6 - Dreiser, class, and the home

Summary

Despite a remarkable decline from middle-class respectability to ignominious death in a Bowery flop house, George Hurstwood represents something of a typical figure in the twentieth-century American novel. With the character of Hurstwood, Theodore Dreiser identified white middle-class male experience with profound spiritual alienation and located the source of its problems not in the conventional places of metropolitan modernity - the street, the department store, the hotel - but rather within the putative bastion against the destabilizing forces of modernity: the home. Sister Carrie anticipates an important but neglected tradition of domestic writing by and about men, in which the affluent house owner is understood to possess a material shelter but to lack a proper spiritual refuge; he is, in other words, effectively “homeless.” In contrast with the representations of nineteenth-century domestic alienation explored by feminist literary scholars such as Nina Baym and Lora Romero, in which masculine identity is understood to depend on the rejection of the woman-centered domestic ideal, their twentieth-century counterparts highlight the sense of loss that accompanies the failure of this ideal for the middle class.