Theodore Dreiser: Sister Carrie

（思政融入点：资本主义社会的丛林法则）

“Too much detail,” Cather once observed, “is apt, like any form of extravagance, to become slightly vulgar.” Theodore Dreiser (1871–1945) would scarcely have agreed. Detail, for him, was the essence of life, and fiction. Of man Dreiser once declared, “his feet are in the trap of circumstance; his eyes are on an illusion.” All Dreiser’s major protagonists suffer from a need that their lives should assume dramatic form; and they suffer, not so much because they cannot fulfill this need, but because they do not really understand it. Wealth, worldly success, sexual gratification are the only aims they can know or name, but none of these reassure them or curb their restlessness. They grapple for money, they wound themselves trying to climb to fame and fortune, yet they remain outcasts: always hopeful for some sign that will release them from their craving for a state of grace or, at least, illumination. In his emphasis on man as the naturalistic victim of circumstance, Dreiser bears a close resemblance to such early contemporaries as Crane and Norris. It was Norris, in fact, who recommended that Dreiser’s first novel, Sister Carrie (1900), should be accepted for publication. In his interest in human yearning, however, Dreiser more nearly resembles his later contemporaries, like Fitzgerald. His other major book besides Sister Carrie, An American Tragedy (1925), was actually published in the same year as The Great Gatsby, although Dreiser had been preparing for it for nearly twenty years. In Sister Carrie, which begins in Chicago and ends in New York, Dreiser recorded his impression of cities that, like life itself, glitter, beckon, seduce, and destroy without reference to notions of justice and desert. The result was and remains a novel remarkably free from moralizing. Carrie Meeber, a Midwestern country girl, moves to Chicago, becomes the mistress of a salesman, Charles Drouet, then the mistress of a middle-aged, married restaurant manager, George Hurstwood. Hurstwood embezzles money; they flee to New York, where Hurstwood gradually sinks into failure, becoming a drunken beggar on Skid Row. Carrie, meanwhile, becomes a chorus girl, deserts Hurstwood; and, although she fails to find the happiness of which she dreams, not only survives but is launched on a successful career. With a natural buoyancy, like a cork bobbing on water, Carrie is ambitious and, like so many of Dreiser’s outcasts, given to moral expediency. When, for instance, her “average little conscience” questions her about what she is doing, the reply is simple: “the voice of want made answer for her.” By the end of the novel, Carrie is still longing, destined to know “neither surfeit nor content” as she sits dreamily in her rocking chair. But that, Dreiser intimates, is the human condition, not a punishment for the errant protagonist. Continuing to work as a journalist, Dreiser took ten years to publish his next novel, Jennie Gerhardt (1911). This was followed by what Dreiser called his “Trilogy of Desire”: The Financier (1912), The Titan (1914), and The Stoic (published posthumously in 1947). The “survival of the fittest” ideas that he had gathered from Herbert Spencer and T. M. Huxley led Dreiser not only to sympathize with the weak Making It New: 1900–1945 167 and victimized but also to place a heavy emotional investment in the Nietzschean business superman of this trilogy. Based on the character of the business magnate Charles T. Yerkes, Frank Cowperwood, the hero of all three novels is a man with a simple motto: “I satisfy myself.” The tone of the trilogy is set early on in The Financier, when the ten-year-old Cowperwood, already a “natural leader,” sees a glass tank at the local fishmarket. In it are a lobster and a squid; and, every day he passes by, Cowperwood notices that the lobster has devoured just as much as it needs for its nourishment. “That’s the way it has to be,” Cowperwood comments to himself. Having “figured it out” to his own satisfaction, Cowperwood resolves to be quick enough, and to be like an animal that can “adapt itself to conditions.” He rises to power in terms that are both economic and erotic. But he, too, is eventually defeated by the “trap of circumstance”: when, at the end of The Titan, his business plans are defeated. There is no moral to this, his fall, Dreiser intimates, any more than there is to his rise. The time has come, quite simply, for the pendulum to swing against him. Despite their obvious differences, both Cowperwood and Carrie are described as innocents and soldiers of fortune, destined to make their way in a world they never made, to fight in the name of aspirations they can feel but cannot name – and, eventually, to lose. That destiny also belongs to Clyde Griffiths, the protagonist of An American Tragedy. This novel, inspired by an actual murder case that occurred in 1906, tells the story of how Clyde falls in love with Sondra Finchley, a rich girl who represents the elegance and wealth to which he has always aspired. A poor boy himself, he hopes to marry Sondra, What stands in his way is that another woman, Roberta Alden, just as poor as him, is carrying his child. She demands that Clyde marry her; Clyde plans to murder Roberta and takes her boating to fulfill his plans. He lacks the resolution to carry it through but, when the boat accidentally overturns, Clyde swims away leaving Roberta to drown. Clyde is not tragic in any traditional sense; that is the irony of the title. He has almost no assertive will, the pivotal event of his life, the death of Roberta, is an accident; in his passivity, rootlessness, and alienation he is no more, and no less, than any other man, and, in particular, any other American. With a compelling mixture of sympathy and criticism, Dreiser moves Clyde, in the first half of An American Tragedy, toward a moment in his life that, while an accident, seems inevitable, the sum of all his failures of will and understanding. Then, in the second half, he shows in relentless detail how the trap of circumstance closes more tightly and literally on his protagonist: as he faces indictment, trial, conviction, and execution. The result overall is a book that, like Sister Carrie, captures both the real conditions of life, as Dreiser saw them, and what he termed “the restless heart of man.” It is a tragedy, not in the traditional sense, but because it registers what its author called “the essential tragedy of life,” that man is “a waif and an interloper in Nature.” And it is an American tragedy because it gives us a protagonist who is the victim, not just of circumstance, but of his own circumscribed dreams. While his rejection of conventional morality earned Dreiser the disapproval of many readers and reviewers of the time, he was stoutly defended by such leading cultural commentators as H. L. Mencken (1880–1956). Mencken was chiefly notable for founding the detective magazine The Black Mask in 1920 and the influential periodical The American Mercuryin 1924, and for producing numerous caustic essays collected in six volumes called Prejudices (1919–1927). He delighted in attacking middle-class 168 Making It New: 1900–1945 America, or what he termed the “booboisie”; and the defense of Dreiser gave him the opportunity to do so. So, for that matter, did his support and encouragement of other writers of the day who sometimes aroused antagonism: notably Sinclair Lewis (1885–1951) and Sherwood Anderson (1876–1941). Lewis and Anderson are both sometimes associated with what has been called “the revolt from the village”: that reaction against smalltown values which characterized many American writers early in the twentieth century. That, however, masks many differences. Sinclair Lewis, for instance, chose the path of satire, a critique of provincial American life, and the middleclass in particular, that became the more tempered the older he grew. His first successful novel, Main Street(1920), tells the story of Carol Kennicott, the young wife of the local doctor in the small town of Gopher Prairie. For her, Gopher and its main street are the epitome of the dullness, the mediocrity of American provincialism: what another character calls “the Village Virus.” Carol revolts against the Village Virus, even fleeing to Washington for a while. But, returning to Gopher Prairie eventually, she admits the dashing of her hopes for reform. So the pattern that characterizes all Lewis’s satires of American provincialism is established: the impulse to escape the restrictions of class or routine leads to flight, but the flight meets with only partial success and is followed by a necessary compromise with convention. In the end, the critique is muted, not least because the last word is given to Carol’s husband, Will Kennicott who, for all his stolidity, is portrayed as honest, hard-working, kindly, and thrifty.

Preview questions:

1. The beginning part of Chapter VIII in SisterCarrie is a fine statement of Dreiser's naturalism. What are his major ideas?

2. Discuss Theodore Dreiser's style.