Pecuniary Emulation, Anomie, and the Alleged Metropolitan Conversion of Sister Carrie

Dreiser's Sister Carrie (1900) illustrates how a young girl internalizes modes of subjectivity favorable to a capitalist ecosystem. Urban spectacles of wealth and consumption inspire Carrie to rehearse and perform pecuniarily enhanced versions of herself. What Dreiser calls "the drag of desire" blurs the lines between the motive to outperform competitors in nature, to achieve reputability in society, to find happiness through consumption. Dreiser brilliantly distills scientific sociology's immutable natural laws into discrete social facts in the service of a farsighted and modern analysis of the city at the intersection of capitalist accumulation, demographic trends, class, and gender relations.