This essay argues that Sister Carrie should be understood as a reworking for the American scene of the nineteenth-century European realist novel of ambition, which Theodore Dreiser, as an autodidact, had access to primarily through his youthful reading of Honoré de Balzac, especially The Wild Ass's Skin [La Peau de chagrin] (1831) and Father Goriot [Le Père Goriot] (1835). While most previous critics have seen the influence of Balzac on Dreiser as a mostly settled matter, with Dreiser's early exposure to Balzac's novels supposedly shaping how the American wrote and not the content of what he wrote, in this essay I will show that “Dreiser's debt to Balzac,” as Nancy Warner Barrineau has termed it, is much greater.1 We should regard Dreiser's first novel not merely as influenced by his prior reading of Balzac's The Human Comedy, but as a conscious, sometimes nearly explicit “rewrite” of The Wild Ass's Skin and Father Goriot. By understanding Sister Carrie as a “rewrite,” a genre commonly discussed in postcolonial literary theory, in which a canonical European text and its dominant meanings are resignified, usually with political or revisionary intent, we are able to see how Sister Carrie resituates the Balzacian novel of ambition for the American turn-of-the-century world and social system Dreiser knew.2 Adapting and critiquing what he took to be Balzac's views on social status and wealth, Dreiser's first novel provides an education in skepticism about the capitalist good life that is acutely aware of its origins in and debts to the Balzacian novel. This comparative study of Dreiser and Balzac thus might be said to offer a transatlantic chapter in the “worlding” of realisms, which, as Lauren M. E. Goodlad has proposed, involves following the flexible form's migrations “across media, centuries, hemispheres, and political crises.”3To make this argument, I will examine Dreiser's hyperbolic initial encounter with Balzac, review the surprisingly scarce critical literature on the relationship, and then explore how Dreiser's first novel rises to the level of an explicit rewriting of Balzac.4 Finally, I will conclude by showing that the Balzacian imprint was so strong that when the manuscript of Sister Carrie resists the imposition of an open-ended Balzacian epilogue, Dreiser histrionically performs the ending of Father Goriot in what can be interpreted as a heroic act of authorial emulation motivated by his self-professed intense identification with Balzac's world and characters. Ultimately, what we can learn from this essay is what some of Dreiser's earliest newspaper critics knew to be true of Sister Carrie, but we have perhaps forgotten: “The Balzac-like treatment, the Balzac-like attitude, is everywhere apparent.”5Few American writers have so consistently lionized their European literary forbears in the infatuated language Dreiser reserved for Balzac. Dreiser reported first reading Balzac while working as a newspaperman in Pittsburgh, in 1894. Despite the self-described accidental nature of the discovery—he claimed to have picked up The Wild Ass's Skin by chance in the Carnegie Free Library of Allegheny—years later he would recall his encounter with the French author's novels as a quasi-spiritual conversion. Balzac's “tremendous and sensitive grasp of life,” he wrote, in his memoir A Book about Myself (1922), astonished him, and he formed an immediate, identificatory bond with the French writer's characters.6 This intense identification was rooted in Dreiser's judgment that Balzac did his best work with the “brooding, seeking, ambitious beginner in life's social, political, artistic, and commercial affairs,” characters, he confessed, who were “so much like myself.”7 In recreating the scene of Dreiser the ambitious young journalist's introduction to The Human Comedy, the depth of his immersion in Balzac's world can scarcely be overstated: “For a period of four or five months,” Dreiser recalled, “I ate, slept, dreamed, lived him and his characters and his views and his city. I cannot imagine a greater joy and inspiration than I had in Balzac.”8 While intense pleasure is the dominant note in this affaire de cœur with Balzac's fictional world, the French author's representation of Paris at first made Dreiser think ill of Pittsburgh and American cities in general, before helping him discover their untapped literary possibilities. “Ah! To become the Balzac of America!” was how he formulated his ambitious aim after discovering Balzac in Pittsburgh, or so he reported years later while visiting Balzac's home in Passy, in western Paris.9 Amid the profuse praise, we see Dreiser's initial identification with Balzac's fiction morph into a desire to exercise a comparable authorial role in the United States.The precise formula for becoming the American Balzac gets clarified in a 1911 interview. Asked to reflect on his early influences, Dreiser ranked Father Goriot among “the world's greatest books.” He said, in a since oft-quoted remark, “I came across Balzac and then I saw what life was—a rich, gorgeous, showy spectacle. . . . I saw for the first time how a book should be written. I saw how, if I ever wrote one, I should write it.”10 In the same interview, perhaps aware of the large literary debt he was incurring, Dreiser clarified that he did not set out as a novelist simply to copy the French author. “I did not expect to write like Balzac,” he underlined, “but to use his method.”11 Given such a frank admission of literary debt, it is hardly surprising that influence studies have treated the Balzac-Dreiser relationship as a settled affair. The author's early critics, in particular, largely accepted Dreiser's view that Balzac's influence was to be found in his literary methods alone, in how he wrote, not what he wrote. Thus F. O. Matthiessen and Robert H. Elias see Balzac as providing a “model” or “cue” for Dreiser's narrative techniques, such as the adoption of Balzac's habit of furnishing authorial commentary.12 Subsequent generations of Dreiser scholars have, for the most part, verified and extended this critical assessment, locating the Balzacian influence in Dreiser's repertoire of narrative techniques.13Yet this general acceptance of Dreiser's own characterization of the terms of his literary debt has obscured the way in which Dreiser actually re-uses and re-purposes Balzac's plots in his first novel. The result is that even a profoundly sensitive critic like Alan Trachtenberg can see in Carrie's reading of Father Goriot little more than a datum of her intellectual progress, and not what I take to be a sign of the novel's larger investment in Balzacian plotting.14 My own essay takes as its jumping-off point Barrineau's discovery that Dreiser did much more than just allude to the Balzacian novel or borrow Balzac's methods in his writing. Part of Dreiser's apprenticeship for Sister Carrie, she ascertained, involved overt plagiarism of the French author. In the May 1896 issue of Ev'ry Month, the popular-song magazine Dreiser edited from 1895 until 1897, he plagiarized a long section from Balzac's The Wild Ass's Skin.15 The next month he lifted another passage from the same novel. This word-for-word reproduction of the Balzacian text under Dreiser's byline, I argue, foreshadows future literary habits, previewing the more intimate system of borrowings and reconfigurations that can be found in Dreiser's first book. Indeed, in my view, Barrineau's exposure of Dreiser's plagiarism overturns the critical consensus, originating with Dreiser himself, that Balzac shaped how Dreiser wrote and not what he wrote. In her article Barrineau remarks that “Dreiser carefully underscores his indebtedness to Balzac” in Sister Carrie and “hints that one key to understanding both Carrie and Hurstwood can be found in Balzac's novels.”16 Despite Barrineau's suggestion, however, no one has as yet really taken up Dreiser's “hint” to us or deeply probed what it might mean for The Wild Ass's Skin and Father Goriot to be interpretive “key[s]” to Sister Carrie in what it is difficult to resist describing in light of the latter two books’ titles—and the system of borrowings I allege they share—as an affiliative relation.17When we go beyond existing readings of the influence of The Wild Ass's Skin on Sister Carrie, which have suggested a likeness between Raphaël de Valentin's brief contemplation of suicide by drowning at the beginning of Balzac's novel and Hurstwood's slow march to death in Carrie at the end, we see a more fundamental way in which Dreiser rewrote aspects of Balzac's 1831 novel.18 Like The Wild Ass's Skin, Balzac's roman fantastique about the perils of realized ambition, Sister Carrie can be understood as a novel about the unlikely emotional damage caused by success in what Dreiser brilliantly theorizes as the “markets of delight.”19 Carrie's long-nourished dreams of pecuniary status in her tumultuous Gilded Age world are almost magically realized when she is elevated from poverty to the chorus line to a starring role in a Broadway play. Yet far from making her happy, as she presumed it would, she discovers that she no longer desires the “high life” she formerly coveted and that her newfound social and pecuniary status as a moneyed Broadway star “is a demoralising thing” (235, 323). One of the novel's ultimate, dispiriting lessons is that the “delight” Carrie sought in the capitalist marketplace is largely a figment, part of an ever-receding, good-life horizon that “tints the distant hilltops of the world” (369). Derived from her bewildering experience of success in the commercial theater, Carrie's disillusionment about the possibilities for fulfillment under capitalism makes Dreiser's novel an ambivalent rebuttal of the by-then well-established, upbeat script of the American success mythology.The novel's tendency to engender such confusion about the American rags-to-riches narrative formula is partly dispelled, however, when we realize that Dreiser's curious development of this theme and plot are a partial inheritance from Balzac. As I show in this section, The Wild Ass's Skin offered Dreiser a source and model for the unhappy success plot he made so central to Sister Carrie. When Dreiser reread Balzac's novel in 1896, while working as editor of Ev'ry Month, he confirmed for himself his early fixation on success and fame as the perennially troubled objects of human desire. As Dreiser proclaimed in the May 1896 issue of the magazine, Balzac shows “what men toil for; how pitifully they slave for fame, how weakly they struggle with it, when their efforts are crowned with success.”20 As evident from this seemingly straightforward yet actually enigmatic pronouncement, Balzacian success presented Dreiser with a psychological paradox. Dreiser pictured Balzacian success as both a wished-for and an undesirable end, something worth “toil[ing]” and “slav[ing]” for but which one must “struggle” against, too. The counter-intuitiveness of human behavior when success is at stake—the fatal attraction of fame, as evinced by Balzac—charged the future novelist's imagination.Yet The Wild Ass's Skin did not only elucidate the meaning of success for the young Dreiser; it also taught him how to make success's perplexing costs—its emotional ravages—legible to readers. By realizing all of Raphaël de Valentin's ambitions in the middle of The Wild Ass's Skin instead of at the end, where success typically folds into the under-scrutinized closural space of the so-called happy ending, Balzac's novel offered Dreiser an unusual plot structure in which the confounding effects of the protagonist's success could be openly exhibited. At the outset of the novel, a despondent Raphaël gambles away his last francs and is preparing to end his life when he makes the startling discovery of a magic ass's skin in a quayside antiquarian shop. The possession of this magic pelt will permit Raphaël to fulfill his every ambition, yet each desire fulfilled will cause the skin to shrink in size. When it disappears completely, his life will also end. In his suicidal despair, Raphaël accepts this arrangement and becomes the owner of the talisman. He throws an orgiastic banquet and inherits a fortune. Yet the knowledge he is hastening his death by satisfying his wishes, as evidenced by the reduced dimensions of the skin, so unnerves him that he ceases to draw any pleasure from such extravagancies and commits himself thereafter to a program of minimizing desire in order to prolong his life. Through this intricate, supernatural plot device, Balzac foregrounds the affective and narratological problem of realized success. As the critic Peter Brooks has explained, Raphaël's desires are brought to full realization too soon in the novel: La Peau de chagrin violates the usual structure of desire in the novel, which is oriented toward the end, and indeed in one instant lifts all the interdictions . . . which one would expect the novel to have to struggle with slowly, and not necessarily with total success. . . . [A]s Raphaël discovers as a consequence of his vision of death, he can no longer desire: “The world belonged to him, he could do and have everything, and he no longer wanted anything”—“il pouvait tout et ne voulait plus rien.”21He could do and have everything, and he no longer wanted anything—Brooks’ lightly altered translation of the French phrase deftly captures not only Raphaël's predicament, but also the good-life confusion that will envelop Carrie after her stardom when she discovers, about four-fifths of the way through her novel, that money “is a demoralising thing” and that the luxuries she had longed for so desperately no longer thrill her. As Brooks notes, a protagonist's “total success” before a novel's close makes it difficult for plot to continue producing meaningful incidents. Applying the observation to Dreiser's novel, we might ask: what more is Carrie to desire—and what is she to do—after she gets what she wants and realizes there is no satisfaction in it? One-fifth of Dreiser's novel remains to be written.The general answer to this question is that the center of narrative interest is transferred, in the late chapters, to Hurstwood. Reviewers and critics have usually found the narrative of the ex-manager's decline to be more compelling than Carrie's twisting in the wind after her stage success. Yet by keeping our interest focused on Carrie, we become aware of the novel's key procedure borrowed from Balzac. As a novel that brings desire to fulfillment in the midst of the narrative, Sister Carrie purposefully and repeatedly exhibits Carrie's paradoxical psychological reaction to her success. Several times over the course of the novel—with Drouet, with Hurstwood, and then as an emancipated woman—Carrie's material desires are fulfilled, she is disappointed by the reality of that fulfillment, and she recovers after a period of depression and inactivity by cathecting a more grandiose dream of the capitalist good life, until eventually, like Raphaël recoiling in permanent horror before the shrinking skin, her crushing experience of upward mobility results in total skepticism about the attainment of happiness within the “markets of delight.”If critics have invariably turned to the logic of urban consumer capitalism to unpack the meaning of Carrie's unhappy success, it is because Dreiser's realist novel, unlike Balzac's supernatural one, has no magic talisman to explain the annulment of her desire. Balzac's talisman, back of which lies Radcliffe's and Hoffmann's gothic tales, and especially the folktale of realized wishes, where the terrible moral is always to be careful what you wish for because you might get it, expresses in efficient, supernatural form the sometimes devastating outcome of success that we see realized in realist trappings in the life of Carrie Meeber.22 In the absence of a capitalist analogue to the magic talisman's explanatory power, critics of Sister Carrie have struggled, for decades, to square the novel's portrayal of some of the most ecstatic scenes of consumer lust in all of American literature with its equally undeniable, Veblenesque contempt for acquisitive materialism. The result has been enduring, profound disagreement about the basic politics of the novel. Critics still have not decided whether it is “for or against capitalism,”23 while those who have tried to untangle Carrie's counterintuitive emotional reactions to her socioeconomic rise in the world often revert to the fence-sitting language of paradox, mystery, and antinomy.24 Restoring Carrie's Balzacian subtext does not settle this debate, yet it does allow us to apprehend that the magic talisman seemingly absent from Dreiser's realist novel may be baked into consumer capitalism itself. Predicated on a panoply of “magical gestures,” in the view of social theorist Raymond Williams, consumer capitalism is that system by which commodities of increasingly doubtful use-value acquire near-talismanic authority and become associated, through the almost supernatural illusions woven by the advertising industry, with status and the satisfaction of genuine human needs they do not and cannot ever in reality fulfill. The derailment of this “system of magical inducements and satisfactions” is at the heart of Carrie's dispiriting epiphany about the trajectory of her life.25In his memoir, Dreiser confirms the importance of Balzac's magic talisman to his thinking in the 1890s, hailing its appearance in The Wild Ass's Skin as an “astounding and mystical discovery” and avowing he “personally identified” with this Balzacian plot device above all others.26 Yet by shearing Balzac's gothic novel of its supernatural conceit when he borrowed from it to produce his own realist novel of turn-of-the-century U.S. consumer capitalist life, Dreiser proved himself to be an astute critic of Balzac. Returning to The Wild Ass's Skin after reading Dreiser, we become aware of how Balzac's novel, considered outside the generic parameters of the Gothic, can also be understood as an indictment of capitalist success. Behind the supernatural plot device, which Balzac used to make sense of Raphaël's seemingly incomprehensible despair at getting everything he wants, lies a concealed affinity with the type of psychological paradox of economic fulfillment animating Carrie's unhappy success. When Raphaël concludes, in the middle of his banquet, after inspecting the diminished proportions of the skin, “I desire nothing,” he is saluted by one of the bankers present for having grasped the true meaning of wealth. “Bravo!” the banker says, “Now you understand what wealth is.”27 Like Carrie after him, Raphaël has grasped the incoherence of what Dreiser's narrator will term the “popular understanding” of money (48): if it is something other people have and you must get, it exists fully only when you covet it but don't have it. When Carrie realizes, during the exhilarating week after her lucrative promotion that the “door to life's perfect enjoyment” will remain permanently closed (335), her active career ends no less certainly than it does for Raphaël, who “saw DEATH” at his banquet.28 For both, it is a kind of narrative death, in which significant articulations of plot are no longer possible. They could do and have everything, but they no longer wanted anything. Or as Dreiser put it in Sister Carrie, “the game was up” when they realize that the money-suffused good-life scenarios of New York and Paris cannot deliver upon their promises of happiness (360), a supremely significant phrasing for an author who saw life as a “game” and the recording role of the realist artist—Balzac and himself included—as showing us “the game as it is played.”29Father Goriot, the Balzacian novel that supposedly showed Dreiser “how a book should be written,” places its central character in a Parisian boardinghouse. Eugène de Rastignac, a twenty-one-year-old law student from a hard-up aristocratic family in southwestern France, has come to Paris to study law and carve out a place for himself in high society. His neighbor in the boardinghouse is the once-wealthy, retired flour merchant and excessively doting father Jean-Joachim Goriot, whose love for his selfish daughters will spell his ruin. Battling poverty and social snobbery as well as his own ignorance and naïveté, Rastignac plans to rise in the world through a series of calculated love affairs. In this process he is guided by a series of mentors, including his powerful cousin Madame de Beauséant and Vautrin, a mysterious amoral schemer. His friend Bianchon, a medical student, exerts a minor influence on him in the novel. The narrative of Rastignac's education and his eventual social success and accession to wealth and political power is continued in later installments of The Human Comedy.At first blush, the resemblance between Father Goriot and Sister Carrie is hardly striking.30 But as the Swedish critic Lars Åhnebrink, the first scholar to give an extended comparison of the major novels of Balzac and Sister Carrie, has shown, both Carrie and Goriot share certain broad underpinnings: they feature small-town protagonists who “arrive unsullied from the provinces in the metropolitan city,” spurred by ambition and with the requisite illusions about happiness, success and wealth.31 In his useful albeit dated article, Åhnebrink goes on to note much finer parallels and affinities between Carrie and Balzac's major works, especially Goriot and Lost Illusions. In common, these three novels show how desire for luxury is incited on walking tours through the rich quarters of the city; how ambition is spurred by painful negative comparisons of oneself with the dandies of Paris or the society ladies of New York; how Carrie, Rastignac, and Lucien acquire fashionable new clothes and feel transformed; how Rastignac and Lucien seduce women to rise and Carrie “lets [herself] be seduced” to rise;32 and how the first really fine dinner, whether at Madame de Beauséant's, at the Rocher de Cancale, or at an exquisite New York restaurant makes the newcomer feel as though he or she has been admitted, however provisionally, to the promised land of social distinction and luxury.Considered cumulatively, the effect of Åhnebrink's catalogue of similarities is to reveal how, beneath an apparently dissimilar surface, the novels share a system of equivalent symbolic weights and values. Set pieces that make up integral scenes and turning points of Balzac's plots find functional equivalents in Dreiser's Chicago or New York. Based on such correspondences, a series of questions imposes itself. What is the deeper significance of Dreiser's reconfiguring of certain scenes from Father Goriot for its new American textual surroundings? What kind of cultural work does this geographical and historical remapping of one of Balzac's major novels do? Such a line of inquiry, pursued here, confirms that in the late 1890s Dreiser was obsessively circling Balzac's forceful yet easily overlooked critique of success and upward mobility. In his first novel, primed by a three-year stint writing profiles of well-heeled Americans for Success magazine, Dreiser borrowed both the unhappy success plot of The Wild Ass's Skin and scenes and characters from Goriot to evince the folly of a success-seeking female Rastignac translated to Gilded Age America. In so doing, he recasts the classic Balzacian hero of desire in a fin-de-siècle plot, where the character's ambitions and ability to sustain her consumer-oriented appetites are under constant threat of invalidation.33The signal change Dreiser makes to the plot of Goriot to achieve this end—only the gender reversal of the protagonist could rival it—involves the recasting of the mentors, the characters who traditionally guide the protagonist of a Bildungsroman in her search for vocation and maturity. In Sister Carrie, we might count the Hansons, Drouet, and Hurstwood as mentors. They represent, in Phillip Fisher's words, “three alternative fixed destinations” that Carrie may accept or reject as models for her own path through life.34 Yet Fisher's list leaves out Carrie's final and perhaps most important mentor, the adroitly-named character Ames (aims), an urbane scientist introduced late in the novel to advise Carrie on matters of ambition, taste, and intellect. In recent decades, how critics interpret Ames has determined whether Sister Carrie is viewed as a Bildungsroman about the growth of an improbable theater-artist or a novel of failed self-fashioning. On both sides of the debate, Ames has established himself as a lynchpin, authorial stand-in, or key messenger, albeit an ambiguous one, to the novel's final meaning.35 Understanding Ames's genesis in Father Goriot helps clarify the conflicting guidance of this figure and Dreiser's orientation toward success at this early point of his career.In Dreiser's re-worlding of Balzac's novel, Carrie's mentor Ames first appears to correspond to the character Vautrin. Just as the world-wise Vautrin hectors his pupil Rastignac with detailed plans for how he should engineer his social ascent, the “social engineer” Ames, as Kevin R. McNamara refers to him, offers forceful prescriptions to Carrie about what she should do, read, and think if she wants to rise in the theatrical world.36 Yet Dreiser's Ames, I argue, is actually based on a different character from Father Goriot, the medical student Bianchon, who serves as an occasional, lightly drawn foil for Rastignac in Balzac's novel by counseling moderate ambition and satisfaction with one's lot. Whereas Bianchon plays only a supporting role in Goriot, his perspective, taken up and magnified by Ames, exerts an outsize influence on the plot of Sister Carrie. That Dreiser thought enough of Balzac's Bianchon to expand his role is evident from Dreiser's personal identification with the medical student, whom he cited in his memoir as one of his favorite Balzacian characters: “Rastignac, Raphael, de Rubempre [sic], Bianchon.”37 The elevation of the minor character Bianchon in this list to a status on par with the protagonists of Balzac's best-known novels is a clear indication of Dreiser's special regard for him. Its reversal of the usual status hierarchies hobbling a minor character's destiny, a narrative strategy typical of the novel rewrite genre, betokens Bianchon's transformation in the scale of significances in Dreiser's first novel.The key passage in Goriot that Dreiser seizes upon to amplify the voice of Bianchon is the conversation between Bianchon and a socially frustrated Rastignac in the Jardin du Luxembourg. While the pair stroll through the park, Bianchon offers his dejected friend advice, in which he decouples personal well-being from wealth and social status: “Happiness, old man,” he explains, “depends on what lies between the sole of your foot and the crown of your head; and whether it costs a million or a hundred louis, the actual amount of pleasure that you receive rests entirely with you, and is just exactly the same in any case.”38 Bianchon's own adherence to this doctrine—his professed contentment to remain within “the little lot I mean to make for myself”39—seals his fate as a minor character in Balzac's novel who lacks sufficient ambition for wider narrative development. But the medical student's—later doctor's—decoupling of prospects for happiness from socioeconomic ascent has the further effect of impugning the careers of those men and women such as Rastignac and, later on, Dreiser's Carrie, who are not content to reside in the “smallest circle.”40 If the human payoff in pleasure has a modest natural limit, no matter what feats one accomplishes or how grandly one dreams—if, as Bianchon suggests, the medical intern at the Hôpital des Capucins can enjoy as many of life's pleasures as the Emperor Napoleon—then the vast ambition to rise in the world of a Rastignac or Carrie is basically folly.41Bianchon's admonition, while dismissed by Rastignac, is most certainly not ignored in Sister Carrie, where its message is compounded and radiates outward through Ames’ prominent advisory role in the novel. Carrie's last mentor proves himself a worthy heir to Bianchon at the Vances’ dinner party at Sherry's, where he acts as a strong counterweight to the appeal of the expensive foods, Tiffany silverware, and upper-class manners. Upon their arrival at the restaurant, Ames remarks that “it is a shame for people to spend so much money this way” (235). He objects flatly to conspicuous consumption (“pay[ing] so much more than these things are worth” [236]), a view the narrator, by deprecating the restaurant's “showy, wasteful, and unwholesome gastronomy” (234), appears to confirm. To Carrie, this double-barreled assault on pecuniary culture comes as a shock. Sherry's had seemed just right to her: “so this was high life in New York,” she had thought upon entering the restaurant (235). “What a wonderful thing it was to be rich” (234). During the meal, Ames does his best to finish off Carrie's good-life fantasy of upper-class living. In a Bianchonian gesture, he announces that he “shouldn't care to be rich” enough to eat at Sherry's: “What good would it do? A man doesn't need this sort of thing to be happy.” Startled by this almost unthinkable separation of the good life and money, Carrie wonders if this “new attitude” might be suitable for him, because of his moral strength, but not for others (237). Ames’ deprecatory comments inevitably detract from enjoyment of the “high life” in the fashionable restaurant, yet his “indifference” to material success also has a soothing effect: it “take[s] away some of the bitterness of the contrast between this life and her life” (238). Later, when Carrie and Ames meet again in New York after she has become a famous actress, he again counsels a sensible limitation of desire: “The world is full of desirable situations, but, unfo