Conclusion glossary referece

The saloon and the theater: Dreiser represents saloons and theaters as vital, energizing features of urban conviviality. In this, he clearly turns his back on advocates of Puritanical morality, who considered these forms of entertainment respectively as inducements to alcoholism (the temperance movement, leading up to prohibition was already active) and obscenity. Dreiser, on the contrary, seems to endorse Drouet’s and

Hurstwood’s predilection for saloons. The two characters regard those institutions as places of masculine conviviality, where customers like to hobnob with important people in a “blaze of lights”. The atmosphere is warm and luxurious: “No evil could come out of the contemplation of an expensively decorated chamber”, Dreiser writes. This sentence does not seem to imply any degree of distance or criticism.
The theater is given an even more prestigious status than the saloon in Carrie: it is the site where artists may help vital energies to express themselves, revealing “the other half of life”. Robert Ames, an engineer who takes interest in Carrie’s stage career tells her accordingly that, as an actress, her duty consists in letting cosmic forces express themselves on the stage. Ironically, the theatrical medium in which this cosmic epiphany may take place seems slightly ridiculous from a contemporary perspective. The Pennsylvania edition of the novel contains a long scene depicting Carrie’s first experience as an actress. The play in which
the young woman performs is clearly a stereotypical late-19^th-century melodrama. Most twentieth-century critics would regard this type of play as commercial, sentimental, and ludicrous. Yet Dreiser takes the genre very seriously—another aspect of the novel that conflicts with the classic definition of naturalism as based on cool, objective scientific observation.
We have seen above that one of the enigmatic features of Sister Carrie consists in its reliance on romance—indeed sometimes on quasi-gothic elements that seem out of place in a text by a novelist who claimed an affiliation to realism. Still, it is possible to make sense of Dreiser’s appropriation of romance if one accepts that the novelist pursues a project of sociological and psychological investigation for which he cannot avail himself of an existing scientific terminology. Indeed some of the most enigmatic (or digressive) passages of Carrie may be regarded as sketches for a pre-psychoanalytical literary psychology of the urban sphere—a theory of urban behavior that takes unconscious influences, pre-conscious determinants into account. Thus, if the novel may be legitimately faulted for failing to investigate the underlying economic mechanisms of the urban world, it can still be praised for attempting to grasp how the minds and sensibilities of individuals are affected by the development of urban societies based on the mutual interdependence of millions of subjects.
This interpretation is predicated on the acknowledgement that theories of the unconscious already existed before they were given a (quasi)-scientific formulation by psychoanalysts such as Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung. Allusions to unconscious thought processes had occurred in literary works and psychological theories since the late 18^th century. Romantic poetry often takes unconscious processes into account, as do novels and plays by Dostoevsky, Ibsen, Zola, Strindberg, and Wilde. In this light, Dreiser’s psychology fits in a tradition of pre-psychoanalytical writing that for obvious reasons does not display the rigor and clarity of Freud’s theories. Dreiser’s psychology seems unfamiliar for several reasons:
Unlike Freudian psychology, it does not focus on individual desire: it charts the movement of a collective unconscious whose field of manifestation is the urban world itself.

• 
  In methodological terms, its raw material—the concepts and vocabulary on which it relies—is drawn from quasi or non-scientific sources such as post-Darwinian evolutionary psychology or even 19^th-century popular culture and superstitions. Thus, however tempting it may be to discard Dreiser’s pseudo-scientific reflections, one should not ignore that, in spite of the writer’s terminological oddities, the conclusions he reaches are sometimes compatible with psychological or sociological theories that are considered valid even today.
  

Dreiser’s urban psychology fits in the tradition that leads up to psychoanalysis notably because it confers a central role to desire and seduction—in most cases issuing from the fascination of the urban market. Characters in Dreiser are “most wholly controlled by desire”. In order to grasp the novelty of this idea in the 19^th-century context, one should take into account the fact that moral behavior at the time was supposedly ruled by moral consciousness, virtue, and the force of will (“character”).
Dreiser’s concept of desire is remarkable in so far as it focuses both on people and commodities. Objects and people can indiscriminately become the heroine’s objects of desire. This implies that in Carrie, there is very little difference between the realms of love, sex, money, and commodity fetishism. Carrie is seduced by Hurstwood because of “the things he represents”; women’s clothes stir “The drag of desire”; “slippers and stockings” affect Carrie “with individual desire”.
Depicted thus, it is clear that desire is not individualized: it is a force that floats through the whole metropolis. Moreover, Dreiser depicts desire as unquenchable: it is never satisfied. This conception of desire is in tune with poststructuralist Jacques Lacan’s theories. Lacan views desire as a mechanism that subjects individuals to the irresistible feeling that there is something missing, lacking in their life. In Carrie, the rocking-chair scene that closes off the Doubleday text lends itself to this interpretation. The narrator’s exclamation—“Oh blind strivings of the human heart” (1981: 487)—may be read as meaning that the heroine will never be satisfied. In this sense, even the less pessimistic ending of the 1900 text may not be read as a sign of hope.
Accordingly, Dreiser’s conception of desire is the basis of his tragic vision: desire is both good and bad (ambivalence); it is a force that propels protagonists in their conquest of the city, but it also dooms them to remaining unfulfilled.
Dreiser often represents the action of the urban world on his protagonists in the form of mysterious voices. These voices may be regarded as the action of desire, or even as the influence of the whole urban sphere. What makes the urban sphere puzzling is of course the fact that it speaks in several voices: it is a plurivocal environment. In the novel, Carrie is addressed by the following “voices”:
The “voice of want” (1981, p. 90)

• 
  The voice of “the senses” (1981, p. 91)
  
• 
  The voice of “instincts” and “the forces of life” (1981, p. 73)
  
• 
  The voice of “things” ; “the things that appeal to desire” (1981, p. 97)
  
• 
  The “voices of the […] inanimate” (1981, p. 98)
  
• 
  The voice of the “environment” exerting a “subtle, persuasive control” (1981, p. 97)
  
• 
  Nonhuman voices: “subtle influences, not human, which environ and appeal to the young imagination when it drifts” (1981, p. 97)
  

From the characters’ perspective, the plurivocal city creates a situation of moral confusion. The dangers threatening Carrie’s moral conscience under the influence of the city are, of course, most clearly illustrated in the scenes where she resolves to become a kept woman—a state akin to prostitution—in order to leave her situation as a “machine girl” in the shoe factory. Note that this possibility is hinted at from very early on, indeed from the moment she meets Drouet again in Chicago.
In this scene, Carrie’s moral dilemma is described as the hesitation of a character wondering which voice she should listen to:
Will she listen to the voice of the “narrow” world, the voice of religious morality?. The victory of traditional morality is not very likely since the novel makes clear that Carrie only has “an average little conscience.” The voice of morality reasserts itself only briefly when a former shoe-factory worker recognizes her in the street with Drouet. Or will she listen to the voice of “the admirable city, which is so fine when you are not poor”? Clearly, the voice of the city is bound to overwhelm her since the urban world is constantly equated with a tempter, a temptress, or a seducer.The psychological model illustrated in these passages clearly admits of determinants that act beyond or beneath the subject’s conscious agency. Freudian psychology as well as 20^th-century sociological theories has made us familiar with the possibility of unconscious influence. Yet because of the terminology and the (pseudo)-scientific sources used by Dreiser, his own psychological discourse seems imbued with overtones of magic: it resonates with the accents of 19^th-century superstition, with the accents of 19th-century melodrama, or even with the atmosphere of circus freak shows (see “The things that appeal to desire are not always visible”.