Precipitating Hurstwood’s desperate resolve to possess Carrie (that soon results in his tricking her into traveling to new places with him) and preparing for her later work in the New York theatrical realm, Carrie’s role in the Elks lodge production of Under the Gaslight — for which Drouet, playing a “witless Aladdin” to her most grand wishes, recruits her — marks a crucial moment in the novel’s tracing of the course of its protagonist’s pursuit of self and “Success.” Before she receives this chance to play a part in the famous melodrama, Carrie has been readied for the role by attending various stage productions with one or both of the men toward whom she has actually been enacting, quasimelodramatically, her unconventional parts (as a “waif amid forces” becoming a “knight of today,” in the language of the titles of Chapters I and VI). In seeing several plays, she has become enchanted by the brightly illuminated, luxurious world of the theater — with its dramas of desire that in one sense seem larger than life, yet in another32 seem quite continuous with those realities of the urban realm which most inspire Carrie’s imaginings. Further, in being involved in her distorted relationships with Drouet and Hurstwood, she has cultivated a talent for role-playing that corresponds to her own desire-driven search for self so dependent upon her trying out or wishing to imitate other “parts” in the social scene. In fact, Philip Fisher, in his interesting reading of the novel (1982), sees “acting” as an apt symbol and metaphor for its world of selfhood based on costume-like clothes, shifting “roles,” and above all a notion of “acting” (in the life of Carrie) that “involves primarily … not deception but
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practice, not insincerity but installment payments on the world of possibility” (“Acting” 269). Thus does the narrator comment, at the point when Drouet suggests she participate in the play, “She was created with that passivity of soul which is always the mirror of the active world” (SC 117). As the revealing allusion to the “mirror’’ figure reminds us here, the course of her experiences leading up to this theatrical opportunity — based on both sartorial and more subtle imitations of others in her efforts to create her “self” — has already prompted her to display “the first subtle outcroppings of an artistic nature, endeavouring to re-create the perfect likeness of some phase of beauty which appealed to her” (SC 117).
Now as this latter remark by the novel’s narrator indicates, the world of the stage to which her one night in Under the Gaslight introduces her, will reveal to Carrie an ultimate path for pursuit of (a “perfect likeness of”) Beauty and a fulfilled sense of self. Unfortunately for Carrie, however, this path is even more destined to disillusion her than the one leading her from one human “ambassador” to another. For while it may be the case, as one critic suggests, that “acting” in Sister Carrie “draws its moral meaning not from a world of true and false but from a dynamic society where all are [socioeconomically] rising or falling” (“Acting” 264), it is surely true that the epistemological and ontological meaning that Carrie finds in the formalized realm of acting entails falsehood to which her self falls prey. As Dreiser’s description of her responses to the backstage ambiance at the theater makes clear, she approaches this realm too trusting in its possibilities:
Since her arrival in the city many things had influenced her, but always in a far-removed manner. This new atmosphere was more friendly. It was wholly unlike the great brilliant mansions which waved her coldly away, permitting her only awe and distant wonder. This took her by the hand kindly, as one who says, ‘My dear, come in.’ It opened for her as if for its own. She had wondered at the greatness of the names upon the bill-boards, the marvel of the long notices in the papers, the beauty of the dresses upon the stage, the atmosphere of carriages, flowers, refinement. Here was no illusion. Here was an open door to see all of that. She had come upon it as one who stumbles upon a secret passage, and behold, she was in the chamber of diamonds and delight! (SC 128–9)
That the partly “authentic” disclosures of a way of being and finding Beauty which the stage world will give her are also riddled with essential elements of “inauthenticity” that will frustratingly misdirect Carrie’s quest is implied by the intensely ironic view she has — “Here was no illusion” — of a world so intrinsically illusory in
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its nature and purposes. And this passage further foreshadows the disillusionment her stage success will later bring her in New York, by suggesting — through all its references to material splendor and goals — how Carrie is confusing the Beauty her spirit seeks with some of its more gilded appearances, “diamonds” (so to speak) with genuine “delight.” All the material fulfillments envisioned in this prophetic passage will eventually be hers because of a stage career, of course, without bringing Carrie the contentment (and ‘‘spiritual” satiation) she seeks.
Given both the “inauthentic” core and false assumptions for their relationship and the fact that her liaison with him will eventuate in her life on stage, it is very appropriate that Hurstwood is moved to greatest desire for Carrie (and to desperate deeds to obtain her) by the impact of multilayered illusion — seeing Carrie Meeber, pretending to be Drouet’s wife, calling herself the actress Carrie Madenda, impersonating Laura, the romantic heroine (whose loving, devoted nature is so unlike her own) in Under the Gaslight. In further parody of the stage melodrama, Hurstwood is soon driven to the melodramatic actions of his “theft” of his employers’ money and his “abduction” of Carrie from Chicago through trickery, leading to Carrie’s new role as “Mrs. Wheeler” in New York. And this role, soon played off against Hurstwood’s steady decline (and loss of “ambassadorial” status for her), points toward the final phase of Carrie’s search for selfhood emblazoned with success and Beauty — a phase in which her encounters with Ames importantly reveal the self-defeating sources of that search.
As soon as Carrie meets Ames through her New York neighbor Mrs. Vance, it is evident that he is meant to be a spokesman for Dreiser — a character/commentator valuably contributing to the novel’s illumination of its heroine’s problematic pursuit. Presented as a studious man with technical expertise, rather intellectual, appreciative of the fine arts, culturally more refined and less hedonistic than the men Carrie has met before, Ames (with his patently symbolic name) aims to educate her (at a new turning point in her life) regarding values. In the process, due to his quite different nature and his lack of seductive or manipulative motives toward her, Ames — it should be noted — communicates to Carrie in a language (potentially “authentic”) causing her to consider, for a change, some questions of value in her life. That is, as June Howard has put it (1985), Ames’s “analytical perspective” enables him not just to “represent” some “qualitatively different … aspirations” to Carrie, but in fact to begin “to explain aspiration itself to her” (Form and History 108). For his views clearly summarize those of Dreiser, articulating in the text a critical commentary
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on the way of living engendered by the materialistic society she unquestioningly accepts. On the evening of their first encounter, Carrie and Ames accompany the wealthy Vances to dinner at the famous Sherry’s, where (as the title of Chapter XXXII indicates) Ames plays the role of Daniel — acting as “A Seer to Translate” while the others enthusiastically enjoy “The Feast of Belshazzar” (as the first part of the title proclaims it). If Carrie sees Sherry’s as an Aladdinish spectacle of lights, jewels, and fine clothes, and reacts to it with the fervor of her response to the ‘‘magical” theatre, Ames shrewdly perceives the shallowness of the restaurant’s illusion of grandeur. The episode makes it clear that Ames is a true individual whose way of being liberates him from all the opinions and customs held sacred by those caught up in conventionality. And the fact that Ames voices his criticisms of the life of “inauthenticity” at Sherry’s reflects careful staging on Dreiser’s part, for that “wonderful temple of gastronomy” (SC 233) perfectly represents all that New York and society as a whole call “Success.”
When Carrie arrives at the sumptuously showy restaurant, she feels like a devoutly religious person who has arrived at a magnificent cathedral to worship: “In all Carrie’s experience she had never seen anything like this. … There was an almost indescribable atmosphere about it which convinced the newcomer that this was the proper thing. … Here was the splendid dining-chamber, all decorated and aglow, where the wealthy ate. Ah … what a wonderful thing it was to be rich” (SC 233–4). While she sits nearly swooning with delight in looking with admiration at every portion of the place, her response is quickly contrasted with Ames’s: offering what is meant as a corrective vision of the scene, he comments to her on the “shame” of such ostentation and wasteful expenditure, as people misguidedly “pay so much more than these things are worth” (SC 235–6). Later in their dinner conversation, as they discuss the most fundamental topic in the novel — the question of the underlying worth of wealth — “seer” Ames gives his most incisive “translation” of the evening: