Like Hawthorne and Melville, Dreiser questions the choices that melodrama (and minstrelsy) authorized, without dismissing
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theatrical time and space as the proper setting for the realistic exploration of selfhood. In this sense, he draws on popular forms to replenish the raw materials of novelistic signification, to broaden his constituency outside as well as inside the text, among readers as well as characters. But he does not do so uncritically. For the middle ground between social and individual, public and private, marketplace and home — the ground sanctified by melodrama and staked out by Hawthorne in The House of Seven Gables — did not exist for Dreiser. He was aware that modernity in the form of machine production had somehow invaded and reconstructed every kind of social intercourse. At least, it had destroyed the local grounds, the familiar places, that once supported it. As he explained in a piece on Salem published in 1898:
It is so modern in parts. Why, only a block from the now large and grimy railroad station, there stood in Hawthorne’s time ‘the town pump,’ which gave forth such a dainty and inspiring rill of thought concerning its own vocation. Some seven trolley lines pass around that identical corner now! The very bowels of the earth from which it drew the sparkling liquid, have been torn out to make way for a smoky two-track tunnel, and steam cars now pass where once the darksome well held its cool treasure in store for man and beast.”26
The earth itself has been hollowed out since Hawthorne’s time, Dreiser suggests; and so the middle ground available to the writers of mid-century offered no foothold to modern writers. The world “out there” — otherness writ large — had already moved, uninvited, into the most familiar realms.
Carrie’s immersion in commodity production (the shoe factory) and circulation (the department store) registers this invasion, and thereby announces that there is no choice to be made between domesticity and marketplace because there is no escape from the latter, not even for a young woman from the country. Minnie, the only representative of Carrie’s family, is the character who dreams according to the older terms of choice established by melodrama and mid-century sentimentalism (and who lives according to the political–economic dictates of modernity). Carrie’s worldly success, and her development as — or rather into — a character, violate these very terms. Again, each voice parodies the other. But Carrie, who as an actress plays the roles allocated by melodrama, embodies the absence of domesticity in her “real life” from the factory and then the stage. There is no escape, then, from the phenomenology of the market: it cannot be displaced or dismissed as it was in the sentimental
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literature or in the larger highbrow culture of the nineteenth century.
The question that follows — for us as for Dreiser — is whether the self can be known, or can make itself, in this discursive milieu, where money creates but also contests the possibility of meaningful signification, of relating particular and universal, of unifying material circumstances and intellectual inscription. The great theorist of the puzzle is Karl Marx. But the immediate implications of the same puzzle obsessed most Americans for most of the nineteenth century because, as Marc Shell points out, “America was the birthplace of the widespread use of paper money in the Western world.” Paper money complicates, intensifies, and enlarges the puzzle of meaningful signification that the use of coinage creates first in antiquity, again in the twelfth century in Western Europe, and yet again in the seventeenth century. For the relation between the substantial thing — the use value of the commodity — and its sign is recast by the appearance and generalization of banknotes as an everyday medium of exchange: “While a coin may be both symbol (as inscription or type) and commodity (as metallic ingot), paper is virtually all symbolic.’’27
Now Americans used paper money as early as the seventeenth century. But they did not become obsessed with the money question as a problem of representation, in both aesthetic and political terms, until the middle of the nineteenth century, when the collapse of the household economy is registered and reinforced by the doubling of the number of banks and the volume of banknotes in circulation (c. 1846–1854). Hereafter, issues of money in every sense come not only to dominate political discourse, but also to invade, if not enrich, aesthetic discourse. These issues turn on the uses of money and the meanings of the self under conditions of capital accumulation — that is, under conditions that efface and reconstruct the inherited division between household and market.
Paper money, it must be emphasized, is not necessarily a threatening or deconstructive medium, so long as its ghostlike formlessness is contained and structured by material antecedents and objects at either end of its circuit — by specie in the bank vault and by use values in the shape of needed commodities. So long as the symbol remains reductive, in other words, and corresponds in theory and practice to real, substantial things, the problem of signification need not be, and is not, a pandemic crisis of representation. For at this level, money functions as mind or language functions under the sign of Enlightenment. it is strictly a medium of exchange, by which the correspondence between unlike things — the underlying unity of particular objects —
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is realized, and the relation between outward existence and inner reflection is posited. Under such a monetary regime, production presupposes a certain level of consumption; money remains a means of exchange, an instrumental appearance that “fits” reality but is never mistaken for reality as such. The production of wealth or the creation of value is accordingly construed as a means to the end of reproducing a certain social–political type — that is, the self-determining head of household whose independence is guaranteed by his control of productive property and consequently of his own labor power.
Capital accumulation requires and enables a different monetary regime, for it makes the production of wealth in the abstract an end in itself. The multiplication of symbols, of weightless tokens of value without material referents, inherent limits, or external moorings, now becomes both method and object of goods production. Since production no longer presupposes a certain level of consumption, money can function as a “store of value,” a floating signifier, a fund of potential claims on time and commodities. The mobility of property and the mobility of the self are, as J. G. A. Popock suggests, constituted by this monetary regime, which emerges in Europe two generations before it does in the United States (1780–1820 as opposed to 1840–1880).28 So it is probably neither incidental nor accidental that the autobiographical agenda of romanticism — its insistence that mind and language are fundamentally creative, for example, and not instruments with which the artist copies the given structure of external reality — emerges in Europe and in the United States at the very moment that money is detached from its referential moorings by the advent of the accumulationist regime.
In the United States, at any rate, the debate over the definition and uses of money was, in effect, a debate over the conditions of selfhood or self-production. And the issues were not decided until the 1890s. By then, however, the value of substitutes for issues of currency, whether greenbacks, Treasury certificates, or national banknotes, was greater than the value of the outstanding currency. These substitutes took many forms, but among them were checks, drafts, bills, deposits, bank clearinghouse certificates, and, finally, securities listed on the stock exchange or contracts made through the produce exchanges (“futures”). Paper money was substantial stuff compared to these apparitions of ‘‘credit,” many of which were never seen outside of the cities, perhaps even the larger cities with central reserve status in the national banking system (New York, Chicago, and St. Louis). In Looking Backward (1887), the utopian novel that reached a circulation of more than one million
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by the mid-1890s, Edward Bellamy summarized the “prodigious illusions” — the crisis of representation — that followed from this development of a credit economy: “Already accustomed to accept money for commodities, the people next accepted promises for money, and ceased to look at all behind the representative for the thing represented. Money was a sign of real commodities, but credit was but a sign of a sign.”29
Meanwhile, the insular world of “real commodities” was colonized by modern advertising, which, like modern credit, referred less to any particular or substantial use values than to the imagined possibilities and unrealized desires that commodities signified as the apparatus of autobiography. Here were the rudiments of the language of demand that economists needed once they assigned the problem of the supply side to classical political economy. But advertising remained the delinquent stepchild of the new marginalist economics, even though these two relatives shared the hedonistic psychology and “subjectivist’’ bent of modernist discourse. It continued to speak the vernacular of desire, and ignored — or redrew — the boundary between fact and fiction by valorizing consumers devoted to immediate gratification. Modern advertising was then the nonrealist language of illusion in which everyday life appeared, that is, became, theatrical.