Sitting alone, she was now an illustration of the devious ways by which one who feels, rather than reasons, may be led in the pursuit of beauty. Though often disillusioned, she was still waiting for that halcyon day when she should be led forth among dreams become real. Ames had pointed out a farther step, but on and on beyond that, if accomplished, would lie others for her. It was forever to be the pursuit of that radiance of delight which tints the distant hilltops of the world.
Oh, Carrie, Carrie! Oh, blind strivings of the human heart! Onward, onward, it saith, and where beauty leads, there it follows. Whether it be the tinkle of a lone sheep bell o’er some quiet landscape, or the glimmer of beauty in sylvan places, or the show of soul in some passing eye, the heart knows and makes answer, following. It is when the feet weary and hope seems vain that the heartaches and the longings arise. Know, then, that for you is neither surfeit nor content. In your rocking-chair, by your window dreaming, shall you long, alone. In your rocking-chair, by your window, shall you dream such happiness as you may never feel.
Endnotes
1 (p. 3) Columbia City: Columbia City, Wisconsin, is a fictional town. In 1887 the sixteen-year-old Dreiser went to look for work in Chicago; he took a train from his home in Warsaw, Indiana, a town 20 miles west of Columbia City, Indiana.
2 (p. 21) At that time the department store was in its earliest form of successful operation: Department stores were an important commercial innovation of the mid-1880s. Their success helped fuel the rise of advertising and, with their fixed pricing, speeded the demise of negotiation and barter, thus democratizing the marketplace. Chicago boasted four: Marshall Field, The Fair, The Boston Store, and Carson, Pirie, Scott.
3 (p. 37) The new socialism ... had not then taken hold upon manufacturing companies: Settlement houses and unions lobbied for improved workplace conditions—shorter workdays, clean toilets, fresh air and natural light, longer lunch breaks, and the installation of safety devices on machines—but the corporations and large business owners resisted these changes and often made concessions only after a long, costly, sometimes violent, strike.
4 (p. 45) “That’s Jules Wallace, the spiritualist”: Wallace apparently used his spiritualism sessions to seduce women for his sexual pleasure; his landlady accused him of enticing women to his room for group sex. Dreiser, who investigated Wallace on assignment for the St. Louis Republican, took a dim view of Wallace’s spiritualism, calling him a charlatan.
5 (p. 84) the liberal analysis of Spencer: Herbert Spencer (1820-1903) was an English philosopher and pioneering sociologist who helped popularize Darwin’s theory of evolution; in fact, he originated one of his own prior to Darwin’s. Dreiser’s literary .naturalism was strongly influenced by some of Spencer’s ideas. Spencer believed that individuals were conditioned by heredity and environment, but that some people could flourish apart from the group and achieve greater freedom. The latter view was more optimistic than Darwin’s or Dreiser’s.
6 (p. 84) Ogden Place: Dreiser had lived on this street in the summer of 1892. It was in a middle-class neighborhood, near Union Park.
7 (p. 94) She amused herself with ... a book by Bertha M. Clay: This was the nom de plume of best-selling author Charlotte M. Brame (1836-1884), whose mediocre, sentimental romance novels often concerned a girl from a poor family who becomes romantically entangled with a nobleman and ends up disappointed and unhappy. On p. 287 Carrie refers to Brame’s best-known work, Dora Thome. For Dreiser, the popularity of such fiction was indicative of America’s debased literary taste.
8 (p. 138) Under the Gaslight: This is a reference to a wildly successful play by Augustin Daly, first produced in 1867. Its climax became a staple of melodramas and early films: The hero, tied to a railroad track, is rescued by the heroine just as a train approaches. Dreiser lifted the excerpts from Under the Gaslight verbatim from the 1895 Samuel French acting edition. Laura, Carrie’s role, finds happiness in Daly’s play, but not in Dreiser’s version.
9 (p. 192) became entangled with a bunco-steerer: “Bunco-steerer” was another name for a con man who lured naive country visitors to places in the city where they could be swindled or robbed. Con men abound in nineteenth-century American fiction. Herman Melville and Mark Twain wrote comic fables about such crooks and the gullible people they duped.
10 (p. 262) an average, and yet exorbitant, rent for a home at the time: The rent is average for the neighborhood, but out of proportion to rents for the same amount of space in other cities. The Upper West Side of Manhattan was just beginning to be built up as a more middle- to upper-class residential neighborhood. In 1907 Henry James, in The American Scene, jeered at the new apartment houses that lined Riverside Drive near Carrie and Hurstwood’s flat. He thought them an “artless jumble,” ugly, vulgar, and lacking in architectural distinction, unlike the elegant scale of the houses in the Washington Square of his childhood.
11 (p. 280) We’re going down to Sherry’s for dinner: Louis Sherry was an opulent restaurant where fashion-conscious people and celebrities dined and gathered to be gawked at. Ames points out to Carrie a vulgarly bejeweled woman whom he castigates as typical of her class’s ostentatious, wasteful spending. Dreiser is particularly disgusted by such lavish restaurants.
12 (p. 292) The poisons generated by remorse ... produce marked physical deterioration. To these Hurstwood was subject: Anastates and katastates were metabolic terms used in the 1890s by physiologists. Katastates break down complex organisms in the body, but in the process a person’s metabolism goes awry. Anastates keep energy levels balanced during metabolism and therefore a person remains emotionally stable. Dreiser’s understanding of these substances comes from the largely discredited psychosomatic theory (an explanation of manic-depression) of the scientist Elmer Gates, about whom he was writing in early 1900.
13 (p. 296) The new flat ... contained only four rooms: This is a stage of downward mobility for Hurstwood and Carrie, a shrinkage of space and of prospects that Hurstwood accepts and Carrie frets at. Dreiser’s sister Emma (on whom Sister Carrie was based) and L. A. Hopkins lived in this neighborhood, and Dreiser visited them there in the mid-1890s.
14 (p. 360) the various trolley companies refused: The long, bitter Brooklyn Trolley Strike of 1895, in which 4,000 workers walked off their jobs to fight for better wages, was marred by frequent violence. The 7,500 National Guardsmen who were called in to escort scabs often attacked crowds with guns and bayonets, and ultimately killed two bystanders. The strike was front-page news for months and ended with a public boycott of the scab-driven trolleys, forcing the trolley companies to re-hire the strikers.
15 (p. 403) “I’m living at the Chelsea now”: This apartment building on West Twenty-third Street, between Seventh and Eighth Avenues, later became a somewhat seedy landmark residence hotel for poets, composers, artists, and assorted bohemians.
16 (p. 416) second-hand Hester Street basement collection: This shopping street on the Lower East Side, lined with tenements, was home mainly to Jewish immigrants; its shops sold cheap goods, and the area’s primary food market was located there. Photographs of the period often show the street teeming with pushcarts, horse carriages, and a sea of humanity.
17 (p. 438) “Pere Goriot,” which Ames had recommended to her: Balzac’s famous novel of 1834 is about a father who sacrifices all for his two selfish, ingrate daughters. That Carrie is reading Père Goriot rather than Dora Thome is proof of her desire to improve herself culturally. The influence of Balzac’s writing on Dreiser is something he referred to often.