their readers, encouraging an emotional excess that parallels the financial
wastefulness on display at the restaurant where he first talks in depth with
Carrie. In contrast, the realism of Balzac – although limited for Ames by
an over-emphasis on “love and fortune” rather than “knowledge” (482) –
provides a model that can both educate and entertain, stressing intellectual
self-discovery and rigorous self-improvement.
Ames’s views generate a new kind of desire in Carrie. On their first meeting,
he suggests that she turn her attention to “comedy-drama,” a proposition
that he modifies to “the dramatic field” (485) when they meet again. Because
of her physical beauty and grace, coupled with her innate abilities – as we
have seen, a particularly sensitive ability to imitate what she sees, and to
evolve (at least, physically) into a form of idealized white womanhood –
Ames believes that Carrie is perfectly fitted to “help the world express itself”
(485). Her “countenance,” even if Carrie feels “unequal to what is written
there” throws Ames into the “speculative contemplation of the ideal – the
something better” (484). Finally, his ideas for her future create “the perfect
Carrie in mind and body, because now her mind was aroused” (485), that
is, they inspire the very ability to live up to the expression on her face that Carrie has always lacked. Believing that all he has said is “absolutely true,”
Carrie’s final thought in the novel is that the “solution being offered to her.
Not money . . . Not clothes . . . Not applause,” but rather “goodness –
labor for others” (486) provides a form of “unsatisfied” (487) desire that is
worthy; that will entertain and educate, rather than titillate.
Ultimately, and despite the bleakness of much of its representation of urban
America, Sister Carrie reconfirms what the White City had suggested, that is (unsurprisingly), that to be successful is to be white. But this is not all: to do so, it depends upon a series of racial markers more complex than have
previously been recognized. Instead, the presence of a racial unconscious in
the representation of George Hurstwood offers a counterpoint to Carrie’s
successful white identity. At the end of the novel, in an echo of Dreiser’s vision of the White City, Carrie’s selfhood is marked by a combination of popularity,
beauty (for the Victorians, as the design and response to the White City
illustrates, an ideal drawn from ancient Greece), and the desire for self and
societal improvement, illustrated, most significantly, by her transcendence of
the culturally dominant desire for money. On stage, as the embodiment of
an idealized culture absent in the outside world, Carrie offers an alternative
to the materialistic obsessions that predominate throughout the novel. As
with Dreiser’s descriptions of the White City, Carrie’s performances assume
an aesthetic significance that counters the “lesser” forms of theatricality
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Sister Carrie and race
represented by both the ethnological exhibits on the Midway Plaisance, and
by the showy characters that surround her. And, like the White City, Carrie
is suggestive of the possibility of further “progress” along the evolutionary
ladder, although there is little to indicate that she herself has fully internalised such “progress.” Carrie’s rise and Hurstwood’s fall enable a mix of ethnic
European groups in the novel and beyond to imaginatively assimilate – to
picture themselves climbing the evolutionary scale – against the backdrop of
an excluded racial otherness, and, with Hurstwood’s death, to imaginatively
contain the degeneracies identified with blackness.
N O T E S
1 Theodore Dreiser: Journalism, ed. T. D. Nostwich (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1988), pp. 136–137.
2 Theodore Dreiser, Newspaper Days: An Autobiography (Santa Rosa: Black Sparrow Press, 2000), p. 312.
3 Theodore Dreiser: Journalism, p. 128.
4 “Opened by the President: Mr. Cleveland Presses the Magic Button at Chicago,”
New York Times, 2 May 1893, pp. 1–2.
5 Ronald E. Martin, American Literature and the Universe of Force (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1981), pp. 59–60.
6 Theodore Dreiser, A Book About Myself (New York: Boni and Liveright, 1922), pp. 457–458.
7 World’s Columbian Exposition Illustrated 3.1 (March 1893): 300.
8 Jude Davies, “Meeting Places: Shopping for Selves in Chicago and New
York,” in Maria Balshaw, Anna Notaro, Liam Kennedy, and Douglas Tallack
(eds.), City Sites: Multimedia Essays on New York and Chicago, 1870s–
1930s, an electronic book (Birmingham: University of Birmingham Press, 2000, http://artsweb.bham.ac.uk/citysites), n.p.
9 Philip Fisher, “Acting, Reading, Fortune’s Wheel: Sister Carrie and the Life History of Objects,” in Eric J. Sundquist (ed.), American Realism: New Essays (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982), pp. 259–277.
10 Eric J. Sundquist, To Wake the Nations: Race in the Making of American Literature (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), p. 277.
11 Kenneth W. Warren, Black and White Strangers: Race and American Literary Realism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), p. 16.
12 Myra Jehlen, “The Ties that Bind: Race and Sex in Pudd’nhead Wilson,” in Susan Gilman and Forest G. Robinson (eds.), Mark Twain’s Pudd’nhead Wilson: Race, Conflict, and Culture (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 1990), p. 111.
13 Walter Benn Michaels, The Gold Standard and the Logic of Naturalism: American Literature at the Turn of the Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), pp. 31–58.
14 Bill Brown, The Material Unconscious: American Amusement, Stephen Crane, and the Economies of Play (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), p. 216.
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c h r i s to p h e r g a i r
15 Wendy Martin, “Introduction” to Martin (ed.), New Essays on The Awakening (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), pp. 15–16.
16 See Richard Dyer, White (London: Routledge, 1997), passim.
17 Michaels, The Gold Standard, p. 42.
G U I D E T O F U RT H E R R E A D I N G
Brown, Bill. The Material Unconscious: American Amusement, Stephen Crane, and the Economies of Play. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996.
Davies, Jude. “Meeting Places: Shopping for Selves in Chicago and New York,” in Maria Balshaw, Anna Notaro, Liam Kennedy, and Douglas Tallack (eds.), City
Sites: Multimedia Essays on New York and Chicago, 1870s–1930s, an elec-
tronic book. Birmingham: University of Birmingham Press, 2000, http://artsweb.
bham.ac.uk/citysites.
Dreiser, Theodore. A Book About Myself. New York: Boni and Liveright, 1922.
Journalism, ed. T. D. Nostwich. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1988.
Newspaper Days: An Autobiography. Santa Rosa: Black Sparrow Press, 1991.
Sister Carrie. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1981.
Dyer, Richard. White. London: Routledge, 1997.
Fisher, Philip. “Acting, Reading, Fortune’s Wheel: Sister Carrie and the Life History of Objects,” in Eric J. Sundquist (ed.), American Realism: New Essays. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982.
Jehlen, Myra. “The Ties that Bind: Race and Sex in Pudd’nhead Wilson,” in Susan Gilman and Forest G. Robinson (eds.). Mark Twain’s Pudd’nhead Wilson: Race, Conflict, and Culture. Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 1990.
Lott, Eric. “White Like Me: Racial Cross-Dressing and the Construction of American Whiteness,” in Amy Kaplan and Donald E. Pease (eds.), Cultures of United States Imperialism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993.
McKee, Patricia. Producing American Races: Henry James, William Faulkner, Toni Morrison. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999.
Martin, Ronald E. American Literature and the Universe of Force. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1981.
Martin, Wendy. “Introduction” to Martin (ed.), New Essays on The Awakening.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988.
Michaels, Walter Benn. The Gold Standard and the Logic of Naturalism: American Literature at the Turn of the Century. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987.
Sundquist, Eric J. To Wake the Nations: Race in the Making of American Literature.
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993.
Warren, Kenneth W. Black and White Strangers: Race and American Literary Realism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993.
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P R I S C I L L A WA L D
Dreiser’s sociological vision
In 1906, the year before Theodore Dreiser reissued Sister Carrie, the American Journal of Sociology published University of Chicago sociologist W. I.
Thomas’s “The Adventitious Character of Woman.”1 In the essay, Thomas
contends that woman was originally dominant but gradually “dropped back
into a somewhat unstable and adventitious relation to the social process”
(32). In his effort to understand this evolution, he explains that modern
women – especially American women – have become dependent on their
communities for regulation. Noting that “an unattached woman has a ten-
dency to become an adventuress – not so much on economic as on psycho-
logical grounds” (41), he contends that when “the ordinary girl . . . becomes
detached from home and group, and is removed not only from surveillance,
but from the ordinary stimulation and interest afforded by social life and
acquaintanceship, her inhibitions are likely to be relaxed” (41–42). Thomas
follows this observation with a description that reads like a plot summary
of Dreiser’s novel:
The girl coming from the country to the city affords one of the clearest cases
of detachment. Assuming that she comes to the city to earn her living, her
work is not only irksome, but so unremunerative that she finds it impossible