Sister Carrie (Barnes & Noble Classics S - Theodore Dreiser [228]
4 (p. 45) “That’s Jules Wallace, the spiritualist”: Wallace apparently used his spiritualism sessions to seduce women for his sexual pleasure; his landlady accused him of enticing women to his room for group sex. Dreiser, who investigated Wallace on assignment for the St. Louis Republican, took a dim view of Wallace’s spiritualism, calling him a charlatan.
5 (p. 84) the liberal analysis of Spencer: Herbert Spencer (1820-1903) was an English philosopher and pioneering sociologist who helped popularize Darwin’s theory of evolution; in fact, he originated one of his own prior to Darwin’s. Dreiser’s literary .naturalism was strongly influenced by some of Spencer’s ideas. Spencer believed that individuals were conditioned by heredity and environment, but that some people could flourish apart from the group and achieve greater freedom. The latter view was more optimistic than Darwin’s or Dreiser’s.
6 (p. 84) Ogden Place: Dreiser had lived on this street in the summer of 1892. It was in a middle-class neighborhood, near Union Park.
7 (p. 94) She amused herself with ... a book by Bertha M. Clay: This was the nom de plume of best-selling author Charlotte M. Brame (1836-1884), whose mediocre, sentimental romance novels often concerned a girl from a poor family who becomes romantically entangled with a nobleman and ends up disappointed and unhappy. On p. 287 Carrie refers to Brame’s best-known work, Dora Thome. For Dreiser, the popularity of such fiction was indicative of America’s debased literary taste.
8 (p. 138) Under the Gaslight: This is a reference to a wildly successful play by Augustin Daly, first produced in 1867. Its climax became a staple of melodramas and early films: The hero, tied to a railroad track, is rescued by the heroine just as a train approaches. Dreiser lifted the excerpts from Under the Gaslight verbatim from the 1895 Samuel French acting edition. Laura, Carrie’s role, finds happiness in Daly’s play, but not in Dreiser’s version.
9 (p. 192) became entangled with a bunco-steerer: “Bunco-steerer” was another name for a con man who lured naive country visitors to places in the city where they could be swindled or robbed. Con men abound in nineteenth-century American fiction. Herman Melville and Mark Twain wrote comic fables about such crooks and the gullible people they duped.
10 (p. 262) an average, and yet exorbitant, rent for a home at the time: The rent is average for the neighborhood, but out of proportion to rents for the same amount of space in other cities. The Upper West Side of Manhattan was just beginning to be built up as a more middle- to upper-class residential neighborhood. In 1907 Henry James, in The American Scene, jeered at the new apartment houses that lined Riverside Drive near Carrie and Hurstwood’s flat. He thought them an “artless jumble,” ugly, vulgar, and lacking in architectural distinction, unlike the elegant scale of the houses in the Washington Square of his childhood.
11 (p. 280) We’re going down to Sherry’s for dinner: Louis Sherry was an opulent restaurant where fashion-conscious people and celebrities dined and gathered to be gawked at. Ames points out to Carrie a vulgarly bejeweled woman whom he castigates as typical of her class’s ostentatious, wasteful spending. Dreiser is particularly disgusted by such lavish restaurants.
12 (p. 292) The poisons generated by remorse ... produce marked physical deterioration. To these Hurstwood was subject: Anastates and katastates were metabolic terms used in the 1890s by physiologists. Katastates break down complex organisms in the body, but in the process a person’s metabolism goes awry. Anastates keep energy levels balanced during metabolism and therefore a person remains emotionally stable. Dreiser’s understanding of these substances comes from the largely discredited psychosomatic theory (an explanation of manic-depression) of the scientist Elmer Gates, about whom he was writing