Between wonder and entanglement: Fictions of community and Theodore Dreiser's "Sister Carrie".
Item
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Title
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Between wonder and entanglement: Fictions of community and Theodore Dreiser's "Sister Carrie".
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Identifier
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AAI9304749
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identifier
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9304749
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Creator
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Zaluda, Scott.
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Contributor
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Adviser: Neal Tolchin
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Date
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1992
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Language
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English
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Publisher
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City University of New York.
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Subject
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Literature, American | American Studies | History, United States
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Abstract
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The publication in 1981 of an edition of Theodore Dreiser's Sister Carrie based upon the manuscript has exposed to a generation of readers many more details of Dreiser's dialogue with the social conflicts of his day. Restored references to elements of life in late nineteenth-century American cities and a fuller representation of characters' social relations demonstrate Dreiser's participation in a contemporary discourse, not only on naturalism, but on American, especially urban, community. Through its characters' experience of connection with others in expanding, stratifying industrial centers, the manuscript Sister Carrie narrates more pronouncedly fictions of community which contest a variety of "communities" articulated in cultural discourse at the turn of the century.;Potent political and cultural arguments of the day frame Sister Carrie's intertwined narratives of a young woman from the provinces reconnoitering urban social boundaries and a middle-aged man losing connection with the social elements that have created him. Dreiser tests out the possibilities for togetherness in terms of the problem of resettlement in a mobile society, the city-dweller's nostalgia for homogeneous community, conventions of male intimacy in saloons and fraternal orders, constructs of mental illness which delineated class membership, competition among politicians to define a master fiction of community, and a discourse of contemporary literary realists, culture critics, and reformers attempting to articulate an ideal community.;The experience of social situation in Dreiser's first novel cannot be reconciled with any one notion of togetherness; the desire for community persists as an unresolvable problem. Sister Carrie imagines community as provocative, as an idea signifying ambivalence about social situation, as a provisional setting within and against which character and reader momentarily understand the self. Social structures are caught up in an endless deferral of stability as characters struggle to achieve and subsequently to escape others' fictions of permanence. Repeatedly, as they are drawn back into the undifferentiated, chaotic wonder of larger forces and movements, characters invariably struggle to entangle themselves again among these unstable, elastic, group arrangements. Imagined communities contrast and overlap, yielding no clear compromise or ideal, and ambivalent characters always remain psychologically and socially between cultures.
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Type
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dissertation
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Source
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PQT Legacy CUNY.xlsx
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degree
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Ph.D.
