Feminist Thing Theory in Sister Carrie

Abstract

Feminist Thing Theory in Sister Carrie Tracy Lemaster (bio) Sister Carrie employs a ubiquitous rhetoric of "things," using the word thing and its compounds something, anything, and everything more than a thousand times. The term's placement is as prominent as its repetition, the term appearing within the first page and a half of every single chapter. Yet critics have not looked at Dreiser's rhetorical preoccupation with the word thing other than through passing critiques of his overall "tedious repetition of words" (Leibowitz xvi). Accounts of Dreiser's "relentless repetition" (Matthiessen 85) are often coupled with references to his seeming sense of the insufficiency of his linguistic medium, as in his comments in Sister Carrie that "words are but vague shadows of the volumes we mean" (6) and that "[p]eople in general attach too much importance to words" (88). Dreiser's supposed uncertainty about the efficacy and interpretative power of language and his skepticism about being able "to give authoritative shape to words" (Poirier 239) unfairly frames his rhetorical strategies as passive report. Rather than merely contributing to the monotony of his style, Dreiser's use of thing becomes an important means of characterization. What we might call "thing rhetoric" documents Carrie's development both as an actress and as a "stand-in for the figure of the writer" (Hochman 57) through her gradual appropriation of Dreiser's authorial voice. When Carrie employs this rhetoric, she challenges woman's social objectification and commodification, as is shown in a reading of the novel in terms of feminist thing theory. "It strikes to the heart of all life, animate and inanimate": Thing Theories Arguably the creator of thing theory for literary studies, Bill Brown challenges the assumed mute and self-evident status of the object by demonstrating how the animate and inanimate reciprocally shape, mimic, and [End Page 41] occupy one another in instances where "things seem slightly human and humans seem slightly thing-like" (Sense 9).1 By asking "why and how we use objects to make meaning, to make or re-make ourselves, to organize our anxieties and affections, to sublimate our fears and shape our fantasies" (4), Brown raises questions relevant for Sister Carrie. As Caren Town observes, in Dreiser's works "locations and objects have become personified and people objectified. … Dreiser has invested a great deal in his descriptions of the material world. … [I]f the characters themselves are inarticulate, bewildered, or mistaken, then the things surrounding them must do the work instead. [Thus] objects create instead of represent self " (44). Town's Lacanian analysis of Carrie's self-formation in relation to her mirror is one study among many interested in a single object or a set of object relations in the novel. Brown himself has addressed how "Dreiser stands out among American realists and naturalists as the writer most devoted to things: to the detailed rendering of streets, hotels and restaurants and office buildings, magnificent mansions and squalid flats, shoes and scarves and jackets and skirts" ("Matter" 84), and he goes on to describe windows in Sister Carrie as "an optical mechanism that generates a dialectic of proximity and distance which structures desire" (88). However, this traditional thing-theory approach does not account for how Dreiser's thing rhetoric adds dimensions to objects beyond what mere descriptions achieve. As Alan Trachtenburg argues, because "Dreiser's reverence for the world of objects is so great that at various times it seems as if he tries to transmute the word into the object itself," the relationships between materiality, representation, and signification are so enmeshed in Sister Carrie as to produce the effect of the "thingness of words and the wordness (or articulateness) of things" (Trachtenburg 101). Brown addresses the relevance of thing theory to gender only in a brief discussion of how woman as "the priestess of the temple of consumption" (quoting Charlotte Perkins Gilman) implicates the man "harnessed" by domestic goods (quoting Henry David Thoreau) (Sense 24).2 In contrast to Brown, feminist thing theorists, recognizing the political in the personal, investigate "an aesthetics of everyday life to ponder questions about gender" (Lloyd xiv), including questions about women's marginalization from democratic processes and their...