Conclusion glossary referece

Freedom (1898)
Frank Norris: McTeague (1899).
These novels reveal that, by the early 20th century, the ability to provide a depiction of the metropolis had become a test of modernity for fiction: the more urban the topic, the more modern the novel would be. Depictions of urban life were therefore regarded as the legitimate topic for naturalist novels. Indeed, to late-19^th-century upper-class observers, the immigrant city was the very example of an unfamiliar environment. It therefore lent itself to the discourse of naturalism.
The prominence of the city as an artistic subject is not an exclusively literary phenomenon. It is also noticeable in the development of turn-of-the-twentieth-century American painting. Nature romanticism had been the keynote of 19th-century American painting. By the early 20th century, however, romantic landscape painting was superseded by the realism/ naturalism of the “Ashcan school”—painters who offered a realist/ naturalist representation of city life displaying impressionistic and expressionistic stylistic features.
In addition to being a new aesthetic object, city life constituted an ideological problem for the American intelligentsia. In the early 19th c., the US was meant to become an agrarian republic. This was the project devised notably by President Thomas Jefferson. Conversely, cities were regarded as a corrupting influence: the “Fair country” was contrasted with the “Dark City” The history of colonization postponed the moment when big cities and heavy industries started developing in the US. Yet in the 1870s, after the Civil War, the shift toward industrialization and large-scale urbanization became irreversible. The growth of cities was rendered possible by mass immigration, notably from Eastern and Southern Europe. The growth of Chicago, the “inland metropolis” in the midwestern plain was emblematic of this huge social change. Chicago seemed to be a city that grew out of nothing in a matter of decades.
Urban planners, social workers, investigative journalists, politicians, even philosophers devoted their attention the problems of urban growth. Their reform campaigns are usually lumped together under the label “Progressivism”.The task of Progressivism consisted in reforming public life in the US in order to make it compatible with urban-industrial conditions. Progressivism therefore departed from traditional Yankee individualism, which refused the interdependent lifestyle necessary to city-dwellers.
Progressivism constitutes the first among the three moments in US politics that contributed to the development of the welfare state. The second moment took place in the 1930s under Franklin Delano Roosevelt. and the third in the 1960s under Lyndon B. Johnson. These efforts were spectacularly reversed by Ronald Reagan’s presidency in the 1980s and by later neo-conservative policies.
Before Progressivism, an early manifestation of the urge to adapt US society to urban conditions came from the field of urban planning. American urban planners tried to rationalize urban space. For instance, in the 1860s, Frederick Law Olmsted drew up the plans of Central Park in New York City—a project that was part of the planned development of Manhattan.
In the 1890s, the “City Beautiful” movement was created. Its members sought to elaborate a civic-minded form of urban planning. The “White City” of the 1893 Columbian exhibition in Chicago constitutes an early achievement of the City Beautiful movement. The City Beautiful movement also advocated the development of garden cities—suburban neighborhoods landscaped in a picturesque fashion. This innovation enjoyed considerable success in Europe. Though the advocates of the City Beautiful movement were certainly civic-minded, their efforts are sometimes criticized today on the grounds that they were class-biased. Their project might indeed be interpreted as a gesture of social control: they aimed to make cities safe for the upper classes. In this respect, it is even possible to discern a racial and social connotation in the name of Chicago’s “White City”: the project advertises a city tailored to the needs of white people.
In 1889, Jane Addams, a Chicago social worker, established a social center—a “settlement”—in a working-class neighborhood of Chicago. This was the beginning of the urban settlement movement, which allowed upper-class young women to engage in social work. Addams’s settlement, named “Hull-House,” worked both as a center of sociological research and as a venue for social activities. Addams’s efforts were specifically meant to help immigrant families and their children adapt to their new life in the US. Jane Addams also became involved in local politics in order to foster social legislation. She received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1931.
The efforts of social workers and urban reformers in the 1890s found considerable support in a journalistic practice nicknamed muckraking, which developed in the the early 20^th century. The muckrakers—Lincoln Steffens, Upton Sinclair, Linda Tarbell, Jack London—were investigative journalists who exposed various social wrongs in early-twentieth-century America—in the Progressive Era. We examine their contribution to realism and naturalism in more detail in the chapter devoted to realism in the 1910s.
When reading Sister Carrie as a novel of the metropolis, it is essential to determine whether Dreiser shares the anti-urban attitudes and social concerns that were common among late19th-century American writers and intellectuals.
It is for instance useful to find out whether Sister Carrie aligns itself with previous urban novels—works such as William Dean Howells’s A Hazard of New Fortunes, particularly . Howells’s text takes for granted and partially endorses the American diffidence to urban life. Hazard also emphasizes the literary difficulties involved in providing a realist depiction of the city: the novel presents New York as a kaleidoscope of social and ethnic groups that partially elude the grasp of literary observers.
Dreiser’s attitude to the emergent urban-industrial seems, however, less easy to ascertain than his predecessors’. One overall feature of Sister Carrie which may help us determine how Dreiser positions himself on this issue is the general sense of drift that characterizes the writer’s portrayal of characters and cityscape. Nothing seems stable in Sister Carrie: everything and everyone seems caught up in a drifting movement: Carrie is compared to “A waif amid forces Hurstwood is dragged down into an ineluctable downward spiral. Linguistically speaking, there are recurrent allusions to mobility, instability, drifting, and erosion,. Even Carrie’s mind is in a constant state of flux.
It would be convenient to consider that Dreiser’s emphasis on the lack of stability of city life amounts to a moral condemnation.
Symptomatically, most pre-1980s
critics of Dreiser assume that the writer shared his contemporaries’ rejection of urban consumerism. There is a political dimension to this interpretation: these critics assume that a radical, left-wing writer would automatically condemn the social conditions created by the turn-of-the-twentieth-century city—a reading corroborated by the pessimism of Dreiser’s later major novel, An American Tragedy. Still, Carrie’s sense of drift does not in itself constitute a negative feature of city life. It may be read as an aspect of its intensity .Therefore, post-1980 critics refute the image of Dreiser as a critic of urban consumerism. They emphasize instead the passages of Sister Carrie that manifest the writer’s fascination with the energy of the urban sphere, and interpret this response as a possible endorsement of urban capitalism.
To make matters more intricate, we have to take into account the fact that the novel now exists in two versions—The Doubleday edition of 1900 and the reconstructed manuscript published by the University of Philadelphia in 1981. There are important differences between the two texts: the 1900 edition is shorter—Dreiser’s -
scientific reflections were removed—and its style, revised by Dreiser’s wife, conforms far more to “genteel” literary decorum. Crucially, the ending of the two texts differ. The Doubleday edition ends with Carrie daydreaming in her rocking chair, while the Pennsylvania text ends with Hurstwood’s death It would be simplistic to infer that the daydream ending makes the Doubleday text a more optimistic novel. Yet the Pennsylvania edition, because of its final suicide, as well as through many other textual features, is on the whole bleaker and as such closer to the classic definition of naturalist writing. Overall, it makes sense to opt for an interpretation that, instead of pigeon-holing the early Dreiser either as a naive apologist or a bitter critic of the urban sphere, highlights the novel’s genuine ambivalence towards urban life: the novel points out both the exhilaration of city life and the dire consequences it exerts on quite a few people’s lives. This contrast is never completely resolved in the novel, which is indeed somewhat frustrating for readers.
This ambivalence is clearly illustrated in the opposite evolution of the main characters: Carrie flourishes in the city, while Hurstwood goes to his death. A similar contrast opposes the vision of Carrie happily daydreaming in her rocking chair, with the depiction of Hurstwood experiencing feelings of dejection in the same rocking chair. Note that Drouet, Carrie’s first lover, undergoes no similar change: he remains his own superficial self.
Likewise, the contrast between the positive and negative features of city life is nowhere better expressed than in a scene by the end of the novel, where two very different crowds are contrasted. On the one hand, we see crowds of well-todo theater-goers, ready to enjoy a performance. On the other, we discover lines of out-of-work paupers marshalled by a Civil-War veteran, who helps them find a shelter for the night. The contrast is all the more poignant as, unlike in anti-urban authors, the pleasure of the theater is genuine in Dreiser. There is no hint that the merry theater crowd should be regarded as alienated or morally vacuous.; Conversely, dejected or impoverished crowds appear in other passages of the novel: Another striking feature of Dreiser’s representation of the city is the fact that the urban world exerts a strong fascination, a potent seduction on the novel’s heroine. This fascination takes hold even before she actually sees Chicago “since her infancy her ears had been full of its fame ; “its cunning wiles; the city “appeals to the astonished senses in equivocal terms . Yet this seduction is counterbalanced by the hazards of poverty, even death. The city is therefore both fascinating and dangerous. In the chapter devoted to Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle, we discuss this mixture of wonder and terror as a signature feature of the aesthetic of the urban sublime. Dreiser’s Carrie is indeed as much a novel of the urban sublime as Sinclair’s evocation of industrial Chicago.
The seduction exerted by the city on Carrie Meeber is heightened by the fact that, in the late 19^th century, the urban sphere was to many people an ill-understood economy. Carrie herself embodies this ignorance of the mechanics of urban life: she is able to grasp the workings of “the little stone-cutter’s yard at Columbia city”, but she cannot understand “he strange energies and vast interests” of the city.
Intriguingly, Sister Carrie does not always attempt to take scrutinize and demystify the mechanisms of the urban economy—at least not in the way that would fit the requirements of realist fiction, and certainly not in a fashion that satisfies left-wing or Marxist critics. We are never given a detailed account of how “the strange energies and vast interests” of urban life actually function.
Dreiser’s reluctance to offer a rational analysis of urban economics is crucial for the evaluation of the politics of Sister Carrie. Karl Marx himself argues that the complexity of the capitalist economy acts as a tool of power. It allows capitalists to conceal the causes of exploitation and inequality. Likewise, American critic Alan Trachtenberg, in The Incorporation of America, contends that it was in the interest of late-nineteenth-century capitalists to render the urban-economy mystifying. A novel that fails to probe the workings of the capitalist system therefore serves to exacerbate what Marxist critics call reification—the capacity of capitalism to make its own mechanisms more mysterious than they actually are, and therefore to conceal that the economy is only a network of human relations. The Marxist critic Georg Lukács argues that the very function of realist fiction consists in combating reification. In literary terms, this means that Sister Carrie, though it seems to promise its readers a realist survey of the metropolis, only offers a romance account of its object—a romanticized portrayal that condones the logic of inequality and profit.
Some of the features of Sister Carrie that render his depiction of the urban sphere mysterious, yet fascinating find their origin in the literary tradition of urban gothic—the variety of gothic fiction focusing on city locales. In this sense,