The American Dream and Dreams as a Concept
In Martin Dressier, Steven Millhauser is indeed concerned with the social implications of the American Dream (and, in foregrounding the very fact that this pillar of American culture is a dream), but he is also equally interested in dreams and hallucinations as such. Not only is Martin "living the American dream," he is in an important sense "dreaming" his life. Millhauser presents Martin's experiences of the world as heightened, hallucinatory experiences that flirt with the boundary between reality and dreams. This is evident throughout the novel, such as in the moments at which Martin feels as though everything is "too much, too much—the whole world was trembling—at any moment it would crack apart." Martin feels dreamily disconnected from his environment: "Then the dream feeling would come over him, as if his real life were not here, where it seemed to be, but over there, a little off to one side, just over there."
Dreamlike Experiences with Women
Many of Martin's key experiences, especially those with women, seem to happen in this luminal dream-space of disjunction and dislocation. Martin's first sexual experience, for instance, is shrouded in mystery and at times verges on the hallucinatory. Mrs. Hamilton, a "powerful and far from unattractive woman" arrives at the hotel where young Martin is a bellboy and begins to draw him "close to her in some puzzling, secret way." It is not surprising to find an episode involving the young hero's seduction by an experienced older woman in a bildungsroman like Martin Dressier, but Millhauser's description of the act itself is striking for its emphasis on dream. "Everything seems like a dream," Mrs. Hamilton says to Martin:
That's what they say, you know: life is but a dream. As in that child's song—how does it go? Merrily merrily. Life is but a dream. My pulse is absolutely racing. . . . Is this a dream? My heart's racing, racing: can't you feel it? Can't you? Silly boy, what's wrong with you? Here, place your hand here, on my poor racing-away heart. Yes. Yes. Don't you know anything? Come here now. Here now. Yes. . . . And Martin entered her fever-dream, at first awkwardly, then easily: it was all very easy, easy and mysterious, for he barely knew what was happening, there in the dusk of the parlor, in a world at the edge of the world—Mrs. Hamilton's dream.
Indeed, this moment with Mrs. Hamilton is merely the first of Martin's many dreamlike experiences with women. On his wedding night for instance, his new bride Caroline refuses his sexual overtures, so Martin sleeps with Marie Haskova, a worker in one of his hotels; yet it is unclear whether Martin is making love to Marie, to Louise Hamilton, to Caroline, or to Alice Bell, since all appear to him during the act itself. Millhauser summarizes the peculiar logic of the situation: "if he had been unfaithful to Caroline by coming here on his wedding night, he had also been unfaithful to Marie, who had taken him in without a word, without a reproach, only to find herself secretly replaced, in her own bed, by Caroline."
Interchangeability of Women and Male Desire
The interchangeability of these women is striking, even disturbing, but Millhauser seems to be making an interesting point about desire's "slippery" nature. If Martin finds himself wanting more and more in the business world without ever really knowing precisely what he desires, he also finds himself more than a little confused about his romantic desires. His love for Caroline, for example, seems more a product of the structure of Martin's relationship with the Vernon women rather than of any actual quality possessed by Caroline herself....
(This entire section contains 350 words.)
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Caroline is simply the sister with whom Martin has the least contact. He spends innumerable evenings dining with Emmeline and Mrs. Vernon while Caroline lies sick in the hotel room upstairs, and it is Caroline's very inaccessibility that draws Martin to her. His desire seems to be produced by the seeming impossibility of its very fulfillment, and by his lack of knowledge about its object (when Martin actually comes to know Caroline intimately, he is less pleased with her). Caroline herself seems to recognize the shallowness of Martin's affection, in the end strangely attempting an exchange in which she offers her sister to Martin as a new object of desire.
The recurrent motif of interchangeable women is most perfectly summarized when Martin himself comes to believe that he has three wives rather than one, and that his "real" wife is actually the least real of the three: "Of the three wives, Emmeline and Marie Haskova were the most vividly present to him, the most solidly there, whereas Caroline seemed a ghost-wife, a dream-wife—though he wondered whether it wasn't precisely her lack of substance that allowed her to haunt and hover, to invade the edges of other women." While this surreal state of affairs certainly is not out of place in the dreamscape of Millhauser's novel, it seems clear that there is at least an implicit critique of male desire at work here. Martin's very confusion—his indifference even—concerning the women in his life betrays his inability to conceive of others (particularly women) as real figures rather than as mere players in his dream-life.
Opposition Between Dream and Reality
Hand in hand with the thematic importance of dreams and fantasy comes the inevitable question of the opposition between dream and reality. Yet the importance of this thematic opposition extends beyond simple questions like, Did Martin really have sex with Mrs. Hamilton or was he/she just dreaming about it? The opposition between dreams and reality is absolutely central to the novel's main narrative line, as the hotels Martin constructs are fantasies themselves, attempts to transcend the status of hotel and become new "ways of life" (as Harwinton puts it). Furthermore, the hotels Martin creates draw parallels between the dream/reality opposition and the oppositions between technology and nature, imitation and imitated, copy and original. The hotels are not only hallucinatory representations of reality—or at least as much of it as Martin can possibly squeeze in—but also fully fledged alternative realities. Some have argued that the "postmodern" era is signaled by the dominance of the copy or "simulacrum," that we now live in a world where the image (i.e. the Gulf War as televised on Cable News Network) has overtaken the "real" (the actual war itself). Whether this is an accurate portrayal of contemporary experience or not, it seems at times as though Millhauser is offering us an allegory of this particular postmodern trend. Indeed, it seems clear that Martin's goal in creating the Dressier is to create a model which will, in some sense, supersede the original. Martin strives towards an absolutely encyclopedic imitation of the world; each new version of the Dressier is not simply a hotel, but rather a little world in and of itself. Martin sees the hotels as ultimately pushing beyond the limits of the real city itself: "The department store and the hotel were little cities within the city, but they were also experimental cities, cities in advance of the city." But the move towards dreamlike imitation does not end here. Towards the novel's conclusion, Martin begins to hire actors to act as though they were guests: "In return for free room and board he would invite a troupe of out-of-work actors to sit in the lobby chairs, stroll about, play billiards in the billiard rooms and write letters in the writing rooms, to talk, to laugh—to create, in short, the atmosphere of a peacefully flourishing community." The hotel (the imitation of the world) is now an imitation of itself, and this brings us full circle, back to Martin's first visit to the old Vanderlyn Hotel with Charley Stratemeyer, where Martin sees some actors practicing in one of the rooms and is frightened by his inability to distinguish performance from reality. Martin sees three women sitting, looking remarkably like the three Vernon women, and he cannot discern whether they are actresses or residents or hallucinations: "The three women were a sign, demon-women summoned up from deepest dream. For a building was a dream, a dream made of stone, the dream lurking in the stone so that the stone wasn't stone only but dream, more dream than stone, dream-stone and dream-steel, forever unlasting." We are left asking ourselves where Millhauser leaves us when Martin slips "out of his life . . . through a crack in the world"—and what, exactly, the author is saying about America through his American Dreamer in this odd conclusion. If Martin is indeed being "punished for something deeper than crime, for a desire, a forbidden desire, the desire to create the world," perhaps Millhauser is taking aim at the constitutively hubristic American Dream, suggesting that the world produced by advertising, technology, and capitalism may in fact be a modern Tower of Babel.
