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By Root 4624 0

requires a unified culture, and America in many ways was a splintered society. Theatergoers clamored for entertainment and uplift, romances and laughs. Many Western towns sported an opera house on whose stage road companies might perform Dion Boucicault’s London Assurance, Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, or lurid melodramas and sentimental plays about love betrayed and redeemed. Audience’s tastes were promiscuous and undiscriminating; they rarely wanted to be challenged. Although theatergoers in big cities like Chicago and New York may have been more prosperous and sophisticated than, say, their Central City, Colorado, counterparts, they too enjoyed spectacle: gorgeous costumes, colorful sets, and musical ballads, as well as elaborate dance routines, risque repartee, or the tale of a villain saved by the love of a virtuous woman. The tired businessmen who go to Carrie’s musicals adore her as a charming, comely woman whom they dream of making their mistress. Women of wealth and leisure, the chief consumers of theater, were perfectly content with conventional drama. Dreiser contemptuously describes one example: “The play was one of those drawing-room concoctions in which charmingly overdressed ladies and gentlemen suffer the pangs of love and jealousy amid gilded surroundings.... They have the charm of showing suffering under ideal conditions” (p. 278). For Dreiser the realist, such pandering to illusions was base and offensive. Ames serves as his mouthpiece to skewer such meretricious theatricals.

The theater on the streets, particularly on matinee days, eclipsed the tepid or silly dramas inside the playhouses. Dreiser is fascinated by the smart set’s ritual pageant as its members strolled down Broadway:

There gathered, before the matinee and afterwards, not only all the pretty women who love a showy parade, but the men who love to gaze upon and admire them. It was a very imposing procession of pretty faces and fine clothes. Women appeared in their very best hats, shoes, and gloves, and walked arm in arm on their way to the fine shops or theatres strung along from Fourteenth to Thirty-fourth streets (p. 275).

Carrie is as dazzled by the pomp and fashion as she is by the play’s romantic chimeras, but lacking Mrs. Vance’s self-assurance, she feels disconcerted by the men ogling her and self-conscious about the cut of her dress. She “longed to feel the delight of parading here as an equal” (p. 276).

In the 1890s women, even those with an education, had relatively few outlets for their talents, and uneducated women had few choices and faced the bleakest prospects: They could work in factories or marry and take care of their children; a small number of lucky ones could teach or work as nurses and midwives. For a fallen woman like Carrie, the possibilities for a career were severely limited. But being an actress afforded the single woman more sexual latitude than her housewife-sisters and a chance to earn large sums of money. Dreiser does not condemn Carrie for her moral slips—she does not wear a scarlet letter on her bosom—but he does punish her nonetheless: Like Hawthorne’s Hester Prynne, she cannot fashion an entirely new identity that would be in harmony with her dreams of happiness and self-fulfillment.

—Herbert Leibowitz

TO MY FRIEND

Arthur Henry

WHOSE STEADFAST IDEALS AND SERENE

DEVOTION TO TRUTH AND BEAUTY

HAVE SERVED TO LIGHTEN THE METHOD

AND STRENGTHEN THE PURPOSE OF

THIS VOLUME.

CHAPTER I

THE MAGNET ATTRACTING:

A WAIF AMID FORCES

WHEN CAROLINE MEEBER BOARDED the afternoon train for Chicago, her total outfit consisted of a small trunk, a cheap imitation alligator-skin satchel, a small lunch in a paper box, and a yellow leather snap purse, containing her ticket, a scrap of paper with her sister’s address in Van Buren Street, and four dollars in money. It was in August, 1889. She was eighteen years of age, bright, timid, and full of the illusions of ignorance and youth. Whatever touch of regret at parting characterised her thoughts, it was certainly not for advantages now being given up. A gush