SOURCE: "The City as Noncommunity," in From Main Street to State Street: Town, City, and Community in America, Kennikat Press, 1977, pp. 68-79.

[In the following essay from her book-length study of urban settings in American literature, Goist discusses the works of Theodore Dreiser and Henry Blake Fuller.]

Though he lived in cities and even wrote one "urban novel," Hamlin Garland remained essentially a writer of the frontier or middle border. But the locale of his one effort at city fiction has been the focal point of a good deal of novelistic effort. At the turn of the nineteenth century two of the outstanding novelists of Chicago were Theodore Dreiser (1871-1945) and Henry Blake Fuller (1857-1929). Their backgrounds were quite different, as were both their literary and life styles. Dreiser came from the hinterlands and spent a good portion of his career attempting to come to terms with America's largest cities, Chicago and New York. Fuller was born and lived all his life in Chicago, and after an initial effort to deal with his native city he turned largely to other kinds of work. Given these and other differences to be discussed in this chapter, it is interesting to note that both Dreiser and Fuller share a structure of feeling with Garland in regard to individualism and community in the city.

In her study The American Urban Novel (1954), Blanche Gelfant maintains that "with the publication of Sister Carrie, the twentieth-century American city novel came into being" (p. 63). It is significant to note that Theodore Dreiser, the author of this important urban novel, like his contemporaries Booth Tarkington, Zona Gale, Sherwood Anderson, and Sinclair Lewis, grew up in small town America. Like Tarkington he was from Indiana, and like Anderson he knew small town poverty at first hand. But unlike these members of his generation Dreiser became a novelist of the city, and in his books he attempted to define the meaning of large cities for American life.

Forty years after Dreiser's Sister Carrie appeared in 1900, the Chicago sociologist Louis Wirth wrote a now classic essay entitled "Urbanism as a Way of Life," in which he argued that the uniqueness of a big city lifestyle results from the interaction of the large size, diversity, and heterogeneity of its population. Theodore Dreiser was not a sociologist consciously measuring the relative weight of certain given variables, but he was a participant observer who, like Wirth, sought in his aesthetic rendering of the metropolis to explain what urbanism meant as a way of life.¹

Before writing Sister Carrie Dreiser was a successful newspaper and free-lance magazine writer. Only reluctantly, at the urging of a close friend, did he take a hand at writing a novel. But once he set to work, he was able to complete the book in seven months (probably only four of which were actually spent on Sister Carrie). In that relatively short period he produced an American literary classic. Dreiser was able to achieve this feat in part because he had spent the preceding seven years writing prodigiously for newspapers and magazines, thus learning his craft. Also, when he turned to fiction he drew on his own personal encounters with the city. As the experiences of George Willard and Felix Fay in the towns of Ohio, Iowa, and Illinois encouraged them to look to Chicago as the next step in their ventures, so Dreiser and his fictional characters were drawn to that metropolis of the Midwest to find the meaning of life. The adventures of Carrie take up where the stories of George and Felix leave off: in her the meaning and impact of the city upon the half-formed small town youngster is traced. Dreiser's volume is an urban novel precisely because it reveals how the city environment shaped the lives of its individual characters.²

The book's plot revolves around the fortunes of three people and covers the period from August, 1889, to January, 1897. Caroline Meeber comes to Chicago from Columbia City, Wisconsin, and gets a physically exhausting, low-paying job in a cheap shoe factory. She lives with her sister and brother-in-law, whose pinched existence is determined largely by his menial job cleaning refrigerator cars at the city's stockyards. Following a short illness, Carrie loses her job and, without an income from which to pay the rent or buy clothes for the winter, accidentally runs into Charles Drouet, a flashy traveling salesman she had met on the train to Chicago. Disheartened by the restrictive life at her sister's flat, unable to secure a job, convinced of Drouet's concern for her, and desirous of the lifestyle he can provide, she accepts his offer and the two begin living together.

Soon thereafter Drouet introduces his "wife" to George Hurstwood, the suave manager of Fitzgerald and Moy's, a fashionable downtown bar. Hurstwood has a comfortable life, a substantial home, and a respectable wife who has conventional social ambitions for her two children. But he falls in love with Carrie, who does not yet know he is married, wins her away from Drouet, who, when he finds out what has been going on, tells her about Hurstwood's marital status. As his own marriage collapses, Hurstwood, in a moment of wine-confused panic, takes almost $11,000 from his employer's safe, and by a ruse tricks Carrie into going to Montreal with him. He is forced to return most of the money; then he and Carrie, who has reconciled herself to the situation (she does not know about the theft of the money), change their name, get married, and go to New York. There Hurstwood experiences a decline of fortunes that eventually leads him to the Bowery where he resorts to panhandling. In contrast, his wife (now Carrie Medenda) launches a stage career which brings her wealth and prominence, abandoning Hurstwood in the process. At the end of the novel Hurstwood, now a completely defeated individual, crawls away into a flophouse, turns on the gas, and ends his life. Carrie, unfulfilled by her success, sits alone in her rocking-chair, amidst luxurious surroundings, unhappy, yearning for something she is unable to attain.³

The plot and characters in the novel were drawn largely from Dreiser's own family experiences. In 1885 his sister Emma began an affair with a man some fifteen years her senior who was a cashier at a swank Chicago bar. She soon learned that he was married and had three children. Nonetheless, she joined him and they went to Montreal; on the way he revealed that while drunk he had stolen money from his employers. He returned most of the $3,500, the employers did not prosecute, and he and Emma settled in New York as managers of a rather shady rooming house. In the novel Dreiser's sister becomes Sister Carrie and the Chicago cashier is Hurstwood. The figure of Drouet was based on a clever, popular, and welldressed student Dreiser had envied at the University of Indiana, which he attended in 1889-90. More important than these close parallels between fiction and fact is the way the events and characters are recreated to reflect Dreiser's understanding of the meaning of city life.

The first thing one notices about Carrie is how little influence a small town background contributes in her adjustments to the metropolis. A reader learns almost nothing about her parents (except that her father works in a flour mill) and nothing at all about her eighteen years in Columbia City. When she leaves, "the threads which bound her so lightly to girlhood were irretrievably broken" (p. 1), and only rarely does she have "a far-off thought of Columbia City" (p. 58). When she does have a fleeting memory of her home town, it is because she is disturbed or confused over some moral and/or economic issue: as she begins living with Drouet (p. 86), as she contrasts North Shore Drive elegance with Drouet's Ogden Place rooms (p. 128), or just after she has left Drouet and learned that Hurstwood is married (p. 271). But even when she has lost her job in the shoe factory and her sister suggests that she return home, although Carrie agrees, this is never a real alternative. "Columbia City, what was there for her? She knew its dull, little round by heart." Like Rose Dutcher she has seen Chicago, and here she wants to stay and experience life. "Here was the great, mysterious city which was still a magnet for her. What she had seen only suggested its possibilities. Now to turn her back on it and live the little old life out there . . ." seemed impossible (pp. 73-74). In the next scene Carrie allows Drouet to buy her clothes and set her up in an apartment. The glittering possibilities of the city have overcome whatever moral hesitation still lingers "lightly" from her Columbia City girlhood.

As Carrie enters the city, although she is eighteen, her character is essentially unformed. Self-interest is her guiding characteristic; enjoying "the keener pleasures of life," she is "ambitious to gain in material things." She is "a fair example of the middle American class—two generations removed from the emigrant" (p. 2). What impact does the city have on this young, half-formed middle American? It impresses itself on Carrie, as it had on Dreiser himself, as a place of sharp contrasts between drudgery, poverty, and anonymity on the one hand, ease, wealth, and prominence on the other. Carrie quickly responds to the latter. The joyless, relentless, laboring, and humdrum existence of her sister and brother-in-law represent one urban reality. In contrast to this narrowness is the more luxurious life of Drouet, Hurstwood, and her female acquaintances Mrs. Hale and Mrs. Vance. That life revolves around fine clothes and jewelry, the fashion promenades in Chicago (and later in New York), social contacts, good restaurants, and the excitement of the theater—all made possible by money. "Money: something everybody else has and I must get . . ." (p. 70). If the city measures one's worth by what one has, then she intends to get. Carrie's capacity to understand what society values and her spirit in pursuing those goals are her inherited characteristics; the specific values she accepts are acquired from the city environment. Urbanism as a way of life for Carrie means attempting to achieve a lifestyle marked by prominence and wealth.

The irony is that Carrie does achieve success, as a noted actress, and yet she is unfulfilled. She seems as little responsible for her rise to stardom as Hurstwood is for his plunge from an upper class position ("the first grade below the luxuriously rich") to being a street beggar. At the end of the novel, as Hurstwood ends his life by his own hand, finally defeated by circumstances over which he has no control, Carrie sits idly rocking in her chair, successful according to the terms she has accepted but in her way also trapped, dreaming vaguely of something beyond her elegant surroundings. Carrie has recently been stirred by the urgings of Robert Ames of Indianapolis that she give up comedy and turn to serious drama. Ames argues that her face reflects a longing which many people feel and are struggling to express, and that she should (indeed, has an obligation to) use this genius on the stage so that people can express themselves through her. Carrie does not understand the import of what Ames is urging, and as the world represented by Drouet and Hurstwood loses its allure she is left confused and uncertain about life.

Dreiser's point here is important in understanding his interpretation of the city. When Carrie comes to Chicago, she has the imagination and capacity to respond to beauty, but her vague aesthetic yearnings have as yet no guiding principle or definite focal point for realization. The urban ideal of beauty held up so alluringly before her is one of glitter and show, and being an imaginative and impressionable person she responds accordingly and makes the city's goals her own. Dreiser is not criticizing Carrie for her choice, for it was a choice he had himself made when first encountering the city. But when she achieves the earthly success represented by Hurstwood and offered by the city, she senses that it somehow does not bring happiness. She is, Dreiser tells us, "an illustration of the devious ways by which one who feels, rather than reasons, may be led in the pursuit of beauty" (p. 557). The realization of the material success valued in Chicago and New York does not bring emotional and human fulfillment, but on the contrary leaves one emotionally drained and spiritually confused.

In his use of symbols and imagery, as in his manipulation of plot and characters, Dreiser's conception of the city is discerned. Carrie is seen as "a waif amid forces," "half-equipped little knight," "a soldier of fortune," "a pilgrim," "a wisp in the wind," and "a harp in the wind"—in other words, a wanderer at the mercy of arbitrary gods. As she is bounced hither and yon, her shifting identity is reflected in various names: Caroline Meeber becomes in the course of her wanderings "Sister Carrie, "Cad," "Mrs. Drouet," "Mrs. G. W. Murdock," "Mrs. Wheeler," and finally "Carrie Medenda." Her real entry into the cherished "walled city" (the world of wealth and luxury) is attained by her discovery of "the gate to the world," the theater. The stage, as so often in novels of this period, represents not only the show and glamour of city life, but is also pictured as providing a means for actors and audiences alike to play a role in life. It is a way, so Dreiser and other authors imply, for the many estranged urbanites to gain the illusion that they are a part of things, for a moment at least. For Carrie, then, her way of entering into the swirl of life around her means having a role to play. "Oh if she could only have such a part, how broad would be her life! She too could act appealing" (p. 345). In this "elfland" world of Aladdin her success is, arbitrarily, assured. A final recurring symbol, that of the rocking chair, captures this note of the ceaseless yet meaningless urban movement, a to-and-fro motion with no apparent direction: the rise and fall of individual lives has as much reason as the back-and-forth rocking of Carrie's chair.

If community involves, as recent sociologists argue, the meaningful interaction of people who share certain socially sanctioned norms and behavior, then there is no community in the city world of Sister Carrie. People in the novel live and die alone. Personal relationships are of only the most tenuous nature. Hurstwood leaves his family with startling ease, with no twinge of conscience. His wife's main concern over her husband's departure is of a strictly monetary nature. Hurstwood's "friends" at the bar are merely casual acquaintances, whose "hail fellow well met" élan is but a facade. Drouet is a man with no permanent home and no lasting relationships, a traveling salesman who flits easily from place to place, woman to woman. Carrie finds it only slightly more difficult to break family ties and intimate relationships with Drouet and Hurstwood.

Dreiser's city is a world where even the closest and most intimate relationships are easily abandoned. Here there is no hope of developing and maintaining the bonds which traditionally have held community together. The city of Theodore Dreiser is the epitome of noncommunity.

In 1928 Theodore Dreiser wrote of a little-known author, Henry B. Fuller, that he was "the man who led the van of realism in America." Dreiser praised Fuller's novel With the Procession (1895), calling it "as sound and agreeable a piece of American realism as that decade, or any since, produced."⁴ Not widely known even in his own lifetime, though highly respected by a few style-conscious writers and critics, Fuller has recently been the focus of renewed interest, evidenced most clearly by the publication of a combined biography and critical study in 1974. Bernard Bowron, Jr.'s, Henry B. Fuller of Chicago carried the appropriate subtitle "The Ordeal of a Genteel Realist in Ungenteel America." Appropriate because Fuller, though a native Chicagoan whose grandfather had come to the city in 1849 and made a sizable fortune, was a recluse who did not share the booster attitude and aggressive business values which dominated his city. Yet Fuller did not flee America to become a literary expatriate, but sought in some of his early work to deal with the "formulation of American society" as exemplified in Chicago.⁵

With the Procession is the story of one of Chicago's Old Settler families, the Marshalls, whose commitment to the standards of a bygone day has left them "out of things," the social parade having passed them by. The novel involves the efforts of a younger generation of Marshalls to lift the family into "the procession."⁶

David Marshall, the father, has built up a successful grocery business through thirty-five years of steady work and conservative economic practices. He performs his role in life with "an air of patient, self-approving resignation" (p. 17). He works on from year to year at his business, with no particular goal in mind, because this is what he knows and what he does best. He has lost interest in "society," and he understands his obligation to be to his family and to his employees and their families, but not to the public at large. In his life and outlook David Marshall exemplifies an individualism and privatism which Fuller implies was more appropriate to an earlier day. A good part of the efforts on the part of other characters in the novel is aimed at persuading David Marshall of his duty to the broader society of Chicago.

The elder Marshall resists these overtures largely because the Chicago "public" he is becoming aware of is not at all the same "society" that his daughters wish to join. In the first place, it is eventually revealed that Marshall's business practices have not always been as decorous as he might have wished them to be. His partner Gilbert Beiden follows the more aggressive, extralegal practices of the day. How did such a man become an associate of the more staid and cautious Marshall? Beiden was taken into the firm during the financial panic of 1873, just two years after the great Chicago fire, when Marshall & Co. was on the brink of ruin. Marshall is forced to resort to tactics "quite outside the lines of mercantile morality, and barely inside the lines of legality itself," and Beiden is hired away from a rival firm to accomplish the maneuver (p. 100). Once established, he pushes ahead to become a full partner, eventually attempts to wrest control from Marshall and transform the business into a stock company. But Fuller is not simply attributing all good to the Old Settlers and all bad to the newcomers: there is obviously a closer relationship between the sharp practices of the new businessmen and the "conservatism" of the Old Settlers than David Marshall might at times like to admit to himself.

Near the end of the novel, with David on his deathbed, Marshall & Beiden is in receivership. But the family fortune (some $3,000,000) is not lost. David's oldest son Roger has successfully invested his father's money in speculative real estate ventures, which represents another break with the professed practices of the past. Roger Marshall is a lawyer, also involved with the seamier aspects of the family business. In the process of these dealings he becomes familiar with the rapidly changing social character of the city.

Roger participates in one set of events, the details of which take place "offstage" and are revealed only piecemeal in snatches of conversation. They reflect the inescapable entanglement of the Marshalls with a newer Chicago. An immigrant woman, Mrs. Van Horn, has purchased goods from David and is reselling them from her residence, which is only two blocks from the Marshall home. A writ is issued to halt the practice, but the woman is alerted by a relative connected with the police court, and when the search takes place no goods are found. Her son is an alderman, her nephew a bailiff, and when the matter gets to court it is continued (delayed) three times. When Roger presses the issue in the lower court, two of the woman's nephews break into the Marshall stable and beat the coachman. When these ruffians go before the court, the alderman's son writes out a fictitious bail bond, then the two muggers jump bail and the bond is forfeited.

Roger's function in all this, and other such matters, is to act as an intermediary, a sort of buffer, between the Marshalls and the changing world of Chicago which is engulfing them. At the unsatisfactory conclusion of the Van Horn affair, Roger tells his father, who is gradually becoming aware of the implications of such incidents:

You have lifted off the cover and looked in. Do you want to go deeper? You'll find a hell-broth—thieves, gamblers, prostitutes, pawnbrokers, saloonkeepers, aldermen, heelers, justices, bailiffs, policemen—all concocted for us within a short quarter of a century. .. . I never felt so cheap and filthy in my life. (p. 145)

David wonders if he himself isn't to blame as he sees his son coarsening under the impact of such activities. Again, the "new" Chicago is impinging forcefully upon David Marshall and his family. The survival of the family is due in no small part to its ability, in the person of Roger, to understand change and adapt to new conditions.

Eliza Marshall, David's wife, is initially even more immune to the changing world in which she lives than her husband. She is, the narrator tells us, "a kind of antiquated villager—a geological survival from an earlier age" (p. 7). Her Chicago is still the town of 1860 (a "town," incidentally, with a population of 190,000 in that year), "an Arcadia which, in some dim and inexplicable way, had remained for her an Arcadia still—bigger, noisier, richer, yet different only in degree, and not essentially in kind" (p. 10). The Marshall home had been built in 1860 in a sedate residential area on Michigan Avenue, but thirty years later the neighborhood has changed drastically. By 1893 the local church has moved and old neighbors gone to more fashionable areas. Hotels, business offices, boarding houses, even a cheap music hall, have replaced the former homes. A suburban railway which runs close by spews its smoke and cinders over the yard into the house. Finally the family experiences urban violence when the Van Horn ruffians break into the Marshall stable.

Eliza clings tenaciously to her aging possessions and old ways amidst all this hectic change. This trait is effectively symbolized in her annual jelly making, which takes place every July, despite the fact that the "smoke and cinders of metropolitan life" have killed all her currant bushes. She now cans store-bought currants. The urban smoke has also killed Eliza's cherry tree and the rest of the garden as well. Successful efforts to effect a move from this "dear old place" to a new, more fashionable house are one of the key indications that the Marshalls have indeed begun once again to march "with the procession."

Jane Marshall is the daughter responsible for bringing about the family's entrance into the mainstream of Chicago's upper class social procession. She is also the family member most marked by the Old Settler spirit. Jane, thirty-three and single, launches her younger sister Rosy into the social limelight, and even succeeds in pushing her reluctant father into the role of an after-dinner speaker. Once in society, Rosy becomes insufferable, marries a somewhat nebulous Englishman because his father has a title, and cuts her mother's old friends from the wedding list, making sure her new "society" acquaintances are invited. Jane is also successful in convincing the elder Marshall that a move "further out" is called for, and the new house is nearing completion as the novel ends (the old home to be knocked down and replaced by a warehouse). Jane has twinges of remorse: "If it hadn't been for me we should never have left our old home and given up our old life" .. . (p. 261). But she is consoled by a proposal of marriage from Theodore Brower, a progressive, reform-minded insurance man.

Jane is forcefully assisted in her successful social maneuvers on behalf of the Marshall family by the wealthy and socially prominent Mrs. Granger Bates. The daughter of a "boss-carpenter," she and her husband have struggled up to a position of financial, cultural, and philanthropic leadership in Chicago. She is proud of this achievement and her position. "We have fought the fight—a fair field and no favor—and we have come out ahead. And we shall stay there too; keep up with the procession is my motto, and head it if you can. I do head it, and I feel that I'm where I belong" (p. 58). Years before, David Marshall was one of her favorite suitors, and though they have not seen one another in years she is now eager to help Jane with her plans.

Mrs. Bates has a strong streak of nostalgia for the earlier times and simpler ways of her childhood, but, as Bowron points out, she is not a sentimentalist (p. 156). She has a good sense of just how much of the procession is mere show and how much is of cultural value. If the dominant values of "privatism," of laissez-faire business enterprise, can give rise to socially valuable and culturally worthwhile creations, Fuller suggests that it will be due to people of the kind represented by Mrs. Granger Bates and Jane Marshall. They do not want to see the Old Settler spirit give way before the onslaught of the Beldens and other newcomers. Thus, Mrs. Bates is willing to help Jane, in whom she finds "one of us"

In contrast to the artistic and social hopes for a business culture which Mrs. Bates represents, is the almost complete disdain for Chicago expressed by Truesdale, Jane's younger brother. Truesdale leaves Yale to study art and music in Europe, or more correctly, "on the Continent." He returns to Chicago, where he observes there is "so little taste . . . so little training, so little education, so total an absence of any collective sense of the fit and proper" (p. 73). In Chicago Truesdale deplores the lack of promenades, cafes, journals, and the absence of an atmosphere of leisure he believes conducive to art and culture. American cities are too big, too noisy, too dirty, and too confusing and disordered to serve as an environment in which a true culture could flourish. Truesdale's pretentious ridicule of Chicago is based on his self-consciously acquired appreciation of the picturesque Gothic in France and Italy. At the end of the novel Truesdale is on his way to Japan, after it has been discovered that while in Europe he had an affair with an Alsatian girl whose father is now working for Marshall & Beiden. The resolution of this sordid matter by Roger (which includes buying off the girl's family by providing a willing husband for her) is just one more element driving David Marshall to his deathbed.

In sharp contrast to Truesdale stands the engineer-architect Tom Bingham, president of Bingham Construction Company. Bingham (who may have been based on Fuller's friend Daniel Burnham, a famous Chicago architect and city planner) thoroughly accepts Chicago values and gives them form in the ornate residences and steel-frame business towers which he builds. He is the architect and builder of the Marshalls' new home. Also in contrast to Truesdale, but from a different angle, is Theodore Brower, the man Jane chooses over Bingham as a husband. Brower's role in the novel is somewhat ambiguous. His is the one voice of near-dissent in the book, but his interesting reform suggestion of a legal-aid justice center for the poor is dropped. Instead it is decided to have a college building serve as a monument to David Marshall. In leading up to his original suggestion, Brower observes:

This town of ours labors under one peculiar disadvantage: it is the only great city in the world to which all its citizens have come for one common, avowed object of making money. . . . In this Garden City of ours every man cultivates his own little bed and his neighbor his, but who looks after the paths between? . . . The thing to teach the public is this: the general good is a different thing from the sum of the individual goods. Over in the settlements we are trying to make these newcomers realize that they are a part of the body politic; perhaps we need another settlement to remind some of the original charter-members of the same fact. (pp. 203-4)

What Brower is talking about is community and, as Larzer Ziff points out, Fuller seems to put more stock in this approach to Chicago's future than in the hopes many people placed in the transforming power of the example of planned orderliness represented by the buildings of the famous "White City" built for the Chicago World's Fair in 1893. This seems to be confirmed in Jane Marshall's choice of Brower as a husband rather than Bingham, an architect whose hopes for the future are akin to those of the City Beautiful advocate who designed the buildings and grounds for that famous fair.⁷

As far as Fuller would go with the reform theme was to suggest that in some vague way the Old Settler spirit of Mrs. Granger Bates would be melded with the liberal concerns of Brower. This was, at least, a step beyond the limitations of David Marshall's individualism, Eliza's nostalgic blindness, Truesdale's superciliousness, and Bingham's entrepreneurism. But Fuller, with one exception, dropped Chicago from his future literary subject matter, abandoning the difficult task of giving creative shape to a society he was so ambiguous toward. And yet, as Bowron has pointed out, "his inability to escape Chicago, both as fact and symbol, is, ironically, the essence of his art" (p. xxvii). What Fuller attempted and could not do was to cope with the contradictions, caused by rapid growth and change, which were so characteristic of Chicago in the 1890s and after.

Guy Szuberla, in his study of Fuller's vision of Chicago as a "cityscape," has indicated one important aspect of With the Procession as an urban novel. Szuberla argues that Fuller is probably the first American novelist to discard the agrarian myth as an adequate mode of perception for dealing with the modern machine-made city environment. In this interpretation Fuller's work "reflects a new idea of urban space" akin to Hart Crane's later directive that literature "absorb the machine" and "surrender . . . temporarily, to the sensations of urban life" (pp. 83-84).⁸ What this means in With the Procession is that both the Arcadian perception of Mrs. Marshall and the pseudosophisticated view of the picturesque and pastoral held by her son Truesdale are rejected as ways of seeing the city. The lesson is clear: "The pastoral myth, which has served to define the America of the past, has lost its relevance in the modern city" (p. 90).

Szuberla's point is convincing, but in the context of the present discussion it needs to be supplemented by a further observation. Though the pastoral myth had been abandoned by Fuller as a way of seeing the city, he was unable to come to terms with the growing social contradictions of Chicago. He could not resolve the dilemma between his respect for the individualistic Old Settler spirit and the vague community consciousness of Brower. For an instant Brower becomes a spokesman for the immigrants and poor of the city. Fuller's awareness of the impact of social change is shown in the Van Horn affair and in Brower's response to it. But the author's inability to cope with the meaning of these events is reflected in the fact that the action of the Van Horn affair takes place offstage and is revealed to the reader only indirectly. Instead, Fuller emphasizes the more traditional literary motif of tension between an older established class, the Marshalls, and social parvenus like the Beldens. Thus, one of the final scenes is the putdown of Mrs. Beiden by Eliza Marshall (who conveys the false impression that daughter Rosy has been "presented at court"). Fuller was, at the same time, aware of the much more important conflict between the immigrant poor and the Old Settlers. But by inclination and social position (he was manager of his family's business affairs after his father's death in 1885) he ultimately shied away from the issue. Clearly, however, for all the ambiguities he felt, his final vote was cast for the individualism of the Old Settlers.

The city of Theodore Dreiser lacks community in the sense that the word is being used in the present study. People in Dreiser's Chicago and New York lack the basic social interaction and sharing which are now so frequently understood to be primary characteristics of community. Sister Carrie suggests that such traits have always been lacking in the city. In Henry Blake Fuller's Chicago, on the other hand, an older "style" of upper class community is being challenged by significant social changes resulting from industrialization and immigration. This older way of living is also being shattered by a growing materialistically oriented effort to keep up with the procession, and by those new to the game who don't always follow the established rules. It is not suggested by Fuller that all was peace and harmony in the past, but among a certain stratum of society there was a distinct "us" feeling, a sense of belonging based on social and economic position. An exclusive community, the Old Settlers' Chicago involved social interaction and shared experiences among a class operating in a given geographic locale. But the locale was rapidly changing after 1860, in physical dimension, population size, and social composition. The older sense of community and the lifestyle it represented were being undermined both by the "immigrant hordes" and by aggressive middle class social climbers. If for Dreiser the city was just naturally always anticommunity, from Fuller's perspective it had become so by the 1890s.

¹ Louis Wirth, "Urbanism as a Way of Life," American Journal of Sociology 44 (July 1938): 1-24; Blanche Housman Gelfant, The American City Novel, pp. 42-94.

² Biographical material on Dreiser in this chapter is based on Robert H. Elias, Theodore Dreiser; W. A. Swanberg, Dreiser; Theodore Dreiser, A Book about Myself, and Dawn.

³ Theodore Dreiser, Sister Carrie.

⁴ Theodore Dreiser, introduction, Frank Norris, McTeague (New York, 1928), p. vii-xi; "The Great American Novel," American Spectator 1 (December 1932): 1.

⁵ Biographical material on Fuller in this chapter is based on Bernard R. Bowron, Jr., Henry Blake Fuller of Chicago, and John Pilkington, Henry Blake Fuller.

⁶ Henry Blake Fuller, With the Procession.

⁷ Larzer Ziff, The American 1890s, pp. 112-13. See also Thomas Hines, Burnham of Chicago.

⁸ Guy Szuberla, "Making the Sublime Mechanical." I would like to thank Professor Szuberla for his helpful suggestions in regard to this chapter.