In 1980, Walter Benn Michaels suggested that Sister Carrie could not be interpreted as a refusal to approve modern industrial capitalism. He argued that the novel’s “economy of desire” identifies Carrie with an inexhaustible commodity lust — an “involvement with the world [of objects] so central to one’s sense of self that the distinction between what one is and what one wants tends to disappear.” The equilibrium and individual autonomy celebrated in the republican and realist traditions of the nineteenth century are explicitly repudiated by such an economy, which defines desire that is “in principle never satisfied” as the condition of life itself. By this reading, Dreiser’s doubts about the new industrial order are rather less than self-evident. Indeed Michaels claimed that the “unrestrained capitalism” of the turn of the century receives an “unequivocal endorsement” in Sister Carrie. He concluded by suggesting that what is “arguably the greatest American realist novel” remains popular because it celebrates the commodity fetishism and psychological destiblimation peculiar to twentieth-century capitalism.38
It seems that these readings converge only on the name they give to the novel’s form — realism. And yet they agree that realism is not the only level of writing in the novel. For Petrey, the language of realism par excellence is found in the shoe factory scenes; for Michaels, that language is the “literature of exhausted desire and economic failure” which corresponds to Hurstwood’s decline. They might also agree that Sister Carrie is not merely a realist novel, simply because Carrie’s career does not follow the path anticipated in the shoe factory and traced in Hurstwood’s decline. Ultimately, she moves out of the neighborhood naturalized by realism. In any event, the reading I have proposed can accom-
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modate those of both Petrey and Michaels, for it acknowledges, but does not privilege, the novel’s realist level of writing. To put this another way, my reading would suggest that both Petrey and Michaels are correct, because Sister Carrie is critical of industrial capitalism, but not from the Archimedean standpoint of a self that remains undefiled by the commodity form.
Michaels is not wrong, for example, to claim that Sister Carrie represents an “unequivocal endorsement” of modern capitalism, because the novel embraces and endorses History as such, as the antecedent necessity or reality that is beyond criticism. Even so, the ethical or utopian principle of romance remains. For after all is said and done, Carrie is not contained by historical reality; she contains it. And so she stands between, and perhaps embodies, the transcendent truths realized in the epoch of accumulation. She is living proof that freedom resides in necessity, in the historically determined “worldness” of the world. But she also acts on the principle of hope residing in the knowledge that true freedom lies somewhere beyond necessity, in the posthistorical redefinition of work as Play. Since she is in this sense both object and subject of History, her story required the representation of the historical from the standpoint of the ethical, or, more simply, realism in the narrative form of romance.
As Dreiser tells the story, Carrie becomes the “new woman” of the twentieth century, in whom we can see a transitive subject taking shape in the movement away from the familiar social norms and roles of the nineteenth century. But it is precisely the movement away from the familiar that casts Carrie as our sister, as the lead in a “family romance’’ from which domesticity is altogether lacking. In effect, then, we are just now catching up with Carrie. For we can now see that she stood at the same crossroad we have finally reached in our own thinking about the character(s) of postmodern society.
We know, for example, that there is no meaningful distinction to be drawn between appearance and reality in the consumer culture — the “political economy of the sign” — specific to late corporate capitalism. We also know that if there is a meaningful distinction to be drawn between self and society in this consumer culture, it is not to be deduced from the ontological priority of the “natural individual,” the modern subject, the pure self. Self and Other(ness) are not indistinguishable; but they are indissoluble. To choose between them, or to assume that they are not contingent moments on a continuum but elements of an irresolvable contradiction, is to validate the dualism that petrifies every invidious distinction, including the kind that keeps the spheres of
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male and female separate. In Sister Carrie, Dreiser postpones the choice and interrogates the assumption by avoiding closure; like Whitman, he will not let us read for the ending. So he invites us to extend and complete his fiction, to make its rendering of the self a moment of truth we are still producing.
Notes
1. See Hans Robert Jauss, “Literary History as a Challenge to Literary Theory,” New Literary History 2 (1970): 7–37. (Quotation, p. 11.) On the ironies of historicism across the curriculum, see, for example, Quentin Skinner, “Meaning and Understanding in the History of Ideas,” History and Theory 8 (1969): 3–53; David Carroll, “The Alterity of Discourse: Form, History, and the Question of the Political,” Diacritics 13 (1983): 65–83; Peter U. Hohendahl, “On Reception Aesthetics,’’ New German Critique 28 (1983): 108–46; Fredric Jameson, “Marxism and Historicism,” New Literary History 11 (1979): 41–73; Alasdair MacIntyre, “The Relationship of Philosophy to its Past,” in Philosophy in History ed. Richard Rorty, J. B. Schneewind, Quentin Skinner (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1984), pp. 31–48; and Michael Sprinker, “The Current Conjuncture in Theory,” College English 51 (1989): 825–31.
2. For evidence that our generation of critics has rediscovered the literary event called naturalism, see the Special Issue on Dreiser of Modern Fiction Studies 23, no. 3 (1977); Eric J. Sundquist, ed. American Realism: New Essays (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982); Donald Pizer, Twentieth-Century American Literary Naturalism (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1982); Philip Fisher, Hard Facts: Setting and Form in the American Novel (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), pp. 6–7, 12–13, 20–1, 128–78; June Howard, Form and History in American Literary Naturalism (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1985), esp. pp. 41–50, 99–102, 107–111, 115, 150–1, 155; and Rachel Bowlby, Just Looking: Consumer Culture in Dreiser, Gissing, and Zola (London: Metheun, 1985), esp. pp. 1–65.
3. Since narrative forms are embedded in the history of writing, to retrieve one from the dustbin of literary usage, Barthes suggests, is “an act of historical solidarity.” He elaborates on the point in a way that informs all subsequent literary historicisms: the choice of form, he claims, establishes a “relationship between creation and society,” and entails a “literary language transformed by its social finality.” Thus writing as such is “essentially the morality of form, the choice of that social area within which the writer elects to
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situate the Nature of his language” (Writing Degree Zero, trans. A. Lavers and C. Smith [London: Cape, 1967], p. 14). So conceived, form is both a result and a definition of history. The choice of one over another is determined in the first place by availability, by the range of forms the history of writing has placed at the disposal of writers. But that choice defines the scope of what may be represented, without apology or explanation, as real, plausible, or consequential events — that is, it defines the historical or usable past, and so anticipates, or prepares us for, a certain future. Since modern fiction “is constructed in a zone of contact with the incomplete events of a particular present,” as Mikhail Bakhtin insists, it necessarily opens onto a future, and indeed “begins to feel closer to the future than the past, and begins to seek some valorized support in the future” (The Dialogic Imagination, trans. C. Emerson and M. Holquist, ed. M. Holquist [Austin: University of Texas Press, 1982], 33, 26). The morality of form, I would then say, simply is this anticipatory arena where actuality and possibility, past and present, are allowed to collaborate on a history of the future. Hence to suggesst that form or genre should be treated as the “immanent ideology’’ or the “political unconscious” of fictional discourse, as Fredric Jameson does in The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1981), is not to remint the reductionist coinage of base and superstructure; it is instead to suggest that form is to fictional discourse what paradigm is to nonfictional discourse — that is, an historically specific protocol that naturalizes an observable reality and constitutes a social relation between practitioners (writers) and their potential publics.
4. See John Higham, “The Reorientation of American Culture in the 1890s,” The Origins of Modern Consciousness, ed. John Weiss (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1965), pp. 25–48. See also Charles Child Walcutt, American Literary Naturalism: A Divided Stream (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1956; 2d ed. 1973). Walcutt’s approach to naturalism is consistent with my more limited attempt to situate one of Dreiser’s novels within the problematic of cultural change in the late nineteenth-century United States, for, in chap. 1, esp. pp. 10–23, he suggests (1) that the American Dream resides in the overthrow of the dualism centering in the antinomy of desire and reason (or body and mind), which animates the Western intellectual tradition as such, and which is codified in modern liberal psychology; (2) that the poetics of this Dream are most clearly articulated in what he calls the monism of transcendentalism — in what most of the rest of us would probably call the dialectics of the American Renaissance; (3) that American literary naturalism is an effort to get beyond the same fundamental