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substantial roles in trivial entertainments, and through a combination of luck and an appealing stage presence, she gradually rises into the empyrean of minor stardom. The gates of the walled city now swing open to admit her as one of the privileged. As Carrie Madenda, her name appears in gossip column squibs, and her face is prominently displayed on flyers and theatrical placards, and in the glossy brochures the publicity mills print. But while she takes pleasure in what money buys her—a suite in the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel, a carriage to take her to and from the theater, elegant frocks hanging in her closet, adulation—her inner life alters in only small ways. She is glad to have sloughed off the identity of a “servile petitioner,” but her fantasies of happiness lie beyond her grasp to fulfill. When the idealist Ames criticizes the creaky dramatic vehicles she plays in as popular rot of the times built to hackneyed formulas, Carrie earnestly “longs for that which is better.” She grows smart enough to brush off the sycophants and gigolos who send her mash notes and promise her the moon; she appreciates refinement and “the force of a superior man” like Ames, a cool moralist and occasional mentor, who observes the Gilded Age’s excesses without being disordered by them. But he ventures no romantic approach toward her, as if she is a curious, if sympathetic, victim and specimen of the zeitgeist’s skewed values. Wishing to improve herself culturally, Carrie takes his recommendation that she read Balzac’s Père Goriot. But she cannot escape her fate of permanent loneliness.

Carrie is a pitiable, not a tragic character. She lacks dimension, an active will, a daring imagination, and a reasoning faculty that might lead her to spiritual enlightenment. In the novel, she is bruised by experience, but never smitten by a passion, love, or moral betrayal that shakes her to the core of her being, as, say, Isabel Archer is in Portrait of a Lady. Dreiser originally ended Sister Carrie with Hurstwood’s suicide, but he decided to add a coda that sums up Carrie’s emotional impasse—and his verdict. Although pitying “the blind strivings of her heart,” he condemns her to pursue “that halcyon day when she should be led forth among dreams become real” (p. 445). In the prime of life, she rocks poignantly like an old grandmother on a Maine porch, her memories mostly ashes. Spoken in the voice of a biblical prophet, Dreiser’s final words clang shut the gates that bar her entry into the “vale of soul-making” (to use Keats’s beautiful phrase) that she desires: “In your rocking chair, by your window, shall you dream such happiness as you may never feel.”

Dreiser’s portrait of Hurstwood, by contrast, is haunting and harrowing. The slow disintegration—or decomposition—of his personality is a triumph of the novelist’s art. As his business prospects in New York turn sour—he lacks the effrontery and drive to get ahead in its highly competitive atmosphere—Hurstwood begins to flounder. He fitfully seeks employment, timidly reenacting Carrie’s discouraged moods when she searched for work in Chicago: hesitant, fearing rejection, inventing pretexts to stay home. One by one, the gregarious, confident layers of his self peel off, and he surrenders to longer and longer bouts of inaction and brooding. Like Carrie, he sits in a rocking chair, absorbed in the flow of random thoughts and jumbled feelings. Each stage of his decline is marked by some physical gesture: his shabby clothes, stubbly beard, and haggard face; his insatiable scanning of newspapers; his long hours lounging in hotel chairs in order to keep warm and pass the long afternoons; his demented counting of his money as it dwindles, especially after his desperate attempt to recoup at the poker table fails; and his scrimping on food to save pennies. As Hurstwood turns into a debased version of his former self—uncouth, surly, pathetic, repulsive—Carrie feels increasingly alienated from, then ashamed of, him. Their relationship unravels with neither protest nor self-justification from him. At the nadir of his