occupants now put them. The trace of the commodity never wears off, and
even when the installment house furniture is paid for, its looks won’t change.
The condition of the Hansons’ flat is less a sign of poverty per se, however,
than of aspirations of upward mobility. “Of a clean, saving disposition,”
Sven Hanson is making payments on two West Side lots: “His ambition was
some day to build a house on them” (9). The money Carrie pays for room
and board is designed to accelerate the Hansons’ residential goals; in going to live with Charles Drouet, a salesman whom she met on the train to Chicago,
she resists both this exploitation and the principle of delayed gratification.
Hanson wants to own a house like Hurstwood, but Dreiser indicates that
house ownership and affluence may not entail the sort of sweeping changes
in domestic atmosphere that one might expect.
If the Hansons do appear to lead the “lean and narrow life,” character-
ized by “a settled opposition to anything save a conservative round of toil”
(10), that Carrie reads from their furnishings, then we can see as well that
the Hurstwoods’ impersonal and interchangeable interior seems to tell us
something important about the inhabitants, not so much about their indi-
vidual tastes and preferences but rather their emotional detachment from
one another. It is impossible to tell from the passage and subsequent descrip-
tions of the family’s interactions whether impersonal and indifferent domes-
tic artifacts simply express or are in fact understood to cause impersonal
and indifferent domestic relations. But it is significant that Dreiser refrains from depicting “the failure of the family” – the fracture of the Hurstwood
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home – until he has described the failure of the material environment to pro-
vide a nurturing home atmosphere.11 The priority given to deficient domestic
objects seems to suggest that material interiors can influence the interiority
of the inhabitants, disabling the family members’ emotional connection to
one another and to the house and its contents that the name home is always imagined to invoke. In Sister Carrie, owned space, the house, the conventional “home,” is depicted as emotionally uninhabitable space.
Long before Hurstwood has become homeless in an economic sense –
that is to say, houseless – he begins to experience himself as homeless in a
spiritual sense, and indeed, the situations are causally linked. He begins the
decline into actual transience when he seeks at some level to find someone
who will make him feel at home, as he “make[s] at home” (241) the patrons
of the saloons he manages in Chicago and New York. Carrie is herself quite
sensitive to “affectional atmosphere[s]” (8), as we see in her criticisms of the Hansons’ physical and emotional environment. Indeed, Hurstwood finds her
so attractive in part because “her industry and natural love of order” give the
“cosey” apartment she shares with Drouet “an air pleasing in the extreme”
(69), and he fantasizes about the time “when Drouet was disposed of en-
tirely and she was waiting evenings in cosey little quarters for him” (106).
He admires Carrie’s youth and beauty but also her facility as a home-maker.
In other words, Hurstwood finds her compelling as a mistress not because
she represents an alternative to domestic life but because she represents the
fulfillment of its promise. But Hurstwood miscalculates. For all her domestic
abilities, Carrie is not satisfied exclusively with home-making, especially for someone who doesn’t fulfill his end of their implicit domestic contract, as
Hurstwood ceases to do after they run away to New York and he falls on
economic hard times. At the end of the novel, as a celebrity and successful
actress, Carrie chooses to establish herself in a fashionable hotel, where all
of the work of home-making – furnishing, cooking, and decorating – falls
to others. In moving Carrie to “such a place as she had always dreamed
of occupying” (331), Dreiser frees her from a domesticity that is otherwise
associated in this novel with making a home for a man. And Carrie’s suc-
cessful rejection of a conventional homelife underscores that men alone are
imagined to suffer from the lack of a proper home. None of the Hurstwoods
enjoys the “beneficent influence” (63) of a proper home, but only George
Hurstwood noticeably misses it and seeks futilely, for a while, to recover it.
His wife and daughter get exactly what they want, a wealthy husband for
the latter; his son weirdly disappears.
While it might be tempting to dismiss Dreiser’s panegyric to “[a] lovely
home atmosphere,” “one of the flowers of the world,” as an example of the
kind of overwriting that has vexed many critics of Sister Carrie, it offers an 105
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important insight into the emotional value of the home for a male novelist
more readily associated with gritty urban realism and class struggle than
with a strong domestic sensibility. Dreiser’s biographer Richard Lingeman
has written that “Theodore was repelled by the bourgeois proprieties even
though he admired the ‘stable virtues, order, care’ which middle-class life represented: the stable home life he had rarely known.”12 In Dreiser’s fiction,
this duality is most clearly evident in The “Genius” , a semi-autobiographical novel about a gifted painter whose talent and sensibilities establish him as
a figure for the author. From the first pages the novel is keenly attuned to
the appeal of pleasant middle-class home and family life in a small mid-
western town. But the protagonist Eugene Witla’s “burning opposition to
the commonplace,” perhaps better described as the artist’s “spiritual right”
to be both selfish and stupid, prevents him from reproducing it elsewhere,
even when he has the means to do so.13 Eugene acknowledges the stabilizing
effects of an ordered and attractive home and on some level appreciates his
wife’s repeated attempts to create one even as he resists the confinement it
implies. Only after he has harried Angela Witla to death can he achieve both
artistic success and a tenable albeit unconventional domestic life with his
motherless infant daughter.
More than any of Dreiser’s novels, the attractions of a good home life
infuse Jennie Gerhardt because here the spirit of home is achieved. It emerges, strikingly, amid the utter violation of all the usual “bourgeois proprieties.”
Jennie Gerhardt, the self-sacrificing daughter of working-class immigrant
parents, exercises an unusual fascination for powerful older men, who find
in her a soothing antidote to the frenzy and indifference, the “kaleidoscopic
glitter” and “intellectual fatigue,” of contemporary urban life: “A girl like
Jennie is like a comfortable fire to the average masculine mind; it is like
warmth after the freezing attitude of harder dispositions.”14 Jennie is herself a hearth, the emotional center of the home, and her natural warmth attracts
first a US Senator, “an otherwise homeless bachelor” (7), who lives in the
fine hotel where Jennie and her mother work and who seduces her after she
becomes his laundress. He promises to marry her but then dies. Her warmth
is next enjoyed by Lester Kane, the wealthy son of a prominent carriage
manufacturer. Lester will neither marry Jennie nor, for a time, give her up,
and they eventually settle together in a large house, “an old-time home”
(251), in Hyde Park, a lovely suburban enclave in South Chicago. Jennie
is an instinctive home-maker: like Carrie, she possesses “natural industry
and love of order,” and she provides for Lester “exactly the service and the
atmosphere which he needed to be comfortable and happy” (197). Unlike
Carrie, Jennie finds loving service to men to be sufficient occupation. And
in contrast with Angela Witla, another Dreiser woman with noteworthy
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domestic talents, Jennie does not waste her efforts on a man who does not
value them, even if Lester cannot finally appreciate her talents quite enough.
Lester and Jennie achieve something like domestic happiness for a time,
marred for Jennie only by Lester’s unwillingness to marry her. It is the nar-
rowmindedness of the outside world, more than Lester’s opposition to a
more conventional arrangement, that destroys their home. The neighbors
are “well-to-do, aspiring, middle-class people . . . all trying to get along and get up . . . they would not remain here long” (257). At first they are delighted to have a man of Lester’s social stature and a woman of Jennie’s charms
among them. But rather than finding privacy in their eleven-room suburban
retreat, Lester and Jennie are made conspicuous by it. As the Chicago school
sociologists would have observed, the village-like atmosphere of the exclu-
sive suburb, as well as its cohesive economic and racial character, foster more contact and intimacy among residents. Jennie cannot preserve her anonymity
in a Hyde Park house as she did in a North Side apartment. Because she must
assume the public role of wife, their secret is revealed. Lester’s family threatens to disinherit him; friends shun him; and he finally leaves Jennie for a