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Notes

one. Dreiser,

Sister Carrie

(

1900

; rpt.

New York

:

Norton

,

1970

), p.

103

. Subsequent citations indicated parenthetically.

2. Phillips,

Susan Lenox: Her Fall and Rise

(

1917

; rpt.

New York

:

D. Appleton

,

1937

),

I

,

388

. Subsequent citations indicated parenthetically.

3. Critics including Vernon Parrington (

The Beginning of Critical Realism in America, 1860–1920

[

New York

:

Harcourt, Brace

,

1930

]) and Alfred Kazin (

On Native Grounds

[

New York

:

Harcourt, Caryatid

,

1942

]) read Hurstwood'due south struggle to detect work in New York and his descent into poverty as a forceful condemnation of capitalism.

4. Michaels,

The Aureate Standard and the Logic of Naturalism

(

Berkeley

:

Univ. of California Printing

,

1987

), p.

35

. Other scholars focusing on consumption in the novel take highlighted gender and consumer culture: meet Philip Fisher,

Hard Facts: Setting and Form in the American Novel

(

New York

:

Oxford Univ. Printing

,

1985

); and Rachel Bowlby,

Merely Looking: Consumer Civilization in Dreiser, Gissing and Zola

(

Hoboken

:

Taylor & Francis

,

2009

).

5. Nina Markov makes a case for reading Carrie equally a member of the working class (

"Course, Civilization, and Capital in Sister Carrie,"

Dreiser Studies

,

36

[Summer

2005

],

3

–

27

). In

Women, Coercion, Modernity

(

Chicago

:

Univ. of Chicago Printing

,

2004

), Jennifer Fleissner analyzes Carrie's representation as a working subject field, deeming Carrie's career as an actress more than "sheer make-believe" and in fact rooted in a "real-world model" of working women (180). Laura Hapke demonstrates that Dreiser frequently isolates his female working characters from the "worker culture" that truly defined the "feminine work experience" (

"Men Strike, Women Stitch: Gendered Labor Worlds in Dreiser's Social Protest Art,"

in

Theodore Dreiser and American Civilization

, ed. Yoshinobu Hakutani [

Newark

:

Univ. of Delaware Press

,

2000

], p.

113

).

6. Elizabeth Boyle'due south recent analysis of Wharton'southward "Bunner Sisters" through the lens of the department shop consumption indicates exciting work near the cultural context these vast retail establishments can offer to reading contemporaneous literature (

"'Becoming a Part of Her Innermost Being': Gender, Mass-Product, and the Development of Department Shop Culture in Edith Wharton'due south 'Bunner Sisters,'"

American Literary Realism

,

47

[Jump

2015

],

203

–

18

). I would like to suggest here that focusing our critical attention on the workforce, rather than consumerism, that sustains these stores can reveal an invisible category of labor and highlight the claiming of reconciling consumer indulgence with the need for labor reform.

7. January Whitaker,

Service and Way: How the American Department Shop Fashioned the Middle Class

(

New York

:

St. Martin's

,

2006

), p.

32

.

10. Dreiser,

Sister Carrie: The Pennsylvania Edition

(

Philadelphia

:

Univ. of Pennsylvania Press

,

1981

), p.

55

. Department store wages varied depending on a number of factors, including particular position, worker feel, hours employed, and quality of the shop itself. Whereas historian Susan Porter Benson locates a Boston saleswoman's weekly salary at $vi.20 in 1880 and $7.15 in 1908 (

Counter Cultures: Saleswomen, Managers, and Customers in American Department Stores, 1890–1949

[

Urbana

:

Univ. of Illinois Press

,

1988

], pp.

301

–

04

), both Alice Woodbridge's

"Report on the Condition of Working Women in New York Retail Stores"

(

New York

:

Freytag

,

1893

) and Louise Bowen's Chicago written report from 1911 (

"The Department Store Girl: Based Upon Interviews with 200 Girls"

[

Chicago

:

Juvenile Protective Association of Chicago

,

1911

]) denounce the depression wages of department store shopgirls, claiming they do not constitute a living wage. In her contemporaneous fiction, Lurana Sheldon places the salary at a lower quality department store between $4 and $5 per calendar week (

For Humanity'south Sake, New York Weekly

, 29 Dec

1900

through ix March

1901

). An 1899 article testifies to these varied statistics, lamenting, "Information technology is non possible to obtain trustworthy statistics as to the wages paid in department stores" (William Handy,

"The Department Store in the West,"

Arena

,

22

[September

1899

],

320

).

11. Despite Dreiser's reputation for beingness sloppy in his linguistic communication choices, his variations in usage here, I debate, speak to a more than deliberate reluctance to specify a coherent identity for the department store shopgirl.

12. Dreiser,

Sis Carrie: The Pennsylvania Edition

, p.

17

.

xiii. Dreiser,

Sis Carrie: The Pennsylvania Edition

, p.

55

.

14. Dreiser,

Sister Carrie: The Pennsylvania Edition

, p.

98

.

15. Quoted in Nancy Barrineau, ed.

Theodore Dreiser's Ev'ry Month

(

Athens

:

Univ. of Georgia Printing

,

1996

), p.

192

(emphasis mine).

16. See Parrington and Kazin. Jerome Loving connects Dreiser's later on writing about labor to his developing political behavior, linking Dreiser's increasing socialist sympathies in the 1920s to his portrayal of Clyde Griffiths every bit "a victim of social and economical forces beyond his command" in An American Tragedy (

The Last Titan: A Life of Theodore Dreiser

[

Berkeley

:

Univ. of California Press

,

2005

], p.

298

). In 1945 Dreiser officially joined the American Communist Party (397).

17. In 1899, Dreiser published an article indicating his encouragement on the prospects of sweatshop workers. In

"It Pays to Treat Workers Generously"

(

Success

, xvi September

1899

, pp.

691

–

92

), the condition of the suffering, invisible underclass seems greatly brightened for Dreiser through the lens of John Patterson'south factory, aberrant as it may in fact take been. In fact, the purportedly dated, untenable conditions he describes in the shoe factory where Carrie works share much in common with the department store working conditions in 1899 outlined in Annie MacLean's revealing

"Two Weeks in Department Stores"

(

American Journal of Folklore

4

[May

1899

],

721

–

41

).

18. Fleissner persuasively reads Carrie's job equally an actress in New York as a historically realistic and legitimate form of work (pp.

180

–

81

).

20. Dreiser,

Sister Carrie: The Pennsylvania Edition

, p.

106

.

21. Dreiser's representation of women's work remains consistent in subsequent novels. In her assay of female labor in Dreiser'southward work, Hapke notes that Jennie Gerhardt'southward task washing laundry receives the same distanced treatment of female labor seen in Sister Carrie. This "decoupling [of] women and work" (110) extends, I would argue, even to An American Tragedy (

1925

), where Roberta's position at Griffiths Collar & Shirt Company functions more every bit a marker of her class identity than as an occupation of physical labor for her.

22. Yoshinobu Hakutani,

Selected Magazine Articles of Theodore Dreiser: Life and Fine art in the American 1890s

(

Rutherford

:

Fairleigh Dickinson Univ. Printing

,

1985

), p.

131

.

24. Robert Elias,

Theodore Dreiser: Apostle of Nature

(

Ithaca

:

Cornell Univ. Press

,

1970

), p.

100

.

27. Hakutani, p.

33

; Elias, p.

100

.

28. Lest we aspect Dreiser's optimism most department store work to Carrie rather than to Dreiser, numerous historical records indicate that shopgirl labor at the plow of the century was plagued with difficulty. Accounts of the era from the Working Women'due south Society of New York (run across Woodbridge's report) as well as Annie MacLean's "Two Weeks in a Department Store" illustrate widespread problems with living wages and exploitation. These studies outline low wages, long hours, filthy conditions, and physical pains and exhaustion. At the very least, the timely issues raised in journalism and in popular fiction, such as Sheldon's For Gold or Soul, were accurate representations of existent problems with department store piece of work that Dreiser's novel disregards.

29. In this way, Dreiser does inject Carrie's plot with a kind of romanticism. Though I trace this lack of realism to Dreiser'southward ain oversight in shopgirl labor weather every bit opposed to patterns in his diction, my reading aligns with Sandy Petrey'southward conclusion that the Carrie plotline of the novel lacks the realism attributed to the Hurstwood sections (

"The Language of Realism, The Linguistic communication of False Consciousness: A Reading of Sister Carrie,"

Novel

,

10

[Winter

1977

],

101

–

13

).

thirty. Sexual exploitation, as well, appears in Susan Lenox and in numerous literary representations of shopgirl labor as another form of the various indignities (also including low wages for difficult labor and invisibility to the consuming classes) to which shopgirls are subjected.

Copyright 2016 past the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois

2016

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