cillary narrative of estrangement that directs the reader’s attention toward
the distinctly alienating domestic artifacts of metropolitan consumer culture.
This narrative focuses on the Hurstwoods’ single-family house, the kind of
residence against which readers would have measured the strangeness of the
less private domestic spaces of the modern city.
Hurstwood “kept a horse and neat trap, had his wife and two children,
who were well established in a neat house on the North Side near Lincoln
Park . . .”3 The house, the horse, the family – all are comparable credentials
that signify Hurstwood’s financial and social well-being, but the extraor-
dinary “neat[ness]” of these arrangements is belied by the disorder that
exists within the house. Dreiser offers a brief sentimental homage to “[a]
lovely home atmosphere . . . one of the flowers of the world, than which
there is nothing more tender, nothing more delicate, nothing more calcu-
lated to make strong and just the natures cradled and nourished within it”
(63), before lamenting its utter absence at the Hurstwoods. Dreiser does
not proceed, as one might expect, by chronicling immediately and in detail
the strained relations between Hurstwood and his family. Instead he en-
courages us to see a connection between spiritual and material shelter by
prefacing a sustained critique of the “home atmosphere” with a catalogue of
the house’s furnishings, which I quote in full because of its significance for my argument.
Hurstwood’s residence could scarcely be said to be infused with this home
spirit. It lacked that toleration and regard without which the home is nothing.
There was fine furniture, arranged as soothingly as the artistic perception of
the occupants warranted. There were soft rugs, rich, upholstered chairs and
divans, a grand piano, a marble carving of some unknown Venus by some
unknown artist, and a number of small bronzes gathered from heaven knows
where, but generally sold by the large furniture houses along with everything
else which goes to make the ‘perfectly appointed house’.
(63)
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Dreiser’s juxtaposition of the complaint about the absence of “toleration and
regard without which the home is nothing” (nothing but a house) and the
description of its “fine” furnishings seems at first to suggest that the elegant interior is a compensation for the house’s failure as a home. This conclusion
is derailed, however, by the narrator’s growing contempt, which culminates
in the exasperated “from heaven knows where” bronzes, and is registered
as well in the “unknown” Venus and its “unknown” artist, a repetition that
suggests the anonymous productions of mass culture rather than the antique
value of Art. The house’s failure as a home is then perhaps attributable
to its opulence: the self-conscious exhibition of the family’s material and
social prosperity and ambitions is inimical to an interior “home spirit.” But
the furnishings aren’t merely “fine,” they are mass-produced. The alternately
bored and disparaging tone of the paragraph indicates that these possessions
are not particularly valued by the inhabitants. Moreover, the “unknown
lives” that Kaplan associates with rental spaces are, in Hurstwood’s house,
those of his supposed intimates, the family members who will be repeatedly
characterized, as Carrie was on her arrival in Chicago, by their “indifference”
(103) to Hurstwood and to each other.
Indeed, although recent influential critics of Sister Carrie have tended to concentrate on its dynamics of desire as constitutive of the American city,
capitalism, and consumerism, the most frequently repeated and probably
most important word in Sister Carrie, at least in the Chicago portion of the novel when Hurstwood is at his economic and social prime, is not desire
or longing but indifference.4 While indifference can certainly entail the condition of “satisfied desire,” which Walter Benn Michaels has argued, with
reference to Hurstwood and Sister Carrie, cannot be “distinguished from death,” it does not signify simply the absence of desire. Indifference connotes more generally the total evacuation of affect; it indicates a failure of
feeling.5
For urban sociologists as well as for Dreiser, indifference was among the
most distinctive and traumatic psychic features of the modern city. This
idea found its exemplary expression in Georg Simmel’s “The Metropolis
and Mental Life” (1903), which theorized that the intensity of psychical
stimulation in the metropolis blunts discrimination. The urbanite responds
intellectually rather than emotionally to her environment, and as the mind
no longer distinguishes between and engages each image or contact, she be-
comes increasingly blasé. The result of the city’s demand for extreme differ-
entiation was indifference.6 Simmel’s thought influenced prominent early-
twentieth-century sociologists at the University of Chicago, who found in
Dreiser a useful and stimulating literary explication of their theories about
urban life. Using Chicago as a model, so-called “Chicago school” sociologists
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Dreiser, class, and the home
contrasted the impersonality and indifference of the modern city of strangers
with the close communal ties and casual intimacy found in villages and small
towns.7 More recently, in literary studies Raymond Williams described a
“new kind of alienation” that emerged with great cities and became a fun-
damental feature of the nineteenth-century European and American novel:
the alienation of the street, of constant motion and transitory impressions,
of brief and random human contacts, the city of mobs and masses.8
This powerful argument about the psychic impact of the modern city ac-
counts quite well for the opening scenes of Sister Carrie, in which Carrie wanders Chicago in search of work and with an eye toward the pleasures
the big city affords her. More than once her fellow city-dwellers on the streets and in the stores are characterized by their “indifference” (17) toward her.
But the conventional sociological line does not adequately address either the
heroine’s profound emotional attraction and connection to the urban mar-
ketplace or Hurstwood’s peculiarly domestic brand of alienation in Chicago.
Hurstwood is least alienated at the upscale saloon he manages, where he
thrives on superficial public contact with strangers and acquaintances and
prides himself on his ability to discriminate among the individuals and classes who enter: “He had a finely graduated scale of informality and friendship”
(33–34). In a useful correction to the sociological account of the indifferent
city, Philip Fisher has claimed that Sister Carrie attests to the modern city’s embodiment of consumer desire, a dynamic projection of human “will and
need”: “far from being in any simple way estranged in the city, man is for the
first time surrounded by himself.”9 Fisher’s reading helps us to understand
the appeal of the saloon, where “it was part of [Hurstwood’s] success” to
“greet personally with a ‘Well, old fellow,’ hundreds of actors, merchants,
politicians, and the general run of successful characters about town” (33);
there are really no strangers in Hurstwood’s place. Fisher also clarifies the
logic behind the commodities that personally address Carrie as she wanders
the aisles of the department store, such as the lace collar that coos seduc-
tively to her: “My dear . . . I fit you beautifully; don’t give me up” (75).
But again, the observation that the city in Sister Carrie materializes human needs and desires cannot explain the absence of the “home spirit” at the
Hurstwoods’ house, where interior decoration may be thought to offer a
particularly potent example of a man (or woman) “surrounded by himself.”
In the suggestively titled “The House of Fiction,” Jean-Christophe Agnew
describes a view of the world and, implicitly, of the domestic interior in
particular “as so much raw space to be furnished with mobile, detachable,
and transactionable goods,” where the boundaries between “the self and
the commodified world” frequently “collapse.”10 This argument has had
a significant impact on our understanding of the psychological impact of
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commodity culture. But the situation at the Hurstwoods instead imagines
an important and undesirable boundary between the self and its things:
domestic objects are indicted for their failure to register the personal traces of the inhabitants, to “express” the inhabitants, in the language of twentieth-century interior decorating. This amounts to a failure to create a physical
space for intimacy and thus to make a house a home. The Hurstwood interior
is impersonal and interchangeable, a product of “the large furniture houses.”
It is as deficient in its way as the meager flat that Carrie occupies with
her sister and brother-in-law upon her arrival in Chicago. At the Hansons,
Carrie “felt the drag of a lean and narrow life. The walls of the rooms were
discordantly papered. The floors were covered with matting and the hall
laid with a thin rag carpet. One could see that the furniture was of that
poor, hurriedly patched together quality sold by the instalment [sic] houses”
(9). Sister Carrie marks the difference in social class even as it underscores a basic similarity between the Hansons’ shabby items from the installment
house and the Hurstwoods’ elegant possessions from the furniture house.
Despite the economic contrast, both interiors suggest the commercial ori-
gins of their furnishings more than they do the concrete uses to which the