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Gaslight and Magic Lamp in Sister Carrie

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 December 2020

Hugh Witemeyer
Hugh Witemeyer*
Affiliation:
University of California, Berkeley
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Abstract

Dreiser drew heavily upon his youthful experience of the theater in creating his first novel. His characters are as foolishly enamored of the false glamor and factitious realities of the stage as he himself had once been. By the time he wrote Sister Carrie, however, he had achieved a mature perspective and control which allowed him to use the theater for his own artistic purposes. He characterizes his heroine's fantasy life by showing how she constantly associates the stage (gaslight) with Aladdin's treasure cave (magic lamp). At the same time he emphasizes the inadequacy of these fantasies by creating a network of ironic parallels between the plays his characters attend or act in, and their actual situations in his story. The most elaborate of these ironies involves Augustin Daly's Under the Gaslight, the play-within-the-play which gives Carrie her first taste of acting. The reactions of Dreiser's three principal characters to Daly's play offer a suggestive paradigm of their general psychology throughout the novel—a sadly immature, almost infantile, psychology.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 86 , Issue 2 , March 1971 , pp. 236 - 240
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1971

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References

Note 1 in page 240 The “motif of the Arabian Nights” in Sister Carrie is discussed by William Phillips in “The Imagery of Dreiser's Novels,” PMLA, 78 (Dec. 1963), 527–85. Phillips argues that it is the most constant of Dreiser's image-patterns, and also gives an excellent analysis of An American Tragedy in these terms. No one has yet described the extent to which the romance motif of a knight penetrating and conquering a walled and wealthy city governs Dreiser's language and use of settings in Sister Carrie.

Note 2 in page 240 Dawn: A History of Myself (New York: H. Liveright, 1931), pp. 360–64.

Note 3 in page 240 Sister Carrie, Modern Library ed. (New York: Random House, 1927), p. 179. This edition is printed from the plates of the first edition (New York: Doubleday and Page, 1900), so that subsequent page references in the text of the present essay will apply to both. As Vrest Orton notes, “these same plates were used, from first to last, by six different publishers, to print six different issues of the book” (Dreiseriana: A Book About His Books, New York: Stratford Press, 1929, p. 19).

Note 4 in page 240 Dawn, p. 363.

Note 5 in page 240 Dreiser's subsequent descriptions of Lola are nearly all governed by this initial martial image. She is the “blue-eyed soldier” (pp. 435, 504) and she conducts “lightsome tourneys with the gay youths” (p. 507).

Note 6 in page 240 The song is sung by a chorus of schoolgirls “eighteen and under.” Carrie is eighteen at the beginning of the novel. Dreiser remembered seeing The Mikado done in Evansville “with a chorus of two girls only!” (Dawn, p. 360). Marjorie Morningstar achieves her first theatrical success in a Hunter College production of The Mikado, and the title of her major song (“My object all sublime”) becomes a leading ironic leitmotif in. the novel as a whole.

Note 7 in page 240 Augustin Daly, Under the Gaslight: A Totally Original and Picturesque Drama of Life and Love in These Times, in Five Acts, Author's Ed., French's Standard Drama, No. CCCLXXVII (New York and London: Samuel French, 1867).