The role of the theater in Dreiser’s Sister Carrie is mainly to mirror, or present - by means of a metaphor, the stages in social life of the main characters. Apart from serving as a parallel between living and acting, theater – or rather the act of performing- is used as a kind of imagery epithet: describing the characters, their personalities, social stand, morals as well as the material possessions through which theses are expressed.
Dreiser draws many parallels between social and theatrical performance. The first that we encounter is when Drouet takes Carrie to a dinner to a posh restaurant. At the time of the novel’s events, plate glass windows were for the first time commonly installed in shops, offices and restaurants. In the novel, these windows served as a door to what was going on inside, to observe the spectacle of buying and dining – just like the stage is a gate to the own life of a play in a theater. During that initial dinner, the beautifully arranged fancy food is being portrayed as, and serves the role of, objects converted into the stage setting. People walking on the street, separated only by a thin glass, become the audience for the first in Carrie’s life performance: “The window creates a polarized world of inside and outside, actor and spectator, rich and poor, that would not occur if what were going on inside were simply unknown” (Fisher, 261). Interestingly, this allegorical first performance in the restaurant, just like the actual first performance Carrie gave in Chicago were both facilitated by Drouet.
The motif of men facilitating Carrie’s rise is also reflected in her theatrical performance. The very fact that her relationships lacked in sexuality and their description portrayed Carrie as rather disinterested in the men themselves provides an insight in how each of these men is a means of climbing up in her social life rather than developing a strong relationship. It is not my point here to prove her intentions as wrong or correct, as in fact, she was simply driven by her desire for comfort and fear of poverty. What I am trying to point is how each of her partners serves as a symbol, as a representation, of each stage in her career, which she again achieves partly through the relationships she had. Donald Pizer explicitly defines this process in his book:
“The three men in Carrie’s life – Drouet, Hurstwood and Ames – represent an upward movement on Carrie’s part. Drouet introduces Carrie to a middle-class world of comfort, show, and finery; Hurstwood to a world of personal and social power; and Ames to that of the intellect. Each relationship serves to refine Carrie’s response to life, to raise her above her previous values and desires to a higher stage of development and awareness” (Pizer, 67).
And just as Drouet presents Carrie with the possibilities of the material world and gets her on the stage for the first time, he induces in her the thoughts of climbing higher – possibly through acting. Hurstwood being the initiator of Carrie’s insight into the high life and culture is present in her life – though, at that point, following exactly the opposite direction in his own life - when she manages to achieve a success on the stage. Then finally, as Ames appears with the higher intellectual thought, which by now was absent in Carrie’s emotional longings for the material and fame, she starts considering shifting in her acting from the commercial into more ambitious productions, thus proving never to be able to achieve that ultimate happiness she’s chasing in her life - personal and on the stage.
The very interesting point to notice is that of what role the names play, what is their relation between theatrical and real life “roles”. As Fisher smoothly summarizes, “Carrie is Sister Carrie, Carrie Meeber, Cad, Mrs. Drouet, Carrie Madenda, Mrs. Murdock, and Mrs. Wheeler, as well as Laura, Katisha the Country maid, the frowing Quakeress, and her many other roles. Hurstwood becomes Murdock and then Wheeler, demonstrating the difference between aliases and stage names” (Fisher, 264). Carrie plays the role of a sister, then of Drouet’s wife, then of an actress Carrie Madenda, and finally of Hurstwood’s wife – here under two different surnames – as if she was a wife of two different incarnations of Hurstwood. At some point Carrie has so many names – fake marriages, her stage name, the name of the role she plays – that the border between truth and false, between the stage performance and the life performance becomes so thin that everything blurs and the reader, as well as Carrie herself, seem to get lost in all this entanglement and fail to recognize what is real and what is fiction, where is the line between pretending and being sincere, what is being lived for real and what is being played out.
Dreiser creates a parallel between the stages of Carrie’s career on stage and job careers of the three men, thus making us questioning what it really is that we are buying while pursuing money and success: Drouet sells samples of different sorts, not full products, so what he actually does is that he sells himself – his confidence and felicity. Carrie at this point is not doing any serious stage playing – she only has a small part in some small play in an unimportant theater. Her role is that of a sample, which Drouet deals with. When we meet Hurstwood, we see it is not material goods that he sells. Instead, he sells his presence which gives air to the nightclub. At the higher level of her career, Carrie is not just a supporting actress in a chorus. She becomes a celebrity – showered with gifts and offers from men all around her - and it is this notion which reflects Hurstwood’s selling his fine presence. Finally, once she achieved everything she had previously thought would bring her the ultimate happiness, Carrie encounters Ames, who leads the way to even higher level in her quest: “At the peak of the hierarchy of work that Dreiser has constructed is the actress. Her self, her inner emotional being, is what is sold to the ticket buyers. The objects have vanished entirely. The personality and vitality alone remain to sell” (Fisher, 266).
Melodrama in Sister Carrie is somewhat ubiquitous: it is on the stage, in Carrie’s personal life, it is on the streets – when Carrie observes all the glamorous women in neat clothes and their slick movements. Theater represent the extreme emotions and longings that Carrie is constantly haunted by. It transforms them into reality. And, although never being able to satisfy her desires, Carrie is greatly attracted to it for the superficial layer it offers. To conclude and terminate this case I would like to quote Donal Pizer, who accurately settles the essence of the relation between social and theatrical performance in the novel: “Carrie’s career on the sage symbolizes both the emotional intensity she is capable of bringing to life and the fact that she requires the intrinsically extraordinary and exciting world of the theater to call forth and embody her emotional depth” (Pizer, 19).
Bibliography:
The motif of men facilitating Carrie’s rise is also reflected in her theatrical performance. The very fact that her relationships lacked in sexuality and their description portrayed Carrie as rather disinterested in the men themselves provides an insight in how each of these men is a means of climbing up in her social life rather than developing a strong relationship. It is not my point here to prove her intentions as wrong or correct, as in fact, she was simply driven by her desire for comfort and fear of poverty. What I am trying to point is how each of her partners serves as a symbol, as a representation, of each stage in her career, which she again achieves partly through the relationships she had. Donald Pizer explicitly defines this process in his book:
“The three men in Carrie’s life – Drouet, Hurstwood and Ames – represent an upward movement on Carrie’s part. Drouet introduces Carrie to a middle-class world of comfort, show, and finery; Hurstwood to a world of personal and social power; and Ames to that of the intellect. Each relationship serves to refine Carrie’s response to life, to raise her above her previous values and desires to a higher stage of development and awareness” (Pizer, 67).
And just as Drouet presents Carrie with the possibilities of the material world and gets her on the stage for the first time, he induces in her the thoughts of climbing higher – possibly through acting. Hurstwood being the initiator of Carrie’s insight into the high life and culture is present in her life – though, at that point, following exactly the opposite direction in his own life - when she manages to achieve a success on the stage. Then finally, as Ames appears with the higher intellectual thought, which by now was absent in Carrie’s emotional longings for the material and fame, she starts considering shifting in her acting from the commercial into more ambitious productions, thus proving never to be able to achieve that ultimate happiness she’s chasing in her life - personal and on the stage.
The very interesting point to notice is that of what role the names play, what is their relation between theatrical and real life “roles”. As Fisher smoothly summarizes, “Carrie is Sister Carrie, Carrie Meeber, Cad, Mrs. Drouet, Carrie Madenda, Mrs. Murdock, and Mrs. Wheeler, as well as Laura, Katisha the Country maid, the frowing Quakeress, and her many other roles. Hurstwood becomes Murdock and then Wheeler, demonstrating the difference between aliases and stage names” (Fisher, 264). Carrie plays the role of a sister, then of Drouet’s wife, then of an actress Carrie Madenda, and finally of Hurstwood’s wife – here under two different surnames – as if she was a wife of two different incarnations of Hurstwood. At some point Carrie has so many names – fake marriages, her stage name, the name of the role she plays – that the border between truth and false, between the stage performance and the life performance becomes so thin that everything blurs and the reader, as well as Carrie herself, seem to get lost in all this entanglement and fail to recognize what is real and what is fiction, where is the line between pretending and being sincere, what is being lived for real and what is being played out.
Dreiser creates a parallel between the stages of Carrie’s career on stage and job careers of the three men, thus making us questioning what it really is that we are buying while pursuing money and success: Drouet sells samples of different sorts, not full products, so what he actually does is that he sells himself – his confidence and felicity. Carrie at this point is not doing any serious stage playing – she only has a small part in some small play in an unimportant theater. Her role is that of a sample, which Drouet deals with. When we meet Hurstwood, we see it is not material goods that he sells. Instead, he sells his presence which gives air to the nightclub. At the higher level of her career, Carrie is not just a supporting actress in a chorus. She becomes a celebrity – showered with gifts and offers from men all around her - and it is this notion which reflects Hurstwood’s selling his fine presence. Finally, once she achieved everything she had previously thought would bring her the ultimate happiness, Carrie encounters Ames, who leads the way to even higher level in her quest: “At the peak of the hierarchy of work that Dreiser has constructed is the actress. Her self, her inner emotional being, is what is sold to the ticket buyers. The objects have vanished entirely. The personality and vitality alone remain to sell” (Fisher, 266).
Melodrama in Sister Carrie is somewhat ubiquitous: it is on the stage, in Carrie’s personal life, it is on the streets – when Carrie observes all the glamorous women in neat clothes and their slick movements. Theater represent the extreme emotions and longings that Carrie is constantly haunted by. It transforms them into reality. And, although never being able to satisfy her desires, Carrie is greatly attracted to it for the superficial layer it offers. To conclude and terminate this case I would like to quote Donal Pizer, who accurately settles the essence of the relation between social and theatrical performance in the novel: “Carrie’s career on the sage symbolizes both the emotional intensity she is capable of bringing to life and the fact that she requires the intrinsically extraordinary and exciting world of the theater to call forth and embody her emotional depth” (Pizer, 19).
Bibliography:
- Fisher, Philip. "Acting, Reading, Fortune's Wheel: Sister Carrie and the life history of objects." In Eric J. Sundquist, ed. American realism : new essays. Baltimore London : Johns Hopkins UP, 1982. 259-277.
- Pizer, Donald. Realism and naturalism in nineteenth-century American literature. Carbondale [etc.] : Southern Illinois P, 1984.