g ünter l eyPoldt What Carrie Wants: Romantic Longing and Balzac’s Upward Mobility Novel in Theodore Dreiser’s Sister Carrie Reading Theodore Dreiser as an American realist/ naturalist influences our sense of Sister Carrie’s “problem�” It urges us, for example, to see the novel’s closing tableau - Carrie on her rocking chair, rich, lonely, full of obscure longing 1 - as a portrait of arrested development in an advanced stage of Gilded-Age consumer capitalism� In Blanche Gelfant’s empathetic paraphrase: “Poor Carrie� Her desire is illimitable, but her imagination is limited to the world of goods�” 2 For “Dreiser shows,” in Gelfant’s view, that Carrie “is conditioned biologically and culturally to want and buy�” Again: “Poor Carrie� She wanted a real self and ends up a fiery figure of consumption” (183-4). The realist/ naturalist period-slot places Carrie Meeber in the neighborhood of Madame Bovary, whom Flaubert describes as “being of a temperament more sentimental than artistic�” 3 Prompted by Emma Bovary’s indulgence in the “tantalizing phantasmagoria of sentimental realities,” 4 we attribute Carrie’s commodity fetishism to her failure to distinguish between real and illusory values� “Madame Bovary, c’est moi,” Flaubert reportedly said; 5 and Dreiser, too, has been accused of being too enmeshed in Carrie’s reveries for his own good� Since the retrospective framing of Dreiser as post-romantic situates him near the polished and detached point-of-view poetics of Flaubert and Henry James, we discover in him (in Amy Kaplan’s phrase) “two discordant narrative registers�” 6 Suddenly some of the more lyrical moods in Sister Carrie, 1 Theodore Dreiser, Sister Carrie, ed� Donald Pizer (NY: Norton, 3rd edition, 2006) 353-4� Further reference to this text will be parenthetically included in the text as SC� 2 Blanche H� Gelfant, “What More Can Carrie Want? Naturalistic Ways of Consuming Women,” Cambridge Companion to American Realism and Naturalism, ed� Donald Pizer (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1995) 178-210; 179� 3 Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary, ed� Margaret Cohen (NY: Norton, 2005) 32� 4 Flaubert, Madame Bovary 33� 5 Reported, that is, by Flaubert’s French biographer René Descharmes in 1909, who heard it from someone who heard it from Flaubert’s correspondent Amélie Bosquet, who reported it as Flaubert’s answer to her question about the provenance of Emma Bovary’s character� See Madame Bovary: le bovarysme et la littérature de langue anglaise, ed� Nicole Terrien, Yvan Leclerc (Mont-Saint-Aignan: Publications de l’université de Rouen, 2004) 6, fn�10� 6 Amy Kaplan, The Social Construction of American Realism (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1988) 140� For an early version of this claim, see Charles C� Walcutt’s American Literary Naturalism: A Divided Stream (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1956), which suggests that the unconscious transcendentalism of such American authors as Stephen Crane, Jack London, Frank Norris, and Theodore Dreiser prevents them from realizing their naturalist aims� 150 g ünter l eyPoldt the sort of passages critics hardly find jarring in the earlier realisms of Balzac or Stendhal, seem maudlin (“Oh, blind strivings of the human heart! ” [SC 354]), moralizing (“When a girl leaves her home at eighteen” …� [SC 1]), or pompously romantic (“the glimmer of beauty in sylvan places, or the show of soul in some passing eye, the heart knows and makes answer, following” [SC 354])� But how discordant are these “registers” really, given Dreiser’s middlebrow beginnings within the same decade - the 1890s - that saw a Balzac revival, the cult of Trilby, Wagnerism, and various higher and lower kinds of aestheticism that revolved around a mid-cult of genius and the mystique of “bohemia”? The realism/ naturalism construction obscures the messiness of Dreiser’s literary background� It encourages a narrow view of Sister Carrie as a sociologically-minded “condition of the modern city” novel that ignores Dreiser’s investment in the metaphysical and aesthetic discourses of the 1890s� Carrie’s supposed “pathologies” - her sentimentality, drivenness, unstillable longing, amorality, lack of lasting social ties, etc� - can be better understood if we recover Dreiser’s interest in the artist-novel (exemplified by The “Genius,” his most autobiographical work), his fascination with a lateromantic metaphysics of desire, and his attraction to Balzac’s characteristic triangulation of desire and ambition� 1. Desire and the Logic of Consumer Capitalism The idea of two discordant registers became central to Dreiser’s detractors� 7 In order to claim him for a serious American Naturalism, early-twentieth century critics either downplayed his sentimental register as a minor element of his work (secondary to his social realist project) or portrayed it as a kind of countercultural parody (a performative unmasking of “false consciousness”)� 8 One of the most counterintuitive defenses of Dreiser to date - Walter Benn Michaels’ “Carrie’s Popular Economy” (1980) - radicalized the logic of periodization. In Michaels’ view the novel’s language of excessive feeling reflects not an outdated sensibility but Dreiser’s inescapable immersion in consumer capitalism (“Sister Carrie is not anticapitalist at all” but “structured by an economy in which excess is seen to generate the power of both capitalism and the novel”)� 9 Critics have contested some of Michaels’ more unconventional inter- 7 In 1960 Leslie Fielder claimed, for example, that “[t]he fictional world of Dreiser is the absolutely sentimental world, in which morality itself has been dissolved in pity; and in such a world, Charlotte Temple is quite appropriately reborn” (Life and Death in the American Novel [1960; Normal, IL: Dalkey Archive, 1997] 253)� 8 The seminal essays are Sandy Petrey’s “The Language of Realism, the Language of False Consciousness: A Reading of Sister Carrie�” Novel (Winter 1977): 101-113; and Cathy N� Davidson and Arnold E� Davidson, “Carrie’s Sisters: The Popular Prototypes for Dreiser’s Heroine,” Modern Fiction Studies 23 (Autumn 1977): 396-407� 9 Walter Benn Michaels, “Sister Carrie’s Popular Economy,” Critical Inquiry 7�2 (Winter 1980 ): 373-90; 390� What Carrie Wants 151 pretive moves, 10 but his essay opened a new faultline of dissent in Dreiser scholarship� The major oppositions of the debate - Frankfurt school vs� Foucault, critique vs� complicity, practical criticism vs� new-historicist revisionism - crystallize in the critical disagreement about the meaning of Carrie’s reading of Balzac: Does her embrace of high literature at the end of the novel suggest a tentative hope for her personal growth or just another turn within the degrading hamster wheel of consumption? A less obvious effect of Michaels’ revisionist intervention, however, is that it strengthened the authority of the realism/ naturalism period-slot, deepening a critical consensus that Carrie’s situation of endless longing follows naturally from the logic of the age, namely “consumer capitalism’s underlying dynamic of unending desire�” 11 Whether the novel is in fact raging against or simply stating the matter, Carrie’s situation follows from the economic rationalities of her late-nineteenth-century milieu - Michaels claims that the explanation for Carrie’s identitarian vacuum (the fact that she is what she desires) 12 is “already implicit” in the writings of “Adam Smith and David Ricardo” (388)� 2. Carrie in the Lonely Crowd The idea that Dreiser explores the psychodynamic consequences of consumer capitalism had already shaped old-historicist readings of Sister Carrie, and it resonated well with the post-WWII discourse of consumption-induced apathy as represented by David Riesman’s popular The Lonely Crowd (1950)� Riesman suggested that previous to the late nineteenth century, when the market was still largely shaped by the logic of production rather than consumption, people were more likely to internalize important sources of authority during their formative years� This enabled them to grow into self-reliant individuals with an “inner compass” of norms and values. When modernity fine-tuned everyone’s “radar” for the consumption practices of their neighbors, this impeded the emergence of a coherent inner value system� Even adults were now hypersensitive to the external authority of consumption-defined and mass-media-inculcated peer pressure� In Riesman’s view the increasingly 10 For example, can one really attribute Hurstwood’s downfall to the waning of his desire? Is it possible to claim that Robert Ames, the bookish Midwesterner who emerges as a kind of tutor-figure to Carrie towards the end of the novel, is not Dreiser’s mouthpiece but a caricature of William Dean Howells (representative of an outdated economy of scarcity)? See Kevin McNamara, “The Ames of the Good Society: Sister Carrie and Social Engineering,” Criticism 34�2 (Spring 1992): 217-35� 11 Phillip Barrish, The Cambridge Introduction to American Literary Realism (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2011) 124� 12 In Walter Benn Michaels’ formulation: “What you are is what you want, in other words, what you aren’t” (382). And: “Carrie’s body, infinitely incomplete, is literary and economic, immaterial and material, the body of desire in capitalism” (“Fictitious Dealing: A Reply to Leo Bersani,” Critical Inquiry 8�1 [Autumn 1981]: 165-171; 169)� 152 g ünter l eyPoldt “other-directed” American middle classes developed a feminized, fluid sense of selfhood and were driven by interior motives no more substantial than “diffuse anxiety�” 13 Riesman’s account seems somewhat dated today, 14 and Michaels’ thesis of Dreiser’s complicity attests to rising doubts about whether true inner-directedness ever existed� Still, the revisionist claims about Dreiser’s complicity hardly differ from traditional alienation models à la Riesman where the market-generated fetishistic desire has so thoroughly invaded Carrie’s (and perhaps Dreiser’s) inner world that the distinction between inside and outside has become meaningless� As June Howard phrases this claim, “one could ask for no more vivid description of commodity fetishism” than Dreiser’s account of Carrie’s “desire” as something at once “‘in her’” and somehow “separate from her self and enforcing itself upon her,” so that “what is within and what is without are not easily separable, nor is an authentic self easily located�” 15 3. Romantic Sehnsucht/ Ontological Longing/ Mystical Desire But what if the person in the rocking chair, solitary, longing for an ever-elusive “happiness” (SC 355), were not a realist-naturalist “lost lady” 16 but someone who resembles the iconic late-nineteenth-century images of, say, Wilhelm Meister, Ludwig van Beethoven, Baudelaire, even Walt Whitman? Would the motif of unquenchable Sehnsucht then still strike us as an allegory or symptom of economic incorporation? Carrie’s sensibility perfectly illustrates the nineteenth-century theologies, philosophies, and “art religions” that explain the phenomenon of unending desire in terms of humanity’s attraction to a higher presence (God, the Infinite, the Absolute, Being, Over-soul, Life-Force, etc)� 17 Within the frame of a romantic artist novel, Carrie’s intuitive longing for 13 David Riesman, The Lonely Crowd (New Haven: Yale UP, 1950) 26; his emphasis� See Winfried Fluck’s application of Riesman’s terms to distinguish American naturalism from realism, in Romance with America: Essays on Culture, Literature, and American Studies (Heidelberg: Winter, 2009) 206ff�, and his contrast between Riesman and George Herbert Mead, in “Crime, Guilt, and Subjectivity in Dreiser, Mead, and Lacan,” Amerikastudien/ American Studies 58�2 (2013): 235-58� 14 As do many similar accounts of cultural decline that emerged around such 1950s topics as conformity, culture industry, narcissism, and commercialism� See Daniel Horowitz, Consuming Pleasures: Intellectuals and Popular Culture in the Postwar World (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012)� 15 June Howard, Form and History in American Literary Naturalism (Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1985) 42� 16 Christoph Den Tandt, “American Literary Naturalism,” A Companion to American Fiction, 1865-1914, ed� Robert Lamb, G�R� Thompson (London: Blackwell, 2009) 96-118; 110� 17 Classic nineteenth-century theorists of ontological desire are Schleiermacher, Friedrich Schlegel, Schelling, and Kierkegaard� The literary discourse of Sehnsucht begins at least with Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister’s Lehrjahre (Mignon’s plaintive songs are presented as “sympathetic” to the yearning of the bildungs hero)� The religious background of the romantic-period concepts involves St� Augustine’s iconic meditations about how the desire for God accounts for the perpetual “restlessness” of the soul and Jakob Boehme’s What Carrie Wants 153 beauty signifies a visionary-artistic temperament. The logic of period succession implies that the mystical identity model may well have inspired creative breakthroughs in Grasmere, Jena or Vienna around 1800 (and perhaps, too, on the Boston common in 1837), but that with the Age of Realism/ Naturalism it became residual, esoteric, a source of sentimental cliché� The ontological interpretation of desire, however, never lost cultural relevance within the literary field through which Dreiser moves during the 1890s. His digression, in chapter VIII, on the “middle stage” of modern civilization (which leaves “untutored man” as a “wisp in the wind”) (SC 54) rehearses a view of humanity as essentially incomplete (with irredeemable desire as the direct symptom of this incompleteness) that is so deeply inscribed in late-nineteenth-century thought that it dominates cultural theory from philosophical discourse down to the imaginaries of popular magazine culture� 18 As we can gauge from the US reception of George du Maurier’s Trilby, the mystique of the yearning bohemian artist was attractive to the new middlebrow audiences of the 1880s and 1890s that, according to Jonathan Freedman, sought to invoke “the authority of taste, aesthetics, and culture” made available to them by “mass market magazines” and “reading clubs�” 19 Dreiser read Trilby when it was serialized by Harper’s Monthly in 1894, and he later remembered having experienced the novel “with profound emotional perturbation, leaving me sadly craving,” and “lost, for the time, in the beauty of Paris and studio life�” 20 One year previously Harper’s featured Arthur Symons’ article on “The Decadent Movement in Literature,” which praised Paul Verlaine and Stéphane Mallarmé as exemplars of a countercultural Bohemian avant-garde that was “haunted by the desire to create�” 21 Dreiser wrote about Verlaine in 1896, 22 and presumably felt the currency of motifs that connect bohemian desire with a literary avant-garde� Consider, for example, how Symons describes the French poets in 1899 (in the book version of his Harper’s article): “To Verlaine every corner of the world was alive with tempting and consoling and terrifying beauty�” And: “To him, physical sight and spiritual vision, by some strange alchemical operation of the brain, were one�” 23 Moreover: “With Verlaine […] often love may pass into sensuality, to whatever length sensuality may be hurried,” but “sensuality is never more than the malady of love,” and indeed a “love desiring the absolute, seeking in vain, seeking mystical theory on the striving towards light as a general principle underlying the material world� In all of these cases, desire is considered a response to an ontological absence that (in contrast to a material need, which disappears as soon as its object is attained) is essentially unstillable because its object is conceived of as an alterity� 18 On the ubiquity of this motif see Abrams Natural Supernaturalism (NY: Norton, 1971)� 19 Jonathan Freedman, The Temple of Culture: Assimilation and Anti-Semitism in Literary Anglo-America (NY: Oxford UP, 2000) 93� 20 Theodore Dreiser, Newspaper Days: An Autobiography, ed� T� D� Nostwich (Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 1991) 545-6� 21 Harper’s New Monthly Magazine 87�522 (November 1893): 858-869; 862� 22 Theodore Dreiser, “[March 1896],” Theodore Dreiser’s Ev’ry Month, ed� Nancy Warner Barrineau (Athens: U of Georgia P, 1996) 53-4� 23 Arthur Symons, The Symbolist Movement in Literature (London: Heinemann, 1899) 82� 154 g ünter l eyPoldt always, and, finally, out of the depths, finding God” (97). We are used to associating Symons’ celebration of French avant-garde bohemia with a modernist generation of poets leading up to T�S� Eliot and Ezra Pound, but his suggestion that love “is a desire for the infinite in humanity” (98) seems hardly out of sync with a highand mid-cultural establishment that perceived Wagnerism as one of its most important aesthetic achievements: Tristan und Isolde premiered in New York in 1886, 24 the Tristan chord being Wagner’s intended expression of “longing without attainment” 25 - “I don’t know what it is about music,” Carrie says to Ames: “but it always makes me feel as if I wanted something” (SC 340)� 4. Varieties of Mystical Desire: Carrie and Gustav Klimt’s Beethoven Frieze At question here is not “influence” - Dreiser did not, to my knowledge, care much for French Symbolism, or Wagnerism� But placing Sister Carrie within the larger literary and artistic field of the 1890s can help us to see how the mystical concept of desire stretches across the high-cultural and middlebrow spaces within which Dreiser was trying to establish his literary voice� As a conveniently remote but arguably instructive foil for Dreiser’s mysticism, I suggest we situate Carrie’s journey within the iconic fin-de-siècle conceptualization of desire and beauty in Gustav Klimt’s Beethoven Frieze, an Art Nouveau mural for a 1902 Vienna-Secession exhibition in celebration of Beethoven’s Ninth symphony� The Beethoven Frieze (Fig� 2) consists of painted and decorated plaster panels that cover three walls of a dedicated room within the Vienna secession building. The first two panels on the left-side wall are almost blank, except for a rhythmical series of vaguely-drawn human silhouettes flowing across the panel’s upper rim towards the ceiling (Fig� 1)� Fig� 1� Detail of second left-hand panel, upper rim: “hovering genii [schwebende Gestalten],” from Marian Bisanz-Prakken, Gustav Klimt. Der Beethovenfries: Geschichte, Funktion und Bedeutung (Salzburg: Residenz, 1977) 62� 24 Joseph Horowitz, Wagner Nights: An American History (Berkeley: U of California P, 1994) 107� 25 Richard Wagner, program note to the Overture of Tristan and Isolde, 1859/ 60, Dichtungen und Schriften, ed� Dieter Borchmeyer, 10 vols (Frankfurt: Insel, 1983) IV: 104� What Carrie Wants 155 Fig� 2� Drawing of the Beethoven Fries by B� Woodcock, from Peter Vergo, “Gustav Klimt’s Beethoven Frieze,” The Burlington Magazine 115 (Feb� 1973): 108-113; 112� 156 g ünter l eyPoldt The original exhibition catalogue explains that these are “hovering genii,” symbolizing the “desire [Sehnsucht] for happiness�” 26 Klimt’s composition locates the origin of the genii in a higher region beyond the scope of representation� They break into the sphere of vision as transcendent force� Klimt’s next left-hand panel portrays the “suffering of weak humanity�” Three naked, haggard-looking figures are depicted in a pleading or begging position. Kneeling, with folded hands, they are oriented towards a gold-plated ensemble of three figures, a knight in bright golden armor, and two female personifications. As the program explains, “suffering humanity” is “petitioning” the “well-armored strong man [den wohlgerüsteten Starken]” to fight for them in “the struggle for happiness,” and they are also appealing to “Pity” and “Ambition,” the “inner-driving forces” that motivate the Hero’s struggle� The famous center-wall panels depict personifications of the “hostile forces” the quest for human happiness will have to face (“Sickness, madness, death, lust and wantonness, intemperance, gnawing grief”)� But any heroic engagement with these external antagonisms leaves the deeper reality of human longing untouched: “Humanity’s yearnings and desires fly past” this lurid spectacle of earthly threats and temptations, which indicates the futility of this battle for our attainment of ultimate happiness� The way out of the dilemma seems to lie with aesthetic contemplation: At the end of the first panel on the right-hand corridor, we see that the “floating genii” are interrupted by a goldplated personification of Poetry, whose lyre reaches into the heights of their sphere and contains them completely: “The desire for happiness is quenched [findet Stillung] in Poetry” (Fig. 3). The final panel culminates in an aesthetic apotheosis: Its left side displays a golden vortex with upward flowing female personifications: “The arts lead us into an ideal world, the only place where we can find pure joy, pure happiness, pure love�” On the right, a garden scene shows a “choir of angels of Paradise; ” they sing Schiller’s words to Beethoven’s Ninth (“Freude schöner Götterfunke [Joy thy gleaming spark divine]”)� In front of the choir, a golden structure houses a naked human couple, engaged in an embrace� Again Schiller’s program: “Diesen Kuß der ganzen Welt [This kiss to the whole world]�” 27 26 “Max Klinger - Beethoven - XIV� Kunstausstellung der Vereinigung Bildender Künstler Österreichs Secession” (Wien: Wiener Bibliophilen-Gesellschaft, 1902) 25-26; reprinted in Gustav Klimt, Beethovenfries (Wien: Secession, 2002) 40-1� 27 Most critics have tried to stabilize the meaning of Klimt’s cycle of images by mapping it onto Richard Wagner’s writings on Beethoven, though it is significant here that contemporary viewers were mainly struck by its allegorical openness - the Austro-Hungarian art critic Ludwig Hevesi had the impression that the frieze depicted “people’s longing for happiness, more or less, I should say, because allegories should not be completely understandable” (“Sezession [18� April 1902],” Acht Jahre Sezession (März 1997-Juni 1905): Kritik - Polemik - Chronik [Wien: Carl Konegen, 1906] 390-4; 392: “Klimt hat sich die Sehnsucht der Menschheit nach dem Glück gedacht� So ungefähr, sei hinzugefügt, denn Allegorien soll man gar nicht ganz verstehen”)� Interpretive closure began when in 1977 Marian Bisanz-Prakken showed parallels between Klimt’s images and a program that Richard Wagner had written for his Dresden production of Beethoven’s Ninth� Wagner’s paraphrase of the content of the Ninth’s four movements can be made to square with four stations in Klimt’s cycle (see Marian Bisanz-Prakken, What Carrie Wants 157 Fig. 3. Detail of first right-hand panel: “The desire for happiness is quenched [findet Stillung] in Poetry, ” from Bisanz-Prakken, Gustav Klimt. Der Beethovenfries 76� Klimt’s mural demonstrates how the mystical account of human longing could be made to resonate with both avant-garde and traditional viewpoints� The idea of ontological desire and the redemptive power of the arts cohered well with the image of music as a divine language that defined the international Beethoven cult� It also accorded with Schillerian-Arnoldian culture models that considered aesthetic bildung a tonic against philistine civilization and implied what Amy Hungerford calls a “living-religious faith” in Gustav Klimt. Der Beethovenfries: Geschichte, Funktion und Bedeutung [Salzburg: Residenz, 1977])� While there is no evidence for this in the context of Klimt, in the anonymous author of the catalogue program, or in the contemporary reception, this reading has become standard and is repeated by most exhibition catalogues� Other interpretations relate Klimt’s images to his biography (his struggles as a maligned artist), Wagner’s 1870 Schopenhauerian treatise Beethoven, or the writings of Schopenhauer and Nietzsche (see Kevin C� Karnes, A Kingdom Not of This World: Wagner, the Arts, and Utopian Visions in Fin-de-Siècle Vienna [NY: Oxford UP, 2013] chap 4)� Wagner’s program uses passages from Goethe’s Faust, and some critics have seen the latter as a relevant source (see Claire Wilsdon, “Klimt’s Beethoven Frieze: Goethe, Tempelkunst, and the Fulfillment of Wishes,” Art History 19�1 [March 1996]: 44-73)� 158 g ünter l eyPoldt “literary form�” 28 The popular portrait of Beethoven as a daemonic or heroic genius-prophet who bravely penetrates the “‘Divine Idea’ pervading the visible universe” 29 could be understood in the terms of romantic-period transcendental idealism, whose anticlerical critique of established religion 30 had been considered radical in the 1830s but become more acceptable in intellectual and middlebrow circles around 1900� Yet the Beethoven mystique could also be made to suit the mainstream positions that combined the concept of genius with more traditional forms of Christian belief� 31 Both transcendentalist and Christian views recognize human longing as a positive force that signifies a craving for God or a “feeling for the infinite.” 32 E�T�A� Hoffmann’s famous review of Beethoven’s Fifth (1810) frames the transition from Haydn to Mozart and Beethoven in terms of an increasing sensitivity to desire that indicates a spiritual breakthrough� 33 Hoffmann portrays the “pain” of desire expressed in Beethoven as a cathartic higher emotion that momentarily turns us into “ecstatic visionaries” (98) able to transcend the lower desires of the everyday� From this viewpoint, Klimt’s allegory would seem to suggest a familiar bildungsroman that maps well onto the “sentimental” reading of Sister Carrie: The desire at the root of the human condition propels us forward (Carrie is drawn towards Chicago), but “hostile 28 Amy Hungerford, Postmodern Belief: American literature and religion since 1960 (Princeton: Princeton UP, 2010) xviii� 29 Thomas Carlyle, “State of German Literature,” Edinburgh Review 46�92 (Oct�): 304-51; 329� In a later formulation, Carlyle associates genius with the “musical thought” that the heroic “mind that has penetrated into the inmost heart of the thing” detects at the root of a universal consciousness (On Heroes, Hero-worship, & the Heroic in History, ed� Michael K� Goldberg et al� [Berkeley: U of California P, 1993] 71)� 30 As suggested in Thomas Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus (1833-4), Emerson’s “Divinity School Address” (1838) or David Friedrich Strauß’ Life of Jesus (1835/ 36)� 31 Positions that considered music to be expressive not only of “the laws of man’s nature, with all the laws that govern the created universe” but also of “the eternal ideas of God,” as the Boston musicologist John Sullivan Dwight put it in 1845 (“Musical Review,” Harbinger 1 [1845]: 13)� 32 “Religion ist Sinn und Geschmak fürs Unendliche�” Friedrich Schleiermacher, Über die Religion: Reden and die Gebildeten unter ihren Verächtern [1799] (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2001) 80. Schleiermacher defines the “longing [Sehnsucht] for the marvellous and supernatural [Wunderbaren und Übernatürlichen]” as a “striving for the higher [Streben nach dem Höheren]” that he considers essential for a fully realized humanity (120)� For him, the ability to experience “holy sadness [heilige Wehmuth]” - a “feeling of unsatisfied longing for a great object [das Gefühl der unbefriedigten Sehnsucht die auf einen großen Gegenstand gerichtet ist]” - is crucial for cultivating the religious sense and thus constitutes the “true and highest aim of virtuosity in Christian practice [das eigentliche höchste Ziel der Virtuosität im Christenthum” (188)� 33 Whereas Haydn’s symphonies mainly evoke scenes of laughter and joy (“no suffering, no pain; only sweet, melancholy longing for the beloved vision floating far off in the red glow of evening”) and Mozart’s music leads us further “into the realm of spirits” (a “first intimation of infinity,” “the gentle spirit-voices of love and melancholy”), Beethoven opens us up to spiritual reality: his “music sets in motion the machinery of awe, of fear, of terror, of pain, and awakens that infinite yearning […] in which every desire, leaping up in sounds of exultation, sinks back and disappears�” E.T.A. Hoffmann’s Musical Writings, ed� David Charlton (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1989) 97-8� What Carrie Wants 159 forces” seek to destroy us (poverty, sickness) or lure us towards a “wild lust,” as our “restlessness” and “despair” drive us to chase one “new happiness after the other” 34 (Carrie succumbs to a succession of low pleasures, commodities, fame, money)� But aesthetic contemplation connects us to a higher, spiritual love that stills our longing and prepares us for the democratic embrace of humanity (Carrie accepts more spiritual-artistic gifts: Ames rather than Hurstwood or Drouet, Balzac and tragic acting rather than sentimental fiction and cabaret). We might draw out this spiritualist reading by mapping Carrie’s final scene onto the transcendentalist-Buddhist ending of Dreiser’s final novel, The Stoic (1947): There, for the first time, she had experienced the dawn of a spiritual awakening, which was even now enabling her to see more clearly� She must go on, she must grow, she thought, and acquire, if possible, a real and deep understanding of the meaning of life and its spiritual import� 35 Carrie, too, is allowed an epiphanic sense, towards the end of Sister Carrie, that the people and things to which she had been attracted were mere “representations” of a larger spiritual essence: What “she longed for” was not “Chicago, New York; Drouet, Hurstwood; the world of fashion and the world of stage - these were but incidents,” or “representations” that “Time” proved “false” - but “that which they represented” (SC 353), that is, the mystical reality beyond the shifting external clothes� 36 On the other hand, the mystical identity model needs only a minor adjustment to blend into the more negative visions of presence that struck turn-ofthe-century audiences as more cutting-edge or (depending on the viewpoint) more offensive, readings that our period-frames tend to assign to a secular, amoral type of fin-de-siècle aestheticism (Baudelaire and Verlaine, Pater and Wilde, Nietzsche and Hofmannsthal)� One direction of shifting emphasis leads through the reinterpretation of desire in terms of an irrational lifeforce, such as Schopenhauer’s “blind will-to-live” 37 that precedes human consciousness and governs the “thing in itself” (the verbal derivative “Wollen” signifies “to want,” “to desire”). Through Schopenhauer’s eyes, Klimt’s images become considerably darker: “Humanity’s yearnings and desires fly past” the “hostile forces” because the distinction between higher and lower forms 34 Richard Wagner, Dichtungen und Schriften, ed� Dieter Borchmeyer, 10 vols� (Frankfurt: Insel, 1983) 9: 21� The quotation is from Wagner’s 1846 program for the Ninth’s second movement that critics have applied to Klimt’s depiction of “hostile forces�” 35 Theodore Dreiser, The Stoic (Cleveland: The World, 1947) 310� The reference is to Frank Cowperwood’s idealized lover Berenice Fleming, who finds her peace, after Cowperwood’s death, through Buddhist meditation� 36 On “clothes” as a metaphor for mediated forms of presence see Carlyle’s influential Sartor Resartus (1833-4) and Emerson’s distinction between substance and its various historical metaphors for “Being” in “Experience” (1844) (Works, Centenary Edition [Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1903] III: 72-3). 37 Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, 2 vols�, trans� E�F�J� Payne (NY: Dover, 1966) II: 579� In Schopenhauer’s words, “No possible satisfaction in the world could suffice to still [the individual’s] craving, set a final goal to its demands, and fill the bottomless pit of its heart” (II: 573). 160 g ünter l eyPoldt of desire has become pointless, being both objectifications of blind will (or with Spencer and Freud, the caprice of chemical matter, sexual drives or the id)� The relevance of literary and aesthetic expression lies then not in any redemptive connection with a divine sphere; it merely offers a momentary escape from the suffering of constant longing� 38 Because critics consider the darker viewpoint (arbitrary force rather than transcendent presence) better attuned to a naturalist sensibility and poetics, they wish Dreiser had cut the sentimental overtones from Sister Carrie’s epilogue� 39 If Carrie’s discovery of Balzac marks just another stage in human self-delusion, why celebrate it with romantic clichés? It is not clear, however, that the distinction between a sentimental (transcendentalist) and a naturalist (Schopenhauerian, Spencerian) conception is as sharp in Dreiser’s literary practice as the period breaks that structure our literary histories would imply� Consider, for example, the two endings to Dreiser’s artist novel The “Genius” (1911/ 1915). In the first version of 1911 (which remained unpublished until 2008), Dreiser’s alter ego Eugene Witla has grown into a “stronger and calmer” person who successfully moved beyond the “religious abstrusities” of both conventional Christianity and Christian Science to which he had formerly clung� Stumbling over a volume of Herbert Spencer’s Facts and Comments (1902), Eugene quotes Spencer’s troubled sense of absence in a Godless universe (“the consciousness that without origin or cause infinite Space has ever existed and must ever exist,” Spencer says, “produces in me a feeling from which I shrink”)� Rereading this passage reminds Eugene how far he has progressed: Spencer’s vision of a void “could never trouble me anymore,” because life now seemed governed by “a ruling power” that “rules all - is all, and it is not malicious�” 40 We might say that the development of the 1911 Eugene parallels the generic bildung of the transcendentalist hero, whose loss of traditional religion due to the exposure to the empirical sciences leads through a debilitating phase of skeptical despair (Carlyle’s “Everlasting No”) until the discovery of a higher spiritual reality leads to a redemptive kind of self-reliance (the “Everlasting Yea”)� 41 Now, critics have noted that the revised ending that Dreiser published refuses such a resolution: Spencer’s quotation is now elevated to “the sanest interpretation of the limitations of human thought that I have ever read,” one that indeed seems “peculiarly related to [Eugene’s] view point�” Moreover, “religious thought” is more clearly condemned as a tonic for “ethical and spiritual ease,” “a bandage which man has invented to protect a soul made bloody by circumstances�” Because this revision moves the text further towards Schopenhauer and Spencer, critics have found it more in tune with 38 According to Schopenhauer, “knowledge of the whole, of the inner nature of the thingin-itself” can help us to detach ourselves from “all and every willing” and reach a “state of voluntary renunciation, resignation, true composure, and complete will-lessness” (I: 379)� 39 Donald Pizer, The Novels of Theodore Dreiser (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1976) 95� 40 Theodore Dreiser, The Genius, ed� Clare Eby (Urbana: U of Illinois P, 2008) 744-5� 41 See Sartor Resartus, Book II, chapter 7: “The Everlasting No,” chap� 8: “The Center of Indifference,” and chap� 9: “The Everlasting Yea�” What Carrie Wants 161 Dreiser’s naturalism� And yet both endings resolve the problem of “unknowability” with a contemplative vision of beauty that recalls a traditional rhetoric of mystical union� In the 1911, transcendentalist ending, the reason that Eugene is no longer troubled by the doctrines of “natural selection” and the “will to live” is that “[i]t was beautiful now to think of the universe as being good, not evil” (744). In the manner of negative theology, Eugene’s confidence is based on a leap of faith rather than settled knowledge, but this leap is encouraged by his deep sense of aesthetic presence when he looks up at the stars� The 1915, “naturalist” ending makes the same point, merely embellishing the aesthetic brilliance of the scene: Where in 1911 Eugene simply finds the night “cool, brilliant” (746), in 1915 he is dazzled by “Orion’s majestic belt and those mystic constellations that make dippers, bears, and that remote cloudy formation known as the Milky Way�” And he adds: “What a sweet welter life is - how rich, how tender, how grim, how artistic - how like a colourful symphony�” Thus: “Great art dreams welled up into his soul as he viewed the sparkling deeps of space” (907)� In other words, the symphonic fullness of the universe causes the sort of reaction that Klimt’s final panel depicts as aesthetic jouissance and that Walter Pater, the icon of fin-de-siècle aestheticism, described as moments of “intense consciousness” or “pauses of time” that make us “spectators of all the fulness of existence” and “quintessence of life�” 42 Pater is often “detranscendentalized” 43 by a period logic that classifies the fin de siècle in terms of a radically secular moral decadence, and so is Klimt� To the degree that twentieth-century Klimt scholarship deemphasized his mysticism, his work came to embody disenchanted representations of sexual libido that today’s audiences often perceive as art-nouveau kitsch� 44 Dreiser’s detranscendentalization has had a similar effect: his interest in love and desire becomes an embarrassment once it is reduced to the “unsentimental” twentieth-century terms of sexual drives and addictive consumerism� 45 The 42 Walter Pater, The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry, 4th edition (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1986) 96� 43 On detranscendentalization, see Daniel Malachuck, “Emerson’s Politics, Retranscendentalized,” A Political Companion to Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed� Alan Levine, Daniel Malachuck (Lexington: UP of Kentucky, 2011) 265-304� 44 According to Anna Celenza, writing in 2004, Klimt’s Beethoven Frieze “is more Freudian in nature - a dreamscape inhabited by bestial monsters and deranged, erotic women” that focuses “on the psychosis of man as he strives for pure joy and fulfillment” (“Music and the Vienna Secession: 1897-1902,” Music in Art 29�1/ 2 [Spring-Fall 2004], 203-212; 209)� Like Dreiser’s The “Genius,” Klimt’s frieze was perceived in its time as scandalously explicit (for a summary of the reception, see Kevin Karnes, “Wagner, Klimt, and the Metaphysics of Creativity in ‘fin-de-siècle’ Vienna,” Journal of the American Musicological Society 62� 3 [Fall 2009]: 647-654; 688)� For the increasing suspicion from the second half of the twentieth century that Klimt represents bland mainstream eroticism, see his portrayal as “purest mass-hystery producing kitsch” in Thomas Bernhard’s Alte Meister. Komödie (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1985) 225� 45 Jerome Loving, Dreiser’s recent biographer, exemplifies well the disenchanting viewpoint: He describes Dreiser’s tragic heroes as “victims of relentless concupiscence,” no less, apparently, than the author himself: “Theodore Dreiser’s lechery is fairly well known� While writing his biography, I found it a challenge to tell his entire story 162 g ünter l eyPoldt realist/ naturalist framework, then, has made it harder to recall the normality of Dreiser’s metaphysics within the contemporary literary field. Consider, for example, how unsurprising this metaphysics seems to Randolph Bourne in 1916� In his review of The “Genius” Bourne situates Dreiser with “Dostoevski and Tolstoi” and other “Continental Novelists” whom he considers to specialize in portraying “the inexorable desire of life, a desire which is no more physical than it is spiritual, a desire which consists often of walking in the mud with the face towards the stars,” a “push and yearning” that “makes for religion and art in a kind of insatiable straining towards realization and perfection�” Hence: “[Dreiser’s] hero is really not Sister Carrie or the Titan or the Genius, but that desire within us that pounds in manifold guise upon the iron wall of experience�” 46 Bourne would have recognized, I presume, another aspect of desire that Dreiser draws from a nineteenth-century discourse of heroism� According to this discourse, Carrie’s ability to represent the ineffable desires of her age makes her a “representative” individual� The mid-Victorian and US reception of this discourse is usually associated with Emerson’s Representative Men and Carlyle’s On Heroes and Heroism, but by the 1890s Hegel’s more negative formulation of “historical greatness” had appeared in the high-theoretical and middle-brow sections of Dreiser’s literary field. 47 Hegel suggests that desire emerges when historical change opens up a gap between the national mind and its external conditions (when “inward development” of “spirit” has “outgrown the world it inhabits”)� There is then a sense of “dissatisfaction” in the air, but because ordinary people cannot yet know what exactly it is they are longing for, their desire remains diffuse (it “is not yet positively present; its status is accordingly negative”)� Great men, or “world-historical individuals” are “first” able “to formulate the desires of their fellows explicitly.” 48 Ames’ advice that Carrie live up to her unusual gift shows how in the 1890s this concept has become a trope of middle-brow discourse: “The world is always struggling to express itself,” [Ames] went on� “Most people are not capable of voicing their feelings� They depend upon others� That is what genius is for� One man expresses their desires for them in music; another one in poetry; another one in a play� Sometimes nature does it in a face - it makes the face representative of all desire� That’s what has happened in your case�” (SC 341-2) without ultimately boring my reader� For Dreiser never in his life settled down to one woman” (“Theodore Dreiser: Letters to Women� New Letters [Review], American Literary Realism 44�1 [Fall 2011]: 84-85)� 46 Randolph Bourne, “Desire as Hero [review of Dreiser’s The Genius],” The New Republic (January 29, 1916): 5-6; 5� 47 Hegel formulated his ideas of historical greatness in his 1820s Berlin lectures on the Philosophy of World History� Published from manuscripts and student write-ups in 1837 and 1840, these lectures were little known before the second half of the nineteenth-century (the first English translation appeared in 1857). 48 G�W�F� Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of World History, transl� H�B� Nisbet (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1975) 84� What Carrie Wants 163 Carrie is attracted to “the idea that her look was something which represented the world’s longings,” but this scene also recalls Hegel’s point that heroic desire never attaches to a final, knowable, rational objective. Carrie is not intellectually weighing a reasonable proposition about the next step in her career� Rather, Ames’ words strike her as something “her heart craved; ” they render her “aroused” and “warm with delight; ” for they have “unlocked” yet another “door to a new desire,” namely, becoming a more “serious” actress (SC 341-2)� In Hegel’s words, heroic individuals are obsessed with a “ruling passion” that leads them to break with conventional morality, 49 and in order to satisfy this passion they forgo the “happiness” of a “private life; ” devoting “their energy to a particular cause” until, when their task is done, they “fall aside like empty husks” (85-6)� What counts, in the end, is not authenticity but performative success: Carrie will have historical greatness if she shows her contemporaries the not-yet realized direction of their desires� Denigrating this kind of “passion” as “lust” or egoism misses the point, according to Hegel, as it would be mere “psychological pedantry” (87)� 5. Romantic Longing and Upward Mobility: Dreiser, Dickens, and Balzac Once we reduce Carrie’s longing for beauty to a symptom of materialist greed or insecurity-driven social climbing, she seems lacking in the qualities that define the protagonists of canonical nineteenth-century upward-mobility novels� The bildungsroman tradition that dominates the midand latecentury literary field tends to hold the proverbial “rags to riches” motif - in which social advancement is mainly an issue of material-economic success - in productive tension with the motif of “authentic” self-realization as an “inner” process of growth� The prominence of the idea of bildung in nineteenthcentury realism invites us to interpret Carrie’s materialism as a flaw and her encounter with Ames as a redemptive attempt to break out of the “vanity fair” of social ambition� In other words, the period frame encourages us to place Sister Carrie in the tradition paradigmatically represented by Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations (1860/ 61)� At the outset of Great Expectations the protagonist Pip is a young boy destined to a hard but honest life as a blacksmith in the provincial marshes of Kent� His desire to rise in the world emerges when he meets the wealthy spinster Miss Havisham� As in Carrie’s case, this desire manifests itself primarily as a passion for a socially advanced person (Estella, Miss Havisham’s cultivated and arrogant protégé)� When an anonymous benefactor enables Pip to move to London with the means to transform himself into a gentleman, his former social world seems increasingly “common” to him� 50 Dickens por- 49 Note how Dreiser pictures Carrie’s moral guilt as the “voice of the people” that “was only an average little consciousness, a thing which represented the world, her past environment, habit, convention, in a confused way” (SC 67)� 50 Great Expectations, ed� Edgar Rosenberg (NY: Norton, 1999) 59� 164 g ünter l eyPoldt trays Pip’s changing perspective in terms of a delusion that has heartbreaking effects; it prevents him, for example, from seeing that his childhood sweetheart Biddy is more worthy of his love than Estella, and from overcoming his embarrassment when the blacksmith Joe, his warm-hearted substitute father figure, visits him in his posh London abode. Pip’s class shame is triangular in René Girard’s sense: 51 he is “haunted by the fear” that Estella should see him at the forge, “with a black face and hands, doing the coarsest part of my work” (87)� Carrie experiences a similar shift in a Chicago department store, when she is confronted with “the shop girls with whom she now compared poorly�” 52 Once she is approached by the comparatively more genteel Drouet, shop-girls like herself strike her as “common” (SC 38)� In Dickens’ world, triangular desires hinder the attainment of true bildung� At the end of Great Expectations the loss of Pip’s fortune (along with the exposure of his benefactor’s criminal background) proves to be cathartic� The shock of recognition helps Pip to overcome his class shame, to renounce all claims to undeserved wealth, and to focus instead on a humble but honest career as an office clerk - “I work pretty hard for a sufficient living,” he says to Estella in the final scene of the novel; and Estella, too, has suffered, renounced, and personally grown� While Great Expectations is fascinated by how class shame affects one’s embodied perception, 53 it also suggests that the problem can be resolved by developing one’s moral consciousness� Pip’s recognition of the inalienable values of Joe’s and Biddy’s personhood conveniently removes the attraction he felt for a socially higher sphere symbolized by Estella’s beauty� Placed within Dickens’ framework of internal bildung, Carrie’s development seems arrested because her intellectual moral insights have little impact on her felt desire� 6. Carrie and Rastignac The arrested development motif is less clear in the upward mobility narratives of Honoré de Balzac, which Dreiser enthusiastically read� 54 In Balzac, social ambition has a great deal to do with how ontological desire directs itself to a more elevated social world� When Eugène de Rastignac, the hero of 51 René Girard, “Triangular Desire,” Deceit, Desire, and the Novel: Self and Other in Literary Structure [1961] (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1976) 1-52� 52 “[W]herever she encountered the eye of one it was only to recognise in it a keen analysis of her own position - her individual shortcomings of dress and that shadow of manner which she thought must hang about her and make clear to all who and what she was” (SC 17)� 53 See especially chap� XIV: “It is a most miserable thing to feel ashamed of home� […] Home had never been a very pleasant place to me, because of my sister’s temper� But, Joe had sanctified it, and I had believed in it. […] Once, it had seemed to me that [as Joe’s apprentice] I should be distinguished and happy� Now the reality was in my hold, I only felt that I was dusty with the dust of small-coal” (86-87)� 54 Dreiser first encountered Balzac’s work in Pittsburgh’s Carnegie Library in 1894. See his account in Newspaper Days 515-7, and Nancy Watner Barrineau, “Dreiser’s debt to Balzac,” American Literary Realism 24�2 (1992): 70-80� What Carrie Wants 165 Père Goriot (1835), arrives in Paris from the Southern provinces as a young law student, his immersion in the metropolis teaches him “how things are done,” how to “master the capital’s peculiar language” and “grow accustomed to its special pleasures�” Paris broadens his social “horizons,” 55 and this alters his sense of where he stands within the larger social whole� In contrast to his former “childish illusions” and “provincial notions,” he now sees “[t]he tiny Rastignac estate” for what it is from a metropolitan perspective: a minor house that barely manages to scrape along while “squeezing out” Eugène’s stipend like their “family table wine” needs to be “squeezed out of the very leavings of the winepress�” As in Sister Carrie, the perception of status is felt viscerally, as an aesthetic attraction: “his sisters, who had always seemed so beautiful to [Rastignac], as a child,” are now eclipsed by the more dazzling beauty of “the women of Paris” (26-7)� Of course, Balzac frequently plays up the motif of false idols: When Rastignac surrenders to the glamour of the Parisian social elites, the narrator accuses him of having succumbed to “the sizzling voice” of “Satan,” - “that god of vanity, whose tinsel strikes us as a symbol of power,” “draping women in imperial purple, casting a foolish glory on thrones” (93)� It is not hard to interpret Balzac’s moralizing commentaries as a similar critique of alienation that Dreiser scholarship detects in Sister Carrie� Indeed Balzac’s frequent imaging of aristocratic power as a kind of “magic” recalls the Marxist motif of capitalism as a primitive cult: The “religious quirks of the commodity” 56 have led Rastignac astray, awakening an archaic religious desire (fetishism) for material success and power that detracts from the inalienable value of disinterested love� There are moments when Rastignac himself reaches a Marxist recognition of the economic base of his enchantment: When he arrives at the Countess Anastasie de Restaud’s Parisian residence without a suitable carriage, where “the scornful glances of the servants” make him “sharply aware of his inferiority” (44) and the Countess cuts him after a social faux-pas, he suddenly begins to “[see] the world as it really [is],” and to “under[stand] that money is the ultima ratio” (64)� Faced with the arch-villain Vautrain’s cynical account of moral value (“Honesty will get you nowhere,” “there are no principles, just things that happen” [85; 89]), Rastignac experiences a moment of redemptive moral clarity worthy of Dickens’ Pip: “No� I want to work nobly, purely; I want to work night and day, I want a fortune I’ve earned” (91)� But in the world of Balzac such moral principles remain too abstract to be integrated into people’s lived experience� 57 As the narrator puts it, only spiritual virtuosi - hermits who “constantly rejoice at the sound of infinity speaking” - can resist “society’s rules and regulations” (169)� Since Rastignac 55 Père Goriot, ed� Peter Brooks (NY: Norton, 1994) 26� 56 Karl Marx� Das Kapital, Band 1, Erster Abschnitt, in Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, Werke, Band 23, S� 49-98, 85� 57 As Moretti points out “Balzacian ‘realism’ is founded on the rejection of sharp contrasts� Aware that the way of the world will never change at any given stage, it sees all conflict as a necessary and yet transitory passage, which should never become bind- 166 g ünter l eyPoldt is neither a hermit-virtuoso nor particularly good at intellectualist moral reflection, 58 the “enchantment” of social power is a performative reality that he cannot escape� The further he moves into the sphere of aristocratic glamour, the more he is affected by the differing phenomenologies of higher and lower social spaces: The shabby boarding house in which he resides increasingly revolts him, the high-cultural splendor of the Parisian nobility makes him dizzy with awe and desire� Père Goriot emphasizes the difference between theoretical knowledge about power and the affective intensities through which power is felt� Similar to Carrie’s affairs with Drouet and Hurstwood, Rastignac’s upwardly directed courtships are neither in bad faith nor entirely the result of a rationalist scheme� They arise at least partly from intuitive moves towards power, while the moral implications of these moves are always, to a degree, over Rastignac’s head� 59 Though he knows that seducing the wealthy Baroness de Nucingen (the less ruthless of Goriot’s two daughters) is crucial to his social success, Rastignac is also genuinely overwhelmed by the Baroness’s charms, and as their courtship unfolds, he is drawn both to her beauty and the social power she represents� 60 In Dreiser’s characterization of Carrie as a sensitive but more or less unreflective artist-figure, strategic motivations seem even less important: “reason had very little part in this,” Dreiser insists� As a “dreamer” who simply “follows” “the sound of beauty,” Carrie “instinctively” moves towards the spheres of Chicago that seem to offer “more of loveliness than she had ever known” (SC 353)� Carrie is drawn towards an atmosphere in which power, wealth, beauty, and higher values seem to become indistinguishable or reinforce one another through spatial contact� There is thus a difference, according to Dreiser, between the mystical “desire” that propels Carrie forward (like “a variable wind” “filling our sails for some far-off port”) and the “selfishness” that makes people move more “unchangingly, unpoetically” in a certain direction� 61 ing: ‘there are no principles, there are only circumstances�’ In structural terms: to be realistic means to deny the existence of stable and clearly opposed paradigms” (The Way of the World: The Bildungsroman in European Culture [London: Verso, 1987] 153)� 58 “Damn, I can’t make heads or tails of it,” he says about his moral conundrum� “I don’t want to try thinking it through: the heart’s a good enough guide” (91)� 59 “Without bothering to know exactly how he knew, he already understood that to rise to the top in this world’s complex play of forces, he needed to hitch himself to some vehicle in motion” (101)� 60 The attraction of beauty and power overlap to the point of becoming indistinguishable: “By the time he reached his doorstep, Rastignac had developed a warm passion for Madame de Nucingen, who seemed to him slender and slim, as delicate as a swallow� The intoxicating sweetness of her eyes, the silky softness of her skin (under which it seemed to him he could see the blood flowing), the enchanting sound of her voice, her blond hair - he remembered everything, and perhaps his long walk, which kept his own blood circulating vigorously, helped his fascination develop” (101)� 61 SC 358 - this passage was cut by Dreiser and Arthur Henry before publication� What Carrie Wants 167 7. Higher Atmospheres Both Balzac and Dreiser provide remarkable ethnographic descriptions of how privileged social settings can strike us as “higher atmospheres�” According to Gernot Böhme, atmospheres are perceived affectively rather than intellectually, as part of an aesthetic experience (in a pre-Kantian sense, aisthesis, perception)� 62 When Rastignac and Carrie move up through the social spheres of Paris and Chicago, their feeling of being dazzled by something larger than themselves brings to mind the way we respond to spaces of consecrated culture� Arguably the attraction of these spaces (the “aura” of an art museum, the “presence” of a canonical literary text, the “radiance” of a priceless collection piece or a memorial object) is inseparable from a sense of how they connect to the “charismatic” centers within society’s cultural topography of values� 63 Entering charismatic space can feel like moving closer towards “fullness” in Charles Taylor’s sense, a “place of power” that is experienced as a “motivating intensity” because it embodies (experientially, performatively) “some activity, or condition” where “life is fuller, richer, deeper, more worth while, more admirable, more what it should be�” 64 For Taylor fullness is not just a configuration of moral ideas, beliefs, or truth-claims; the most abstract values come in a material shape that affects us with a sense of higher or lower atmospheric attraction� In Webb Keane’s example, you cannot have the quality of “redness” in abstraction, without some materiality that “inescapably binds it to some other qualities as well, which can be contingent but real factors in its social life�” For instance, “redness in an apple comes along in a spherical shape, light weight, sweet flavor, a tendency to rot, and so forth�” 65 Webb’s image of how the materiality of “red” might change if it comes bundled with a rotting apple seems a pertinent metaphor for the “social biographies” of concepts, things, practices, or places, which can become radiant, banal, or obnoxious depending on the material economies in which they are embedded� Martina Löw makes a similar point 62 In Böhme’s example: the buzz of an insect at night might first be experienced as an atmospheric feeling of ominous expectation� The more we recognize the menacing sound more distinctly as the buzz of a mosquito, we gradually move from an affective sense towards a conceptual meaning� Once we “switch on the light and localize the mosquito, the atmospheric quality that was at first sensed breaks down and shrivels up into the mosquito-thing, as an object of perception” (Aisthetik: Vorlesungen über Ästhetik als allgemeine Wahrnehmungslehre [München: Fink, 2001] 42)� The initial atmospheric sense (something ominous) shifts towards a different, conceptually sharpened atmospheric sense (a mosquito in the room)� To say that atmospheres emerge from preinterpretive experience is to suggest that they are felt rather than rationally deduced, but it does not imply that such experiences are natural or universal (see Martina Löw, “The Constitution of Space,” The European Journal of Social Theory 11�1 [2011]: 25-49; 46-9) On the problems of the term “pre-interpretive” see John Searle, The Social Construction of Reality (NY: Free Press, 1995) 133-4� 63 Edward Shils, The Constitution of Society (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1982) sec II� 64 Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2007) 5� 65 Webb Keane, “Signs Are Not the Garb of Meaning: On the Social Analysis of Material Things,” Materiality, ed� Daniel Miller (Durham: Duke UP, 2006) 182-205; 188� 168 g ünter l eyPoldt when she suggests that the atmosphere of a place is shaped by how we perceive the people and things that are “spaced” within or connected to this place� 66 It is hard to separate the experiential atmosphere of an art-museum visit (our feeling of expansion, awe, pleasure, and intensity, say) from our practical sense of the social materialities to which this museum connects (including the social prestige and the economic wealth that attach to the bodies and things that circulate through high-cultural space)� From Carrie’s viewpoint, the sphere where people wear “fine raiment” in “elegant surroundings” is experienced as a higher, happier, more sacred atmosphere, where people “see[m] to be contented” (SC 353)� On the one hand, Carrie perceives Hurstwood intuitively: he “radiate[s] an atmosphere which suffuse[s] her being” and gives her a sense of transformative power: “she brightened under his influence until all her best side was exhibited. She felt that she was more clever with him” (SC 84)� 67 On the other hand, Carrie’s atmospheric perception of Hurstwood is charged by the aesthetic perception of social power: “In this conversation” Carrie does not hear Hurstwood’s words but “the voices of the things” he “represent[s]� How suave was the counsel of his appearance! How feelingly did his superior state speak for itself! ” (SC 84-5)� To suggest that atmospheres are rooted in social configurations is not, however, the same as reducing them to aesthetic illusions whose deeper reality consists in sociological “hard facts” in Philip Fisher’s sense� 68 Focusing on certain “hard facts” about socioeconomic hierarchy is one kind of practice; experiencing an atmosphere as higher or more sacred is another; but it is not clear how both practices relate to one another� Just as our attraction to museum space does not simply go away once we realize its elitist context or its economic foundations, the more cynical analysis of a love relationship to a socially more es- 66 According to Löw: “The external effects of social goods or people [connected to a certain space] do not remain discrete, they develop their own potentiality in joint arrangement� To bring it to a point, the concurrent perception of various external effects generates specific atmospheres, which - as in all perceptual processes - requires active attention� Atmospheres are accordingly the external effect of social goods and human beings realized perceptually in their spatial ordering� This means that atmospheres arise through the perception of interactions between people and/ or from the external effect of social goods in their arrangement” (“The Constitution of Space” 44)� 67 The “words” that Carrie and Hurstwood exchange during their courtship only “dimly represent” the “surging feelings and desires” that “lie behind” their conversation� In Dreiser’s metaphor, the atmosphere of the conversation relates to what is actually being said like “the low music” of an “orchestra” to “the dramatic incident which it is used to cover” (SC 84-5)� 68 In Hard Facts: Setting and Form in the American Novel (1985), Fisher suggests that the city in the naturalist city novel is a “privileged setting” with which the US literary imagination displaces and explores the “objectification of the self” within consumer culture. This objectification would then constitute the “hard fact” at the root of Sister Carrie, in a similar way that the killing of the Native-Americans and the institution of slavery form the hard-factual basis of such privileged settings as the wilderness in the historical novel and the homestead in the sentimental novel� What Carrie Wants 169 tablished person need not turn this relationship into a pseudo-reality� 69 Even Rastignac - whose name has become a symbol of the ruthless parvenu - shifts between two states of mind: There is Rastignac the arriviste, who in the famous closing scene of the novel envisages his conquest of Paris, and Rastignac the sensitive dreamer who lets his “heart be the guide” and intuitively drifts toward power� 8. Acquired Tastes Both Balzac and Dreiser are interested in how our perception of an atmosphere as “higher” or “lower” is shaped by our social biographies� If the atmosphere of a place depends on how we perceive the bodies and things that are “spaced” around this place, the perceptive schemes for this need to be acquired and trained� 70 For example, at the beginning of his upward journey Rastignac knows about distinctions between aristocratic ranks, but he does not experience them in any meaningful way� He gathers that the Vicomtesse de Beauséant, his tutor figure and benefactress, is “an aristocrat among aristocrats,” but when she invites him for the first time to one of her salons, Rastignac has an inadequate sense of orientation: All distinctions seem to blur, and the higher and lower nobilities appear to him an undifferentiated “horde of Parisian deities” (28), all equally “dazz[ling]” and desirable� As Rastignac habitualizes himself with the topographies of social power, the Vicomtesse’s charisma affects him more intensely (“He could have groveled at her feet, he wished he had some demonic power with which to carry her off” [97])� The more Rastignac attunes himself to the aristocratic field, the more successful his moves become� 71 69 See Bruce Robbins’ summary of how cynical and more generous interpretations of upwardly mobile attraction always tend to be in tension: “We have all seen many versions and degrees of the intimacy that, as in Silence of the Lambs, brings together a younger person on the way up with another who is socially established, more powerful, perhaps inclined to help only for a price� We have probably all vacillated between cynical and less cynical readings of such intimacy� We know that social climbing seeks shelter in love stories, where it can hide its true colors. What better camouflage for the pursuit of social advantages than to make them seem the unintended result of pairing up with the boss or the boss’s daughter, hence as natural and innocent as falling in love? This is just a love story, isn’t it? Do we really have to look under the hood? On the other hand, who can keep from entertaining the mean-spirited hypothesis that the drive toward the final tender embrace is fuelled by high-octane ambition? Where relationships like these are concerned, cynicism and sentimental self-forgetfulness seem equally unavoidable� Yet neither can satisfactorily account for the erotic component in upward mobility” (Upward Mobility and the Common Good: Towards a Literary History of the Welfare State [Princeton: Princeton UP, 2007] xiii)� 70 Martina Löw, “The Constitution of Space” 46-9� 71 Adjusting to the field enables Rastignac to have a realistic view about his relation to the Vicomtesse� Sensing that she is too far removed from his sphere to become his lover, he seeks her help as a “fairy Godmother,” letting her contact charisma render him attractive to the Baroness de Nucingen� 170 g ünter l eyPoldt Carrie is similarly overwhelmed, upon her arrival in Chicago, by the city’s glamour� Her orientation within Chicago’s social landscape is still so vague that the ascending spheres of Drouet, Hurstwood, and beyond dissolve into a diffuse field of transcendence. From Carrie’s relatively low social position, even the most quotidian commercial merchandise seem infused with the phenomenology of the sacred� 9. Carrie and the Voice of the Commodity Carrie’s attraction to things, which Dreiser portrays in some of the most iconic passages in the novel, has been considered key evidence for the arresteddevelopment thesis� Critics usually point to the famous seduction scene in which Carrie is tempted by the siren voice of department-store wares: “Fine clothes” “spoke” to her “tenderly and Jesuitically for themselves” (“‘Ah, such little feet,’ said the leather of the soft new shoes; ‘how effectively I cover them� What a pity they should ever want my aid’”), and when Carrie “came within earshot of their pleading, desire in her bent a willing ear” (SC 72)� According to the arrested-development thesis, the call of the commodity symbolizes the logic of self-objectification that contributes to Carrie’s emptiness and Hurstwood’s death� 72 Such a reading, however, relies on a distinction between commodities and sacred objects that seems too sharp for Dreiser’s (and Balzac’s) ethnographies of higher atmospheres� The point here is not only to recall (with Igor Kopytoff and Arjun Appadurai) that the borders between “commodified” and “singularized” things might shift from one context to the next 73 but also that commodities can possess several simultaneous higher and lower social lives whose materialities might interact and reinforce one another in complex ways� The shoes and lace collars speaking to Carrie have a profane use value (as objects that can be desired, used, exhausted, and discarded), but they also embody for her a more enduring, mystical, transubstantiated materiality that invokes contact with a higher order� Just because department store merchandise can inhabit a lower economy of short-term desires (fetishism in the Freudian sense) does not mean that they cannot at the same time be bundled with “higher” or long-term values beyond the ordinary - the most banal commercial product, as modern advertisers know too well, can become a singularity by being linked to an imagined space above the quotidian� Carrie “was much affected by the remarkable displays 72 According to Fisher, Carrie’s desire for clothes is homologous to the commodification of herself and Hurstwood; that is, people are portrayed in terms of a “life history” of “products and objects which are best when new or fresh and then become worn out and discarded� The life history of a shirt is one of continual decline� All goods are used up and replaced� Within Sister Carrie relationships, houses, cities, and especially living situations are discarded in the way clothing might be” (Hard Facts 174-5)� 73 Igor Kopytoff, “The Cultural Biography of Things: Commoditization as Process,” The Social Life of Things, Ed� Arjun Appadurai (Cambridge: CUP, 1996) 64-94; Appadurai, “Introduction: Commodities and the Politics of Value,” The Social Life of Things 1-63� See my “Singularity and the Literary Market,” New Literary History 45�1 (Winter 2014): 71-88� What Carrie Wants 171 of trinkets, dress, goods, stationery, and jewelry,” not because she regressed into a sensualist stage of thing addiction (as Trina in Norris’ McTeague [1899]) but because these objects embodied for her a higher world, so long, that is, as “she felt keenly the fact that not any of these things were in the range of her purchase” (SC 16)� 10. Atmospheres as Shifting Social Horizons: Carrie and Balzac’s Lost Illusions The Chicago section of Sister Carrie has been read as a “social comedy of mobility” based on a “static” social hierarchy through which Carrie ascends (Fisher 170)� But both Carrie’s and Hurstwood’s selves are functions of social position: their habitus changes from one move to the next� Upon her arrival in Chicago (when “books” and “knowledge” are still “beyond her interest,” and her countrified lower-middle-class body lacks “intuitive graces” [2]), Carrie is still dazzled by department store things, and impressed by Drouet’s socioeconomic station� Her restlessness arises not because she wants more of the same commodities but because her increasing experience of city life under Drouet’s tutorship “double[s]” her “knowledge of grace” and transforms her into “a girl of considerable taste” (SC 75)� In contrast to Dickens’ Pip, who is able to return to a natural horizon of values suitable both to his former life as an apprentice country artisan and his more recent habitus as an white-collar clerk, Carrie’s social biography has transformed her into a different person� Her horizon of charismatic desire recedes into the middle-class world represented by Hurstwood� Hurstwood, too, has a history of social mobility: Setting out as a lowermiddle-class “barkeeper in a commonplace saloon,” he advanced to the more prestigious position as manager in the fashionable Fitzgerald and Moy’s� His talent in “making a good impression” has helped him to make the most of his job (as a manager without “financial control”): he is on speaking terms with those “rich individuals” who frequent Fitzgerald and Moy’s, the “hundreds of actors, merchants, politicians, and the general run of successful characters about town�” While the wealthiest of his upper-middle-class patrons are beyond his reach (“too rich, too famous, or too successful, with whom he could not attempt any familiarity of address”) (SC 32), from Drouet’s perspective Hurstwood comes across as “a very successful and well-known man about town” (SC 31)� Carrie experiences his social power atmospherically, as “a drag in the direction of honour” (94)� With the move to New York, however, this constellation changes significantly: “Whatever a man like Hurstwood could be in Chicago,” Dreiser says, within the grander scale of social life in New York, “Hurstwood was nothing” (SC 205)� Stripped of his social clout and wealth he drifts towards failure and destitution at the same time that Carrie becomes a commercially successful actress� As Carrie becomes the sort of person that can afford to patronize Fitzgerald and Moy’s, her sense of orientation shifts: Earning more money 172 g ünter l eyPoldt than she knows how to spend, the world of department stores and fashionable bars become part of the ordinary� This enables Robert Ames to reroute her desire towards a new horizon (Arnoldian culture) for which Hurstwood’s middle-brow tastes provide no meaningful frame of reference anymore� 74 The context-sensitivity of charisma is a major theme in another novel that Ames assigned for Carrie to read, Balzac’s The Great Man from the Provinces, or Lost Illusions (1837-1843)� 75 The first part of the novel centers on the encounter of two exceptionally brilliant provincials who meet in the city of Angoulême� Marie-Louise Anaïs de Bargeton is a minor aristocrat admired by the countrified social elites for her taste in music and literature. Even though her potential for true cultural sophistication was hampered by the mediocrity of her social environment, she is considered “the social queen of Angoulême,” 76 and the family residence in which she conducts her “salon,” the “Hôtel de Bargeton,” is perceived as a kind of “Louvre” (46)� Lucien Chardon is a young and aspiring poet from an unprivileged background: as the son of an impoverished apothecary and a midwife in a stigmatized part of town (the Houmeau) he would find it hard to gain entry even in the middle-class circles of Angoulême’s social center (the Vieille-Ville)� But when he is presented to Madame de Bargeton as a homegrown “budding genius” [grande homme futur]” (48) who might one day outshine the likes of Victor Hugo, Lucien becomes an instant success� His poetic imagination stands out among the literari and high society that frequent Angoulême’s salons� Longing to be in “touch with genius [connaître le génie]” (48), Madame de Bargeton is “struck by Lucien’s exceptionally good looks, his shy demeanor and his voice” and sees in him simply “poetry incarnate” (50)� Lucien in turn is smitten by the “womanly” charms of the thirty-six-year-old aristocrat and “intoxicated” by her “conversation” (50)� They form a “pure” (platonic) love relationship: the short-term attraction of more immediate desires or pragmatic uses (Lucien Chardon as a beautiful and graceful younger lover, Louise de Bargeton as a stepping stone to material gain) are overshadowed by the lovers’ more spiritual invocation of contact with a higher order� Lucien’s beauty seems all the more alluring to Louise because as a poetic genius he embodies privileged access to ontological vision� Louise’s attractiveness, on the other hand, is enhanced by social distance: “intimidated by this woman’s high rank” Lucien experiences a “fear, hope, and despair” that deepens his love for her (53)� 74 Renouncing both commercial theater and sentimental women’s fiction, Carrie catches up, as it were, with Dreiser’s sense of professional taste: “In her comfortable chambers at the Waldorf, Carrie was reading at this time ‘Père Goriot,’ which Ames had recommended to her� It was so strong, and Ames’s mere recommendation had so aroused her interest, that she caught nearly the full sympathetic significance of it. For the first time, it was being borne in upon her how silly and worthless had been her earlier reading, as a whole” (SC 349)� 75 See p� 368, a passage that Dreiser and Arthur Henry cut from the typescript� 76 Balzac, Lost Illusions, ed� Herbert Hunt (Oxford: Penguin, 2004) 47� What Carrie Wants 173 In the world of Great Expectations Lucien’s awe of social rank would count as a less noble emotion than Louise’s desire to be in touch with poetic genius� In Balzac’s fictional universe, however, the difference is not that clear: From Lucien’s low-status viewpoint the aristocratic center of Angoulême seems continuous with the cultural heights of Paris and - by extension - the higher moral and aesthetic life of the French nation� In Balzac’s terms: “For the inhabitants of L’Houmeau,” the “majesty” of the Bargeton residence (“this small-scale Louvre”) was “as remote to them as the sun itself” (46)� Social distance, in other words, can produce the phenomenology of the sacred� And from the perception of Louise, while poetic genius might seem extraterritorial to social hierarchy, the sacred has a way of embodying itself within a cultural topography, that is, a constellation of places, people, practices, and institutions that are experienced as closer or further away from a larger charismatic authority. Louise places genius with a specific poetic tradition - she imagines Lucien to “outshine Victor Hugo, the enfant sublime, Lamartine, Walter Scott and Byron” (130) - and a distinct socio-spatial figuration, the consecrating institutions and social networks in Paris� 77 Yet when the two lovers abscond to Paris, a larger world with a more powerful charismatic center, their higher atmospheres collapse like force fields unplugged from their electric source: “mutual disenchantment was setting in,” Balzac writes, for in Paris “[t]he poet was seeing life on a larger scale, and society was taking on a new aspect in Louise’s eyes” (162)� The shift in the comparative constellation is ruthless: Lucien begins to see Louise “as she was seen by the people of Paris: a tall, desiccated woman with freckled skin, faded complexion and strikingly red hair; angular, affected, pretentious, provincial of speech and above all badly dressed! ” (169)� Louise, too, is struck by the comparatively “sorry figure” (161) that Lucien cuts in the metropolis - she feels “humiliated in her love” (171), and “mortified by the little impression her handsome Lucien was making” (173)� In the company of the sophisticated Parisian literati Lucien seems “starched, stilted, stiff, and raw like the clothes he was wearing” (173). The shifting power figuration that simultaneously robs Lucien and Louise of their “illusions” (178) about one another also thrusts sublimity on Louise’s distant cousin, the prestigious Marquise d’Espard, who has ties to the Royal court and conducts a renowned salon frequented by “exceptionally illustrious people” (165)� Louise is immediately “seduced, dazzled, and fascinated” by the Marquise, whom she accepts as a tutor figure, and she wishes to become the “satellite to this star.” Lucien, too, feels the “desire” for “the protection of so lofty a person”; the Marquise strikes him with “the same impression” that Louise “had made on him in Angoulême,” and he falls “in love with her immediately” (178)� As matters 77 Locating genius in a Parisian cultural space encourages Louise to conceive of Lucien’s poetic bildung along the lines of social gentrification. To “fashion” Lucien into a “great man” means to help him to attain a suitably high-cultural habitus� Louise thus wishes to “perfect his manners” (55), turn him into a royalist (who drops his “low-class” ideals of “1793” [59]) and make him renounce his lower-middle-class father by taking on his mother’s aristocratic maiden name, de Rubempré (58)� 174 g ünter l eyPoldt stand, however, Lucien’s career resembles Hurstwood’s rather than Carrie’s: While Louise moves on to “désangoulêmer” herself rapidly and successfully, accomplishing a “metamorphosis” into Parisian sophistication so seamless that her former lover hardly recognizes her anymore, Lucien slowly tumbles towards failure� Lucien’s downfall is complex, but, like Hurstwood’s, it arguably follows from his increasing surrender to the short-term economies of pleasure and profit that undo his former allegiances to charismatic values. 78 After being abandoned by Louise and the Marquise, he at first falls on his feet, as he is received into the art-religious circle of literary Bohemians, the “Cénacle,” whose high-principled members recognize his talent and support his artistic calling� But faced with the realities of writerly poverty and the indignity of having to peddle his manuscripts in a philistine market, he gives in to the temptations of journalism (a pernicious culture industry, according to Balzac), at the same time that he begins an affair with the actress and courtesan Coralie, who induces him, in Balzac’s words, to place “sensual love above pure love, enjoyment [jouissance] above desire” (295)� Impressing his editors with an innovative and sharp-witted style of reviewing, Lucien becomes somewhat of a celebrity journalist, and this gets him invited again into the aristocratic salons� The powerful Marquise d’Espard is impressed with his “metamorphosis” (399), and offers to arrange his reunion with Louise (who is now a widow), promising to use her influence at court to get Lucien an “ordonnance” that would allow him to call himself Comte du Rubempré (via his mother’s maiden name), thus making him an eligible marriage candidate for Louise. Lucien is hugely flattered by this, and when one week later he meets Louise at another salon he senses that she is “feeling attracted once more” to him: “In a single moment Lucien and Louise had recovered their illusions about each other and were talking in friendly language” (406)� But Balzac also makes clear that living with Coralie has clouded Lucien’s higher judgment� Just as he mistakes higher and lower kinds of love, he also misreads the polite flattery of his aristocratic hosts and overestimates his position (falsely assuming that “his success in this fine and fashionable world” of the aristocratic salon “was no less great than in the world of journalism”)� Thus at once “intoxicated with vanity” and “intoxicated with Coralie” (406) Lucien “remains undecided” until Louise leaves “with an unappeasable desire for vengeance” (405)� According to Franco Moretti, Lucien fails because he miscalculates: the “illusion” that “destroys” him is not about “hope” but about “not knowing the true value of things�” This puts him not “in contradiction with market society; ” it makes him merely “economically irrational” (he “initially sells himself cheap, and afterwards, when it is too late, asks for too high a price”) (167)� But given Balzac’s distinction between higher and lower desires, Lucien’s miscalculation is linked to his drifting, his choice of Coralie over “the pure idealistic love [l’amour pure, exalté] he had felt for Madame de 78 Jacques Noiray, “Mémoire, oubli, illusion dans Illusion Perdues: L’exemple de Lucien de Rubempré,” L’Année balzacienne 8 (2007�1): 185-196� What Carrie Wants 175 Bargeton” (294), and his embrace of the life-style of a “viveur” whose main occupation is partying and gambling� He miscalculates, in other words, because his “willpower” is “weakened by the sloth which made him indifferent to the fine resolutions taken at moments when he had an inkling of his real situation” (411)� 79 When at the end of the sequel novel, Splendeurs et misères des courtisanes (1838-47), Lucien, ready to hang himself in his prison cell, looks out of the window into the “primitive beauty” of Paris’ medieval architecture “with a sense of wonder,” Balzac symbolically separates his higher and lower selves: Lucien now becomes “two Luciens, one Lucien the poet” who is in touch with the higher life of the nation (imaginarily “wandering through the Middle Ages, through the arcades and under the turrets of Saint Louis IX” at the Conciergerie), and “one Lucien ready for suicide,” 80 who, like Hurstwood, has succumbed to the low-economic cycles of short-term desire, exhaustion, and ruin� In Dreiser’s unabridged typescript, Carrie talks about “the sadness of the failure of Lucien de Rubem[p]ré,” and Ames rejoins that he was too obsessed with “love and fortune” (368)� Lucien’s fate functions as a cautionary tale� What if Carrie should tire of the rigorous demands of tragic acting, descend into a more pleasurable, less demanding culture industry, or get erotically entangled with the lower pleasure of sensual love (like Lucien’s entanglement with Coralie, or Hurstwood’s with Carrie)? 81 Might her aesthetic orientation be similarly clouded and induce her to give up her rocking chair for short-term satisfactions? But Carrie is “no sensualist, longing to drowse sleepily in the lap of luxury” (SC 55), and Dreiser suggests that her artistic sensibilities are better attuned than Lucien’s to the atmospheres of society’s charismatic center� 79 He regularly attends the aristocratic salons to which he is invited, but the “strain of Parisian conversation and gambling absorbed the few ideas, the little strength which his excesses left him,” and he “loses the “lucidity of mind and cool-headedness needed for looking about him and displaying the consummate tact which upstarts must employ at every instant” (411)� Lucien’s former ambition to rise is now reduced to his longing for the ordinance granting him an aristocratic name: “Thrilled by the glamour of aristocracy, the poet felt unspeakable mortification at hearing himself called Chardon when he saw that the salons only admitted men who bore high-sounding names with titles to set them off” (408)� He starts to take riding lessons and develops a “pride of caste” and “aristocratic vanity” that alienates his friends, while the real aristocracy (including the Marquise and Louise) begin to manipulate him with the prospect of making him “one of us” (pretending to further his hopes for the right to call himself Comte de Rubempré) (456)� 80 Splendeurs et misères des courtisanes (Paris: Gallimard, 1973) 533� 81 As Donald Pizer points out, “Love and romance are not involved in [Hurstwood’s] response to Carrie; he is drawn rather by what an attractive young woman represents to a middle-aged, sexually jaded husband - an opportunity to regain his own youth and freshness by the sexual conquest and possession of a fresh young girl” (“The Problem of American Literary Naturalism and Theodore Dreiser’s Sister Carrie,” American Literary Realism 32 [Fall 1999] 9)� 176 g ünter l eyPoldt Works Cited Abrams, M�H� Natural Supernaturalism� NY: Norton, 1971� Balzac, Honoré de� Lost Illusions� Ed� Herbert Hunt� Oxford: Penguin, 2004� -----� Père Goriot� Ed� Peter Brooks� NY: Norton, 1994� -----� Splendeurs et misères des courtisanes� Paris: Gallimard, 1973� Barrineau, Nancy Watner� “Dreiser’s debt to Balzac�” American Literary Realism 24�2 (1992): 70-80� Barrish, Phillip� The Cambridge Introduction to American Literary Realism� Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2011� Bernhard, Thomas� Alte Meister. Komödie� Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1985� Bisanz-Prakken, Marian� Gustav Klimt. Der Beethovenfries: Geschichte, Funktion und Bedeutung� Salzburg: Residenz, 1977� Böhme, Hartmut� Aisthetik: Vorlesungen über Ästhetik als allgemeine Wahrnehmungslehre� München: Fink, 2001� Bourne, Randolph� “Desire as Hero,” The New Republic (January 29, 1916): 5-6� Carlyle, Thomas� On Heroes, Hero-worship, & the Heroic in History� Ed� Michael K� Goldberg et al� Berkeley: U of California P, 1993� -----� “State of German Literature�” Edinburgh Review 46�92 (Oct� 1829): 304-51� Celenza, Anna� “Music and the Vienna Secession: 1897-1902�” Music in Art 29�1�2 (Spring-Fall 2004): 203-212� Davidson, Cathy N�, and Arnold E� Davidson� “Carrie’s Sisters: The Popular Prototypes for Dreiser’s Heroine�” Modern Fiction Studies 23 (Autumn 1977): 396-407� Den Tandt, Christoph� “American Literary Naturalism�” A Companion to American Fiction, 1865-1914� Ed� Robert Lamb, G�R� Thompson� (London: Blackwell, 2009) 96-118� Dickens, Charles� Great Expectations� Ed� Edgar Rosenberg� NY: Norton, 1999� Dreiser, Theodore� The Genius� Ed� Clare Eby� Urbana: U of Illinois P, 2008� -----� Newspaper Days: An Autobiography� Ed� T� D� Nostwich� Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 1991� -----� “[March 1896],” Theodore Dreiser’s Ev’ry Month� Ed� Nancy Warner Barrineau� Athens: U of Georgia P, 1996� 53-4� -----� Sister Carrie� Ed� Donald Pizer� NY: Norton, 3rd edition, 2006� -----� The Stoic� Cleveland: The World, 1947� Dwight, John Sullivan� “Musical Review�” Harbinger 1 (1845): 13� Fielder, Leslie� Life and Death in the American Novel� Normal, IL: Dalkey Archive, 1997� Fisher, Philip� Hard Facts: Setting and Form in the American Novel� Oxford: Oxford UP, 1985� Flaubert, Gustave� Madame Bovary, ed� Margaret Cohen� NY: Norton, 2005� Fluck, Winfried� “Crime, Guilt, and Subjectivity in Dreiser, Mead, and Lacan�” Amerikastudien/ American Studies 58�2 (2013): 235-58� -----� Romance with America: Essays on Culture, Literature, and American Studies� Heidelberg: Winter, 2009� Freedman, Jonathan� The Temple of Culture: Assimilation and Anti-Semitism in Literary Anglo-America� NY: Oxford UP, 2000� Gelfant, Blanche H� “What More Can Carrie Want? Naturalistic Ways of Consuming Women�” Cambridge Companion to American Realism and Naturalism� Ed� Donald Pizer� Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1995� 178-210� What Carrie Wants 177 Girard, René� “Triangular Desire�” Deceit, Desire, and the Novel: Self and Other in Literary Structure� Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1976� 1-52� Hegel, G�W�F� Lectures on the Philosophy of World History� Transl� H�B� Nisbet� Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1975� Hevesi, Ludwig, “Sezession [18� April 1902]�” Acht Jahre Sezession (März 1997-Juni 1905): Kritik - Polemik - Chronik� Wien: Carl Konegen, 1906� 390-4� Hoffmann, E�T�A� E.T.A. Hoffmann’s Musical Writings� Ed� David Charlton� Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1989� Horowitz, Daniel� Consuming Pleasures: Intellectuals and Popular Culture in the Postwar World� Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 2012� Horowitz, Joseph� Wagner Nights: An American History� Berkeley: U of California P, 1994� Howard, June� Form and History in American Literary Naturalism� Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1985� Hungerford, Amy� Postmodern Belief: American Literature and Religion since 1960� Princeton: Princeton UP, 2010� Kaplan, Amy� The Social Construction of American Realism� Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1988� Karnes, Kevin C� A Kingdom Not of This World: Wagner, the Arts, and Utopian Visions in Fin-de-Siècle Vienna� NY: Oxford UP, 2013� -----. “Wagner, Klimt, and the Metaphysics of Creativity in ‘fin-de-siècle’ Vienna.” Journal of the American Musicological Society 62� 3 (Fall 2009): 647-654� Keane, Webb� “Signs Are Not the Garb of Meaning: On the Social Analysis of Material Things�” Materiality� Ed� Daniel Miller� Durham: Duke UP, 2006� 182-205� Klimt, Gustav� Beethovenfries� Wien: Secession, 2002� Kopytoff, Igor� “The Cultural Biography of Things: Commoditization as Process�” The Social Life of Things, Ed� Arjun Appadurai� Cambridge: CUP, 1996� 64-94� Leypoldt, Günter� “Singularity and the Literary Market�” New Literary History 45�1 (Winter 2014): 71-88� Loving, Jerome� “Theodore Dreiser: Letters to Women� New Letters [Review], American Literary Realism 44�1 (Fall 2011): 84-85� Löw, Martina� “The Constitution of Space�” The European Journal of Social Theory 11�1 (2011): 25-49� Malachuck, Daniel� “Emerson’s Politics, Retranscendentalized,” A Political Companion to Ralph Waldo Emerson� Ed� Alan Levine, Daniel Malachuck� Lexington: UP of Kentucky, 2011� 265-304� McNamara, Kevin� “The Ames of the Good Society: Sister Carrie and Social Engineering�” Criticism 34�2 (Spring 1992): 217-35� Michaels, Walter Benn� “Sister Carrie’s Popular Economy�” Critical Inquiry 7�2 (Winter 1980): 373-90� -----� “Fictitious Dealing: A Reply to Leo Bersani�” Critical Inquiry 8�1 (Autumn 1981): 165-171� Morretti, Franco� The Way of the World: The Bildungsroman in European Culture London: Verso, 1987� Noiray, Jacques� “Mémoire, oubli, illusion dans Illusion Perdues: L’exemple de Lucien de Rubempré�” L’Année balzacienne 8 (2007�1): 185-196� Pater, Walter� The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry� 4th Edition� Oxford: Oxford UP, 1986� 178 g ünter l eyPoldt Petrey� Sandy� “The Language of Realism, the Language of False Consciousness: A Reading of Sister Carrie�” Novel (Winter 1977): 101-113� Pizer, Donald� The Novels of Theodore Dreiser� Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1976� -----� “The Problem of American Literary Naturalism and Theodore Dreiser’s Sister Carrie�” American Literary Realism 32 (Fall 1999): 1-11� Riesman, David� The Lonely Crowd. New Haven: Yale UP, 1950� Robbins, Bruce� Upward Mobility and the Common Good: Towards a Literary History of the Welfare State (Princeton: Princeton UP, 2007)� Schleiermacher, Friedrich� Über die Religion: Reden and die Gebildeten unter ihren Verächtern� Berlin: de Gruyter, 2001� Schopenhauer, Arthur� The World as Will and Representation� 2 vols� Trans� E�F�J� Payne� NY: Dover, 1966� Searle, John� The Social Construction of Reality� NY: Free Press, 1995� Shils, Edward� The Constitution of Society� Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1982� Symons, Arthur� “The Decadent Movement in Literature�” Harper’s New Monthly Magazine 87�522 (November 1893): 858-869� -----� The Symbolist Movement in Literature� London: Heinemann, 1899� Taylor, Charles� A Secular Age� Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2007� Terrien, Nicole, and Yvan Leclerc� Madame Bovary: le bovarysme et la littérature de langue anglaise� Mont-Saint-Aignan: Publications de l’université de Rouen, 2004� Wagner, Richard� Dichtungen und Schriften, Ed� Dieter Borchmeyer, 10 vols� Frankfurt: Insel, 1983� Walcutt, Charles C� American Literary Naturalism: A Divided Stream� Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1956� Wilsdon, Claire. “Klimt’s Beethoven Frieze: Goethe, Tempelkunst, and the Fulfillment of Wishes�” Art History 19�1 (March 1996): 44-73�