Cities, he notes again and again, are magnets—and thus social laboratories—for all sorts of people looking to improve their lot. In the 1890s, Chicago’s expansion accelerated at a frenzied pace; new buildings sprang up on every block. The cocky city seemed to offer unprecedented opportunities for success to those who could ride the crest of this wave. In the first half of Sister Carrie, the lower rungs of the social hierarchy—the factory workers and the large armies of the unemployed, the ill, the petty criminals, the unassimilated immigrants, and the poor unable to fend for themselves—lurk in the shadows of Dreiser’s canvas. But in the second half, when economic distress spreads hunger and despair across New York City, they occupy more of the foreground.

Into this volatile urban atmosphere steps Carrie Meeber, a naive, wide-eyed wayfarer from a small town in Wisconsin, eager to escape the boring parochialism of her upbringing. She has no marketable skills to win the notice of prospective employers—she is morbidly shy and afraid of rebuffs—and she possesses little more to distinguish her than a pretty face and a trim figure. A brief taste of her sister’s narrow existence, all toil and no pleasure, and of the monotony of factory work distresses her. Privation staring her in the face, she is “rescued” by Drouet, a “drummer” (traveling salesman) who had befriended her on the train from Wisconsin. A glib, good-natured egotist who enjoys the company of women and flirts in a style of superficial gallantry, Drouet coaxes her into letting him buy her a skirt, jacket, and hat at one of the glamorous new department stores and setting her up in a charming, airy flat. Carrie feels no passion for Drouet; what seduces her are the material things he lavishes on her: clothes, pleasant rooms looked after by a maid, dinners at brightly lit restaurants, evenings at the theater, and carriage rides through Lincoln Park.

When Hurstwood and Carrie meet, he woos her in a wily campaign to detach her from Drouet. Weak-willed and unworldly, Carrie cannot see through Hurstwood’s suave niceties; she is flattered by his solicitude, by the flowers he sends, clandestine meetings in the park, discreet love letters. She is mildly uneasy at their liaison, but her conscience does not nag at her. At Fitzgerald and Moy’s, a fancy saloon where he serves as manager, Hurstwood is adept at “small palaver” and bonhomie, his manners more polished than his rival Drouet’s. He knows when to drink with his customers and when to keep his distance. Dreiser describes this male preserve, another layer of social life in Chicago, in detail because it furnishes clues to Hurstwood’s character. Hurstwood delights in looking around the posh watering hole and watching boxing champ John Sullivan hold court at the bar, while in the back room, ward bosses drink whiskey, smoke cigars, gossip, tell risque stories, and cut (shady) deals. Hurstwood owns a piece of the American dream of success.

When Carrie wins plaudits in her stage debut before an audience of Masons, it is Hurstwood who, acting as impresario, brings a friendly claque to the amateur theatrical night. With consequences he cannot foresee, he boosts her self-esteem and plants in her mind the seed of the idea that she might have a career on the gilded stage. Throughout the novel, theater fuels in her a love of the limelight and of the magical “paraphernalia of disguise.” Carrie may seem like an implausible candidate to make a splash in the big city pond: At first, as a mere member of the chorus line, she is, Dreiser comments dryly, “absolutely nothing.” But her pert appearance soon lands her more substantial roles in trivial entertainments, and through a combination of luck and an appealing stage presence, she gradually rises into the empyrean of minor stardom. The gates of the walled city now swing open to admit her as one of the privileged. As Carrie Madenda, her name appears in gossip column squibs, and her face is prominently displayed on flyers and theatrical placards, and in the glossy brochures the publicity mills print. But while she takes pleasure in what money buys her—a suite in the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel, a carriage to take her to and from the theater, elegant frocks hanging in her closet, adulation—her inner life alters in only small ways. She is glad to have sloughed off the identity of a “servile petitioner,” but her fantasies of happiness lie beyond her grasp to fulfill. When the idealist Ames criticizes the creaky dramatic vehicles she plays in as popular rot of the times built to hackneyed formulas, Carrie earnestly “longs for that which is better.” She grows smart enough to brush off the sycophants and gigolos who send her mash notes and promise her the moon; she appreciates refinement and “the force of a superior man” like Ames, a cool moralist and occasional mentor, who observes the Gilded Age’s excesses without being disordered by them. But he ventures no romantic approach toward her, as if she is a curious, if sympathetic, victim and specimen of the zeitgeist’s skewed values. Wishing to improve herself culturally, Carrie takes his recommendation that she read Balzac’s Père Goriot. But she cannot escape her fate of permanent loneliness.

Carrie is a pitiable, not a tragic character. She lacks dimension, an active will, a daring imagination, and a reasoning faculty that might lead her to spiritual enlightenment. In the novel, she is bruised by experience, but never smitten by a passion, love, or moral betrayal that shakes her to the core of her being, as, say, Isabel Archer is in Portrait of a Lady. Dreiser originally ended Sister Carrie with Hurstwood’s suicide, but he decided to add a coda that sums up Carrie’s emotional impasse—and his verdict. Although pitying “the blind strivings of her heart,” he condemns her to pursue “that halcyon day when she should be led forth among dreams become real” (p. 445).