The Limits to Theodore Dreiser's Fantasy: Frank Cowperwood's Other Side

Reading Theodore Dreiser's first two Frank Copwerwood novels, The Financier and The Titan, I never forgot the extent to which Cowperwood was a fantasy figure for Dreiser--the man that he wished he could be, with the attitude toward life and the capacities he only wished he had, instead of his reality as he found himself as a sensitive, romantic, but not well-born young man forced to make his way in a brutal social world he could not but lament. Indeed, reading The Financier there was many a time that Dreiser's characterizations of Frank, and especially the responsiveness of women to him, had me laughing out loud over how far he went here. ("Cowperwood . . . so brisk, dynamic, seemingly unromantic . . . concealed . . . a deep underlying element of romance and fire" beneath "a very forceful exterior," Dreiser writes at one point, making that point for neither the first nor the last time.) Something of this idealization of Cowperwood is particularly evident in Dreiser imbuing Cowperwood with a philosophical bent and having this "thinking man" just so happen to think like himself (not least, in regard to the arts or sexual morality).

Still, if Dreiser's novels were nothing but such a fantasy they would be a lot less interesting. If it can seem that Dreiser's fantasy of being a Cowperwood-like figure gets the better of him at times, Dreiser is under no illusions about the hard-driving businessman taking a terribly humane view of others. Compelled to give some thought to "the working class" by the shock of the Haymarket bombing some years earlier, Dreiser informs us, Frank was not incapable of sympathy for an individual he thought the workers "patient, inartistic, hopeless," incapable of "understand[ing] his dreams or his visions," and indeed "rather like animals," such that he disbelieved in both "the strength of the masses" and "their ultimate rights." He also thought of them as being better rather than worse off for the activity of businessmen like him in the world performing the function of "better perfect[ing] its mechanism and habitable order," such that he owed no more to the world than the wages he paid out for labor as he went about endeavors whose sole real purpose in the end was his making hundreds of millions for himself--Dreiser on this point, far from deluded, treating Cowperwood fairly realistically.