“Oh, Blind Strivings of the Human Heart!”: Theory of Mind and Human Agency in Theodor Dreiser’s Sister Carrie

The beginning of Theodore Dreiser’s Sister Carrie features an intrusive narrator who asserts in the opening pages that, when “a girl leaves her home at eighteen, she does one of two things. Either she falls into saving hands and becomes better, or she rapidly assumes the cosmopolitan standard of virtue and becomes worse” (1). Throughout Sister Carrie, the narrator works exceedingly hard to undermine our interpretation of the action of the novel as springing from the free will of the characters. The narrator frequently either precedes or interrupts the action with a philosophical micro-treatise focused on the way in which the actions of the novel’s characters cannot possibly be an expression of a truly free will. Nevertheless, Dreiser’s narrator is unable to override the free will of the characters because our brains have evolved to presuppose the existence and nature of other “minds.”

Research into human cognition reveals that an individual’s mind interprets a much more dynamic interplay with perceived minds—that is, with the minds of others—than it might at first appear. We are aware that fictional characters do not have minds of their own, so to treat literary characters as though they do have complete minds seems absurd. However, one reason fiction works and is fulfilling for us is because, whether or not we remain actively aware that the characters in a fictional narrative are fabricated, we will read them as though they are, in fact, real. In daily life, when we encounter other people, we ascribe a mind to them that is analogous to our own. We engage with them as if they, like us, have a complete past, and this attribution of a complete mind allows us to relate to them as believable expressions of humanity. This attribution of mind is no less true with fictional characters than it is with real people. What is called Theory of Mind examines just this tendency.

Theory of Mind considers how human beings ascribe full minds to others, and thus it provides an interestingly new way of understanding how we read fiction. In the case of naturalistic fiction, the blurring of the line between the reader’s mind, the character’s mind, and the narrator’s mind illuminates the nature of human agency—or, more familiarly, “free will.” Sister Carrie is a novel that exhibits a struggle with what a lack of free will means for human experience and responsibility. However, reading the novel with an eye to human cognitive capacities reveals that free will, and thus personal responsibility, is not so easy to dismiss. As such, Sister Carrie becomes a place where naturalistic philosophy and human experience come into conflict, and instead of naturalistic forces winning out over free will, the human experience of free will challenges a deterministic universe’s ability to undermine meaning and responsibility.

In its illumination of the problem of free will, Theory of Mind posits that our perception of other’s minds is a consequence of the evolved cognitive architecture of the human brain, and the consequences of how we perceive other minds cannot be ignored no matter how messy they make our understanding of the way we interpret a text. Lisa Zunshine explains that literature “pervasively capitalizes on and stimulates Theory of Mind mechanisms that had evolved to deal with real people, even as on some level readers do remain aware that fictive characters are not real people at all” (Why 10). Theory of Mind, then, is nothing less than the biologically automatic ascription of subjecthood to another person.¹ Literary applications of Theory of Mind demonstrate that this ascription happens when we read literary characters in nearly the same way that it happens when we “read” the people in our social environment.

George Butte calls the complicated interaction of minds “deep intersubjectivity,” which he describes as “a web of partially interpenetrating consciousnesses that exists wherever perceiving subjects, that is, human beings, collect” (28). It was the evolved neurobiological capacity to read, in effect, another’s mind that allowed early humans...