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SOUNDING REAL
Musicality and American Fiction at the Turn of the Twentieth Century
By Cristina L. Ruotolo THE UNIVERSITY OF ALABAMA PRESS
Copyright © 2013 The University of Alabama Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8173-1798-0
CHAPTER 1
Not Just Looking
Sister Carrie's Musical Economy
In the voluminous critical discussion of Dreiser's first novel, which has long remained central to the canon of American realism and naturalism, a good deal of energy has gone into recognizing and analyzing its representations of the visual culture of commodity capitalism. Focus on the novel's "visual economy," as Bill Brown calls it, took off after Rachel Bowlby's provocative Just Looking (1985), which traces evocations of consumer culture in novels by Dreiser, Gissing, and Zola. For Bowlby, Sister Carrie epitomizes the "new consumer capitalism" in which " 'things' are inseparable from how they look," and Carrie herself exists as "an image par excellence." While critics have since debated whether or not Dreiser's novel "endorses" the burgeoning consumer culture he so meticulously documents (the word is Walter Benn Michaels's), the assumption underlying Bowlby's title prevails: that vision remains separable from, as well as privileged over, other forms of perception in Sister Carrie.
But Dreiser's characters, like most of us, are rarely "just looking." This chapter focuses on Dreiser's own quite remarkable, if undernoted, attention to the sounds of the new consumer capitalism and to the ways in which his characters imagine, as well as hear, their modern urban contexts as replete with sounds as well as sights. Rather than simply accompany the visual landscape of the modern city, like an added soundtrack, the aural interacts with and sometimes even subsumes the visual in Dreiser's novel. At times, it reinforces the idea that "things are inseparable from how they look," but as often suggests a gap between surface and interior, and invites characters, as well as readers, to imagine pockets of subjectivity and sociality that remain invisible, immaterial, ephemeral, and thus unavailable to vision and to a "visual economy."
In missing the aural register of Sister Carrie, critics have underappreciated the relevance of Theodore Dreiser's connections with the music business to his first novel. Scholars generally have approached his editorial stint with a Tin Pan Alley magazine as one part of his more general training in journalistic writing and have been less interested in what it says about Dreiser's attitudes about music and the music industry than in what it tells us about his vexed relationship with his brother, Paul Dresser, a highly successful writer of sentimental songs (who, like many in the entertainment industry, altered his name). During the period when Dreiser edited Ev'ry Month for music publishers Howley and Haviland (1894–96), American musical practices were in the midst of dramatic changes and expansion, and his writings about those practices, in Ev'ry Month and elsewhere, offer a number of significant insights into music's presence and importance in American cultural life at this time. His essays from the years just prior to the publication of Sister Carrie also help us to recognize the ways in which his first novel registers a fundamental shift in the way music is being experienced and understood in turn-of-the-century urban America.
While short on scenes of actual music making, Sister Carrie is in fact rich with what might be called musical affect. Traces of sentimental songs pervade this novel, from its chapter titles, which, as Sandy Petry notes, might be mistaken for Tin Pan Alley titles and lyrics, to the language of the novel's many sentimental moments, to Carrie herself, as one particularly "affected by music" and at crucial moments both propelled and limited by her aural sensitivity. While some regret Sister Carrie's occasional forays into sentimental rapture as lapses in Dreiser's more properly "realist" mission, others recognize them as significant expressions of his relationship with consumer capitalism. But in their disparate readings of Dreiser's intentions, critics often assume a seamless link between sentimentalism and consumerism and reduce the novel's musical moments, along with the desires they arouse, to the profit-driven manipulations of commodity capitalism. In so doing, they effectively ignore Dreiser's interest in a resistance to consumerism that emerges from within sentimental moments, as indeed a crucial element of their appeal. As Amy Kaplan notes, Sister Carrie often gives sentimental voice to a form of desire that commodities appeal to but cannot fulfill within the social conditions of turn-of-the-century capitalism. But the novel's musical moments, like Dreiser's turn-of-the-century essays about music and the music industry, suggest not only a tension between sentimental desire and the marketplace but also a tension within a commoditized musicality or within Tin Pan Alley songs themselves. Unlike the material items appealing to Carrie from the other side of department store windows and arousing her desire by remaining just out of reach, music comes to her, arousing her emotions and desires by crossing boundaries between self and other and between subject and object. The desire aroused by music, as Dreiser understands it, certainly resonates with consumer desire, but also suggests a longing for social connections that remain irreducible to market values and inaccessible to what, for Brown, is the "glass-mediated theatricality of everyday life" often structuring Carrie's experience and relationships. What makes Sister Carrie's musical moments so interesting, for our understanding of cultural history and of music in general, is the way they propel audiences both into and away from the marketplace, promising—and momentarily delivering—an ephemeral, invisible, and intangible experience that nonetheless depends upon, and is located within, an increasingly rationalized, depersonalized commodity capitalism.
Sister Carrie is the only novel in this study whose musicscape is dominated by the emotional register of Tin Pan Alley's sentimental song genre, to the virtual exclusion of all other styles and forms, including those generating the most heated debate—ragtime, Wagner, and nationalist art music. While Dreiser's journalistic writings on music at the turn of the century address a wider frame of musical reference than his first novel, they, too, demonstrate a decided preference for popular songs that evoked themes and emotions of nostalgia, loss, regret, and "far away" places over the more forward-looking, rousing modern music beginning to gain in popularity. What Sister Carrie does share, however, with the other novels in this study is its recognition of the changing place and function of music at the turn of the twentieth century. Musical experience, in this novel, even at its most sentimental, is associated with the spaces, relationships, opportunities, and dangers of the modern city. Music functions here, as in the other novels, equivocally, on the one hand promising to express otherwise inarticulable truths and realities and on the other threatening to remake what is true and real and thus underscore the impermeability and instability of modern American reality. Perhaps more than any other novel (except The Awakening, a focus of chapter 2), Sister Carrie gives us a musicscape that threatens to undermine the very project of realism, as both an object that defies representation and as itself a mode of representation that promises unmediated access to a hidden reality unavailable to words.
"Things Breath'd into the Unguarded Ear"
In the opening pages of Sister Carrie, Dreiser characterizes Chicago as "a blare of sound, a roar of life" and Carrie's initial relationship to it as that of an "unguarded ear" to a barrage of musical appeals. He would echo this language twenty years later when recalling his own first encounter with the city, which he experienced as a "roaring, yelling, screaming whirlpool of life":
It is given to some cities, as to some lands, to suggest romance, and to me Chicago did that daily and hourly. It sang, or seemed to, and in spite of what I deemed my various troubles I was singing with it.... How I loved the tonic note of even the grinding wheels of the trucks and cars of the Chicago of that day; the clang and the clatter of its cable and electric lines. Its great beer and express wagons, its lurching surge of vehicles in every street. All had a tonic, rhythmic, symphonic import.... Chicago, as I viewed it then, was symphonic. It was like a great orchestra in the tumult of noble strophes. I was like a guest at a feast, eating and drinking in a delirium of delight.
As he represents it, a symphonic city immediately welcomed the young Dreiser into its music making, and offered his emerging urban selfhood a new kind of pleasure. Though inducing "delirium," Chicago's "noble strophes" do not threaten to undermine Dreiser's ambition or overwhelm his individuality. Carrie's Chicago, if similarly musical, is decidedly less "noble" in its invitation to the young female newcomer: "A blare of sound, a roar of life, a vast array of human hives, appeal to the astonished senses in equivocal terms. Without a counselor at hand to whisper cautious interpretations, what falsehoods may not these things breathe into the unguarded ear! Unrecognized for what they are, their beauty, like music, too often relaxes, then weakens, then perverts the simpler human perceptions" (4). The narrator's cautionary voice here warns against the effects of the city's sounds, which, "like music," might corrupt an "unsophisticated and natural mind" like Carrie's (4). While the novel quickly abandons a moralizing perspective (and any stable notion of "corruption"), it nonetheless remains focused on the beckoning musicality of urban experience, and in ways that remain "equivocal" about whether music is something to be celebrated or guarded against.
Dreiser's focus on the sounds of urban experience not only reflects the fact that cities were noisier places than the smaller towns from which he and his heroine traveled but also suggests music's changing presence in cities like Chicago and New York toward the end of the nineteenth century. Before writing Sister Carrie, Dreiser became familiar with some of these changes when rescued from unemployment during his first months in New York City by his brother's publishers. With Paul Dresser's encouragement, "Howley and Haviland" set Dreiser up as founding editor of Ev'ry Month, a women's magazine that would promote the company's sheet music by offering previews of three or four new songs with each issue. The magazine's principal writer as well as editor, Dreiser found himself both supporting and, in a sense, competing with the burgeoning sheet music industry that was coming to be known as Tin Pan Alley. Particularly at this early point in his career, before he had any real success as a journalist or fiction writer, Dreiser's enchantment with the immense popularity of his brother's songs was tempered by concern that his own more serious and important authorship still lacked any significant audience.
While recording technology and radio would bring about dramatic changes for American musical experience after World War I—changes that have been the focus of much recent scholarship—Tin Pan Alley's modes of production, promotion, and distribution preceded these technology-driven changes and in many ways paved their way. Named for the cacophony of piano strains emanating from the windows of one block of 28th Street in New York, Tin Pan Alley centralized the work of composing, arranging, printing, and marketing popular music. Rather than wait for minstrel and vaudeville performances to generate a song's popularity and marketability, music publishers now worked strenuously to create instant collective demand and what might be called brand loyalty. Toward this end, publishers developed new strategies utilizing new venues of live performance on stage, as well as new uses of public space, to give the impression that a song had already "caught on" and thus was worthy of purchase in the form of sheet music. (The relationship between live performance and reproduced music continues to be at the center of the music industry, as each is presented as a necessary complement to the other.) Celebrity singers were paid to include new songs in their shows, while boys were hired to infiltrate audiences and join in at the song's refrain, to perform, in a sense, the song's irresistibility. Beyond the theater, publishers hired musicians to play and sing on street corners, from moving trucks, in music stores, department stores, and restaurants. Like the planted audience member, these performers would advertise a song's desirability by staging its irrepressible ubiquity, its already-being-part of the urban soundscape. Charles Harris, whose "After the Ball" (1892) was the first multimillion copy hit, promised "Songs Written to Order" on the sign in his office window, thus announcing a shift from producer to consumer as songwriting's driving force. Magazines like Ev'ry Month, by including "free" sheet music with every issue (a strategy music publishers had, in fact, been using for decades), were perhaps the least conspicuous of marketing ploys, if still effective at creating a buzz, instilling loyalty to particular songwriters (and thus to Howley and Haviland) and, of course, increasing subscriptions to the magazine itself.
Tin Pan Alley's growing presence at the turn of the century must be understood in the context of a general transformation of popular music's place in urban life, including its ubiquity in the emerging venues and rituals of "nightlife." Offering new synergies of pleasure, cabarets, nightclubs, and restaurants combined popular tunes with alcohol and food. Musical theater was on the rise, benefiting from the influx of black composers and performers to the city, and with them new "ragtime" styles of music and dance. As Lewis Erenberg and Kathy Peiss have demonstrated, these urban sites of leisure afforded new forms of social experience that inspired new anxieties. Of growing concern was the perceived threat to the innocence and virtue of young unmarried women, who in fact made up a majority of the new audiences. According to Erenberg, critics of nightlife "believed that too much expressive pleasure in a risqué environment endangered young women" and warned that women allowed to enjoy music in a public setting would be "easily led to prostitution and away from the traditional role of home and mother." Peiss recounts newspaper stories "filled with dramatic accounts of innocent daughters tempted by glittering dance halls, seduced and drugged by ruthless 'cadets' or pimps, and held against their will in brothels." While such fears mostly centered on the working class, a similar kind of reaction to new musical environments was emerging within the more middle- and leisure-class world of classical music at this time, as will be discussed in chapter 2, with a main focus on the leisure-class woman's musical exodus from the parlor. Joseph Horowitz has described the "protofeminism" inspired by leisure-class women's growing passion for Wagner's opera, as it seemed to arouse and encourage female erotic experience not only outside the home but also in the company of other women. No longer fixed within the private space of the parlor, where music once served, or was thought to serve, to strengthen the emotional bonds of family and the boundaries of bourgeois femininity, music's growing presence in public and anonymous arenas threatened no less than to remake women's emotional economies. That American musicians and audiences across the highbrow/lowbrow divide were beginning to embrace, more seriously than previous generations, the music of African Americans, fueled the perceived threat to white womanhood, and through them, to white America as a whole, as will be discussed in chapters 3 and 4.
Although Dreiser occasionally took note of the shifting racial dynamics of American music culture, he tended to collapse almost all of his observations about contemporary musical life into questions about the effects of its growing commercialization. His early journalism and first novel offer valuable and deeply ambivalent insights into the effects of the new relations of production and reception of music in America, as again and again he both celebrates and seems to regret the way music has been put into circulation along new social and spatial pathways, challenging conventional emotional economies of social life.
"Words and Music": Writing for Tin Pan Alley
During his short tenure at Ev'ry Month, Dreiser only occasionally wrote essays that touched on the musical tastes of his readership, most of whom, he realized, were more interested in the magazine's bonus sheet music than its articles. In one Ev'ry Month column, Dreiser regretfully observes a waning interest in "newspapers, magazines, pamphlets and books" and goes on to suggest that people seem more interested in live voices than written text: "Everywhere, on every hand, come ... signs of the but ill-suppressed excitement and desire to hear. Everywhere are those who seem half hungry to hear a man once more endowed as the orator; everywhere those who would gladly be thrilled by the sentiment of an impassioned voice." In a short poem entitled "Words and Music," Dreiser conveys in no uncertain terms his sense of the secondary status of text and authorship to music and songwriting for his readers: "I being but the words and not the song, / None cares to hear, / Till wedded unto music sweet and strong / Divinely clear." That his own audience was more interested in "music sweet and strong" than in his written words is echoed in a letter he received from his own sister (whom many consider the model for "Sister" Carrie): "I wish you would send me and Ed every month [Ev'ry Month] regular as Ed plays the violen [sic] and I would like it for the music there is in it. Sister Emma."
(Continues...)
Excerpted from SOUNDING REAL by Cristina L. Ruotolo. Copyright © 2013 The University of Alabama Press. Excerpted by permission of THE UNIVERSITY OF ALABAMA PRESS.
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