1. Wilkinson, Peter, “Why Demi Moore Wants More,” Redbook (01 1993): 48–51, 91–92Google Scholar. The blurb for the article reads: “Don't envy her perfect body, happy marriage, wealth, or success. Though this actress has it all, she's not yet satisfied” (p. 48). Perhaps one clue to Demi Moore's desire for more lies in her eyes: “delicate, slightly startled ovals that take in every detail” (p. 48, emphasis added). As this essay will argue, what the eyes “take in” determines what the person wants literally to take in or consume.

2. Needless to say, each of these subjects is surrounded by a mass of critical theory and controversy, most of which I must relegate to the ellipsis in which I have placed historical time. However, I would like to mention some of the works that have helped me see the links between literary naturalism and desire, consumption, and determinism. From a collection of essays on free will, I have taken as a working definition of determinism the succinctly stated necessitarian view that “every event and state of affair is ‘causally necessitated’ by preceding events and states of affairs” (Watson, Gary, ed., Free Will [New York: Oxford University Press, 1982], p. 2)Google Scholar. Critics usually equated literary naturalism with determinism, particularly Dreiser's critics who see the writer linking cause and effect into a binding chain. In an early essay (1943), Philip Rahv distinguished naturalism from realism by “its treatment of the relation of character to background.” In naturalistic fiction, he said, the individual is not merely “subordinate to” his background; he is “wholly determined by it.” Rahv pointed to Dreiser as an example of an American writer who plotted “the careers of his characters strictly within a determinative process” (“Notes on the Decline of Naturalism,” in Documents of Modern Literary Realism, ed. Becker, George J. [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1963], p. 584)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Donald Pizer has slightly modulated the equation of naturalism with determinism by substituting circumscribed for determined. At “the “ideological core of American naturalism,” he writes, is “a sense of man more circumscribed than conventionally acknowledged” (Twentieth-Century American Literary Naturalism: An Interpretation [Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1982], p. 6)Google Scholar. Lee Clark Mitchell has linked naturalism to a “scientific concept of determinism” according to which the individual's actions are subject to “insidious” constraints, and the writer's attention directed “to innate traits and socialized habits … [and] scenes of coercions” (“Naturalism and the Languages of Determinism,” The Columbia Literary History, ed. Elliott, Emory et al. [New York: Columbia University Press, 1988], pp. 534–49)Google Scholar. Contributing to the rise of literary naturalism, Mitchell says, was the growth of industrialism, urbanization, and “a new consumer society” (p. 527). In his recent study of American naturalism, Mitchell has shifted his critical attention from “scientific to linguistic forms of determinism,” for reasons he explains in a preface entitled “Taking Determinism Seriously” (Determined Fictions: American Literary Naturalism [New York: Columia University Press, 1989], pp. vii–xvii.)Google Scholar. Mitchell's reading of An American Tragedy focuses upon “the psychopoetics of desire”; desire is an inevitable subject in writing about Dreiser who, as we know, entitled his Cowperwood novels A Trilogy of Desire.

Among the many subjects drawn into debates over determinism is women's dress - a subject of consequence to Dreiser's Carrie and hence to this essay. Women's dress, we are told, still raises the “ever-controversial question” of determinism by asking whether biological differences between women and men determine differences in their dress (Roach, Mary Ellen, “The Social Symbolism of Women's Dress,” in The Fabrics of Culture: The Anthropology of Clothing and Adornment, ed. Cordwell, Justine M. and Schwarz, Ronald A. [New York: Mouton, 1979], pp. 415–22)Google Scholar. Like fashion, material culture has been linked to determinism. See, for example, Jules David Prown's claim that “[t]he fundamental attitude underlying the study of material culture is, as with most contemporary scholarship, a pervasive determinism” (“Mind in Matter: An Introduction to Material Culture Theory and Method,” Winterthur Portfolio: A Journal of American Material Culture 17 [Spring 1982]: 6Google Scholar, original emphasis).

As we know, the influence of deterministic thinking upon the conduct of human affairs has been continuous, profound, and highly consequential; and, as we shall see, it has figured in the development of American advertising, architecture, and politics, at least as they are represented in much theoretical and critical writing and in American literature. This is not to say that the deterministic views inscribed in various disciplines and cultural theories remain unchallenged. See, for example, the challenge to classical views on the determination of human needs made by Pretteceille, Edmond and Terrail, Jean-Pierre in Capitalism, Consumption and Needs, trans. Matthews, Sarah (New York: Basil Blackwell, 1985).Google Scholar

3. Sister Carrie, ed. Pizer, Donald (New York: Norton, 1970), p. 335Google Scholar. Sister Carrie was published originally in 1900. Another Sister Carrie, published in 1993, transports Dreiser's waif to a surrealistically hip contemporary American scene where she finds adventure in the advertising world, prostitution, and murder. See Fairbanks, Lauren, Sister Carrie, a Novel (Normal, Ill: Dalkey Archive, 1993)Google Scholar. Among this novel's bizarre and zany scenes is one in which Carrie responds to a Narrator's synopsis of a “masterpiece” that describes a “sweet little girl” who has “all her needs met.” “The poor little fuck - will she ever be this happy again?” the Narrator asks; “Is she enjoying it at all? Probably not enough, we all tend to think there is MUCH MORE” (p. 61, original emphasis). Carrie's incongruous comment, “How strange,” fits into all the incongruities of this strange and irreverent book. I read Fairbanks's book after I had written this essay, and though it interests me as an attempt to imagine a contemporary Carrie, it does not serve as the test case I am seeking, which is a text that imagines a contemporary woman transplanted to a place where there is nothing to buy.

4. Maslow, Abraham H., “A Theory of Human Motivation (1943),” in Motivation and Personality (1954; rept. New York: Harper and Row, 1970), p. 46Google Scholar. Maslow finds self-actualized people “flexible,” capable of adapting themselves realistically to any people, any environment” (p. xxi, original emphasis). Such flexibility allows the consuming women of this essay to adapt to the disparate and difficult settings described in the texts I discuss. Maslow contextualizes a desire for more within a psychological theory that seeks benignly to show people the way to happiness. Others contextualize the desire within an economic system that seeks to maximize profit. To sell products, advertisers, for example, need to understand that “[w]e all want more,” we all measure our own improvement, as well as social change, “by getting more” (Berman, Ronald, Advertising and Social Change [Beverly Hills, Calif.: Sage, 1981], pp. 68–69).Google Scholar

5. Maslow, , Motivation and Personality, pp. 98, xvi–xvii.Google Scholar

6. See Cohn, David, J. B. Watson, The Founder of Behaviorism: A Biography (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1979)Google Scholar. “When Watson got off the train in New York,” Cohn writes, “he had no money, no job and no prospects” (p. 159). If the name were switched from Watson to Hurstwood, the sentence could have appeared in Sister Carrie- and, with another switch, it could have appeared in Dreiser's biography. In 1903, when Sister Carrie seemed a dismal failure, Dreiser arrived in New York depressed and impoverished, lamenting the failure of his novel and his life. Cohn's description of the “indiscreet affair” that led to Watson's terrible troubles also applies to Dreiser and to his character, each of whom had been drawn irresistibly and ruinously to a young woman who “stirred something very deep in him” (Cohn, , Watson, p. 148)Google Scholar. Cohn is misleading, however, when he says that Watson arrived in New York with “no prospects,” for the behaviorist had long thought of applying his psychological theories to business, particularly the business of advertising. The rupture in his academic career became an opportunity for Watson to begin another career which he saw as a logical extension of his experimental work: he would apply the techniques of behavioral conditioning he had studied in the laboratory to the marketplace. On Watson's belief that psychology should be used as an instrument of “social control” and, specifically, used in advertising to create “a society of consumers,” see Buckley, Kerry W., “The Selling of a Psychologist: John Broadus Watson and the Application of Behavioral Techniques to Advertising,” Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences 18 (07 1982): 207–213.0.CO;2-8>CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed. Buckley quotes Watson as saying that “the consumer is to the manufacturer, the department stores and the advertising agencies, what the green frog is to the physiologist” (p. 212).

7. Cohn attributes Watson's phenomenal success in advertising to the “great god, the consumer [who] had made Watson so rich that he lived at one of the best addresses in Manhattan.” Like Dreiser, Watson “began to dress in a very dandified fashion” that may have made him look “more attractive,” though it gave him, Watson's biographer says, “a slightly ridiculous air in retrospect” (p. 192). Obviously, men re-fashion themselves through their clothes as hopefully as women (or women characters), at once seeking and advertising a new self through a change of costume. Like Watson the psychologist, Dreiser the writer became a supersalesman. For after he had fallen into bad times in New York, he went on to earn the considerable salary often thousand dollars as director of the Butterwick publications, The Designer, The New Idea Woman's Magazine, and The Delineator, magazines advertising Butterwick dress patterns and featuring articles on women's fashion. I should add that eventually Dreiser lost this position because of “amorous misconduct.”

That the psychologist could teach the businessman how to “coerce” the consumer into buying was the belief of William Dill Scott, Ph.D., with whom Watson and others were affiliated in organizing the Scott Company, a consulting firm that showed businessmen how to use psychology to their profit. The author of influential books on the art of advertising, Scott held various prestigious positions, including that of Director of the Psychological Laboratory of Northwestern University and Director of the Bureau of Salesman Research, Carnegie Institute of Technology. In one of his books, Scott “assumed the pleasant task” of “systematizing” and “presenting” the subject of the psychology of advertising” in a form that would “be of distinct practical value to all who are interested in business promotion” (The Psychology of Advertising: A Simple Exposition of the Principles of Psychology in Their Relation to Successful Advertising [Boston: Small, Maynard, 1971], pp. 5–6)Google Scholar. He dedicated another book to the “YOUNG BUSINESS MAN … who is studying to make his arguments more convincing and his suggestions more coercive” (Influencing Men in Business: The Psychology of Argument and Suggestion, rev. Delton T. Howard, Ph.D. [1911; rept. New York: Ronald, 1928], emphasis added)Google Scholar. Scott believed that modern psychology showed man to be “a creature who rarely reasons” (p. 35), and women to be particularly impetuous buyers whose “deliberation is interrupted by a sudden extreme feeling of value” that attaches itself to a commodity (p. 62).

The irrational choices women make, especially in the marketplace, usually seem to psychologists more marked and censorious than those made by men. A putatively objective “mathematical examination” of the forces that determine choice ends up pointing to the particular irrationality of women: “Women in a supermarket are susceptible to the tricks of the advertiser and packer; they do not make rational choices” (von Bertalanffy, Ludwig, General System Theory: Foundations, Development, Applications [New York: George Braziller, 1968])Google Scholar. Even irrational choices can be conditioned and manipulated, Bertalanffy asserts, illustrating once again how human behavior can be deliberately determined: “In our society, it is the job of an influential specialty - advertisers, motivation researchers, etc. — to make choices irrational which essentially is done by coupling biological factors — conditioned reflex, unconscious drives — with symbolic values” (pp. 115–16, original emphasis).

Among the many studies explicating the ways that symbolic values are imputed to material things — aside from Marx's quintessential study of the fetishization of commodities in Capital and of consumption in Grundrisse — I list here only some highly selected works pertinent to this essay (and these are aside, also, from the Frankfurt school of critical theory to which many on this abbreviated list are indebted): Ewen, Stuart, Captains of Consciousness: Advertising and the Roots of the Consumer Culture (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1976)Google Scholar; Douglas, Mary and Isherwood, Baron, The World of Goods (New York: Basil Blackwell, 1979)Google Scholar; Haug, W. F., Critique of Commodity Aesthetics (1971; rept. Cambridge: Polity, 1986)Google Scholar; Campbell, Colin, The Romantic Ethic and the Spirit of Modern Consumerism (New York: Basil Blackwell, 1987)Google Scholar; Springborg, Patricial, The Problem of Human Needs and the Critique of Civilisation (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1981)Google Scholar; Lichtman, Richard, The Production of Desire: The Integration of Psychoanalysis into Marxist Theory (New York: Macmillan, 1982)Google Scholar; Steele, Valerie, Fashion and Eroticism: Ideals of Feminine Beauty from the Victorian Era to the Jazz Age (New York: Oxford University, 1985)Google Scholar; Solomon, Michael R., ed., The Psychology of Fashion (Lexington, Mass.: Lexington, 1985)Google Scholar; and Richards, Thomas, The Commodity Culture of Victorian England: Advertising and Spectacle, 1851–1914 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990)Google Scholar. Though this last book begins in London with the spectacle of the Crystal Palace, it goes on to refer to American fiction and, perhaps fittingly, bestows upon Dreiser's character yet another false name, erroneously calling the little actress Carrie Meacham (p. 207).

8. Writing at the time of the cold war, E. J. Kahn, Jr., wondered why the Communists “picked” on Coca-Cola as an emblematically invidious American product. “It's because Coca-Cola is a champion of the profit motive, and wherever it goes, it spreads profits,” a Coca-Cola man explained: “Everyone who has anything to do with the drink makes money and becomes a member of the bourgeoisie” (The Big Drink: The Story of Coca-Cola [New York: Random House, 1960], p. 32).Google Scholar

9. According to Stuart Ewen and Ewen, Elizabeth, “The department store was more than a site for consumption; it was the sight of consumption.…Shopping was a perceptual adventure” (Channels of Desire: Mass Images and the Shaping of American Consciousness [New York: McGraw-Hill, 1982], p. 68, original emphasis)Google Scholar. Or in the words of Marx, Karl, “The need which consumption feels for the object is created by the perception of it” (Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy, trans. Nicolaus, Martin [New York: Vintage, 1973Google Scholar; written in the winter of 1857–58 and published in German in 1939 and in 1953], p. 92). For an analysis of how the considered use of space in department stores reflects a managerial purpose to “indoctrinate the customer in the culture of consumption,” see Benson, Susan Porter, “Palace of Consumption and Machine for Selling: The American Department Store, 1880–1940,” Radical History Review 21 (Fall 1979): 199–221CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Benson argues that department store managers consciously manipulated space in order “to convey a lofty impression of consumption as the key to status, happiness, and personal fulfillment while at the same time attending to the crasser mechanics of buying and selling” (p. 202). Benson's phrase “Palace of Consumption” calls to mind Daniel J. Boorstin's earlier discussion of the first department stores as “Consumer Palaces” (The Americans: The Democratic Experience [New York: Random House, 1973], pp. 101–9)Google Scholar. Boorstin traces a historical relationship between the rise of department stores with their plate-glass windows and the growth of city crowds and public transportation systems, in particular, streetcar lines (which figure significantly in Sister Carrie). William R. Leach has described “a transformative movement in history” that occurred when women first entered newly designed and conceptualized department stores (“Transformation in a Culture of Consumption: Women and Department Stores, 1890–1925,” Journal of American History 71 [09 1984]: 319–42)Google Scholar. These grand settings evoked an “upsurge of longing, a diffuse desire for something better … [that] was a hallmark of the consumer culture” (p. 337). Leach has expanded his study of American consumer culture in his recently published book Land of Desire: Merchants, Power, and the Rise of a New American Culture (New York: Pantheon, 1993)Google Scholar. Land of Desire appeared after I had written this essay, for which it provides (if belatedly) a detailed historical context. In The Bourgeois and the Bibelot (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1984)Google Scholar, Remy G. Saisselin describes the general impact of early American consumer habits upon shoppers, noting in passing characters in Dreiser's Sister Carrie and Zola's The Ladies' Paradise who encounter the department store as a “cultural space” (pp. 33–49). For an analysis of how the “sensual appeal of stores and the central modern experience of shopping” have “affected the novelistic sensibility” of William Dean Howells, Sinclair Lewis, F. Scott Fitzgerald, as well as of Dreiser, see Harris, Neil's interesting essay, “The Drama of Consumer Desire,” in Yankee Enterprise: The Rise of the American System of Manufactures, ed. Myr, Otto and Post, Robert C. (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1981), pp. 189–216.Google Scholar

10. Artley, Alexandra, ed., The Golden Age of Shop Design: European Shop Interiors 1880–1939 (New York: Whitney Library of Design, 1976), pp. 6–7Google Scholar. For a history of the Bon Marché, see Miller, Michael B., The Bon Marché. Bourgeois Culture and the Department Store, 1869–1920 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981)Google Scholar. Drawing upon the Bon Marché for the setting and plot of his novel The Ladies' Paradise (Au bonheur des dames), Emile Zola dramatized the myriad ways that a department store sought to seduce women into buying. See The Ladies' Paradise (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992; published in English by Henry Vizetelly in 1886)Google Scholar. In a study of English department stores, Alison Adburgham claims that Bainbridge's of Newcastle and Kendal Milne & Faulkner of Manchester, rather than the Bon Marche, should be “nominated as the first department stores” (Shops and Shopping 1800–1914: Where, and in What Manner the Well-dressed Englishwoman Bought her Clothes [London: George Allen and Unwin, 1964], p. 137).Google Scholar

11. Drawing upon Marx and his understanding of the commodity as fetish, William Leiss describes “a dynamic interaction between the material and symbolic correlates of human needing” (The Limits of Satisfaction: An essay on the problem of needs and commodities [Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1976], p. 67)Google Scholar. Leiss states the widely shared view that through a complex “network of symbolic mediations” modern market economies “orient [human] needs entirely toward commodities” (p. 67). In his study of the symbolic value of goods, Grant McCracken relates the need for self-refashioning to consumption as it is expressed through purchases. Acts of buying can initiate the creation of a new self as they initiate a new rite of passage. See Culture and Consumption: New Approaches to the Symbolic Character of Consumer Goods and Activities (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988)Google Scholar. Even the chair on which both Carrie and Hurstwood famously rocked owed its popularity, at least in good part, to advertisements that imbued it with symbolic values. As Richard L. Bushman explains, rocking chairs melded the values of “comfort and gentility,” a combination touted in early-19th-Century advertisements: “The refined rocker stood for the changes going on … as the American middle classes … tried to assimilate parlor culture into the modest domestic economies of ordinary people” (The Refinement of America: Persons, Houses, Cities [New York: Knopf, 1992], p. 272)Google Scholar. In seeking out general “clues” to the “historical roots of consumer culture” in Sister Carrie, Michael Schudson notes that for a woman “the road to success” is paved not “by work and career alone but by lifestyle and consumption” (Advertising, The Uneasy Persuasion: Its Dubious Impact on American Society [New York: Basic, 1984], p. 148)Google Scholar. We should note, however, that Carrie achieves success by working and that her style of life as a conspicuous consumer follows upon, rather than paves the way to, her success as an actress. This is not to minimize the importance of sex, sexuality, and gender in Dreiser's novel, but to point out that Carrie is, significantly, a working woman. (I might note parenthetically that Schudson's discussion of Sister Carrie contains some minor misreadings: Carrie does not actually “seek a job at several department stores” [p. 149] - she feels too inferior and intimidated; the good-natured and affable Drouet is hardly “sinister” [p. 149]; and Carrie's “world” is not really of the “1880s” [p. 159], since the novel begins in August, 1889, and events of the 1890s - like the streetcar strike — significantly affect the plot.)

12. Ewen and Ewen, , Channels of Desire, p. 126.Google Scholar

13. On the importance of clothes to the so-called fashionables of Carrie's time, see Banner, Lois W., American Beauty (New York: Knopf, 1983), pp. 17–27Google Scholar. As a subject for study, fashion has engaged a vast range of theorists and cultural critics, figuring peripherally in works of diverse interests, and centrally in articles and books that have approached the subject from diverse directions. Approaching fashion as a system of signs, Roland Barthes presented a semiological interpretation that he himself declared outmoded — old-fashioned — in his “Foreword” to The Fashion System, trans. Matthew Ward and Richard Howard (1967; rept. New York: Hill and Wang, 1983). Alison Lurie also approached clothes as a sign system in her much more easygoing, popular history of fashion, The Language of Clothes (New York: Random House, 1981). Both semiotic studies confirm the view expressed in Ewen and Ewen's polemical work, Channels of Desire, that “clothing constitutes a generally understood language of society” (p. 126). This is a language that Banner's “fashionables” knew and Carrie was acquiring. For a considered discussion of the differences between “the codes of clothing and language” and the significance of these differences to the study of material culture, see McCracken, “Clothing as Language,” in Culture and Consumption, pp. 57–70.

Through an ingeniously punning use of language, Jacques Lacan has turned the “profound bivalence of… analytical theory on the subject of the symbolism of clothes” into a means of evaluating “the impasse reached with the notion of the symbol… in psychoanalysis” (The Seminar of Jacques Lacan: Book VII, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis 1959–1960, ed. Miller, Jacques-Alain, trans. Porter, Dennis [New York: Norton, 1992Google Scholar; published originally in 1986 as Le Seminaire], p. 226). Lacan creates “a fable” concerning “the power of cloth” as it reveals the relationship between hiding (by clothing) and the hidden (the phallus, of course), between need and desire, privation or lack and the frustration, rather than gratification, of desire — among other matters (“The function of the good,” pp. 218–30).Google Scholar

14. The idle fashionable rich whom Carrie longed to emulate were mercilessly dissected by Veblen, Thorstein in The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899; rept. New York: Viking Penguin, 1976)Google Scholar. In his essay “The Economic Theory of Woman's Dress” (1894), Veblen distinguished between clothing as articles of “comfort,” and dress as “display of wasteful expenditure” (Veblen, Thorstein, Essays in Our Changing Order, ed. Ardzrooni, Leon [New York: Viking], p. 68, passim)Google Scholar. When Carrie is a poor shop-girl, her threadbare jacket cannot give her the comfort of warmth. She needs comfort; she wants display. When she becomes an actress, the clothing she wears on the stage is pure display or “dress.”

15. I draw upon a succinct but assured equation of terms: “Consumption – better put, the delineation of a self by acquisition …” (Berman, , Advertising and Social Change, p. 107).Google Scholar

16. Dreiser's dictum that clothes make the man undergoes a significant refinement in a modern study of fashion and its relation to the images of art. In Seeing Through Clothes (New York: Viking, 1978)Google Scholar, Hollander, Ann writes, “Clothes make not the man, but the image of man” (p. xv)Google Scholar. While Dreiser's Carrie wants to look like the well-dressed women she sees, in actuality, Hollander argues, people want to look like the representations of the human figure they see in the art of their times. Hollander describes the eye as mediating for the self as it presents images of images rather than, as writers as diverse as Dreiser and O'Brien show, images of “real” others. I would describe the eye as etiolating the self when it offers a person representations to emulate — which is not to deny that many real people fashion themselves upon artifactual images.

Clothes literally make the man in the novel The Invisible Man. H.G. Wells's famous character loses his social identity when he loses his “appearance” by becoming invisible. In an attempt to become “a human being again,” he goes to a department store (aptly named the Omnium) to look for clothes. Like Dreiser, Wells lists everything the store displays: stockings, gloves, lamb's-wool pants, lamb's-wool vests, trousers, lounge jacket, overcoat, slouch hat; like Carrie, the Invisible Man wants everything he sees. The more clothes he puts on, the more “acceptable” he becomes as a “figure” in the city; without proper clothes, he was, as Dreiser put it, “nothing.” See chapter 22, “In the Emporium,” in Wells, H. G., The Invisible Man: A Grotesque RomanceGoogle Scholar, published originally in 1897. While the Omnium allows the Invisible Man to find clothes he desperately needs, a department store stirs another strange character, a modern Robinson Crusoe, with desire for superfluity. Inexplicably stranded in an inexplicably depopulated but fully stocked department store, the protagonist of James Gould Cozzens's novella Castaway looks around to find things he might want; the sight of abundance “liberates” him from necessity. “There was no reason why he should not have all the clothes he wanted,” he thinks: “More, if he chose, than he could ever use (S.S. San Pedro and Castaway [New York: Random House], pp. 150–52, 158)Google Scholar. Like consuming women, male characters see possibilities for self-actualization in department stores which, as apparently planned, generate a desire for more.

17. For a discussion of theater as “metaphor for perpetual spectatorship,” see Garfield, Deborah M., “Taking a Part: Actor and Audience in Theodore Dreiser's Sister Carrie,” American Literary Realism 16 (1983): 223–39Google Scholar. For a pertinent psychoanalytic critique of the “relation between viewing and devouring,” see Friedberg, Anne, “A Denial of Difference: Theories of Cinematic Identification,” in Psychoanalysis and Cinema, ed. Kaplan, E. Ann (New York: Routledge, 1990), pp. 36–45Google Scholar. As I have indicated, an etymological meaning of consume is to devour, and an equation of devouring with seeing implies that seeing is, or can be, an act of consumption. In 1935, Otto Fenichel had published a paper on a “symbolic equation” he considered familiar to psychoanalysts, the equation between seeing and devouring. As he put it, “to look at = to devour. When someone gazes intently at an object, we say that he ‘devours it with his eyes’” (“The Scoptophilic Instinct and Identification,” in The Collected Papers of Otto Fenichel 1st ser. [New York: Norton, 1953], pp. 373–97)Google Scholar. Drawing upon Freud, Fenichel traced the scoptophilic instinct to libidinal drives that may express themselves in sadomasochistic actions, in art, in empathetic feelings, or in displacements such as that from the “phallic eye” to the camera. Thus, the unconscious drive behind seeing can become objectified in an image that the camera creates as it imitates the eye in its power to turn a person into a sight. Indeed, in a much-quoted work, Ways of Seeing, John Berger has described woman as an “object of vision” or a “sight” to be seen, in effect, as a commodity available for consumption (Ways of Seeing [1972; rept. New York: Penguin, 1979], p. 47)Google Scholar. Bergers's dicta on sexual difference in ways of seeing have influenced feminist film theory and, more generally, studies of women as objects, rather than the subjects, of desire. “Men look at women,” Berger wrote: “Women watch themselves being looked at” (p. 47). As a man obsessed with looking at women, Dreiser understood the personal and cultural implications of sexually differentiated ways of seeing and dramatized them in Sister Carrie. Drouet and Hurstwood see Carrie, and Carrie sees clothes. Dreiser's male characters are, however, unusually attentive to, and even obsessed by, clothes, but they generally see clothes as a means of possessing a woman. In An American Tragedy, Clyde Griffiths thinks that a coat displayed in a department store window will win him the young woman he desires; and in Sister Carrie, Drouet woos Carrie in the department store by buying her a fashionable outfit.

In an interesting discursive essay on actresses, Jane Blair points out the implications to be deduced from watching a woman occupy the public space of a theater (“Private Parts in Public Places: The Case of Actresses,” in Women and Space: Ground Rules and Social Maps, ed. Ardener, Shirley [New York: St. Martin's, 1981], pp. 205–28)Google Scholar. Blair believes that in the theater an actress “could be her own woman, and speak her own mind” (p. 212) — a view that I have argued elsewhere does not apply to Dreiser's Carrie as an actress permitted, indeed commanded, to speak the words assigned to her by others. See “Speaking Her Own Piece: Emma Goldman and the Discursive Skeins of Autobiography,” in American Autobiography: Retrospect and Prospect, ed. Eakin, Paul John (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991), pp. 235–66.Google Scholar

18. By denning taste as “the product of upbringing and education,” Pierre Bourdieu has linked it to a learning process”: the “eye,” he says, “is the product of history reproduced by education” (Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, trans. Nice, Richard [Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1984Google Scholar; published originally as La Distinction: Critique social du jugement in 1979], p. 3). Bourdieu links taste also to a “social hierarchy of…consumers” created, he believes, by a differential education, and he argues that the social construction of this hierarchy “predisposes taste to function as markers of ‘class’” (pp. 1–2). According to Bourdieu, “the capacity to see (voir)” is a “function of the knowledge (savoir), or [the] concepts … [and] words … available to name visible things.” The history of the construction of seeing and taste is usually forgotten, Bourdieu asserts, but by remembering he believes he can discern “limits” to the “autonomy” that individuals, especially “intellectuals,” have in making classifactory distinctions (pp. 483–84). Bourdieu proleptically answers the critic who might argue that his views on conditioning are culturally conditioned by asserting that they are based upon “scientific observation” as a basis for its representation of human behavior. The basis itself can be questioned, since scientific observation may be a social construction (as various critics and historians now believe).

19. “[I]n shop windows, things stand still … under the spell of one activity only; to change owners. They stand there waiting to be sold” (Sohn-Rethel, Alfred, Intellectual and Manual Labour: A Critique of Epistemology [Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities, 1978], p. 25)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Walter Benjamin supported his claim that advertisement is “superior” to criticism by evoking an image of burning incandescence that, I believe, comments obliquely upon Dreiser's billboard Carrie, for this looming life-sized figure, which appeals to “the mercantile gaze,” may strike onlookers as more real than Carrie's actual presence. According to Benjamin, “Today the most real, the mercantile gaze into the heart of things is the advertisement,” particularly “the huge images” characteristic of an “American style” of display seen in cities. “What, in the end, makes advertisements so superior to criticism?” Benjamin asks and then points to a burning image: “Not what the moving red neon sign says — but the fiery pool reflecting it in the asphalt.” See “This Space for Rent,” in One-Way Street (1955), reprinted in Benjamin, Walter, Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings, ed. Demetz, Peter, trans. Jephcott, Edmund (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978).Google Scholar

20. Baudrillard, Jean, “The Precession of Simulacra,” in Simulations, trans. Foss, Paul, Patton, Paul, and Beitchman, Philip (New York: Semiotext[e], 1983), p. 4Google Scholar. By a simple and deadly transposition, Baudrillard undermines referentiality: “Whereas representation tries to absorb simulation by interpreting it as false representation, simulation envelops the whole edifice of representation as itself a simulacrum” (p. 11).

21. O'Brien, Tim, “Sweetheart of the Song Tra Bong,” in The Things They Carried (New York: Penguin, 1990), pp. 98–125.Google Scholar

22. O'Brien economically condenses the conventions of a character's first encounter with a new ambient world by focusing upon seeing as the stimulus of desire and the sign of appropriation — a “mutual appropriation” in which Mary Anne will be consumed by the landscape she consumes with her eyes. In a study of early travel writings, Mary Louise Pratt has described this “mutual appropriation” (her phrase) as a way of structuring an “arrival scene”: the eye mediates the appropriation as it scans a landscape in which curious others look and “gratify themselves” (Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation [New York: Rout ledge, 1992], p. 80Google Scholar, original emphasis, and passim). In O'Brien's story, as in much of the travel writing that Pratt discusses, the others remain invisible; they are the repressed element in a discourse of conquest. Mary Anne's encounters with others, with Vietnamese, take place at night and are occluded from the story as told; and her “transculturation,” to use Pratt's term, assimilates her to the ways of fellow Americans, the deadly night-ravaging Green Berets, In the end, Mary Anne may have joined the Montagnards in the far distant mountains scanned by her desireful appropriative eyes.

23. In an essay that focuses mainly on Sister Carrie, Philip Fisher describes an “anticipatory self [that] has as its emotional substance hope, desire, yearning, and a state of prospective being for which the notion of acting is merely a convenient cultural symbol” (“The Life History of Objects: The Naturalistic Novel and the City,” in Hard Facts: Setting and Form in the American Novel [New York: Oxford University Press, 1985], p. 159)Google Scholar. Fisher's essay deals with such details as plate-glass windows, discussed here and, also discussed here, with such themes as the self and its commodification, “the importance of clothes,” and “the plot of decline.” Fisher sees the city as the essential milieu for the emergence of the details and themes he discusses. To me, the city has also seemed a determining force in Dreiser's writing. In an early study, I had called Sister Carrie “the generic novel” of 20th-century American city fiction and Dreiser its “generic novelist” (The American City Novel [1953; rept. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1970], p. 64Google Scholar; and in an essay on women in city fiction, I had alluded to Sister Carrie as a realization of a subgenre of urban literature I described in “Sister to Faust: The City's ‘Hungry Woman’ as Heroine,” Novel: A Forum on Fiction 15 (Fall 1981): 23–38Google Scholar. Here, however, I am setting the novel within a pattern of determinism that I believe may pertain to women characters as consuming figures who appear in different guises in different times and places — places other than the American city — and yet remain; in their desires and their acts of consumption, essentially the same. By taking a synoptic view of literary developments, rather than concentrating upon a single text and time, I am asking whether certain patterns persist in naturalism, consumption, and the representation of women.

24. Though obviously men are individualistic and consuming, women often become the personification of cultural traits and effects that writers dramatize as destructive. The soldiers in “Sweetheart of the Song Tra Bong” are medics — men who nurse the needy (who have assumed traditional feminine roles), while the most visible and committed killer is a young woman. In another story, the narrator Rat Kiley disintegrates under the pressures of war, and ends up with a selfinflicted wound that will get him discharged from the army. Like Hurstwood, he turns his destructive powers against himself, while Mary Anne, like Carrie, lives on to pursue her self-fulfillment. For a Marxist study of American individualism that discusses the generation of needs and desires in ways pertinent to this essay, see O'Connor, James, Accumulation Crisis (New York: Basil Blackwell, 1984).Google Scholar

25. Mary Anne's necklace serves the function Richard Slotkin has ascribed to trophies: “to provide visual and concrete proofs of the self-justifying acts of violent self-transcendence and regeneration that produced them” (Regeneration Through Violence: The Mythology of the American Frontier 1600–1860 [Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1972], p. 564)Google Scholar. The Green Berets' hootch where Mary Anne finds her place as a Killer Woman is full of trophies that “stink of the kill” — the decayed head of a black leopard.… And bones. Stacks of bones — all kinds” (p. 119). Slotkin believes that the myth of regeneration through violence, which he traces back to Indian captivity tales, has been used throughout American history to sanctify imperialistic ventures. Most recently, he says, it helped President Johnson escalate the war in Vietnam. In O'Brien's story, regeneration does not entail rescue of others but transformation of the self: Mary Anne becomes a new woman through acts of violence inseparable from the violation of a land.

Like Slotkin, T.J. Jackson Lears has linked American militarism to “social and personal regeneration,” arguing that “war has offered men the chance to escape the demands of bourgeois domesticity” and find the “intensity of experience” they sought (No Place of Grace: Antimodernism and the Transformation of American Culture 1880–1920 [New York: Pantheon, 1981], p. 98)Google Scholar. The argument Lears develops about men — an argument that links “the quest for intense experience” to militarism, and both to “a secular culture of consumerism” (p. 138) — applies to O'Brien's Mary Anne as she pursues her self-transformation in Vietnam. Lear's argument applies also to Dreiser's Carrie, a character in quest of a “selffulfillment” she will never attain. The “vision of a self in endless development,” Lears writes, “is perfectly attuned to an economy based on pointless growth and ceaseless destruction.” Within this economy, advertisers early recognized “the cash value” of manipulating individual needs and underwriting “a notion of selffulfillment through voracious acquisitions” (p. 304). Both Carrie and Mary Anne succumb to this notion.

26. That a Special Forces unit, made up of meticulously and thoroughly trained individuals, would allow a raw young civilian woman to join its nocturnal guerrilla raids is unbelievable, no more so than that such a woman would be able to visit a lover stationed in Vietnam's in-country - though O'Brien's narrator insists upon the truth of his account of her arrival, accommodation, and acceptance. O'Brien has acknowledged that “Sweetheart of the Song Tra Bong” is “so far from one's ordinary expectations as to be a fable,” but he claims “that of all the stories in the book [it] … comes the closest to an actual event.” Since O'Brien had not “witnessed” the event but “been told about it,” he was creating a story out of a story he had heard in order, he said, “to make credible what to me was incredible.” See Coffey, Michael's interview, “Tim O'Brien,” Publishers Weekly 237 (02 16, 1990): 60–61Google Scholar. What O'Brien finds credible, apparently, is that a woman can be transformed into a killer more lethal and savage than all the male figures in his book, and that any American woman who appears in Vietnam, even if only in a photograph that a soldier carries, brings death (as in the story “In the Field,” in The Things They Carried, p. 192)Google Scholar. Robin Moore has also insisted upon the truth of his fictionalized account of the Green Berets, an invented story that brought the then little-known United States Army Special Forces to popular attention (The Green Berets [New York: Crown, 1965])Google Scholar. Moore's hyperventilated fiction became the basis of the John Wayne movie that further popularized the Green Berets. Colonel Charles M. Simpson, a group commander, has given a tempered, basically laudatory account of Special Forces missions in his book Inside the Green Berets, The First Thirty Years: A History of the U.S. Army Special Forces (Novata, Calif.: Presidio, 1985)Google Scholar. As for Vietnam, Colonel Simpson asks, “Can the full story of Special Forces in Vietnam be told?” (p. 96). This is a recurrent question raised in The Things They Carried.

27. In Mason, Bobbie Ann's In Country, a novel (New York: Harper and Row, 1985)Google Scholar, the young woman protagonist tries to imagine herself in the Vietnam War, in which the father she never knew had died. Horrified to discover that her father had actually killed Vietnamese, she draws a distinction between men and women that O'Brien's story subverts. “Women didn't kill,” young Samantha or “Sam” thinks; “Men wanted to kill.… It was their basic profession” (pp. 209–10). Even though she wants to disavow the war she had sought to know, Mason's heroine is gratified, rather than repelled, to find her own name—and “all the names of America” — on the Vietnam Veterans Memorial wall. As “Sam A Hughes,” she shares in the killing and cleansing symbolized by the memorial.

28. Baumgold, Julie, “Killer Women: Here Come the Hardbodies,” New York Magazine 24 (07 29, 1991): 23–29Google Scholar. For an account of real killer women, see MacDonald, Eileen's report of her interviews with women who have committed acts of terrorism in Shoot the Women First (New York: Random House, 1991)Google Scholar. MacDonald concludes that women terrorists — that is, women who kill to further a political cause — “have proved that a woman is just as capable as a man of learning how to make bombs, plant them, and detonate them, and is just as likely to be a good shot with a gun” (p. 233). Reputedly, the injunction to shoot the women first was given to antiterrorist squads because women terrorists were considered more dangerous than men (p. xiv).

29. For a psychoanalytic critique of the relationship between Beauty and the Beast in horror movies, see Linda Williams's insightful essay “When the Woman Looks,” in Re-Vision: Essays in Feminist Film Criticism, ed. Doane, Mary Ann, Mellencamp, Patricia, and Williams, Linda (Los Angeles: University Publications of America, 1984), pp. 83–99Google Scholar. Focusing upon the woman as subject rather than object of the gaze, Williams says that in narrative cinema “to see is to desire” (p. 83)—a point I am making about women characters in American naturalistic fiction. The monster that the woman sees in horror films, Williams argues, often is a double of herself, which may explain the “strange sympathy” that creates a sentimental bond between Beauty and the Beast (or America's Sweetheart and the Green Berets).

30. Ewen, and Ewen, , Channels of Desire, 1991 rev. ed., p. 209.Google Scholar

31. Fonda, Jane, Jane Fonda's Workout Book (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1981), p. 20Google Scholar. For a discussion of Jane Fonda's changing personae and their relationship to her reactions to the Vietnam War, see Dryer, Richard, Stars (London: British Film Institute, 1979), pp. 72–98Google Scholar. Dyer reproduces a still of Fonda as Barbarella dressed in metal and armed with a gun — the sex goddess as killer woman. In The Things They Carried, “Sweet Janie” appeals to O'Brien's most unappealing character, Azar, who makes an obscene joke about the way Janie “boosts a man's morale” (“The Ghost Soldiers,” p. 232)Google Scholar. As Tim the narrator notes, the movie Barbarella had been playing for eight nights in a row — a “lousy movie,” he says (p. 232). Dyer says that Fonda expressed her views on war and women through documentary and commercial films (Vietnam Journey, 1972Google Scholar, and Coming Home, 1978)Google Scholar. As a movie star, however, Fonda was, like any actor, a“phenomenon of consumption” (pp. 19, 39–48). The relation Dyer traces between the star and salient patterns of consumption, particularly conspicuous consumption, extends the arguments of this essay from fictional characters to actual women who enact in contemporary times the cultural roles that Dreiser”s little actress had assumed a hundred years ago.

32. For a highly polemic argument that links a “culture of slimming” to late capitalism, and both to political practice, consumption, and the “manipulation” and “constant frustration of desire,” see Schwartz, Hillel, Never Satisfied: A Cultural History of Diets, Fantasies and Fat (New York: Free Press, 1986), pp. 327–36Google Scholar, passim. “An expanding Late Capitalist world requires that no one ever be satisfied” (p. 329), Schwartz writes, describing the state of women characters who incessantly want more. Quoting passages in Fonda's Workout Book to which I have referred, as well as passages from Fonda's critic, Charles Krauthammer, Schwartz connects capitalism and the culture of slimming to Vietnam. As Krauthammer had noted, Fonda's prescribed diet was that of “the pre-war Vietnam peasant” (p. 335); and as Schwartz notes, Fonda's exhortation to go for the burn “was compatible with the practices of the Thin Society and the profits of Hollywood capitalism” (p. 336) — as, one might add, befits the current Mrs. Ted Turner.

33. Baumgold, , “Killer Women,” pp. 23–29.Google Scholar

34. Baudrillard sees the Vietnam War as “a crucial episode in a peaceful coexistence” of Communist China with capitalistic America. By its nonintervention, China allowed a “passing from a strategy of world revolution to one of a [presumably capitalistic] sharing of forces and empires” (Simulations, p. 67)Google Scholar. Inside Vietnam, Baudrillard argues, the adversaries, seemingly in “a struggle to the death,” shared a single objective: to liquidate “‘primitive’ precapitalistic and antiquated structures.” Once this end was accomplished, a “scenario” for ending the war could be enacted. Though the deaths were real and “heinous,” the war was “a mere simulacrum” (pp. 69–70)Google Scholar. For an elaborate discussion on the staging of reality through representations that are mere simulacra or appearances, see Debord, Guy, Comments on the Society of the Spectacle, trans. Imrie, Malcolm (London: Verso, 1990Google Scholar; published originally in 1988 as Commentaires sur la societe du spectacle).

35. I quote from a monumental novel of our times, Pynchon, Thomas's Gravity's Rainbow (New York: Viking, 1973), p. 3Google Scholar. The novel's highly involuted plot grows out of a psychological experiment in Pavlovian conditioning that is comic, bizarre, and ominous; the themes meld determinism with science and sheer spectacle, and both with war and myriad other matters. If I had world enough and time, I might have extended this essay to include Gravity's Rainbow as (in a Faulknerian phrase) the apotheosis and reductum ad absurdum of the essay's arguments.

36. Broyles, William Jr., “Why Men Love War,” Esquire (11, 1984): 56Google Scholar. David Wyatt discusses the connection among looking, desire, and shame that Michael Herr drew in Dispatches, a book based on Herr's experiences as a journalist — essentially an onlooker or witness — in Vietnam. As Wyatt put it, “The endlessness of looking, its uncanny resemblance to the rhythms of desire — this is what Herr discovers in Vietnam, and it finally has less to do with the quantity and texture of the information coming in than with the sheer and permanent logic of the act of looking itself” (Out of the Sixties: Storytelling and the Vietnam Generation [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993, pp. 182–83)Google Scholar. Wanting more seems an inevitable consequence of separating “the permanent logic of the act of looking” from what one sees, whether the dead bodies Herr looks at or the clothes in a department store window a woman sees. In either instance, the act of looking impresses its logic of insatiability upon the onlooker, who must continue to look and want and, in this endless process, always want more: “Looking, like desire, is an act that is never ended” (p. 182).

37. See Artley, , Golden Age of Shop Design, p. 7Google Scholar; Ewen, and Ewen, , Channels of Desire, p. 74Google Scholar; and Bowlby, Rachel, Just Looking: Consumer Culture in Dreiser, Gissing, and Zola (New York: Methuen, 1985), p. 20Google Scholar. See also Hennion, Antoine and Méadel, Cécile, “The Artisans of Desire: The Mediation of Advertising between Product and Consumer,”Google Scholar trans. Bowker, Geoffrey, Sociological Theory 7 (1989): 191–209Google Scholar, which describes “the discourse of advertising wandering between marketing and seduction” (p. 197). These examples can only suggest, and they can hardly suggest, a countless number of references to the seductiveness of commodities and the seduction of the consumer.

38. As Charles Child Walcutt has pointed out in his important early study of naturalism, “Dreiser believes in a determinism which destroys or modifies the moral view of conduct” (American Naturalism: A Divided Stream [Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1956], p. 193).Google Scholar

39. Abelson, Elaine S., When Ladies Go A-Thieving: Middle-Class Shoplifters in the Victorian Department Store (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), p. 74Google Scholar. Abelson quotes trade journals of the times that advocated the use of department store window displays to “force” onlookers to want what they see: “‘Goods should be so displayed,’ the DGR [Dry Goods Reporter] advised, ‘as to force people to feel that they really wish to possess them’” (quoted on p. 73). The “respectable shoplifter” or kleptomaniac presumably felt the full power of the display, and her legal defense, which had “a softening effect in the courts,” was that she “literally” had been “forced to steal” (p. 185). Lower-class women who stole were simply thieves. Thus the constitution of kleptomania as a mental illness takes place as social class converges with consumerism in the Victorian department stores where women of means can be captivated by display. To suggest the zero point of kleptomania — the historical moment before the disease was differentiated — I have appropriated and emphasized here and in the sentence above terms from Foucault, Michel's well-known work, Madness & Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason (New York: Vintage, 1965Google Scholar; published originally in 1961 as Histoire de la Folie), p. x.Google Scholar

That the “kleptomaniac is not a free agent, in respect of his stealing” became a philosophical matter to Sir Alfred J. Ayer, who believed that the kleptomaniac did not, could not, “go through any process of deciding whether or not to steal. Or rather, if he [sic] does go through such a process, it is irrelevant to his behavior. Whatever he resolved to do, he would steal all the same” — his, or her, action was determined (“Freedom and Necessity,” in Watson, , Free Will, p. 20)Google Scholar. Ironically, department store thefts, whether by kleptomaniacs or ordinary thieves, opened new job opportunities to women, hired as in-house detectives to apprehend the women shoplifters who were increasing in number and decreasing business profits. On the early employment of women detectives in American department stores, see “Women Thief Catchers,” Pittsburgh, Labor National Tribune, no. 18, 04 23, 1896.Google Scholar

40. See Abelson, , When Ladies Go A-Thieving (pp. 173–96)Google Scholar, on the medical, legal, and cultural aspects of kleptomania as a newly denned disease associated with women, department stores, and window displays calculated to create irresistible desire. In his “social” (rather than “business”) history of the Bon Marché, Miller makes the same associations about kleptomania (Bon Marché, pp. 197–206)Google Scholar. That Miller reiterates such terms as seduction, irresistible desire, overpowering urges, incitement and stimulation of desire — words connoting force and sexuality — may help explain why he turns briefly but ultimately to medical, legal, and cultural questions about women and kleptomania.

41. Westbrook, Robert B., “Politics as Consumption: Managing the Modern American Election,” in The Culture of Consumption: Critical Essays in American History, 1880–1980, ed. Fox, Richard Wightman and Lears, T. J. Jackson (New York: Pantheon, 1983), p. 145.Google Scholar

42. For a indicting account of the complicity of fashion, selling, and modern American politics, a conscious and invidious complicity, see Silverman, Debora, Selling Culture: Bloomingdale's, Diana Vreeland, and the New Aristocracy of Taste in Reagan's America (New York: Pantheon, 1986)Google Scholar. For a clear-sighted analysis of the deliberate muddling of spectacle with secrecy during the presidencies of Reagan and Bush, see Rogin, Michael, “‘Make My Day!’ Spectacle as Amnesia in Imperial Politics,” Representations 29 (Winter 1990): 99–123CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Rogin points out that “[s]pectacles, in the Marxist modernist view, shift attention from workers as producers to spectators as consumers of mass culture”; and that “in the postmodern view,” as described by Debord and Baudrillard, spectacles produce, among other effects, a skilled diversion of the public's attention from an “object” or “the real” to “its hyperreal, reproducible representation,” to mere “display” (p. 106).

43. Eisenstadt, Elizabeth L., The Printing Press an as Agent of Change: Communications and Cultural Transformations in Early-Modern Europe, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979)Google Scholar. Eisenstadt described medieval publishers as “both business men and literary dispensers of glory. They served men of letters not only by providing traditional forms of patronage but also by acting as press agents and as cultural impresarios of a new kind.… The printer could take satisfaction in serving humanity at large even while enhancing the reputation of authors and making money for himself (vol. I, p. 23, original emphasis). For interesting literary criticism that begins with the prehistory of advertising as contained within the history of printing and proceeds to fictions that contain — and are contained by — advertisements as “one vast textual system,” see Wicke, Jennifer, Advertising Fictions: Literature, Advertisement, & Social Reading (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988).Google Scholar

44. For two of the many accounts and revisionary tellings of the novel's publishing history, see Salzman, Jack, “The Publication of Sister Carrie: Fact and Fiction,” Library Chronicle of the University of Pennsylvania 33 (1967): 119–33Google Scholar; and Brennan, Stephen C., “The Publication of Sister Carrie: Old and New Fictions,” American Literary Realism 18 (Spring and Autumn 1985): 55–68Google Scholar. For letters and documents involved in the publishing controversy and its “legend,” see the Norton Critical Edition of Sister Carrie already cited (pp. 433–70). Like advertisements, literary criticism can revitalize desire for a text; critics make certain texts fashionable, as we know, and increase their consumption, though critics have also displaced desire from literary texts to literary theory.

45. Quoted from Raferty, John H., “By Bread Alone,” Reedy's Mirror (12 5, 1901)Google Scholar, in Lingeman, Richard, Theodore Dreiser: At the Gates of the City, 1871–1907 (New York: Putnam's, 1986), p. 298; see also p. 415.Google Scholar

46. Even a selective list of indispensable recent studies of Sister Carrie (aside from those already noted) requires more space than this essay allows. The studies I note here suggest the fecund diversity of critical approaches the novel has inspired. See, for example, Pizer, Donald, ed. New Essays on Sister Carrie (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Michaels, Walter Benn, “Sister Carrie's Popular Economy,” in The Gold Standard and the Logic of Naturalism: American Literature at the Turn of the Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987)Google Scholar; Kaplan, Amy, “The Sentimental Revolt of Sister Carrie,” in The Social Construction of American Realism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), pp. 140–60Google Scholar; and Howard, June, Form and History in America Literary Naturalism (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1985)Google Scholar. Among earlier studies of the novel, I note only two germinal critiques: Matthiessen, F. O., Theodore Dreiser (New York: William Sloane Associates, 1951), pp. 55–92Google Scholar; and Moers, Ellen, Two Dreisers (New York: Viking, 1969), pp. 73–152.Google Scholar

47. Girard, René, Desire, Deceit, and the Novel: Self and Other in Literary Structure, trans. Frecerro, Yvonne (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1965), p. 290.Google Scholar

48. Or this conclusion might have been anticipated if one pursued Fredric Jameson's conjecture that historical periods should be denned as a “restructuration” of the “elements” of a previous period's dominant style, rather than a rejection of the period's “content” (“Postmodernism and Consumer Society,” The Anti-aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture, ed. Foster, Hal [Seattle: Bay, 1983], pp. 111–25)Google Scholar. I am suggesting that restructuration leaves intact an underlying pattern of desire ascribed to consuming women in texts produced in different historical times. The effect is to minimize the literary or cultural effects of restructuration. For though the destructive power of a woman who embodies, and is consumed by, capitalistic values may seem central to O'Brien's story and only marginal to Dreiser's novel, the difference between center and margin, I would argue contrary to Jameson, is more illusive than real, and the similarity is more culturally significant than the difference. At the center of both texts there is a woman who wants more; at the margins are the available objects of her desire. If we look closely at these objects, we see they are all products of the same culture of capitalism and they are all produced for consumption. Dreiser may be more ambivalent than O'Brien about the consuming woman he describes, and he is clearly closer to her and more sympathetic, but in other respects he seems to me O'Brien's contemporary rather than his “genealogical precursor” (the term is from Jameson's essay “Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism,” New Left Review 146 [07–08 1984], p. 56).Google Scholar

49. Theories on the etiology of desire are too numerous and well known to recapitulate here. Philosophical theories trace back at least to Hegel, if not further, indeed to the Bible; and psychological theories, to Freud. It would be supererogatory to cite here such contemporaries as Lacan, who formalized the concept of lack, the relation between conscious and unconscious desire, and of both to the acquisition of language (Ecrits); and of French feminists, like Irigaray, Cixous, and Kristeva, who sought to define woman's desire. Another approach to an understanding of desire is through Marxist materialism. Catherine Belsey has merged Althusser's revisionary views of Marxist materialism with Lacan's revisionary views of Freud to produce a critique of literary practices that reveals the role of ideology in the criticism and consumption of books. “[B]ooks are literary commodities,” she writes, but “conventional literary criticism” suppresses “the process of production” crucial to the making of books, mystifying or eliminating the writer's “work” in the same ways that a laborer's work is eliminated in the presentation of a commodity (Critical Practice [London: Methuen, 1980], pp. 126–29)Google Scholar. Belsey sees advertisements as comparable to literary realism insofar as each “constructs its signified out of juxtapositions of signifiers which are intelligible not as direct reflections of an unmediated reality but because we are familiar with the signifying systems from which they are drawn, linguistic, literary, semiotic” — systems that, like individuals, are “interpellated,” she believes, with ideology (Critical Practice, p. 48).Google Scholar