the novel’s start and finish – a rather different pattern emerges. Although,
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somewhat melodramatically, Carrie imagines her flight from Chicago with
Hurstwood as the chance to “come out of bondage into freedom” (290),
she displays few of the “black” traits identified with him, and none of the
markers – cowardliness, laziness, irresponsibility, dishonesty, violence, and
so on – identified in Jehlen’s account of representations of the New Negro.
Instead, she has “no great passion” and, whereas Hurstwood is driven by
his overriding craving for her, feels only a “semblance of affection” for him
(301), and similar lack of emotion when she leaves Columbia City, then her
sister, and later Drouet.
A similar restraint is evident in Carrie’s attitude to sex. Although we must
assume that she is sexually active in her relationships with Hurstwood and
Drouet, this is not a subject that she reflects upon. Where Drouet’s interest
in Carrie is immediately identified as physical, and Hurstwood’s excessive
sexual desires are marked by his visits to brothels, Carrie herself shows
neither pleasure nor repugnance, and does not appear to think about sex.
This absence is representative of much of the thinking of the time, and is a
crucial index of her gendered racial identity. As Wendy Martin has illustrated
in a reading of female sexuality in Kate Chopin’s The Awakening (1899), a woman’s desires were widely believed to correspond to her color:
In general, proper women were not perceived as having sexual needs or as being
capable of experiencing erotic pleasure or orgasm. For a respectable woman
the sex act was one of self-sacrifice; the true woman was passionless . . .
Color charts that hung in drugstores and other public buildings [in the South]
provided an extremely complex key to the hierarchical ranking of racial ances-
try. Moral qualities were attributed to degrees of skin pigmentation, and black women were condemned as lustful she-devils while white women were praised
for ethereal purity akin to that of the angels.15
But, whereas Chopin’s Edna Pontellier becomes a kind of sexual freak within
her community in The Awakening, with her desires being read by her hus-
band and acquaintances as signs of moral and racial deviance, Carrie’s own
desires and actions only surface in her sister’s unconscious, and her own
performances on stage. At the very moment when Carrie is (as it seems)
making love to Drouet for the first time, Minnie is troubled by a dream of
Carrie entering a “deep pit” containing “curious wet stones far down where
the wall disappeared in vague shadows” (79). Predictably, Minnie’s dream
suggests a moral fall as well as a physical one, but its symbolic allusions to
sexual activity remain elliptical, representative of a gendered and racialized
unconscious that precludes the open discussion of the subject.
In order to understand Carrie’s subsequent rise, it is useful to recall the
layout of the World’s Columbian Exposition. The White City, representing
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the peaks of (white American) achievement was approached via the Mid-
way Plaisance, where a series of ethnological exhibits ranging from, at one
end, Native Americans and Africans, to, just outside the White City itself,
the German village, marked out an implicitly evolutionary model of human
progress. Other races, with the notable exception of the African American,
are represented on the same scale – though at different points – as white
Americans, with the promise that, in time, emulation of the educational
model on display will bring about an internalization of that idealized cul-
ture. Carrie’s own development both off stage and on suggests that her tra-
jectory embodies an individualized version of the same model, as she ascends
the evolutionary ladder – an ascension made possible by her ethnic identity,
though not guaranteed by it. At the start of the novel, being “white” is a
struggle for Carrie, whose unaccompanied walks through the city reverber-
ate with echoes of moral impropriety and prostitution. At a time when space
was still rigidly demarcated according to gender, Carrie’s wanderings sug-
gest that it is not only her economic status that is precarious. Nevertheless,
this stage in Carrie’s development is short-lived, since her imitative range
enables her to adapt to new environments. Thus, although her unwedded
sexual activities do imply a position that remains on the margins of official
white female identity – and it is notable that her rise to theatrical stardom
gathers pace once she has abandoned Hurstwood, and apparently embraced
chastity – there are signs that Carrie is becoming “whiter.”
The pattern is even clearer in the differences between her various acting
roles. In her first public performance, as Laura in Under the Gaslight, Carrie is expected to conform to the “most sacred traditions of melodrama,” in a
part where “the sorrowful demeanor, the tremolo music, the long, explana-
tory, cumulative addresses, were all there” (160–161). Although Carrie is
delighted with the part, her performance is on course to be a “wretched fail-
ure” until Hurstwood attempts to “hypnotize her into doing better” (182).
It is unclear whether this hypnosis – a process for unleashing the uncon-
scious – provokes the transformation, but Carrie subsequently exhibits the
“magic of passion,” what Hurstwood sees as “something extraordinarily
good” (185), in the remainder of the performance, in a display of animation
unlike anything else she does throughout the novel. It is at this moment,
with her passions on full display, that she generates the greatest desire in
Hurstwood, who “mastered himself only by a superhuman effort” (193).
In contrast, Carrie’s subsequent roles demand increasing restraint, in a
significant retreat from the emotional excesses of the melodrama. In what
becomes her first speaking part, as “one of a group of oriental beauties” in
a harem (430), Carrie’s new racial identity demands none of the extremes
drawn out in a melodramatic genre associated indelibly – as the unrivaled
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popularity of stage versions of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin
in the 1890s demonstrates – with blackface. Later still, in another clear
evolutionary rise, as the “silent little Quakeress,” Carrie arouses desire in
“the portly gentlemen in the front rows,” who wish to “force away” her
frown with kisses (446–447). At this moment, her new purity is emphasized
both by the religious nature of her role, and by the contrast between the
brightness of the space she occupies on stage and the darkened auditorium,
from where the lascivious glances of the men are directed. In a moment
encapsulating the links between light and moral worthiness and dark and
immorality that became increasingly common in the popular culture of the
turn-of-the century (especially with the emergence of movies), Dreiser focuses
on the relationship between the embodiment of white female virtue on stage
and the darkened male lust in the audience.16 Finally, following her encounter
with the down and out Hurstwood, there is a fusion of public and private
identities, with Carrie’s “lonely, self-withdrawing temper” making her an
“interesting figure in the public eye” (478). In abandoning the theatrical
excesses of melodrama, and increasingly coming to portray the desirable,
though unattainable, model of reserved white womanhood, Carrie increases
her market value beyond anything she had ever expected.
Ultimately, however, even this degree of success provides no satisfaction
for Carrie. Where once merely being offered the chance to act and, later,
being paid more than she can spend provoked “delighted” (434) responses,
her moments of satisfaction are always brief. Walter Benn Michaels has
argued that this is a good thing: that in Carrie’s world satisfaction is “never desirable; it is instead the sign of incipient failure, decay, and finally death”; and that the consumer capitalist America that she inhabits succeeds because
it forever generates new desires.17 But the introduction of Bob Ames steers
Carrie’s desires in a new direction: although Michaels sees Ames’s views as
anachronistic and argues that he is little different from the world he critiques, since he also awakens new desires in Carrie, this is to over-simplify both
Ames’s message and Carrie’s response.
Ames himself is in almost every way the opposite of Hurstwood. Where
Hurstwood is “dark,” Ames has a “clean, white brow” (484); where Hurst-
wood looks older than his years, Ames has “the least touch of boyishness
to Carrie” (333); where Hurstwood is “dressy,” Ames is “wholly free of af-
fectation” (329); and where Hurstwood is an adulterer and bigamist, Ames
“had respect for the married state” (330), and appears “innocent and clean”
(335). Indeed, in total contrast to Hurstwood’s characteristic excesses, Ames
is defined through his restraint, as we have seen, an emotional marker of
“whiteness.” His attitudes to art parallel his moral standpoint, as illustrated in his comments about fiction. For Ames, adopting a defense of emotional
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thriftiness that echoes those of the realist novelist and critic William Dean
Howells, the popular sentimental romances offer a poor role model to