Spectacular Display of the New Modes of Existence: Rethinking Dreiser’s Realism in Sister Carrie

Abstract

Visualizing the vast transformation of both a physical and a psychological landscape of modern America, Theodore Dreiser’s Sister Carrie irrefutably demystifies the discourses of capitalist urban world where life is transformed into spectacles that reshape the topography of individuals’ desires and forces them to be diffused into the whole logic of the capitalist urban society. Most of all, in his conceptualization of the spectacular identity whose intrinsic personal worth or an autonomous self hardly exists, Dreiser reveals a keen awareness of the inadequacies of modern existence evolved out of the capitalist urban world. While the novel serves as an orientation to promote the sense of transformed social structure under the characterization of realism, it also serves as a severe critique of the discourses of American capitalism and the new modes of the existence which seemingly conform to the whole logic and system of capitalist urban society. However, it is difficult to deny that Dreiser’s vision of the new modes of existence in the capitalist urban society actually entangles his fundamental critique of its represented system. For his visions of the possibility for social and psychological growth and for self-actualization appear to assimilate the truism of living and prospering in the capitalist urban world, where the power of spectacle must be recognized. Moreover, Dreiser repeatedly alludes to the inevitableness of capitalist process by engraving the universalized concept of social evolution into his representation of the capitalist urban society and the process of identity formation. Notwithstanding Dreiser actively creates and criticizes the meanings, representations, and ideologies of his own changing culture in his novel, creating for readers a sense of social structure and modes of existence in spectacular visions which are being naturalized and neutralized, his textual reality itself plays a significant role in both reaffirming the social system and its process and re-mystifying the process or the modes of existence within it.