Jeffrey Severs (University of British Columbia, Vancouver)
Oh, Carrie, Carrie! . . . Know, then, that for you is neither surfeit nor content. In your rocking-chair, by your window dreaming, shall you long, alone. In your rocking-chair, by your window, shall you dream such happiness as you may never feel.
—Theodore Dreiser, Sister Carrie
When Oedipa Maas speculates in the first paragraph of The Crying of Lot 49 that Pierce Inverarity’s “whitewashed bust” of Jay Gould might have fallen from a shelf and killed him, Pynchon begins for his protaganist a lesson in capitalist “ikon[s],” a debunking of their whitewashed history. Gravity’s Rainbow sends a similar signal about the nineteenth-century heyday of capitalist expansion on its first page: the “fall of a crystal palace” suggests a nuclear shattering of that industrialist order celebrated in 1851 at London’s Great Exhibition, in a glass structure better known as the Crystal Palace. Thus do capitalist shrines come crashing down in Pynchon, who reminds us always that the “ennoblement of shining steel” depends on coal-tar, “Earth’s excrement,” being “purged out”—or “passed over.” In Against the Day, Pynchon turns to the actual era of robber barons to present a story of capitalism wedded to colonizing and warring aims, a ruthless international system that produces only (as one of the Chums of Chance says) “groundhog sweat, misery and early graves.”5 This novel’s first-page capitalist icons are the “alabaster temples of commerce and industry” the Chums anticipate seeing at the World’s Columbia Exposition in 1893 Chicago (3). The Exposition’s “White City” was erected as a lavish monument to prosperity at a moment when American actuality contradicted its splendor: 1893 was a year of great financial panic in the U.S. To take down and tarnish such temples, to show their distance from reality—this may not be entirely new in Pynchon. But his method for doing so, I argue in this paper, does shift in Against the Day, and in no small part because of a new approach to gender, women’s economic roles, and even women’s sexual selves.
Dally Rideout, an impressionable four- or five-year-old at the World’s Fair, is the character who is most taken with—who remembers the longest—the promise of that glimmering White City’s temples, painted white and powered by electric light. To see Dally’s many meanings as she departs physically and mentally from those fascinating temples is this paper’s main goal. In her Pynchon writes a postmodern version of the belief in capitalism’s promise and despair over its disappointments that were epitomized in this same era by Dreiser’s Carrie Meeber, who continues dreaming, in her novel’s closing lines (quoted in my epigraph), of “such happiness as [she] may never feel.” Dally starts out as such a dreamer, but before the text’s end we see her cycle, Carrie-like, through a whole series of roles that less ethereal economics press upon her, some low, some high: working with her father in Colorado mines, modeling for artists in New York and England, posing as a boy and living destitute on the streets of Venice, being the mistress of an international financier, and acting on the stage in London and Paris while married to Kit Traverse. In her initiation into capitalism’s truer, dirtier order that follows 1893, Pynchon sends Dally on a set of encounters with fallen versions of those alabaster temples and toward an unconscious reckoning with the conception of pure, disembodied markets they represent.
Dally is the only character we see grow from child to adult over the novel’s 1893-1922 span—no small distinction, in a novel framed by the age-defying exploits of the Chums and a more general desire to overcome the constraints of time. Not a pilgrim in search of a personal Shambhala (as so many others are) but a stability-seeking itinerant, she lives within capitalist orders over three decades, fighting off homelessness and sexual enslavement, persisting through economic and gender oppressions (and not, notably, taking up dynamite against them). There are also important contrasts to consider between Dally and V., the shapeshifting woman and degraded virgin who previously loomed over this turn-of-the-century world in Pynchon. Through Dally’s far less abstract and mythologized tale, Pynchon engages with the key women’s narratives of the historical period, both the dime novels and their more literary cousins like Sister Carrie. In making these new allusions, Pynchon ends up asking—in a way that is far more nuanced and far more attentive to his own pro-labor themes—questions he first took from The Education of Henry Adams some 40 years earlier: How do women make capitalism go? And what is the relationship between capitalism and women’s bodies?