to obtain those accessories to her personality in the way of finery which would be sufficient to hold her attention and satisfy her if they were to be had in
plenty. She is lost from the sight of everyone whose opinion has any meaning
for her, while the separation from her home community renders her condition
peculiarly flat and lonely; and she is prepared to accept any opportunity for
stimulation offered her, unless she has been morally standardized before leaving home. To be completely lost sight of may, indeed, become an object under these
circumstances – the only means by which she can without confusion accept
unapproved stimulations – and to pass from a regular to an irregular life and
back again before the fact has been noted is not an unusual course.
(42)
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Thomas may have read – or perhaps read about – Sister Carrie, a book
published and reviewed (although not widely) in 1900. Doubleday, Page,
Dreiser’s original publisher, however, had distributed it without publicity,
and it had sold fewer than five hundred copies before being allowed to go
out of print.2 Whether or not Thomas had read the novel, the similarity
between his description and the plot of Sister Carrie attests to a cultural narrative, a story that seems familiar because it is retold in a variety of
contexts from the pulpit to the press, from novels and plays to medical and
sociology journals. At first glance, in fact, it reads like one of the oldest of cautionary tales, a fallen woman story.
Historians of the period have documented a preoccupation with female
sexuality, which they see as an effect of anxiety about the social change at-
tendant upon the rapid immigration, industrialization and urbanization of
the period.3 Ruth Rosen writes of the “uneasy truce between society and
prostitution” which is periodically “broken by outbursts of social indig-
nation” marked by a preponderance of literature about prostitution (xi).
Fallen women narratives accompany these outbursts, offering accounts of
why women might turn to lives governed by illicit sexuality. They encompass
a variety of stories and genres and are unified only by their condemnation
of female sexuality that is not sanctioned by the state through marriage.
Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa Harlowe, Susanna Rowson’s Charlotte Tem-
ple, and Hannah Foster’s Eliza Wharton are hardly literature’s first seduced
and abandoned maidens, but they are arguably the fictional prototypes of
the nineteenth-century melodrama’s fallen women. The fallen woman may,
like her eighteenth-century literary prototypes, be a woman who, for a va-
riety of reasons, is insufficiently supervised and often lonely and therefore
easily tempted to follow her heart. Alternatively, like Thomas’s unattached
woman and Dreiser’s Carrie Meeber, the fallen woman may be led to
her “irregularity” by her desire for luxuries she cannot afford. While his-
torically the women most likely to choose prostitution had exhausted other
options for subsistence or found them less desirable, the fallen woman of lit-
erature (and melodrama) occupied one of the two former categories. She may
or may not literally end up a prostitute, but her “illicit” sexuality consigns
her to the margins of society where, at least in her literary manifestations,
she probably will not survive.
Carrie Meeber does not only survive, she prospers. And she does not
repent. The danger she, like Thomas’s unattached woman, poses is in fact that
she is neither punished, nor marginalized. Indeed, that is what troubled many
of Dreiser’s readers. The anonymity afforded by the city allows Carrie to
move from poverty to comfort as she assumes the fictive role of the wife first
of Charles Drouet, an ambitious salesman, and then of the already married
178
Dreiser’s sociological vision
George Hurstwood, manager of a prominent saloon, with whom she flees
to New York City from Chicago. Remaining undetected in her deceptions,
she eventually leaves Hurstwood for a successful and widely respected stage
career. She is Thomas’s unattached woman writ large, a newly articulated
type that is easily overlooked because of her resonance not only with the
fallen woman, but also with another emerging figure in the period, the New
Woman.
Dubbed by Carroll Smith-Rosenberg “a revolutionary demographic and
political phenomenon,” the “New Woman” was typically (although not
exclusively, as Nella Larsen’s and Jessie Fauset’s characters attest) white
and middle-class.4 She married late (if at all), had few (if any) children,
and was preoccupied with concerns that many social commentators con-
sidered frivolous. Although her fictional prototypes frequently concerned
themselves with leisure activities, her real-life manifestations had more sub-
stantive ambitions and were interested, as Smith-Rosenberg documents, in
“professional visibility” as they worked for “innovative, often radical, eco-
nomic and social reforms” (245). The terms on which they most charac-
teristically staked their claims were educational, professional, and political.
The New Woman was not a prostitute and may or may not even have been
sexually active, but her refusal of marriage and/or conventional gender roles
put her sexuality at the forefront of public debate and framed the terms of her condemnation.5
Neither Dreiser’s Carrie, nor Thomas’s unattached woman quite fits the
profile either of the conventional fallen woman or of the New Woman. They
are neither socially marginal, nor consciously liberated or engaged in any
kind of social or political struggle. Rather, the unattached woman represents
the working-class counterpart of the New Woman, tainted, like her, by the
fallen woman narratives, but nonetheless distinct in the nature of the anxiety
she produces. While social critiques of both the prostitute and the New
Woman in this period lamented their hyper-visibility, the unattached woman
was troubling because of her unrecognizability. The most salient feature of
the type, it seems, was the ability to disappear in plain view, in Thomas’s
phrase, to “pass from a regular to an irregular life and back again before
the fact has been noted.” The fact that students of the period have tended to
overlook the unattached woman as a type, especially relative to the other two,
attests to the success of the disappearing act: the type has evidently eluded
contemporary critics as effectively as Thomas believed the women eluded
the surveillance of their own contemporaries.6 Chronicling the movement of
his eponymous heroine, a woman modeled on his own sister Emma, Dreiser
stages the drama of the unattached woman, and recognizing Carrie as such
can offer insight into her elusiveness and its consequences.7
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p r i s c i l l a wa l d
Like Thomas, Dreiser was fascinated by the character, but he was equally
intrigued by the logic and consequences of the sociological assumptions that
produced even as it identified “her” as a “type.” Sister Carrie underscores the power and significance of cultural narratives, and of the sociological
preoccupation with classifying “types” of individuals that accompany them.
They emerge in Dreiser’s novel as strategies of making invisibility visible.
In the progress of his own unattached woman from obscurity to the stage,
Dreiser distinguishes Carrie from the fate of most unattached women. Yet, in
her trajectory, he nonetheless demonstrates the logical extension of the artis-
tic possibilities implicit in the description of the type and the contradictions attendant upon the clash of competing narratives.8
I
Both Sister Carrie and Thomas’s publications appeared amidst widespread discussions in popular and specialty journals about the social dangers posed
by both the fallen woman and the New Woman, which increased steadily
throughout the first two decades of the twentieth century. In the medical
press, those discussions were, not surprisingly, framed in terms of disease.
More striking, however, are the social terms in which medical journals repre-
sented the nature and implications of disease. The use of sexually transmitted
diseases to represent a variety of dangers, from the challenge to marriage to
the threat to the nation, may account for the obscured distinctions among
the fallen woman, the New Woman, and the unattached woman and the
particular anxieties that each evoked.
In 1906, the Section on Hygiene and Sanitary Science of the American
Medical Association sponsored a series of papers on marriage and health,
which were presented at the meeting of the Association and reprinted that
year in its main publication, the Journal of the American Medical Associa-
tion. Doctors Bayard Holmes and Albert H. Burr, both of Chicago, focused on the spread of venereal disease and offered what Holmes dubbed “the
physical and evolutionary basis of marriage.”9 Through such arguments, the
medical establishment picked up and elaborated on the image of the fallen
woman, representing her explicitly as a national threat. Assuming that “the
most important function of the human body, biologically, is reproduction,”
Burr went on to describe “the supreme importance of woman in these rela-
tions” as “apparent when we consider her office in prenatal existence; her
role as the nourishing mother; her place as the very foundation stone of
every hearth and home, and her life as the vital center about which cluster
families and tribes and nations.”10 Accordingly, he argues, “the welfare of