Gaslight and Magic Lamp in Sister Carrie

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.

The electrification of the body at the turn of the century

“…In contrast, Carrie's ability to (as one critic puts it) 'electrify' her audience, and ultimately to turn her talent into a commodified product, a 'name in lights', signals the liberation of the powers of desire from the domestic sphere in which Drouet and Hurstwood wish to confine it, and its deployment in the market-place. 18 The 'flare of the gas jets' is part of the evocation of 'theatre' in the amateur production (p. 176), but the building itself is described as lit up in a paragraph which aligns it with the nearby 'brightly lighted shops', anticipating the later proclamation of Carrie's name 'in incandescent fire' on Broadway (p. 493). Hurstwood, in contrast, ends with only 'a small gas jet' (p. 499); he dies by that outmoded technology whose passing -and whose obsolescence in the scheme of modern desire -the novel registers.…”