Conclusion glossary referece

3.American Fiction in the 1900s and 1910s: Political Naturalism, Muckraking, and Premodernism
Proletarian work. By the same logic, Sister Carrie depicts proletarian work as hard and deadening. It is the world of “hard contract”.Therefore, Carrie is only too keen to escape from the shoe factory in which she works in her first weeks in Chicago. In this perspective, the early Dreiser—who later endorsed communism—cannot be regarded as a proletarian novelist “a solemn round of industry”; “the machine girls” . Symptomatically, in one of his autobiographical texts, An Amateur Laborer, Dreiser offers a slightly superficial, romanticized depiction of life in a railroad workshop—a place where he follows a “work cure” after a nervous breakdown. In this account, there is no indication that the novelist identifies with the workers. He regards his own life project as distinct from theirs.
Upper-middle-class domesticity. The (upper)-middle-class family is depicted as a comforting, morally sound universe in sentimental fiction and even in a few works by realist writers (Howells, notoriously). In Carrie, Dreiser follows the logic of realist demystification. He portrays George Hurstwood’s family as dysfunctional (see “Such an atmosphere could hardly come under the category of home life”. The passages devoted to Hurstwood’s family are indeed some of the few in which Dreiser tries his hand at realist satire (cf. Wharton and Henry James)—a style in which he does not excel.
To these conventional lifestyles, Dreiser opposes the “great sea of life”, a field of vital activity that closely corresponds to the urban world. The big city, to Carrie’s inexperienced eyes, is “all wonderful, all vast, all far removed”. Naturalist novelists often resort to oceanic metaphors in order to evoke the emergent metropolis (see Den Tandt, Urban Sublime). The features of urban life that lend themselves to this type of literary characterization are, predictably, the urban crowd and also the flow of financial speculation. Chicago realist Robert Herrick, in his 1905 novel Together indicates that the city is an environment that confronts individuals with “[t]he realization of multitudinous humanity.” Likewise, the title of Herrick’s The Web of Life, suggests that the city is a fabric of vital relations—a social field where life energies express themselves. Frank Norris, in The Octopus and the Pit, compares economic exchanges to vast vital flows. The same vitalist accents appear in passages of Dreiser’s novels. These texts suggest that characters—Carrie, for instance—, when beholding the activities of city dwellers are impressed by the “magnitude of this life”. They therefore have to find a way to be in tune with these vital currents (Carrie manages to do so; Hurstwood fails).
In Dreiser, as in other naturalists, there are specific aspects of the urban environment that contribute to creating the impression that the city is the receptacle of life energies. In other words, there are specific locales where characters can glimpse the movements of the “sea of life.”
The urban crowd is the most explicit manifestation of “Life” that Dreiser’s characters may behold. Again, we should not assume that the spectacle of the crowd is in itself positive or inspiring. Like the whole city itself, the crowd may act either as the very expression of the dynamism of life or as a force that engulfs characters: the “spectacle of warm-blooded humanity”; |

• 
  Department stores and the spectacle of consumption are important sites of life energies according to Dreiser. The department stores scenes in Sister Carrie are comparable to those depicted earlier by Emile Zola in Au bonheur des dames. Zola’s novel focuses on the development of this new form of commerce, and it depicts the psychological, quasi-sexual impact they exert on shoppers vast retail combinations a showplace of dazzling interest and. Symptomatically, Both Zola and Dreiser seem fascinated with this latest development of capitalism. This has led recent critics to point out that Carrie cannot be read as a critique of capitalism. Yet such critics argue that, though Dreiser fails to criticize consumerism, he offers a surprisingly revelatory account of its early developments. As such, Carrie foreshadows later discussions of post-WWII consumerism developed, for instance by Guy Debord in La société du spectacle or Jean Baudrillard in Le système des objets.
  
•