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of her life but has not read the Albert Ross version in which she rescues the fallen Hurstwood figure from the poverty and disgrace that results from his theft but does not marry or live with him. Ames, interestingly, judges the sensational Ross version of her life to be “nearly as bad” (237) as the sentimental Clay version.
If both popular fictions give Carrie a part to play, they have a still further function in the scene at Sherry’s of making oblique comment on the absent figure of Hurstwood, offering alternate versions of his past and future and suggesting that he might survive could he find fictional life in a sensational or sentimental novel rather than in a naturalistic one. Like Stanley in Moulding a Maiden, Hurstwood appropriates another’s money and must flee; like Ronald Earle in Dora Thorne, Hurstwood conducts a socially inappropriate romance and must flee. Again like Ronald Earle, who comes to think that “Dora enjoyed herself more at home than in society, consequently he left her there” (104), Hurstwood in New York City “felt attracted to the outer world, but did not think [Carrie] would care to go along’’ (222). While Ronald Earle repents of his mistake, Hurstwood keeps repeating his.16
Stanley and Ronald are both saved by generous women and regain their lost social places, but Carrie has only nine dollars to offer Hurstwood in their final encounter, at which point his place has been long since permanently lost. On another level, Hurstwood’s views on the indisputability of profits are identical to those expressed by Albert Ross in his note to his readers, wherein Ross beats off his critics with the club of his sales figures. Similarly, back in Chicago in conversation with Drouet, Hurstwood dismissed the seriousness of Caryoe’s gout with “Made a lot of money in his time, though, hasn’t he?” and deflected Drouet’s question about the medium Jules Wallace’s possible fraudulence with “Oh, I don’t know … he’s got the money, all right” (35, 37).
When the three novels are considered together, they form a conversation on two topics of concern: personal choice and art. In Sister Carrie’s dinner scene at Sherry’s, it is Mr. Vance who carries the weight of personal choice. Mr. Vance leads the way into Sherry’s (the temple of consumption), he orders (makes consumer choices) for the entire party, and then he continues “studying the bill of fare, though he had ordered” (233–6). By contrast, in Dora Thorne the choices are polarized — the dark or the fair, the noble or the lowborn; Moulding a Maiden similarly polarizes its choices between the artist and the businessman, seclusion and society. In Sister Carrie, however, the characters, provided with no such polarities, must choose within categories of narrowly
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differentiated items: “ … soup at fifty cents or a dollar, with a dozen kinds to choose from; oysters in forty styles and at sixty cents the half-dozen … ” (234). The enormous range of commodities in every category from soup to gloves to plays to housing — and the absence of clear guides to choice — creates a drama of opportunity and confusion far more difficult for Mr. Vance and the others to see their way through than are the worlds of polarized or forced choices offered in Moulding a Maiden and Dora Thorne.
The three novels link up again over the subject of art — what it is, how to view it, whether to sell it, and what it is worth. Art has a certain mystique in Dora Thorne and Moulding a Maiden. Ronald Earle of Dora Thorne paints society portraits that idealize — even mysticize — their subjects. For Ronald, however, art functions as a means of reentry into the social circles from which his marriage and his reduced circumstances have removed him. In contrast, Lysle, the prosperous painter of Moulding a Maiden, refuses to compromise his art by selling the nude portraits many wish to buy. In both novels, public interest in painting focuses on speculation about the painter’s relationship with his subject — then and now an exploitable point. Both novels link art to women’s appearance and to sexual secrets; neither can justify the sale of a painting except by the artist’s poverty, and neither sees any separation between a painting and its subject. To sell one is to sell out the other.17
In Sister Carrie, where there are neither painters or paintings, art is securely lodged in the arena of personal adornment. Sister Carrie erases the artist/subject/artifact triad of Dora Thorne and Moulding a Maiden; in Sister Carrie the individual is at once artist, canvas, and subject, and the skills of the artist are bent upon the self. Carrie yearns over the gorgeous results this version of art can produce, over the actress whose “dresses had been all that art could suggest” (229). The view is explosive in its candor; it makes a direct connection between art and personal appearance, a connection that is not gender specific and that is practiced not only by Carrie and Mrs. Vance, but also by Drouet and Hurstwood.
Crosscutting among the three novels reveals that the world of Moulding a Maiden constitutes a parallel to Sister Carrie’s world; Dora Thorne, on the other hand, seems to parallel the elements of the theater world within Sister Carrie. Crosscutting also reveals that neither of the popular fictions can stand alone; their limitations are very great. Although it is amusing to find canon-busters telling the New York Times that the choice between the canonized and the uncanonized is “no different from choosing between a hoagy and a pizza,”18 in fact the popular fictions examined here
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do not mix their ingredients in a way readily comparable to Sister Carrie.
Individually, nineteenth-century popular fictions can seem mysterious and unreadable, only achieving understandability when grouped with others — for each of them is backed by dozens or hundreds of others like itself — or when linked to a fiction that can stand alone. Popular fictions are embedded in cultural concerns, but as narratives they operate so as to conceal the seriousness of their concerns. The narrative development of Moulding a Maiden, for example, becomes progressively disconnected from the development of the novel’s core subjects, and the novel’s resolutions complete the disconnection. In this feature Moulding a Maiden is not unusual but typical; it is such jarring disconnection that can give popular fiction its apparent lack of depth or texture, its insubstantiality, its nearly irresistible drive toward trivializing itself.
Even when one has had Theodore Dreiser to do the (difficult work of selecting the popular fictions to be examined, the intertextual connections that emerge resemble shadows that generate further shadows and back up into even greater shadows. Dora Thorne is a distorted shadow of a mobile society that occasionally yearns to be immobilized in a clear-cut social hierarchy; Moulding a Maiden is a flickering shadow of a society’s unresolvable tensions over wealth, identity, and character. Both fictions shadow the plot, characters, and concerns of Sister Carrie. It becomes apparent that popular fictions function in the national conversation not as vigorous participants but as flitting presences. They pose topics — money, power, sex, status — and then race away from them into uncontrolled plot development and a furious drive toward the door-slamming ending. Approachable enough in formulaic groups, as individual fictions they are elusive; while their inconclusiveness is total in all but plot matters, it is not an inconclusiveness that is readily pursued or discussed, unlike the highly arguable inconclusiveness of Sister Carrie.
From another point of view, however, studying popular and serious fiction together has a notable effect of erasing any boundary that might be posed by authorship. The authors of the two popular fictions examined here are shadows behind pseudonyms used as selling points — “the Albatross Series,” ‘‘the new Bertha M. Clay Library” — and, in Clay’s case, as cover for a group of writers. Bertha M. Clay was originally an acronymic pseudonym invented for Charlotte Mary Brame or Braeme (1836–1884), who wrote perhaps twenty novels under that name; Dora Thorne was probably the last. Because the pseudonym was too popular to expire with its bearer in 1884, Brame’s daughter began to write
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as Bertha M. Clay. Eventually the pseudonym passed into the control of the publisher Street & Smith; there a dozen male writers — including John Russell Coryell and Frederick Merrill Van Rensselaer Dey of Nick Carter fame — produced enough Bertha M. Clays to meet demand. In the 1890s, Street & Smith’s standard back-of-the-book advertising asserted that the novels “are not sold in dry-goods stores, are returnable, and Newsdealers should be sure to have a complete stock.”19
For Dreiser, who also had at one time worked as an editor at Street & Smith, both Albert Ross and Bertha M. Clay were representative of, were indeed the very apotheosis of popular fiction, and he regularly used them as reference points in discussing the subject. In 1921, criticizing a “democratically inclusive” list of 242 American writers assembled for the new Department of American Literature and Civilization at the Sorbonne, Dreiser demanded to know why the list contained the names of Eleanor H. Porter, Zane Grey, and Harold Bell Wright, but not those of Albert Ross and especially, Bertha M. Clay: