Sister Carrie (Barnes & Noble Classics S - Theodore Dreiser [13]
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 of tears at her mother’s farewell kiss, a touch in her throat when the cars clacked by the flour mill where her father worked by the day, a pathetic sigh as the familiar green environs of the village passed in review, and the threads which bound her so lightly to girlhood and home were irretrievably broken.
To be sure there was always the next station, where one might descend and return. There was the great city, bound more closely by these very trains which came up daily. Columbia City1 was not so very far away, even once she was in Chicago. What, pray, is a few hours—a few hundred miles? She looked at the little slip bearing her sister’s address and wondered. She gazed at the green landscape, now passing in swift review, until her swifter thoughts replaced its impression with vague conjectures of what Chicago might be.
When a girl leaves her home at eighteen, she does one of two things. Either she falls into saving hands and becomes better, or she rapidly assumes the cosmopolitan standard of virtue and becomes worse. Of an intermediate balance, under the circumstances, there is no possibility. The city has its cunning wiles, no less than the infinitely smaller and more human tempter. There are large forces which allure with all the soulfulness of expression possible in the most cultured human. The gleam of a thousand lights is often as effective as the persuasive light in a wooing and fascinating eye. Half the undoing of the unsophisticated and natural mind is accomplished by forces wholly superhuman. A blare of sound, a roar of life, a vast array of human hives, appeal to the astonished senses in equivocal terms. Without a counsellor at hand to whisper cautious interpretations, what falsehoods may not these things breathe into the unguarded ear! Unrecognised for what they are, their beauty, like music, too often relaxes, then weakens, then perverts the simpler human perceptions.