(121). In a novel where, as Walter Benn Michaels has famously suggested,
desire dictates human behavior,13 this excess signification, just like the allusions to the “dressy manager,” alerts us to Hurstwood’s somewhat excep-
tional characteristics. Once the transformation has begun, it sets in motion
a series of events that appear to be unstoppable. Thus, almost immediately,
Hurstwood’s actions become foolhardy in a manner unimaginable to the
167
c h r i s to p h e r g a i r
figure described at the novel’s start, most notably when he walks and then
drives out with Carrie on Chicago’s West Side. Although he is “nervous
over the publicity of it” (126), especially since the district is home to many
of his acquaintances, Hurstwood’s longing for Carrie overrides his habitual
caution.
At this stage, Hurstwood’s outward behavior toward Carrie herself re-
mains conventional. Although he is married – a point about which Carrie
is unaware – his heavily sentimental and confessional romantic overtures
draw a swift and tender response. It is not long, however, until the logical
consequences of his rhetoric generate more problematic issues, with Carrie’s
desire to be married raising the thought (later executed) of bigamy, a form
of social excess considerably less acceptable than a fondness for expensive
clothes. Similarly, as Hurstwood’s need for Carrie grows, his composed ex-
terior is replaced by something more sinister. When confronted by his wife
about his public outings with Carrie, his response is spontaneous, rather
than calculated:
He crept towards her with a light in his eye that was ominous. Something in
the woman’s cool, cynical, upperhandish manner, as if she were already master,
caused him to feel for the moment as if he could strangle her.
(221)
Hurstwood’s resentment at the idea of his wife’s masterly attitude and his
guilt about his longing for Carrie combine to transform him from respected
citizen to potential murderer. While Mrs. Hurstwood immediately adopts
the role of the calculating businesswoman, consulting a lawyer and hiring a
private detective in order to maximize her financial advantage, her husband
shows no such control. Although he is (just about) able to pretend to be
“in an ordinary mood” when he returns to work the next morning, this
performance conceals an inner violence represented by his references to his
wife as a “confounded bitch” who “could do what she damn pleased” (235).
At times, the now “helpless manager” (241) is confused by his own
transformation, feeling that a “monstrous, unnatural, unwarranted condi-
tion . . . had suddenly descended upon him without his let or hindrance”
(238). His inability to shape his actions, and, most notably, to show any
kind of restraint, is enacted in a variety of ways. Most famously, he steals
the money from Hannah and Hogg’s, and lies to Carrie to persuade her to
leave Chicago with him, in what is effectively her abduction. In New York,
once he is “married” and familiarity with Carrie has prompted a complacent
loss of affection for her, Hurstwood returns to his pursuit of other women
(316). Later, as his financial situation becomes increasingly desperate, a sim-
ilar lack of self-control results in the loss of most of his remaining money in a poker game. In a narrative now driven by the identification of Hurstwood
168
Sister Carrie and race
with excess, even doing nothing comes to signify such lack of restraint. Once
he is out of work, he makes little effort to find a new position, preferring
to lounge in hotel lobbies, and later at home, reading newspapers, like the
“morphine fiend . . . becoming addicted to his ease” (373). Although Carrie’s
resentment about Hurstwood’s lack of work reveals an obvious double stan-
dard in her culture’s logic – it is conventional for her to live off Hurstwood, but inappropriate for her to support him – she correctly identifies what she
sees as laziness as a symptom of his increasing degeneracy.
When we recall Jehlen’s comments about Tom Driscoll, the identification
with Hurstwood is uncanny. To move through her summary systematically
reveals the extent to which Hurstwood is represented through strategies re-
peatedly used to characterize blackness in the 1890s. Although it is probably
rather harsh to categorize him as “cowardly,” since he only quits his job as
scab tram-driver after being shot, Jehlen’s other epithets are easily applied.
We have just seen evidence of his laziness; his role as the “dressy manager”
appears “absurdly pretentious” in the subsequent light of Dreiser’s comments
about “true culture,” when confronted with the “wasteful and unwhole-
some gastronomy” on display at Sherry’s (332); his behavior in his pursuit of
Carrie is plainly “irresponsible,” whether through choice or, as it seems more
accurate to suggest, because, just like the atavistic “New Negro,” he can-
not control his actions. Finally, Hurstwood is a “petty thief” and, as we
have seen, “potentially a murderer,” although he does stop short of killing
his wife.
I am not suggesting that Hurstwood is actually “black,” but rather that an
identification of his actions with those of popular black caricatures helps to
explain his degeneracy and marginalization from the wealthy and successful
culture of which he was once a part. On the other hand, it is remarkable that
once his decline is in progress, his physicality is described in a racialized manner absent in the early stages of the novel. Thus, whereas the introductory
descriptions of Hurstwood focus on what he wears, later passages pay equal
attention to what he looks like, that is “dark of skin . . . quite a disagreeable figure” (349), and “a dark, silent man” (412). The “monstrous” condition
that he recognized in himself while still in Chicago (238) is equated with
a kind of racialized freakery. Where once Hurstwood’s “blackness” was a
uniform that could be discarded if he chose to wear different clothes, or,
as Bill Brown has put it in his account of minstrelsy in the 1890s, “a black
mask [providing] an alter ego that transgressed the white Protestant propri-
ety,” his later identity is impossible to remove, staining his features with a
representation of racial monstrosity that, again following Brown, embodies,
in the “African” freak, “uncivilized, bestial humanity.”14 Given such logic,
it is inevitable that Hurstwood must die at the end of the novel. In order
169
c h r i s to p h e r g a i r
to re-imagine the white universe constructed at the start of the book, the
symbolic representation of a dangerous black presence needs to be removed.
In its place, what remains is the kind of safely segregated African American
otherness represented by the waiter at the Windsor dining room, seemingly
content in his menial position, and posing no threat to the interethnic white-
ness that characterizes Dreiser’s “America.”
Where the polarized signs of blackness mark Hurstwood’s otherness,
Carrie comes to embody a particular version of American whiteness. Just
as Hurstwood’s decline is charted via association with a series of historically specific racial markers, Carrie’s rise depends upon her enactment of forms
of racial role-play only emerging toward the end of the nineteenth century,
when, as we have seen, evolutionary discourse became widely adopted. In
keeping with the dominant cultural ideology of the time, however, the novel’s
understanding of whiteness suggests a much more extensive selection of roles
than those attributed to the African American. Thus, from the start of the
novel, Carrie, who is “two generations removed from the emigrant” (4), em-
barks on a series of performances – job seeker, factory worker, wife, actress –
that will ultimately see her as the popular embodiment of white American
celebrity. What is immediately clear is that Carrie, unlike Hurstwood, has
an innate ability to adapt: although, as has been extensively documented,
Carrie’s rise does depend on a great deal of good fortune, it is also the prod-
uct of her capacity to make the most of her opportunities. Thus, despite her
apparent indifference to the sentimentalized national narrative of the day, in
which hard work and virtue are the prerequisites for success, Carrie’s identity displays none of the excesses associated with Hurstwood.
Many critics have noted that the theatre is the perfect profession for Carrie,
since she has been acting throughout the novel. From the opening paragraph
of the book, in which the “gush of tears at mother’s farewell kiss,” and
“pathetic sigh as the familiar green environs of the village passed in review,”
Carrie, “not conscious of any of this” (3), displays an internalized ability
to enact ritualized cultural gestures. As the narrator explains when Carrie
accepts her first amateur role,
She was created with that passivity of soul which is always the mirror of the
active world. She possessed an innate taste for imitation and no small ability.
(157)
At first glance, this imitative ability may seem to bracket Carrie with forms
of blackness parodied and exaggerated in the minstrelsy so popular at the
time. But, when we look more closely at her performances – and particularly
at the manner in which her roles (both on stage and off) evolve between