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change or movement. Hence romance heroes and heroines seem always to be “reaping the rewards of cosmic victory without ever having been quite aware of what was at stake in the first place.”12
The other salient elements of romance are results of the absence of characters. As Howells noted, and as Frye emphasizes, romance plots extraordinary episodes discontinuously along a “vertical” axis. Its normal planes of existence are idyllic and demonic; or at least they are higher and lower than the everyday experience rendered ‘‘horizontally” in realistic novels. Frye also points out that romance is closer to the mythic world of “total metaphor” than is the novel, because the population of romance is identified with the mysterious externality that constitutes its field of heroic action. From this standpoint, romance becomes the form in which desire cannot be effectively disciplined, evaded, or sublimated. Its heroes and heroines are always being projected beyond themselves by the force of their desires — since we cannot ask what these characters will do, but only what will happen to them, there is no story to be told unless they are so projected — and yet the worldness of the world they register is immediate, particular, almost invasive: it is otherness writ large. In romance, accordingly, there can be no abiding present in which the moral law becomes intelligible by virtue of its internalization: there can be no promise of release from the alienation, the perception of division, that is projected outward as desire. In this sense, the privileged place of truth in romance cannot be found outside of time; it lies at the beginning and at the end of time. Indeed the utopian agenda of romance — the morality of this form — finally derives from the fact that its “characters” are not contained by their world; instead they somehow contain it. As Frye puts it, “the desiring self finds fulfillment that delivers it from the anxieties of reality by containing that reality.”13
Now let us suppose that our three unlikely allies have accounted for the differences between romance and the realist novel. Based on this supposition, Sister Carrie is formally or structurally a romance. To begin with, the novel has no characters to speak of, as Julian Markels observed more than thirty years ago: “they do not make the story, the story manifests them.”14 Carrie, Drouet, and Hurstwood are “below the threshold of consciousness,” and so we cannot at any point ask, given these characters, what will happen? These people are so inarticulate — so “vacant,” to borrow Dreiser’s favorite adjective for his heroine — that Agency and Act have almost no meaning in the novel. Their enclosure within the category of Scene is made explicit by their common source in the darkened theater that Carrie finds so appealing (“This new
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atmosphere was more friendly. … Here was no illusion.”): it is here, and only here, that each of the leading characters comes alive, comes to recognize the objects of his or her desire, and resolves to have them.
Certainly Carrie is a perfectly tuned registering apparatus for the particularity, the worldness of her world. Here she is on Lake Shore Drive at about five o’clock in the evening:
There was a softness in the air which speaks with an infinite delicacy of feeling to the flesh as well as the soul. Carrie felt that it was a lovely day. She was ripened by it in spirit for many suggestions. … Across the broad lawns, now first freshening into green, she saw lamps faintly glowing upon rich interiors. Now it was but a chair, now a table, now an ornate corner, which met her eye, but it appealed to her as almost nothing else could. Such childish fancies as she had had of fairy palaces and kingly quarters now came back. She imagined that across these richly carved entrance-ways, where the globed and crystalled lamps shone upon panelled doors set with stained and designed panes of glass, was neither care not unsatisfied desire. She was perfectly certain that here was happiness. … She gazed and gazed, wondering, delighting, longing, and all the while the siren voice of the unrestful was whispering in her ear. (94)
Markels also reminds us that Sister Carrie is organized around the kind of vertical axis usually found in romance. When our heroine loses her shoe factory job, for example, “Dreiser reverses direction again, leaving Carrie at the bottom and taking us to the ‘top,’ to witness a conversation between Drouet and Hurstwood in the ‘truly swell saloon’ of Fitzgerald and Moy’s.”15 This reversible movement between higher and lower planes of existence is the narrative device by which we are forced to see, in vertical perspective, that Carrie’s early career as a Chicago factory worker is the demonic parody of her later career as New York actress, and that Hurstwood’s decline and fall in New York is the demonic parody of his “high life” in Chicago. That Sister Carrie is dominated by metaphors, as against more displaced, “horizontal,” and representational similes, probably needs no emphasis beyond that provided by Walter Benn Michaels and Lester Cohen.16 But it is worth noting that metaphors are foreign to the language — or level — of realism in the novel; they begin piling tip only when Carrie’s desire identifies her with the objects she does not but must have if she is to be herself. ‘‘She did not grow in knowledge so much as she awakened in the matter of desire,” Dreiser notes as preface to the scene on Lake Shore Drive (94). And in fact
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Carrie’s awakening desire determines her entire itinerary. In this sense, her rise in the real world from factory worker to celebrity actress is a demonic parody of the rise of Silas Lapham, whose moral integrity is secured as a consequence of his escape from the delusions of desire. Thus we can safely assume that the “economy of desire” that animates Sister Carrie is at the very least inconsistent with the fear, or absence, of desire that regulates realism as Howells defined and practiced it.17 We can accordingly claim either that the tradition of social realism is not broad enough to contain the novel, or that a more appropriate formal designation for it is romance.
But the point is not to reclassify Dreiser’s first novel; it is instead to recognize that both sentimentalism and realism are parodied by the romance form in which they are contained and criticized. This “dialogical” combination defines any choice between these forms as fundamentally false or as irrelevant to the possibilities of American life and letters. To put this another way, the transition from rhetoric to style that Sister Carrie reenacts by the juxtaposition of sentimental and realist passages is mediated and criticized by the morality of the novel’s form; but the peculiar morality of the romance form is itself criticized by the realistic inversion of its conventions. Thus the long-standing conflict between romance and realism is registered if not resolved in a fictional discourse that incorporates both without becoming either.
Surely the binary opposition of good and evil that Jameson defines as the ‘‘ideological core of the romance paradigm” is destroyed by Dreiser’s use of realism.18 Carrie’s journey to the idyllic upper world, for example, begins with the loss of her virginity. Her sister Minnie narrates this crucial event in her dreams according to the traditional terms of romance, as a descent or fall that negates identity. But that Dreiser has nothing to say about it in his narrative capacity is emphasized by his answer to Carrie’s question (“What is it I have lost?”): “Before this world-old proposition we stand, serious, interested confused … ” (64–5, 74). The binary opposition of good and evil that Minnie’s romance dream depicts vertically is presented as archaic, as an axis that will not intersect at any point with Carrie’s rise through the real worldliness of her world. But if it is fair to say that the ethical binary at the core of romance is in this manner displaced by realism, it is also fair to say that the serious, interested, and confused voice of realism is at critical moments replaced by a language, or a level of writing, that is neither grotesquely sentimental nor starkly realistic. This is the siren whisper of romance, which awakens the inertial Carrie and
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projects her toward new desires and dreams. This is the voice, as heard in Chapter 12 on Lake Shore Drive, that disavows not the real, but realism.
But how do we explain Dreiser’s novel use of the romance form? Why does he resort to it? In other words, what is naturalized in Sister Carrie that lay beyond the scope of realism? I would suggest three possibilities. First, the incomplete present in which real life gets lived is reinstated under the sign of romance. But this is only one way of saying that the relation between past and present is recast as a developmental or cumulative sequence, through which self-consciousness or reason is realized, not posited as a property of mind in the form of finished characters. Second, desire becomes the medium of that discursive process of realization, so that illusion and alienation, the fall into time and space — and desire — become the sources of identity, not the obstacles to it: personality, consciousness, and character are construed as the results of entanglement in, not release from, the tyranny of external circumstances given by the past. Indeed, Carrie’s desire is the medium through which her memory is restored, her consciousness is awakened, her personality is constructed — the means by which she begins to look and sound, at the end of the novel, like a character in a novel. Her externalization, her immersion in or absorption by the “worldness” of her world, objectifies her particular subjectivity, that is, it eventually makes her self-conscious.