338 Making It New: 1900–1945world, a “fallen woman” who refuses to believe that it is “all blind chance,” that “there
must be something,” “some guiding intelligence.” She has, however, a sterner sense of
duty than Carrie Meeber, which prompts her, among other things, to adopt two
orphaned children when her own child dies. Despite her finer sensibility, however,
she is not rewarded any more than Carrie is punished: she remains an outcast, an
outsider at the funeral of her former lover with which the book ends. And, despite
its more traditional moral tenor, this novel too was attacked for its candor and
unconventional subject matter. No such moralism inhibits what Dreiser called his
“Trilogy of Desire”: The Financier (1912), The Titan (1914), and The Stoic (pub-
lished posthumously in 1947). The “survival of the fittest” ideas that he had gathered
from Herbert Spencer and T. M. Huxley led Dreiser not only to sympathize with the
weak and victimized but also to place a heavy emotional investment in the
Nietzschean business superman of this trilogy. Based on the character of the business
magnate Charles T. Yerkes, Frank Cowperwood, the hero of all three novels, is a man
with a simple motto: “I satisfy myself.” The tone of the trilogy is set early on in The
Financier, when the 10-year-old Cowperwood, already a “natural leader” of his
brothers and schoolmates, sees a glass tank at the local fishmarket. In it are a lobster
and a squid; and, every day he passes by, Cowperwood notices that the lobster has
devoured just as much as it needs for its nourishment. “That’s the way it has to be I
guess,” Cowperwood comments to himself, “That squid wasn’t quick enough.”
Having “figured it out” to his own satisfaction, Cowperwood resolves to be quick
enough, and to be like an animal that can “adapt itself to conditions.” He rises to
power in terms that are both economic and erotic. Sandwiched between triumphant
accounts of his success as a businessman and a financier are similarly triumphal and
sympathetic stories of his sexual conquests: he is, as Dreiser lovingly puts it, “a real
man” in the sense that he is a very superior animal. For all his successes, though,
Cowperwood remains as fundamentally unsatisfied as every other Dreiser
protagonist: “for him,” the reader is told, “was no ultimate peace, no real
understanding, but only hunger and thirst and wonder.” And he, too, is eventually
defeated by the “trap of circumstance” when, at the end of The Titan, his business
plans are defeated. There is no moral to this his fall, Dreiser intimates, any more than
there is to his rise. The time has come, quite simply, for the pendulum to swing
against him. There is a constant rhythm, an incessant swinging back and forth
“wherein the mass subdues the individual, or the individual the mass,” and it is now
time for power to return to “the mass.”
“He is even as a wisp in the wind,” Dreiser observed of man in Sister Carrie,
“moved by every breath of passion, acting now by his will and now by instincts, err-
ing with one, only to retrieve by the other, falling by one, only to rise by the other – a
creature of incalculable variability.” Dreiser’s own variability took him toward
socialism, his faith in which he expressed in such later works of nonfiction as Dreiser
Looks at Russia (1928) and Tragic America (1931). And his sense of the variability of
all human creatures, his conviction that people were wisps in the wind, subject to
rhythms they could hardly understand or articulate, led him to perceive a
fundamental connection between the “giants,” as he called them, and the “pygmies”GGray_c04.indd 338ray_c 04 .indd 338 8 8/1/2011 7:53:48 AM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 53 : 48 AM