Upward Mobility and the Common Good: Toward a Literary History of the Welfare State (review)

The concluding chapters of Theodore Dreiser’s 1900 Sister Carrie chart the final stages of George Hurstwood’s descent from the prosperity he had enjoyed as a bar manager in Chicago to his suicide, alone and forgotten, in a transient hotel. Accounts of the novel that stress the naturalist inevitability of Hurstwood’s fate, however, miss Dreiser’s attention to the various private and institutional actors that slow (if ultimately failing to stop) the one-time manager’s fall after the novel’s title character leaves him to fend for himself: Bellevue, which treats the pneumonia he contracts during his final attempt to hold a job; the religious ex-soldier who stands on a street corner and solicits money to buy beds for other men; the Sisters of Mercy who feed the poor at noon; and the restauranteur who distributes bread at midnight. Taking a broader view, we might say that this portion of the novel begins with the trolley car strike during which Hurstwood briefly scabs, and which—in the figures of the striker who tries to get Hurstwood to “Come down” and join the workers and the policeman who sympathizes with them himself but who does his duty because he “fe[els] the dignity and use of the police force”—announces Dreiser’s concern with charting the various forms of human cooperation existing alongside and to some degree mitigating the bad effects of capitalism.

Bruce Robbins does not discuss Sister Carrie at length in his new book Upward Mobility and the Common Good—his preferred Dreiser novel is The Financier (1912)—but he renders this reading possible through his groundbreaking argument that fiction’s perennial narratives of upward mobility cannot be understood outside of the countervailing, half-formed, and ambivalent ways of imagining the common good whose historical trajectory was the welfare state. As this suggests, and as Hurstwood’s bumpy path to his Potter’s Field burial bears out (the city takes care of him in death, if not in life), Dreiser is less interested in the proto-socialist self-organization of the strikers than in the policeman’s willingness to set aside his instinctive sympathies out of commitment to a principle of “order” (288). If he lacks the imagination to understand his work’s “true social significance” (implicitly, helping the company cut costs), his dedication to some principle of social good outside himself remains admirable. While he declares his own preference for socialism, and chafes in his prologue against the state-boundedness that renders the welfare state not only ineffective against but dependent upon the international division of labor, Robbins nonetheless remains committed to teasing out the literary resonances that might allow us to understand the welfare state as “an adventurous and incomplete project—not a collection of empty administrative mechanisms, but a rechanneling of risky and ethically unpredictable desires, erotic and otherwise, that challenges all our skills in the analysis of narrative and metaphor” (242). Hence Robbins’ interest in The Financier, whose protagonist Frank Cowperwood’s rise through the manipulation of Philadelphia streetcar lines anticipates the messy combination of personal and social advancement that would come to characterize the welfare state as “a means of managing capitalism from within” (96).

Robbins’ reading of Dreiser demonstrates both his brilliant attentiveness to mixed motives—Who else would dare to write about the Pinkertons’ sense of social responsibility?—but also his understanding of the welfare state as something that comes about only after a long history, played out mostly in fiction, of efforts to imagine ways of loving and being responsible to society-at-large. This history begins, in Robbins’ account, with the fascination displayed by Jean-Jacques Rousseau and his numerous novelistic successors for the figure of the older woman as cross-generational erotic memoir: a figure who raises desires that, resisting fulfillment via “conventional channels” such as marriage, enables the eroticization of democracy itself, “the nonreproductive, suprafamilial desire necessary for the...