Exam Prep: Question #1: Drama in Sister Carrie/Maggie

1.Two of the most important American naturalist novels, Sister Carrie and Maggie: A Girl of the Streets, are highly dramatic in their sense of place and staging, and both feature key dramatic performances in public spaces. Discuss the role that drama and performance play in each of these novels, and explain how the dramatic strands of these novels affect the authors shared desire to highlight social inequality and class issues.

In ways that will become clear almost immediately, Maggie and Sister Carrie are deeply different novels. Most of their similarities are superficial: they represent canonical naturalist novels by canonical male novelists that follow and are named for lower-class urban heroines who struggle to find a use for their uncommon beauty and talent. Of course, in another equally superficial way, these novels are highly different: Maggie is short even for a novella, whereas only An American Tragedy makes Sister Carrie look like a picture of restraint. But they do share an emphasis on the dramatic; in both Maggie and Sister Carrie, dramatic performances play a major role in the story and shape the interactions between the characters.

For Maggie, her first date with Pete is an escape from the miserable life of her apartment in the form of a trip to a music hall which mixed burlesque and musical performances, to the enormous delight of Maggie. But more important to Maggie than the musical performances are the cheap plays, all of which are described as having beautiful girls live as the wards of rich gentleman who have impure intentions; the girls are inevitably rescued by dashing young men whose primary action in the play is to rescue elderly strangers.

It is from these plays, and these plays alone, that Maggie gets her view of romance. Pete is transformed into one of the dashing young men who rescues the heroine, and Maggie herself becomes of course the girl in need of rescuing. But Maggie's understanding of her situation could hardly be more at odds with the facts of the case. The greatest dissimilarity is with her home life.

Ok, this isn't working, so breaking it down: 1.Maggie is inspired by the plays to read her life as a storybook romance.
2.However, the reality is that her romance is a play, but an entirely different one. It takes place in music halls of ill-repute, and there people are not judged on their moral fibre but their beauty. Thus Maggie is a succesful performer for atime, but eventually Pete sees his more beautiful ex, and Maggie is abandoned. In other words, she didn't play the part beautifully enough - she was lacking the requisite experience, makeup, and costume.
3.Maggie's home life is an inversion of the plays - she could not live in a slummier setting. But, just like the dance halls, it too is a performing space. Within the apartment, her mother's true colors come out; she destroys furniture and takes her rages out on everyone. When Maggie exits this space by spending a night out, she is condemned to hell by her mother, not for actually doing anything with Pete but merely for not spending the night there - the performance matters, not the action or intentions. And then the mother's true intentions go away when she moves to the public space: the tenement hallway. Here maggie's mother is the picture of morality, condemning Maggie to hell and wailing to her neighbors' of the unfairness of the situation in a way that Crane compares to a museum showman. It is also in this hallway where the book's final performance takes place: after Maggie's death, her mother does a call and response with the other busybodies in the apartment building, reiterating her sadness over Maggie's descent into hell and then finally, vocally, with the final words of the novel, "fergiving" the girl who she did not support in life. This ties in with Pizer's assertion that this is not really a naturalistic novel but rather one concerned with the hypocrisy of society - it's not necessarily environment that brings everyone down, but unrealistic "show morals"

Sister Carrie is not an inversion of the traditional damsel in distress is rescued by dashing young man kind of play, but simply a reordering of it. After all, although Dreiser makes it very clear with some late editorializing that Carrie will not find happiness simply by obtaining the object of her desire (ie fame and fortune) she does nevetheless achieve those things. And she achieves them, at successive terms, by playing the part correctly. The primary rewriting in this retelling of the story of young girl who makes good concerns the role of the prince. Carrie auditions two different princes, Drouet and Hurstwood, and both of them prove ultimately ineffectual. Drouet first wins her heart by simply being present and dandy, and he proves to be her first drama coach: he dresses her correctly and teaches her the correct mannerisms of a lady. Once Carrie starts playing the part of a higher-class woman, her success begins, when she literally begins performing in an amateur play which attracts her the attention of Hurstwood, a nightclub manager who is friends with Drouet but, by virtue of his higher social status, is able to steal Carrie and eventually flee and sham-marry her.

Carrie eventually casts off Hurstwood and rebuffs Drouet, because she reaches a point where her acting can sustain her. Like the heroine of the cheap play, she has made good. Her first steps involved performing in polite company; her later steps came from performing on stage, but either way she has created performances that captivate men and result in success. But, as I mentioned, Dreiser undercuts this final success in a number of ways. For starters, Hurstwood is not only not a handsome prince, he eventually becomes a suicide, ignored by Carrie. Not only does his miserable suicide provide a contrast to Carrie's success, it also makes it clear that Carrie's success is ultimately shallow and has made her unfit for human sympathy. And Dreiser makes clear that it is Carrie's status as a constant performer, always seeking out the correct behavior and best, most superficial finery, that has made an empty shell of her. Carrie, like Maggie, was lured to an unfortunate end by making real life into a peformance; in Maggie's case this performance is mostly forced upon her by others, while Carrie is an active participant in it. (and Ames suggests to her that true art is a way out - he represents possibly an another option, that Carrie misses)