that practice visible in Sister Carrie, as he explores his own fascination with the type and the narrative of the unattached woman.
II
That fascination is, for Susan Mizruchi, precisely the connection that ex-
plains the resonance between literature and sociology. Sociology, she notes,
proposed “the formulation of a science that professionalized the main busi-
ness of novelists – social observation, description of human types and types
of interaction, the classification of types . . .” The “language of social types,”
which she sees as “the most vivid link between sociological and novelistic
writings of the period . . . invested individuals and social phenomena with
the semblance of predictability and control.”14 The sociologist, no less than
the novelist, presented these types through the stories that I have been calling cultural narratives. For Edward Alsworth Ross, mentioned earlier as the pop-ularizer of the concept and term “social control,” the power of the entire
social system derived from the efficacy with which it built “on the foun-
dation afforded by instinct story after story of obedience and loyalty and
public spirit.”15 Those stories socialize individuals by repeatedly rehearsing
the codes and values that consolidate them into groups. The point of the
fallen woman narrative and its subsequent metamorphoses, for example,
was to transform women who transgressed sexual and gender conventions
into types, thereby making them legible and exemplary as warnings. The
proliferation of this story marks it as one of the endless stories “of obedi-
ence and loyalty and public spirit” necessary, in Ross’s formulation, to the
working of the social system. A cautionary tale is, in the end, a story of
obedience told through its antithesis.
Those stories came, of course, in many forms, among them fiction of
all varieties. Both Thomas and his colleague at the University of Chicago,
Robert E. Park, explicitly noted the centrality of fiction to their sociolog-
ical projects. But fiction was not only a source of sociological data. Park
maintained that people learned more about the ability to communicate with
each other “from literature and the arts” than from experience. Distinguish-
ing between “referential” forms of communication (“scientific description”)
and “symbolic and expressive” ones (“literature and the fine arts”), he con-
tended that it was “the function of literature and the arts and of what are de-
scribed in academic circles as the humanities to give us this intimate personal 184
Dreiser’s sociological vision
and inside knowledge of each other which makes social life more aimiable
[sic] and collective action possible.”16 For Park, and many of his contempo-
raries, a better understanding of how society worked would lead to better
social management. Since stories played such a critical role in the process of
socialization, the role of the sociologist was not only to analyze them, but
in the process to tell new ones that would more accurately reflect the social
order as it was – and even, perhaps, as they thought it ought to be.
Alan Trachtenberg credits Dreiser with doing just that, labeling his most
significant achievement in Sister Carrie the “invention of a new way of telling a new American story – a new form for a new content.”17 Dreiser’s style is
controversial, his many authorial intrusions into the narrative seen by some
critics as a disruption. For Trachtenberg, however, they mark his departure
from the realism of such established figures as William Dean Howells and cre-
ate something akin to a science of society: the depiction of a popular, middle-
brow culture in terms that recognize “the historical and social character of
humankind – the representivity which makes our reality . . . always more
than we ourselves can know or in any single instance enact” (114).18 Dreiser’s
fascination with the workings of consciousness, in this reading, motivate the
authorial intrusions that call attention to competing stories, including stories the narrator intends to tell and stories over which he has less control. And
Trachtenberg credits Dreiser with inventing “a narrative-discursive voice
whose significance may lie in its giving first expression in American fiction
to a modernist version of the self-made artist-as-hero” (115).
Like Trachtenberg, I am intrigued by the apparently heavy-handed dis-
gressions that have troubled many of Dreiser’s readers. In the sociological
bent of those intrusions, I similarly read Dreiser’s fascination with cultural
narratives, but I see the resulting product not only as the invention of a new
way of telling stories in an urban industrial world, but also as an exploration of how character, experience, and perception are shaped by its particular stories. Carrie’s unfolding story emerges against the expectations set up by the
familiar narrative of the eighteen-year-old girl’s journey from the country to
the city:
When a girl leaves her home at eighteen, she does one of two things. Either
she falls into saving hands and becomes better, or she rapidly assumes the cos-
mopolitan standard of virtue and becomes worse. Of an intermediate balance,
under the circumstances, there is no possibility. The city has its cunning wiles no less than the infinitely smaller and more human tempter. There are large
forces which allure, with all the soulfulness of expression possible in the most cultured human. The gleam of a thousand lights is often as effective, to all
moral intents and purposes, as the persuasive light in a wooing and fascinating eye. Half the undoing of the unsophisticated and natural mind is accomplished
185
p r i s c i l l a wa l d
by forces wholly superhuman. A blare of sound, a roar of life, a vast array of
human hives appeal to the astonished senses in equivocal terms. Without a
counselor at hand to whisper cautious interpretations, what falsehoods may
not these things breathe into the unguarded ear! Unrecognized for what they
are, their beauty, like music, too often relaxes, then weakens, then perverts the simplest human perceptions.
(4)
For Trachtenberg, Dreiser soon charges us to distrust the familiar narrative,
as we realize that “Carrie may well turn out ‘better’ at the end for having been
‘worse’ at the beginning” (92–93). Trachtenberg maintains that the novel
ends with “a transvalued moral order” in which the reader (and Dreiser)
believes that Carrie “may yet better herself” (115). This reading implies that
Dreiser replaces one (moralizing) narrative with another. But the novel ends
with a Carrie who is neither exonerated, nor satisfied; the moral order may
be less transvalued than uncertain. Dreiser is perhaps more interested in how
she evolves both within and against the familiar (and often contradictory)
narratives that would fix her as a “type.”
From the outset, Dreiser certainly unsettles our expectations. The coun-
selor who immediately serves as the “voice in her ear” is the masher Drouet, a
figure we think we recognize from the predictable fallen woman narrative.19
But Dreiser makes clear that he describes Drouet not in order for the reader
to understand Carrie’s fall so that others might not similarly succumb and
not even in the service of a science of society. Dreiser sounds more like an
ethnographer (Trachtenberg calls him a “social historian”) when he writes:
“Lest this order of individual should permanently pass, let me put down
some of the most striking characteristics of his most successful manner and
method” (6). As a masher and a drummer, Drouet is a curiosity, and he is
of the moment. Evidently, we cannot trust that we recognize this character
from past (literary) encounters or assume that we will recognize him in the
future. For, types are transitory, telling us less about people than about our
efforts to make sense of social change.
As the lengthy opening description makes clear, Carrie is seduced by the
city much more than by Drouet. Of course the story begins on a train, since
Carrie’s seduction and her sin will be mobility enabled by insufficiently strong bonds: “A gush of tears at her mother’s farewell kiss, a touch in the throat
when the cars clacked by the flour mill where her father worked by the day,
a pathetic sigh as the familiar green environs of the village passed in review, and the threads which bound her so lightly to girlhood and home were
irretrievably broken” (1). The city offers her the anonymous spaces in which
to enact her psychological liberation. This unattached woman, however, will
be unable fully to experience it as liberation because she lacks sufficient terms 186
Dreiser’s sociological vision
through which to recognize her new self. She will accordingly spend the entire
novel searching for “a place,” the term she uses for a job but by which she
also, less consciously, means a location in which she will make sense.
Throughout the novel, Dreiser represents Carrie’s largely inarticulate
struggle with social and cultural prescriptions that confound her efforts to
find her “place” in a spatially transforming environment until she finally
comes to understand – intuitively – that she has to invent one. Her actions
and fate do not unfold as predictably as the opening passage suggests. Rather,
she reclaims her unpredictability as Dreiser turns his – and our – attention