Whereas Dreiser’s contemporaries, Stephen Crane and Jack London, are
obsessive in their explorations of racial difference, the accepted critical
stance on Sister Carrie in the past two decades has focused on Dreiser’s attitudes to class and money, but rarely on the racial dimensions of the
book.
Up to a point, this silence is understandable: unlike Crane and London,
whose representations of racial otherness are clearly marked, Dreiser’s novel
appears to have little direct engagement with the role of race in American
life. As Davies suggests, Sister Carrie’s world is almost universally white. Although there are instances of African American presence, such as the “negro”
who waits on Drouet and Carrie at the Windsor dining room (58–59), they
do no more than confirm the narrative suggested by the Exposition. The
waiter repeatedly utters “Yassah,” speaking and acting like an urbanized
form of the “old-time darky,” projected, as Eric Sundquist has argued in an
164
Sister Carrie and race
account of the origin of the cakewalk, as a “type superior” to the stereotyp-
ical “lazy, degenerate, or criminal postbellum blacks, the ‘New Negro’”10
figures imagined in the 1890s, at a moment in post-Reconstruction Ameri-
can history when Southern racial discourse was rapidly becoming the official
national norm. There is nothing in the scene to suggest that the waiter has
the ability or the desire to rise above his servile station. Likewise, other racial and ethnic representations do little to challenge dominant stereotypes: Jews
are shrewd and avaricious; the “Irish type” is “commonplace” (295); and
the Swedish American Hanson combines North European dourness with a
melting pot desire to be rich. Indeed, although his Protestant work ethic
marks him as something of an anachronism in a world of consumption and
spectacle, Hanson is otherwise typical of Dreiser’s representation of white
Europeans’ ability to assimilate into American life.
Sister Carrie, then, carries echoes of the 1893 Fair as seen by Dreiser. His vision of a modern world – on the Midway Plaisance – where, as the representation of the Turkish Jew suggests, everyone is obsessed with pecuniary
gain, has obvious resonance in a novel where the status of individuals is determined by where they can afford to live and what they can afford to wear. As
Hurstwood’s compulsive counting of his diminishing resources, and Carrie’s
craving for cash to purchase clothes imply, to be without money is to lack so-
cial selfhood. Without sufficient money, like Hurstwood when he arrives in
New York, people are “nothing” (305). In addition, Dreiser’s understanding
of the modernity of the Exposition focuses overtly on theatricality, and an-
ticipates the well-documented centrality of acting, or performance, in Sister Carrie.
The narrative implicit in Dreiser’s accounts of the World’s Columbian
Exposition is one of evolutionary progress marked by the contrast between
the sordid modernity of the Midway and the utopian glory of the White City,
and by the progression through the living history of humankind along the
Midway as spectators approached the official Exposition. What is absent
from his account is any sense of the reverse journey of descent, an omission
encouraged, I suggest, by the erasure of an African American presence, widely
perceived as a “threat” to the nation’s future, in his narrative. By concealing one part of the racial construction of American identity, at a moment when
stereotypes ranging from blackface minstrelsy to the murderer and rapist
dominated popular representations of the African American, Dreiser offers
a vision of ultimate progress.
It is self-evident that Sister Carrie contains little of the utopian thought present at the White City. Although Dreiser appears to be enamoured of
many of the trappings of a culture of consumption, he is also scathing
in his attacks on the wastefulness of the wealthy Americans who imagine
165
c h r i s to p h e r g a i r
themselves to be at the top of the evolutionary pile. In the remainder of this
essay, I will argue that Dreiser’s internalization of a dominant racial discourse is inextricably linked to his vision of the nation. Thus, although Davies is
literally correct in his assertion that the novel represents a “white” world,
this does not mean that Dreiser does not deploy familiar contemporary racial
tropes to chart the movements of his protagonists. As Kenneth Warren ar-
gued in Black and White Strangers (1993), a key text in understanding the role of race in American literary realism, “works for which race can serve
as a useful term of inquiry and works that can reveal to us the way that
race has shaped and is shaping our history need not be about race.”11 In
contrast to what was understood (by most visitors) as the racial “purity” of
a Columbian Exposition untainted by an African American presence, Sister
Carrie manifests a return of the racial repressed that defines its fictional universe. Examination of first Hurstwood, and later Carrie will illustrate the
extent of a racialized unconscious in the novel, and will offer a reading of
why Carrie rises and Hurstwood falls that goes beyond familiar accounts of
“fate,” “fortune,” or “chance.”
At the start of the novel, George Hurstwood seems to epitomize the suc-
cessful American businessman. He has worked his way up to his position as
manager of Hannah and Hogg’s Adams Street bar through the Franklinian
combination of “perseverance and industry” (43) and, although his family
life leaves much to be desired in terms of a “lovely home atmosphere,” he
inhabits the “perfectly appointed house” (81) expected of one in his posi-
tion. His job involves social interaction with customers rather than financial
control, and depends upon the “finely graded scale of informality and friend-
ship” (43) with which he differentiates between visitors. Hurstwood is also
characterized by his love of fine clothes and jewellery, always wearing fine
tailored suits and a selection of rings. Even in a world largely defined by
appearances, he stands out, being referred to more than once as the “dressy
manager” (165).
Importantly, in terms of his professional and personal position, Hurst-
wood also has a shrewd understanding of the need to maintain a gap be-
tween public and private life. Although he is not averse to frequenting what
the narrator calls “those more unmentionable resorts of vice” (44), he is
“circumspect in all he did”, and has no “sympathy for the man that made
a mistake and was found out” (85). Thus, he makes a habit of being seen
publicly with his wife, and tends to pursue his private pleasures at a safe distance from Chicago. In sum, Hurstwood is characterized by his restraint –
there is nothing scandalous about his social position and, when he visits the
theatre, he seeks to “make his personality as inconspicuous as possible,”
166
Sister Carrie and race
ensuring that “he was not seen, except by those whose sight was welcome”
(113).
Until he meets Carrie, there is little sense of Hurstwood being other than
what he seems. Although his love of good suits appears slightly excessive,
it certainly does not attract negative attention in the city. Unlike the small
town world of Mark Twain’s Pudd’nhead Wilson (1893), for example, where the wearing of fine “Eastern” clothes brings a swift rebuke from the locals,
Chicago is used to such garb and is more than happy to accept Hurstwood.
And yet, in some ways, there are striking parallels between the two novels. In
Twain’s book, the young Tom Driscoll is inadvertently passing, having been
swapped with the “real” white heir to an aristocratic Southern upbringing at
birth. As such, his performance of dandyism contains an ironic undercurrent
of blackface representation, hidden from his fellow townspeople but evident
to Twain’s readers. Driscoll’s plot of decline transforms him from this carica-
ture into the other principal stereotype of the African American: when Tom
murders his uncle (in the process of robbing from an open safe), he seems to
represent Southern white fears of the danger of the black male, freed from
the supervision and constraints of slavery, regressing into an atavistic brute.
As such, Tom can be seen as what Myra Jehlen has called, “the very type
of the upstart Negro of post-Reconstruction plantation fiction: cowardly,
absurdly pretentious, lazy and irresponsible, a petty thief but potentially a
murderer.”12
Hurstwood’s encounter with Carrie provokes a similar transformation,
and one that suggests that Dreiser’s repeated references to the “dressy man-
ager” are the first stage in a process through which Hurstwood’s degeneracy
is imagined as the product of a kind of authorial racial unconscious. As we
shall see, the transformation of successful businessman into suicidal down
and out progresses via a series of markers that identify Hurstwood’s be-
havioral patterns as “black” in ways remarkably close to Jehlen’s summary
of the “New Negro.” In contrast, as I shall demonstrate later in this essay,
Carrie’s successful rise to international superstardom depends upon the signs
of her whiteness.
From the moment that he meets Carrie, Hurstwood’s white (public) pro-
priety becomes increasingly unstable. Thinking “almost uninterruptedly”
of her, Hurstwood is propelled by an attraction “deeper than mere desire”