Conclusion glossary referece

Carrie may partly be regarded as
an instance of the “Mysteries of the city”—the genre initiated by popular mid-19^th-century French novelist Eugène Sue. Among the famous instances of 19^th-century mysteries of the city, one could mention Sue’s The Mysteries of Paris, American novelist Charles Brockden Brown’s Arthur Mervyn and Wieland, George Lippard’s The
Quaker City, or Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Man of the Crowd” and “The Murders in the Rue Morgue”. The late 19^th-century produced such classic examples of urban gothic as Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray.
The following passages of Sister Carrie are evocative of the tradition of the mysteries of the city: The “wooing and fascinating eye” of the city “Forces wholly superhuman”; “The mesmeric operation of super-intelligible forces; “wall-lined mysteries”; “the other half of life”; “Aladdin’s cave” . The passage referring to the “other half of life” to which we supposedly gain access through the world of the theater is particularly surprising: it implies that a quasi-supernatural world exists beyond the surface appearances of life itself. Likewise, the reference to “forces wholly superhuman” seems to be lifted from a gothic romance, not a naturalist novel. We will see below, however, that, this supernaturalist discourse may still be read as a component of a rational mapping of city life.
In order to do justice to Dreiser’s appraisal of city life, one cannot think in terms of a rigid opposition between pro- and anti-urban attitudes. The distinction that runs through Sister Carrie opposes rather a vital, intense mode of life, of which the urban sphere is the embodiment, and, on the other hand, a repressed, narrow-minded lifestyle. According to the terminology used by Dreiser himself, one may call these two realms respectively “the great sea of life” and the “narrow” world. This distinction implies that the “great sea of life” of the modern metropolis is not necessarily benevolent: it is able to lead characters to perdition; extreme poverty is part of it. Yet it offers the promise of vital intensity. The “narrow world,” on the other hand, has very little to offer. By developing this thematics, Dreiser manifests his opposition to turn-of-the-20^th-century Puritanical values. To him, vital intensity prevails over conventional morality—a stance clearly illustrated in Carrie Meeber’s behavior.
It would be possible, though a little simplistic, to consider that Dreiser’s “narrow world” corresponds to the lifestyle eulogized by the 19^th-century agrarian tradition (Jeffersonian agrarianism; small-town values). Dreiser’s dismissive attitude towards the agrarian tradition is indeed quite remarkable for a writer of his time. Symptomatically, Carrie tells us practically nothing about the heroine’s small-town origins: her life in Columbia City seems to disappear as soon as she takes the train to Chicago. Still, the “narrow world” depicted in the novel does include the universe of small towns, yet it is not limited to it. We should therefore establish a list of the locales and attitudes that constitute the various aspects of this “narrow world” both in the countryside and in the city.
The small town. While the small-town world was (and sometimes still is) held up as the center of gravity of civic virtue in the US, Sister Carrie seems to condemn this world to oblivion. Other works by Dreiser (The “Genius” or the autobiographical Newspaper Days) reveal that the author despised small-town life and was only to happy to escape from it to join the metropolis.
The (lower)-middle-class work ethic. To many 19^th-century Americans, a life of virtuous toil was the very foundation of a virtuous life. This idea is rooted in Protestant theology, and is as such often referred to as the “Protestant Work Ethic” (see Max Weber’s The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, which brilliantly analyzes the link between theology and the work ethic). This life project stands in contrast with European aristocratic values, which consider hard work unfit for refined personalities. Symptomatically, conventional hard work is portrayed negatively in Carrie: it is embodied in one of the least likeable characters of the novel, Carrie’s brother-in-law Hanson. The latter pursues a “conservative round of toil” and despises pleasure