Carrie inhabits this commodified culture, this spectacle, wherein the suspension of disbelief is both necessary and impossible: “she drew near these things, Chicago, New York; Drouet, Hurstwood; the world of fashion and the world of stage — these were but incidents. Not them, but that which they represented, she longed for. Time proved the representation false” (397). But what exactly did these “incidents” represent? “If she wanted to do anything better or move higher she must have more — a great deal more” (362–3). More of what? Money, say the critics, in unison. But isn’t Carrie “too full of wonder and desire to be greedy” (100)? What, then, is money to her? It does not represent substantial things, as if it were a medium of exchange: “Not them, but that which they represented, she longed for.” It is an end in itself: “One of her order of mind would have been content to be cast away on a desert island with a bundle of money, and only the long strain of starvation would have taught her that in some cases it could have no value. Even then she would have had no conception of the relative value of the thing … ” (51). Or rather the not-thing, the insensible symbol that is money: it has no relative or referential value in this sense apart from its self-referential values. “She found, after all — as what millionaire has not? — that
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there was no realising, in consciousness, the meaning of large sums” (355). Symbolization, as such, is now detached from any substantial things; there are only signs of signs. In this sense, the worlds accredited in Sister Carrie and in modern advertising are animated by the same belief in the reality of illusion, appearance, and representation.
What then becomes of my claim that Carrie’s character is ultimately credible? This is not a strictly empirical question — in other words, to answer it is not simply a matter of presenting the textual evidence. For behind it stands the larger question that dominates modern political theory, moral philosophy, and cultural criticism. I have already alluded to that larger question, and will now merely rephrase it: can the self be known — can character be constructed — through entanglement in the externality peculiar to market society? According to Ann Douglas, the answer provided by the women writers of the mid-to-late nineteenth century was “No,” but not exactly in thunder, because they had already been excluded from the market and were carving out a sphere of morality and spirituality that was by definition outside that dynamic, “masculine” preserve. Douglas claims that the “feminization” of American culture — its odd detachment from the hurly-burly of American capitalism — was the result.30 The subsequent failure of our culture (including our political culture) to come to grips with modernity as such is one corollary of ‘‘feminization” so conceived. This is a powerful and persuasive argument, but, as Douglas understands, it applies with special force to those who, in the twentieth century, would be critical of the culture and politics specific to modern capitalism. For if these critics assume at the outset that the market in its modern manifestations is by definition defiling, as did their “feminine” precursors, they cannot locate a source of resistance to or transcendence of capitalism that resides within a present determined by the development of capitalism. More to the point, they cannot acknowledge the possibility that selfhood and market, or character and capitalism, are compatible. The unintended implication of their ostensibly critical stance is, then, the validation of business as usual except in those spheres of life that have somehow remained impervious to the corrosive effects of capital ,accumulation.
A good example of this implication may be found in the recent critique of the “culture of consumption” elaborated by that unruly discipline called American Studies. One of the most sophisticated contributions to the critique is that of Jean-Christophe Agnew, whose study of the “consuming vision” of Henry James is simply brilliant. But in this study of James, Agnew notes that his anal-
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ysis of consumer culture is “deeply indebted” to the theoretical work of William Leiss. Now, according to Leiss, “the striving for satisfaction … is an ‘intensive’ dimension of experience involving the internal disposition of a person,” that is, it does not involve or require the extroversion and objectification of desire as the condition of articulating (knowing) the possible forms of satisfaction. Hence, the ‘‘intensive character of needing suffers in proportion to the sheer extensiveness of the search [for satisfaction] carried out among the almost infinite possibilities.”31 The normative principle of Agnew’s critique is, then, the pure self whose internal disposition — whose subjectivity, character, etc. — is created and experienced not in, through, and as externalized desire for particular objects and others, but rather as release or abstention from the plentitude of possibilities circulating as commodities in the market. This is a self that can secure its identity and realize its own needs only by ignoring such circulation. In effect, therefore, the self as such is to be found only above and beyond the defiling realm of commodity production and distribution, where, according to Douglas, the women writers of the nineteenth century had already placed it, and, for that matter, where the realists would leave it. And in this crucial sense, the contemporary debate about the character(s) of the “culture of consumption” formally recapitulates the literary debate at the turn of the century, for both debates center on the predicates of self-discovery and determination under conditions defined by the ubiquity of the commodity.
Dreiser’s unique position within these debates is incomprehensible unless we recognize that both the sentimental and the realist traditions engender and finally entail the unargued assumption that now animates the critique of the “culture of consumption” — that is, the assumption that there is a necessary contradiction between the development of capitalism and the development of character. Taken at face value, it inspires cultural critique on ethical grounds: to discover the genuine self is to reject capitalism. But it also undermines political critique (or action) on historical grounds: to discover the genuine self is to recover the transparency of precapitalist social conditions, or, failing that, to find an Archimedean point, a “clearing,” outside of existing social relations — perhaps in the “culture of resistance” afforded by radical movements, perhaps in the “free social space” of the university. Future and past accordingly appear as fundamentally incommensurable because the ethical principle — the integrity of the self — does not seem to reside in or flow from the historical development of capitalism. In Sister Carrie, Dreiser turns the assumption into argument by entertaining the possibility that character is a consequence of capitalism. To
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that extent, he explores the possibility that the ethical and the historical are not antithetical, but commensurable and interlocking planes of narrative and analysis.
I emphasize “possibility,” because the novel is ambiguous at every level. But let us see where Carrie stands. At the conclusion, we note first, she has become neither a man nor a wife. That she remains a single woman may seem wholly unexceptional. Yet the playful confusion over identity that characterizes both romance and theater before the twentieth century often led to reversals that did not so much question an allocation of roles according to gender as confirm it, by giving the disguised woman who penetrates the public realm of politics and markets all the attributes of a man. Carrie’s identity is never fixed; but she is still on her own at the end and has not lost the “emotional greatness” that originally propelled her into the world of money, commodities, and the stage. Nor has she learned that she must have a husband. In fact she becomes more wary of men: “Experience of the world and of necessity was in her favour. No longer the lightest word of a man made her head dizzy. She had learned that men could change and fail’’ (343). After she leaves Hurstwood and moves in with her female friend from the chorus line, a member of the opera company “discovered a fancy for her.” But Carrie “found herself criticising this man. He was too stilted, too self-opinionated. He did not talk of anything that lifted her above the common run of clothes and material success” (351).
She also becomes a reader of the novel, leaving behind sentimental romances such as Dora Thorne (246–50, 392–3). To that extent, Carrie fulfills the hopes of Howells: she becomes a recognizable character who grasps the nuances of the moral law (she acquires “character”) insofar as she can identify with the population of the realist text, yet not confuse fiction and fact — a project that requires a certain cognitive distance, or abstraction, from both realms. But the novel that moves her, that suggests “how silly and worthless had been her earlier reading,” is Balzac’s Père Goriot (1835), which Howells of course deemed the worst novel ever written. It is not my purpose to account for Howells’s loathing, or to interpret Père Goriot. Even so, we should note that Carrie’s new reading habits indicate — but also animate — her new capacity for introspection as well as abstraction. The “plague of poverty” that had “galled her” before she drew a star’s salary, for example (318), is now projected outward through the medium of Balzac’s fiction. From her “comfortable chambers at the Waldorf,” her roommate hopes for enough snow to go sleigh riding. “‘Oh dear,’ said Carrie, with whom the sufferings of Father Goriot were still