Dreiser concludes, in fact, where a realist novelist might begin, at the moment consciousness, hitherto “a kind of external relation,” as William James would suggest in 1904, returns to itself. It is almost as if Dreiser were writing the prehistory of the novel as a narrative form or — what amounts to the same thing — of the autonomous individual as a plausible fiction. But Sister Carrie is even more deeply and perversely ‘‘historical” than this. For the point at which it concludes is not just the historical moment at which a realist novel might begin; it is also the moment of memory, of self-consciousness, at which the recorded history of the species does begin. History is not, then, an absent cause in, or simply absent from, the novel: it is inscribed throughout as the product of desire. That is why it first appears under the fantastic sign of romance: “Such childish fancies as she had had of fairy palaces and kingly quarters now came back” (94).
Third, the “chronotope” — the peculiar space–time — of the theater is recovered in and by Dreiser’s use of the romance form.19 To understand what is at stake here, we need to recall the special significance of the theatrical self in nineteenth-century American culture, particularly at mid-century. The most popular ritual in
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this culture was probably minstrelsy, the Yankee invention through which the desiring, sensational self was projected and objectified on stage in the form of the African-American. Minstrelsy was in some ways the ambitious stepchild of melodrama, which was less conclusive, less strident, about the choices it offered between home, hearth, and feminine virtue on the one hand, and market, money, and masculine worldliness on the other.20 In any event, the theater as such foregrounded the new divisions and extensions of the self that had become possible and necessary under the regime of antebellum accumulation.
Within the receding household economy of agricultural subsistence and artisanal industrial production, there was no meaningful distinction to be drawn between economic function and domesticity as the foundation of personal identity, for there were no extrafamilial economic functions except those of incidental commerce, not production. When this economy finally gives way at mid-century (c. 1846–1857), the distinction can be grasped as impending historical disjuncture — as the terms of a choice — in the work of the popular women writers.21 But where the market, or rather money, mediates all social relations and multiplies social roles, so that neither economic function (marketplace) nor domesticity (home) can serve as the foundation of personal identity, the self is divided, distended, and dislocated. This is the problem that seizes the imagination of practically every writer, popular or not, at mid-century.
Some writers treat it as an opportunity as well as a problem (those who treat it as both are our canonical writers). Whitman goes further than anyone else in treating it as such; his “lesson of reception” tends toward what we might justly criticize as pure tolerance. But Melville and Hawthorne also treat the dislocation of the self as something more (or less) than a threat to selfhood. And in their most self-conscious meditations on the romance form — The Confidence Man (1857) and The Blithedale Romance (1852) — they do so in explicitly theatrical terms. Both fictions are deadly serious parodies of minstrelsy in which the self cannot escape its theatrically objectified Other.
Melville kept reminding his readers that the demand for consistency of character in fiction was unrealistic: “is it not a fact, that, in real life, a consistent character is a rara avis?” Real-life experience could not serve as an independent body of fact by which readers could test characterization. For ‘‘no one man can be coextensive with what is.” Moreover, the stuff of experience was accumulated unevenly because the field of experience — space and time — was perceived and assimilated as disjuncture, as het-
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erogeneous, not as simple location on a continuum: “that author who draws a character, even though to common view incongruous in its parts, as the flying squirrel, and, at different periods, as much at variance with itself as the butterfly is with the caterpillar into which it changes, may yet, in so doing, be not false but faithful to the facts.” Thus the implosive chronotype of the theater was crucial to the realistic depiction of real lives: “And as, in real life, the proprieties will not allow people to act out themselves with that unreserve permitted to the stage; so, in books of fiction, they look not only for more entertainment, but, at bottom, even for more reality, than real life can show. … In this way of thinking, the people in a fiction, like the people in a play, must dress as nobody exactly dresses, talk as nobody exactly talks, act as nobody exactly acts.”22 The masquerade of the confidence man was this theatrical negation — this preservation by annulment — of the apparent stability of real lives: nobody on Melville’s stage is exactly who he says he is because everybody is playing his role(s) with sincerity. Every one is false in reality because unity itself is impossible.
Hawthorne, too, announced that his purpose was to “establish a theatre, a little removed from the highway of ordinary travel,” where he might gain a “foothold between fiction and reality.’’ Miles Coverdale, the narrator, describes his own part as “that of the Chorus in a classic play,” but he is in fact the director whose questions provide motives and whose staging creates the triangles of desire that destroy the masquerade at Blithedale. He is also one of the actors in the drama: the more he narrates, the more roles he plays.23 In his concluding confession, at the point we might expect some indication that the narrator is now beyond the narration, Coverdale divides and reinterprets himself again. “I have made but a poor and dim figure in my own narrative,” he claims at the outset, “establishing no separate interest, and suffering my colorless life to take its hue from other lives.” Then he cautions us: “The reader must not take my word for it. … ” But then he promises closure: “the confession, brief as it is, will throw a gleam of light over my behavior in the foregoing incidents, and is, indeed, essential to a full understanding of my story.” And finally he confesses, making his behavior incomprehensible except as the effect of a wholly externalized self, whose personality was the sum of roles derived from total identification with other members of the Blithedale community.24
By their manipulation of the theatrical chronotope specific to a nonrealistic narrative form — the romance — Melville and Hawthorne elucidate what Harold Bloom calls the American Sublime.
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They use the “flare of theatrical facts,” as Howells put it, to illuminate the discursive self, the transitive subject that discovers itself by desiring, or becoming, an Other. By his recovery and revision of the apparently archaic romance form, Dreiser reintroduces this self into American letters — or rather he revives the chronotype of the theater specific to romance as a way of foregrounding this self.
I have already suggested that the theater is the site of characterization in Sister Carrie. Its centrality may be grasped once we recognize that the second half of the novel is a theatrical parody of realism. Hurstwood, for example, is literally absorbed by the reality of the fugitive’s life in New York. He becomes anonymous — in effect invisible — by virtue of his lack of employment, status, and income. Ultimately, he has no place in the real world except in the “grim, beast silence” of a “cold, shrunken, disgruntled mass” (396). But this loss of self may be read, Walter Benn Michaels has shown, as the result of his attempt to secure or stabilize his new identity in and through the paradigmatic realist text — the newspaper.25
Hurstwood’s death is the immediate consequence, then, of desire exhausted, or sublimated, by realism. The last time he rouses himself from his deepening lethargy is at Broadway and Thirty-Ninth Street, under a marquee featuring a life-size poster of “Carrie Madenda,’’ the star of the Casino Company. “‘She’s got it,’ he said incoherently, thinking of money. ‘Let her give me some.’ He started around to the side door. Then he forgot what he was going for and paused, pushing his hands deeper to warm the wrists. Suddenly it returned. The stage door! That was it.” He is of course shoved roughly out the door; without further ado, he reaches his “one distinct mental decision” — that is, to kill himself (391–2). He has no money because he cannot get into the theater: his representational resources are exhausted. He is as good as dead. Carrie, meanwhile, has become a star, a celebrity, “an interesting figure in the public eye,” mainly because she refuses to inhabit the realist text. The narrative movement in which she acts as the feature player is backward, as it were, in time and space — toward the older commercial city, away from the antic brutality of industrial Chicago. But this is the formal movement of the novel, too: as it moves “backward” toward romance, it moves beyond realism. In short, it moves back into the theater rebuilt by Hawthorne and Melville from materials available through melodrama and minstrelsy.