to the disjunction between her behavior and the familiar narrative. Dreiser
is especially interested in her irresolution and uncertainty. In one of his more heavy-handed narrative intrusions, in fact, he underscores his departure from
the province of sociology by venturing into his heroine’s interiority. “In light of the world’s attitude toward woman and her duties,” he writes, “the nature of Carrie’s mental state deserves consideration. Actions such as hers are
measured by an arbitrary scale. Society possesses a conventional standard
whereby it judges all things. All men should be good, all women virtuous.
Wherefore, villain, has thou failed!” (89). The use of the singular “woman”
attests to the flattening effect of social conventions (as demonstrated in the
earlier cited JAMA article). The actions of individual women become more legible and their movements more predictable when they are incorporated
into a narrative about “woman,” a mechanism fundamental to Social As-
cendancy. But the familiar narratives cannot contain – or explain – Carrie.
Once Drouet has set Carrie up (as his “sister”) in a comfortable apartment,
she has time to take stock of her situation. She was “so turned about in all of her earthly relationships that she might well have been a new and different
individual” (89). Here, again is the unattached woman, lost sight of by those
who knew her and imperceptible as an unmarried, sexually active country
girl (that is, fallen woman) to those around her. Dreiser’s language anticipates Thomas’s: lacking a “household law to govern her” and with no “habits”
or “excellent home principles fixed upon her” (77–78), she is not morally
standardized. Hence her confusion when on one hand “she looked into her
glass and saw a prettier Carrie there than she had seen before” and on the
other “she looked into her mind, a mirror prepared of her own and the
world’s opinions, and saw a worse. Between those two images she wavered,
hesitating which to believe” (89). What is most significant here is that both register social evaluations. Neither is right or wrong, and neither replaces the other. She is prettier and better off by one set of standards and morally
worse off by another. Carrie had only “an average little conscience, a thing
which represented the world, her past environment, habit, convention, in a
confused, reflected way. With it, the voice of the people was truly the voice
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of God” (89). Yet, the voice of the people speaks in both registers. When
Carrie tries to reflect (think), her conscience can only reflect (mirror). But
what it mirrors is multiple narratives. Against the condemnatory whisper is
the “voice of want” (90) that articulates the “view of a certain stratum of
society” for whom “Carrie was comfortably established – in the eyes of the
starveling beaten by every wind and gusty sheet of rain, she was safe in a
halcyon harbor” (88).
Confronting herself in the mirror, Carrie does not challenge conventions.
Rather, she registers the force of competing narratives of equal strength.
From the point of view of the shop girls, she has done what she had to do,
and the fact that she is “prettier” than ever before attests to the fact that
she is not the fallen woman of the common melodramas: scarred, discarded,
and consigned to the margins, if in fact she survives. When Carrie’s training
whispers that she is “worse,” that voice gets a hearing too. But the important
points are first, that Carrie is governed by these narratives, and second, that neither one wins out. What she actually “reflects,” then, is social change
itself and how it works through (competing) narratives.
III
Consequently, Dreiser’s depiction of Carrie is inconsistent. Critics have interpreted her as everything from insipid, vapid, and passive to artistic, agentive, and emotionally great, and Dreiser offers support for all of these perspectives. She is “instinctive,” “imitative,” and “full of wonder” (122); she is
“passive” but has the “power of initiative” (131). In fact, Carrie eludes the
narrator and seems even to elude Dreiser, who might well be the first to admit
it. After all, the novel is about exactly those contradictions. But it is clear that Carrie undergoes a profound transformation during the novel as the girl
from the country becomes not a “shop girl” which, in the eyes of her sister
and brother-in-law “was the destiny prefigured for the newcomer” (15), but
a celebrated – maybe even great – actress. In that transformation, Dreiser
chronicles the processes of her socialization, as he registers his uncertainty
about the meaning of those changes.
Sensitive, observant, and imitative, Carrie naturally absorbs the social con-
tradictions of her world. While still living with her sister Minnie, she develops the habit of standing in the doorway of the apartment building and watching
the street scene. “Once in a while she would see a young girl particularly well-dressed or particularly pretty, or both, which excited her envy and enhanced
her longing for nice clothes” (51). Subsequently, she learns from Drouet, who
unself-consciously comments upon the women they encounter. Labeling one
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a “fine stepper,” he awakens in Carrie “a little suggestion of possible defect
in herself . . . If that was so fine she must look at it more closely. Instinctively, she felt a desire to imitate it” (99). Thus she is apprenticed to a new social
vision that is modified and shaped as she ventures more into the world. She
is “branded like wax” (101) not only by Drouet, but by all her associations,
such as her neighbor, Mrs. Hale, whose “gossip . . . formed the medium
through which [Carrie] saw the world” (102). Drouet and Mrs. Hale,
staunch representatives of the emerging middle class, shape Carrie’s desires
and behavior and teach her how to read and move through the spaces of
the city – how to think differently, for example, about what constitutes a
“place” in the world. Dreiser underscores that through imitation, she re-
flects the values and mores of the social spaces she inhabits. In so doing, she registers social desires and makes visible the processes of socialization.
Imitation, of course, does not imply passivity.20 On the contrary, Carrie
consciously emulates the traits that will please those whom she believes she
needs to please. That description, of course, could as easily fit anyone from
a prostitute to a social climber (and a whole array in between), but what dis-
tinguishes Carrie from Stephen Crane’s Maggie or Edith Wharton’s Undine
Spragg or Carry Fisher is that her imitations are more play than work and the
person she most pleases with her imitations is actually herself. Drouet speaks
more truly than he knows when, persuading her to take a part in a play that
his lodge is performing, he advises “‘Just act as you do around here. Be
natural’” (156). For Carrie is always acting, and she is “naturally imitative.”
That is the most distinctive trait of the unattached woman: how she oper-
ates and how she survives. From her first job search, Carrie is “conscious
of being gazed upon and understood for what she was – a wage-seeker”
(18), and she is always “seeing herself observed” (19). What changes when
she begins to gain access to the comforts and luxuries she has craved is the
pleasure she takes in her own gaze. Her favorite occupation, once she has
the leisure to choose, is to reenact “dramatic situations she had witnessed
by recreating, before her mirror, the expressions of the various faces taking
part in the scene” (157). What Drouet thinks is vanity is for the narrator
“nothing more than the first subtle outcroppings of an artistic nature, en-
deavoring to recreate the perfect likeness of some phase of beauty which
appealed to her. In such feeble tendencies . . . , such outworking of desire
to reproduce life, lies the basis of all dramatic art” (157). Carrie does not
so much imitate to please as take genuine pleasure in imitation, which is
why, despite her consciousness of being looked at and appraised, she can
still maintain a “natural manner and total lack of self-consciousness” (397).
She embodies the oxymoron of society by performing naturalness. And she
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prepares herself for her “place” in the theater, the logical outgrowth of the
lessons she has learned as an unattached woman.
Carrie neither refuses, nor embraces, but rather inhabits social codes. She
has no trouble acceding to – and even insisting on – the fictions of “sister”
and “wife.” So fully has she internalized those codes, in fact, that she actually believes she is Hurstwood’s wife in spite of the impossibility of that situation.
Carrie exhibits not just a willingness to play the roles, but a will to believe in them as well. When she moves to New York City and assumes her new
identity, she evinces some adjustment: “It sounded exceedingly odd to Carrie