Critical Evaluation
The Titan is the second in Theodore Dreiser’s trilogy of novels tracing the career of Frank Algernon Cowperwood, which the author had planned to call “A Trilogy of Desire.” The Financier (1912, 1927) tells the story of Cowperwood’s early successes in the financial world of Philadelphia, the start of his extramarital affair with Aileen, and his conviction and imprisonment for grand larceny. In the final novel, The Stoic (1947), Cowperwood is still portrayed as shrewdly energetic and ambitious, now living abroad after his defeat in Chicago, and amassing a large but unneeded fortune in London. Estranged from Berenice, he dies a lonely death while his overextended empire finally crumbles.
Cowperwood’s character is based on that of nineteenth century Chicago financier Charles Yerkes (1837-1905). Like Dreiser’s Cowperwood, Yerkes was a shrewd schemer in business who made his fortune in Philadelphia public transportation, spent a short time in prison for illegal business manipulations, and then moved to Chicago and gained control of a gas trust. Yerkes later tried to monopolize the city’s transportation system through long-term franchises, and when he failed he turned to new business interests in the London Underground. According to Richard Lehan’s account in Theodore Dreiser: His World and His Novels (1969), several even more specific details in The Titan are taken directly from Dreiser’s own exhaustive research into the life of Yerkes and the activities of the Chicago business world he dominated for a time.
The Titan reflects Dreiser’s absorption with the ideas of Herbert Spencer, T. H. Huxley, and other nineteenth century social Darwinists who viewed society as essentially controlled by the law of “survival of the fittest.” In Dreiser’s view, it is the nature of the universe that “a balance is struck wherein the mass subdues the individual or the individual the mass.” Cowperwood’s struggle against Hand, Schryhart, and Arneel is one for survival in the financial jungle of Chicago big business.
For Dreiser, such a struggle is wholly amoral. There is no right or wrong because it is the nature as well as the condition of human beings to have to struggle for power and survival. Cowperwood’s cause is neither more nor less just than that of his antagonists, nor are his means any less scrupulous than their own. He may be said to be more shrewd than they, or to possess more ruthlessness in certain circumstances, but for Dreiser his struggle is the elemental contest between the impulse-driven energies of the individual and those of others in his society.
The forces underlying Cowperwood’s ambitions are actually larger than mere individual desires on his part. Described in the novel as “impelled by some blazing internal force,” Cowperwood is driven by instincts beyond his control. Caught up in a natural struggle for survival and for power over others, he is dominated by “the drug of a personality he could not gainsay.” He can no more remain satisfied with the money and success he has already attained than he can stay content with one woman. Hence the need to conquer, to dominate and control, characterizes both Cowperwood’s financial and his romantic interests. To both, he brings the same shrewd scheming and forcefulness that are needed for success.
The two major plots—Cowperwood’s business life and his romantic life—alternate and mirror each other throughout the novel, and they prove to be integrally related. Cowperwood is as direct in his dealings with women as he is in his confrontations with men of business. The frankness with which he first approaches Rita Sohlberg is very similar to the blunt way he attempts to bribe Governor Swanson. In fact, many of Cowperwood’s...
(This entire section contains 1016 words.)
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mistresses are related to the very men who, mainly as a consequence of his amorous trespassing, end up opposing him most bitterly in Chicago. His affairs with Butler’s, Cochrane’s, and Haguenin’s daughters—like his interlude with Hand’s wife—not only lessen his circle of friends but also gain him those enemies who eventually pull together to defeat him.
As the title of the novel suggests, Cowperwood is a titan among men, one striving after more and achieving greater victory because he is driven to do so by his very nature. As he has himself come to recognize, the “humdrum conventional world could not brook his daring, his insouciance, his constant desire to call a spade a spade. His genial sufficiency was a taunt and a mockery to many.” Yet his is a lonely victory, a fact emphasized by his almost self-imposed alienation from the business community with which his life is so connected and by his being socially ostracized in Chicago despite his wealth.
In a sense, Cowperwood is as much a victim of his will to power as any of those he defeats on the stock exchange. For such men as he, power is the very means of survival, and in the world of Chicago business, power generates money, which in turn generates more power. The cycle, as much as the struggle, is endless. If a balance is ever struck between the power of the individual and that of the group, it is, Dreiser suggests, only temporary, for “without variance, how should the balance be maintained?” For Dreiser, as for Cowperwood, this is the meaning of life, a continual rebalancing, a necessary search on the part of the individual to discover a means of maintaining or acquiring personal desires against those of society. Human beings are but tools of their own private nature, “forever suffering the goad of a restless heart.”
For men like Cowperwood, defeat is no more final or settling than triumph. If he has won anything permanent by the novel’s end, it is the love of Berenice. She is part, at least, of the whole that Cowperwood has been driven to seek and attain. More than that he will never achieve or understand about life. “Thou hast lived,” concludes Dreiser at the end of the novel, as if to say that the struggle and the searching are themselves the whole that human beings seek.