Introduction

Women’s Work: The Bildungsromance of Theodore Dreiser’s <em>Sister Carrie</em>

“…26 Dreiser, a sceptical apprentice of Émile Zola's naturalism, 27 substitutes literary fate for material causality and socioeconomic "forces" (Dreiser's fondest idiom). 28 These forces not only govern the lives of the principal characters of the Bildungsroman through the economic unconscious built into the contextual mainframe of the novel; these fractured subjects all the more embody these forces. Chicago's exterior material conditions both govern and mirror the characters' interior lives and guide their emotional responses to phenomena and stimuli.…”