“Onward, Onward”: Sister Carrie and the Railroad

Abstract

This paper argues that Theodore Dreiser's Sister Carrie (1900) is governed by a distinctly mechanical form of determinism. Through the characters of Drouet, Carrie, and Hurstwood, Dreiser demonstrates the train's instrumentality in transforming America from a series of rural, local economies to a commodity-based economy and, finally, to an economy of signs increasingly divorced from the material circumstances of production and even from products themselves. This economic trajectory manifests itself in a system of narrative determinism: in the world of the novel, actions are determined not solely by free will, or even by biology, but by a combination of these forces and those of the technological-economic system.