Theodore Dreiser and the Concept of the Social

Abstract

Theodore Dreiser and the Concept of the Social Jude Davies (bio) As far as the eye could see were carriages, the one great social diversion of Chicago, because there was otherwise so little opportunity for many to show that they had means. The social forces were not as yet clear or harmonious. Jingling harnesses of nickel, silver, and even plated gold were the sign manual of social hope, if not achievement. —Dreiser, The Titan 18. [“]Our family wasn’t ever in society . . . and I haven’t been much of anything except a slave . . . [”] —Dreiser, “Will You Walk into My Parlor?” 289. Dreiser’s fiction accords immense explicatory force to something, or some things, called “society” and the “social.”1 But what exactly do these terms mean to Dreiser? While his texts are now often read as perceptive cultural histories of American society, what often remains unconsidered is their interrogation of the “social” as a concept. In this essay I make a case for the interest and originality of Dreiser’s interrogation of notions of the social, first by reference to some key texts, and then by showing how during the twentieth century this feature of his writing became a battleground for rival conceptualizations of American society. The titles of Dreiser’s eight novels—Sister Carrie, Jennie Gerhardt, The Financier, The Titan, The “Genius”, An American Tragedy, The Bulwark, and The Stoic—suggest that they take as their quantum the individual. (Partial exceptions are The Titan, whose title refers initially to the city of Chicago and is only conferred on protagonist Frank Cowperwood late in the novel, [End Page 45] and An American Tragedy, which is nevertheless animated by Dreiser’s emotional sympathy with its protagonist Clyde Griffiths.) Still, it is the most socially oriented title that is regarded as his most successful novel, and epithets such as “sister,” “financier,” “bulwark,” and “stoic” signal the imbrication of individuals in society. Thus cued, we could read the above passages as making a typically Dreiserian gesture towards the notion that society acts as some kind of conditioning environment through which human narratives can be explained, as perhaps biology would in some notional form of literary naturalism. Thus The Titan presents Chicago in the 1870s and 1880s as a relatively undeveloped society and therefore a site hospitable to the ambitions of financier Frank Cowperwood, newly released from a prison sentence for embezzlement served in the more socially stable and therefore exclusive Philadelphia. By contrast Imogene Carle, a character in the 1918 short story “Will You Walk into My Parlor?”2 gives voice to a sense of society as inescapably deterministic, exclusion from the elite equating to an almost complete negation of agency. Putting these two passages together invites readings that distinguish between forms of American society on the basis of their relative openness to individuals’ accrual of agency. With gender in mind, contemporary readers might be struck by the importance of patriarchy in restricting the scope of Carle’s autonomy. Foregrounding class, Dreiser himself thought that the building up of large fortunes had led to a closing up of American society between 1870s-80s Chicago and the New York of the 1910s where we encounter Carle. Indeed, as James Truslow Adams would go on to do, Dreiser employed an ideologically loaded sense of historical change, looking backwards past what Alan Trachtenberg calls “the incorporation of America” towards a more dynamic and unruly period (Adams 232–34). In conceptualizing the workings of society, Dreiser also had recourse to ideas of “equation” and “balance” drawn from Herbert Spencer, and critics have done valuable work in demonstrating how his use of these concepts precluded the dead hand of naturalist determinism (see Moers, Culbertson). Building on this work, I want to suggest here that Dreiser’s engagement with ideas of the social is both more complex than a mere historical backdrop to narratives of individual success or failure and more interesting than just another nineteenth-century abstract social philosophy. From this perspective, the language of “equation,” for which Dreiser himself reached, is a post-hoc rationalization that smooths over some of what makes his texts most interesting and most significant in their address to the complexity of the...