to be called ‘Mrs. Wheeler’ by the janitor, but in time she became used to
it, and looked upon the name as her own” (307). Dreiser leaves ambiguous
whether Carrie thinks of it as the oddness of her new (married) identity or the new explicitly fictive role she is playing because her intuitive understanding of social performance makes the distinction irrelevant. She is flexible, mutable,
adaptable, and she understands on some level that all roles are performances
whether or not they are sanctioned by the state.
Hurstwood, too, believes in the social codes, but, unlike Carrie, he does
not understand their performative dimension, and that distinction explains
why she succeeds and he does not. Where she looks forward to being “away
from past associations,” he flees them reluctantly. Where she moves into
freedom, he can’t shake the mantle of criminality. And where she accepts each
name change with equanimity, he chooses a new name as a “concession . . .
to necessity” and, even then, “his initials he could not spare” (291). Carrie
never looks back; Hurstwood does so with regret. At one point he even hopes
he might “resume his old place . . . He forgot [as Carrie never does] that he
had severed himself from the past as by a sword, and that if he did manage to
in some way reunite himself with it, the jagged line of separation and reunion
would always show” (300). Finally, Carrie is able to transform the gaze of
others into a “place” that she can inhabit at least temporarily (the epitome
of mobility), while Hurstwood is transfixed and eventually immobilized by
the condemnatory gaze that he internalizes.
Carrie stages the process of socialization as a performance and the role of
imitation as the height of artistry as well as conformity. She enacts the desirability of a role playing that could alternatively be experienced melancholi-
cally as a loss of agency. In his description of the impulse behind her artistry, Dreiser re-enlists this unattached woman in the service of society. While
Carrie, like the New Woman, manifests no desire to procreate, she
nonetheless acts out (of) the “desire to reproduce life.” The aptly named
Ames, paragon of respectability and personal success, offers her the
terms through which she can understand and discipline the nature of her
self-expression:
190
Dreiser’s sociological vision
‘The world is always struggling to express itself – to make clear its hopes and sorrows and give them voice. It is always seeking the means, and it will delight in the individual who can express these things for it. That is why we have great musicians, great painters, great writers and actors. They have the ability to
express the world’s sorrows and longings, and the world gets up and shouts
their names. All effort is just that. It is the thing which the world wants portrayed, written about, graven, sung or discovered, not the portrayer or writer
or singer, which makes the latter great. You and I are but mediums, through
which something is expressing itself. Now, our duty is to make ourselves ready
mediums.’
(485)
Imagined in these terms, the theater assumes an important sociological func-
tion. The theater as Ames describes it conforms to Park’s sociological defini-
tion of “communication,” which transforms “experiences that are individual
and private” into “an experience that is common and public” and “becomes
the basis for a common and public existence in which every individual, to
greater or less extent, participates and is himself a part.”21 But equally clear from this account is how the very trait that makes Carrie so successful as
an actress made her able to survive as an unattached woman: she expresses
what those around her want – and want her – to express. It also explains the
anxiety she produces. For, the danger of the unattached woman is her power
to reflect the contradictions of social desires: to put in full view, for exam-
ple, that what society actually rewards is not what it says it values. Carrie’s audiences may want to see their desires reflected, but they do not want to
see behind the scenes. They do not want to see the nature of their desires,
and they do not want to see the social mechanisms through which they are
enacted. On stage, Carrie’s performances are entertainment; off-stage, they
bear witness to the instability and insubstantiality of all roles. Carrie’s au-
diences want performances without their consequences and accompanying
insights.
Whether or not Carrie’s actions should be condemned is a question Dreiser
does not resolve. Evidence from the novel can be summoned to support ei-
ther claim, but his sociological vision offered him the alternative of analyst.
I do not claim neutrality for him, but rather indecision. As the social princi-
ple embodied (and perhaps taken to an extreme), Carrie is both magnificent
and frightening, as we might find any reflection of ourselves. And as shape
shifting always is. But Carrie is as magnificent and frightening for what she
cannot fully elude as for what she can. For all of the narrative introspection
and transformation in the novel, Carrie does not fully escape the conta-
gious taint of the fallen woman tale. Haunting what Dreiser presents as the
laudable desire “to reproduce life” is the uncertainty about the nature of
that reproduction: of what it is exactly that Carrie is imitating, carrying, and 191
p r i s c i l l a wa l d
communicating and of what consequences will follow from her on-stage and
off-stage performances. Sister Carrie suggests Dreiser could not answer that question for himself any more than he could for Carrie. But in asking it, he
helped to re-fashion the narratives that would underwrite the terms not only
of sociological and fictional, but also of medical and political, inquiry – and pedagogy – into the twenty-first century.
N O T E S
I wish to thank Thomas Ferraro and Amy Kaplan for very helpful, and timely,
readings of this essay. For invaluable readings of multiple drafts at very short notice – way beyond the call of duty – I am grateful to Dale Bauer, Clare Eby, and Leonard Cassuto. All five made the process of writing this essay a great deal of fun.
1 American Journal of Sociology 12.1 (July, 1906): 32–44 .The essay also appeared the same year as a chapter in Thomas’s Sex and Society (Boston: R. G. Badger, 1907).
2 I am following the Library of America edition of Dreiser’s works when I set the sales at fewer than five hundred copies. Other sources have set it higher, but none as high as six hundred. Frank Doubleday had been reluctant to publish the novel, which had been accepted by his colleague, Walter Hines Page, while Doubleday
was in Europe, and, although Dreiser held him to the original promise, Doubleday did not promote the novel.
3 For my discussion of female sexuality, the fallen woman, and the New Woman, I am especially indebted to the following sources: Ruth Rosen, The Lost Sisterhood: Prostitution in America, 1900–1918 (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Press, 1982); Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, Disorderly Conduct: Visions of Gender in Victorian America, paperback edition (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986); Martha Banta, Imaging American Women: Idea and Ideals in Cultural History (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987); Regina G. Kunzel, Fallen Women, Problem
Girls: Unmarried Mothers and the Professionalization of Social Work, 1890–1945
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993); Mary E. Odem, Delinquent Daughters: Protecting and Policing Adolescent Female Sexuality in the United States, 1885–
1920 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995); Margit Stange, Personal Property: Wives, White Slaves, and the Market in Women (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998); Susan A. Glenn, Female Spectacle: The Theatrical Roots of Modern Feminism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), Lois Rudnick, “The New Woman,” 1915: The Cultural Moment:
The New Politics, the New Woman, the New Psychology, the New Art, and the
New Theatre in America, ed. Adele Heller and Lois Rudnick (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1991): 69–81; Elizabeth Ammons, “The New Woman as
Cultural Symbol and Social Reality: Six Women Writers’ Perspectives,” Heller and Rudnick, eds., pp. 82–97; Ellen Kay Trimberger, “The New Woman and the New
Sexuality: Conflict and Contradiction in the Writings and Lives of Mabel Dodge
and Neith Boyce,” Heller and Rudnick, eds., pp. 98–115; and, for discussions of corresponding issues in England during this period, Judith R. Walkowitz, Prostitution and Victorian Society: Women, Class, and the State (Cambridge: Cambridge 192
Dreiser’s sociological vision
University Press, 1980); and Viv Gardner and Susan Rutherford, eds., The New Woman and Her Sisters: Feminism and Theatre, 1850–1914 (Hemel Hempstead, 1992). Subsequent references in the text to Rosen, Smith-Rosenberg, Glenn, and
Ammons are to these editions.
4 Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, “The New Woman as Androgyne: Social Disorder and
Gender Crisis, 1870–1936,” Smith-Rosenberg, Disorderly Conduct, pp. 245–296, p. 245. For discussions of revisions and critiques of the New Woman in the work of non-white women authors, see Ammons, “The New Woman.”