It is at such points in the study of popular fiction that the formulaic distinctions mentioned earlier become important. E. P. Roe’s The Opening of a Chestnut Burr is pious fiction, with a religious conversion at its center and a disaster — in this case a shipwreck — its vehicle; in formula it is identical to Roe’s earlier bestseller, Barriers Burned Away (1872), which employed the Chicago fire as its vehicle. Bertha M. Clay’s Dora Thorne (1883) is sentimental fiction, concerned with class differences, romantic love, and family ties. Albert Ross’s Moulding a Maiden — sixth in his “Albatross” series — is urban sensationalism centered on money, power, and sex; its plot revolves on deception.11
In effect, the Pennsylvania edition of Sister Carrie, when it replaced the Ross–Clay comparison with a Roe–Clay comparison, replaced not simply one novel with another but one fictional world with another — and, furthermore, made hash of the dinner scene at Sherry’s. First, on the level of surface realism it is apparent that the fashionable Vances would hardly be validating their inside status (–They’re all the rage this fall” [231]) by discussing a seventeen-year-old pious book such as the Roe novel, nor would Vance, as he remarks, have seen it “discussed in some of the papers” (236).
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Mr. and Mrs. Vance are consumed by — and consuming in — the present, in a world to which Roe’s pious formula is irrelevant. Within just a few pages in Chapter 32, the Vances consume or discuss consuming pearl-buttoned gloves, shoes with patent-leather tips, the shirtwaists at Altman’s, circular serge skirts, asparagus, oysters, olives, turtle soup, several bottles of wine, a DeMille play at the Lyceum — and the latest Albatross novel. Second, on the linguistic level, Bob Ames’s judgment that Moulding a Maiden is nearly as bad” as Dora Thorne makes good conversational sense only if Ames is comparing a recent popular success to an older one, an 1891 novel to an 1883 novel. Bob Ames impresses Carrie as an educated person whose every remark illuminates, who is familiar with the contemporary scene and able, at the same time, to make discriminations within it. Thus his comparative judgment of two novels should not expose him to Carrie, Mrs. Vance, or the reader as ignorant of how to construct a comparison.12
Now to the greater matter — the effect of the formulaic choices involved in the scene. The dinner party at Sherry’s involves four fictional characters discussing two popular fictions in the absence of a fifth and very important character — Hurstwood — and inside the containing fiction of Sister Carrie itself. Two specific popular formulas, the sentimental and the urban sensational, operating within the context of the naturalistic, work to connect the pairs of characters who have read them, to offer alternate versions of the still-linked careers of Carrie and Hurstwood, to introduce potentially conflicting views, and to echo Sister Carrie’s own main concerns. Moreover, within the scene, the Albert Ross and Bertha M. Clay novels raise questions about the use the characters make of the popular print world and its force within their culture.
Albert Ross’s Moulding a Maiden, set in New York City and Paris, connects its two readers, Bob Ames and Mrs. Vance. Money is at its core; any reader opening the novel first encounters the author’s note bragging that although he has been accused of every possible fault as a writer, no one can dispute his sales figures. A reader thus assured of possessing a salable commodity can begin the story of Rosalie, a young girl equipped with three competing legal guardians of very different social attitudes, three Pygmalions to one Galatea. One of the guardians is, unknown to Rosalie, actually her mother; she wishes to mold Rosalie along conventional and pious lines. Another, Stanley, a Wall Street hustler whose business ethic is dubious, insists on raising Rosalie as a model of physical fitness, indifferent to personal adornment and devoted to exercise. The third, Lysle, is a painter uncompromised by the sale of a single painting; although Lysle seems as virtuous as Elsie
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Dinsmore, he uses his turn at “molding” Rosalie to introduce her to a version of the Paris demimonde.
Moulding a Maiden transports into the dinner conversation at Sherry’s a confusion of ideas about sex, money, clothes, art, personal deception, and gender roles. Its consecutive “moldings” of Rosalie echo Carrie’s progression from Drouet to Hurstwood to (possibly) Ames, and the career of Stanley the businessman, who suffers loss of place and is forced to flee, echoes the career of George Hurstwood. In Albert Ross’s world, however, fortunes are as easily recouped as lost, and Stanley is eventually reestablished in Argentina. Everyone is in motion in Ross’s novel, its human material is entirely fluid, and its characters’ personal loyalties and desires continually reshape themselves. No character in Moulding a Maiden is allowed the information he or she needs in order to act knowledgeably; thus struggles for personal power — especially the guardians’ struggle over Rosalie — are decided by money. Albert Ross’s ‘‘maiden” is molded by whoever controls her money at any point in the novel. When she is finally released into control of her own money, she spends it, undramatically and without thought or interest, on clothes and jewels. The novel’s tensions thus dissipated, it winds down in a rapid series of rescues, reversals, unmaskings, and marriages.
Bob Ames and Mrs. Vance are cousins and are further bonded by the “cousinship” of having read Moulding a Maiden. Mrs. Vance indicates that she would not be uncomfortable in Albert Ross’s fluid money world, and when her cousin Ames, his stomach full of Sherry’s expensive cookery, opines that he would not care to be rich, he asserts his further cousinship with Ross’s artist — character Lysle, the painter wealthy enough to refuse to sell his work. Regardless of what a reader thinks of Bob Ames, Carrie sees him as “wiser” (237) than the absent Hurstwood, a man who certainly would not share Ames’s sentiments on money. Ames, who looks like a bit of a hypocrite when placed in the context furnished by Moulding a Maiden, thinks little of the novel and even less of Dora Thorne, the novel that bonds him with Carrie.13
The formula and concerns of Dora Thorne are distinctly different from the deliberately titillating material of Moulding a Maiden. In Dora Thorne, set in the English and Italian countryside, Ronald Earle, a noble young English painter whose surname is already a title, stoops from his station to marry the simple and beautiful Dora, daughter of his father’s lodgekeeper. Eventually Ronald, disowned, flees with Dora to Italy where they live a secluded life of mild deprivation until Ronald’s successful society portraits begin to draw him into social circles where the socially uneasy and
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apparently ineducable Dora cannot function. Dora bears twins, acquires a noble and beautiful rival for Ronald’s affection, and suffers nervous collapse. The novel trails on through succeeding generations of romantic disasters and doomed marriages, with love-at-first-sight the governing device.
Dora Thorne drops onto the dinner table at Sherry’s a set of polarities alien to Sister Carrie’s world; beauty and virtue versus social class and breeding. After raising these opposites, however, Dora Thorne evades them, dissolves its own conflicts, and lodges all its surviving characters in a glowing world of wealth and privilege, a world where, as James D. Hart remarked in his discussion of similar fiction, “what was seen was ordered better and what was not seen did not exist.”14 Not one of Dora Thorne’s verities — the happy virtuous poor, the cultivated tastes of the wealthy, the separated family members longing to be reunited — is observable in Sister Carrie or in the glittering paid-for world of Sherry’s where Bob Ames judges the novel to be “bad” (236).
Dora Thorne’s success in the 1880s, one can surmise, grew out of its alignment with the late-nineteenth-century American fascination with royalty and titles, a recurrent phenomenon in American culture that is reinforced when the group goes from dinner at Sherry’s to see a DeMille—Belasco play titled Lord Chumley.15 What Dora Thorne may have offered to Carrie, who read it “a great deal in the past,’’ was the chance she longs for more than once in the novel, the chance to “suffer the pangs of love and jealousy amid gilded surroundings” (228). Otherwise Dora Thorne’s assertion that inherited social place is of primary value and should be clung to at any cost is sheer irrelevance in Carrie’s world. Both popular novels — the sentimental and the sensational — present women in submissive, even helpless, roles. Dora Thorne is insistent on the point that its example of “magnificent womanhood — never troubled her head about ‘woman’s rights’” but was content to be “a good and gentle wife” (400–1). Neither feminism nor good-wifehood has truly constituted one of Carrie’s choices.
A further potential connection raised in the scene at Sherry’s by the Ross and Clay novels is the possibility that in those novels Mrs. Vance and Bob Ames have unknowingly read versions of Carrie’s life. Carrie has, like Dora Thorne, run off with a man who thereby lost everything; like Moulding a Maiden’s Rosalie, she has moved through consecutive relationships, each of which influenced her desires. It is as if Ames and Mrs. Vance know Carrie’s past though she has concealed it from them. Carrie herself did not “wholly enjoy” (78) the Bertha M. Clay version