new “social self” specified by philosophers, jurists, and social scientists in search of an alternative to the morbid isolation of the modern subject. I then turn to the contemporary relevance
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of their reworking as a way of proposing that the decade of the 1890s is the origin of our own time.4 In concluding, I suggest that Whitman’s claim about Hegel (“only Hegel is fit for America”) should be taken seriously, if only because Hegel’s theory of the transitive subject, the discursive self, helps us to understand why we still recognize Carrie as our sister.5
I want to explain how and why Dreiser chose to be influenced by the very writers Howells sought to displace, and why we still respond to Dreiser’s choice. So I need to begin by asking why certain authors, forms, and styles were not immediately accessible to Dreiser’s generation — in other words, why they had to be rediscovered. An answer is to be found, I think, in the critical if not popular success of realism in the late-nineteenth century. William Dean Howells, for example, who championed realism on moral as well as aesthetic grounds, criticized the “intense ethicism” of the antebellum masters, who excelled not in the novel as such but in poetry and romance: ‘‘they still helplessly pointed the moral in all they did … they felt their vocation as prophets too much for their good as poets.” From this standpoint, Hawthorne’s fiction was quite similar to the extremity of romance in Uncle Tom’s Cabin: “its chief virtue, or its prime virtue, is in its address to the conscience, and not in its address to the taste; to the ethical sense, not the aesthetical sense.”6
The shortcoming of romance as form, according to Howells, was its inversion of the proper relation between incident and character. Unlike the realistic novels he wrote, the romance moved erratically along the surface of extraordinary events and allegorical figures, and thus never produced a recognizable individual about whom one could ask: given this character, what will happen? To this extent, romance lacked a citizenry that could grasp, or be obligated by, the moral law; hence its creators had to point the moral from outside the text, is authorial presence, rather than in and through their characters. The task of the novel, was, then, to create these recognizable individuals, these characters, so that the moral law became intelligible as an active dimension of real, everyday life — as the truth embedded in and inseparable from an aesthetic sensibility, a form, that faithfully represented real, everyday life. Only by accomplishing this task could the novel unify the real and the ideal, the “is” and the “ought,” or, as Howells put it in 1887, the facts and the duties of humanity: “no one hereafter will be able to achieve greatness who is false to humanity, either in its facts or its duties. … [N]o conscientious man can now set about painting an image of life … without feeling bound to distinguish so clearly that no reader of his may be misled, between what is
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right and what is wrong … in the actions and characters he portrays.”7
The difficulty here, Howells knew, was to create finished characters with enough interiority to grasp the nuances of the moral law. Unless they were finished in this respect, they could not exemplify the moral issue(s) from within the text, and so could not validate the “ethical sense” of readers by appealing to their “aesthetical sense.” But if they were finished — if their identities were fixed — they could not deal with the novel circumstances and new options that rapid social change, the hallmark of modernity, normally produces. To such characters, the incomplete present in which real life is necessarily lived would appear defiling and dangerous: it would become the source of delusion and the site of dissolution. In Howell’s first major fiction — the work that signifies his attempt to make it as a novelist, not as an arbiter of taste from his editorial position at The Atlantic — this difficulty is powerfully illustrated by the characters themselves. The following exchange takes place toward the end of A Modern Instance (1882), after Ben Halleck, who is in love with Bartley Hubbard’s wife, has returned to the scene of his anguish (from which Hubbard has disappeared) and has tried to convince his perfectly priggish friend Atherton that he has to repress his forbidden desire:
Halleck lay back in his chair, and laughed wearily. ‘I wish I could convince somebody of my wickedness. … I suppose now, that if I took you by the button-hole and informed you confidentally that I had stopped long enough at 129 Clover street to put a knife into Hubbard in a quiet way, you wouldn’t send for a policeman.’