Tall Midget wrote:
Sister Carrie is a masterpiece of literary experimentalism, re-working the conventions of the 19th-century sentimental novel to contend with the problems of nascent urban proletarianization and pervasive inequality. Carrie survives the brutality of industrial capitalism not by transcending capitalist structures (as in a Horatio Algier story), but by completely surrendering to them, instrumentalizing her emotional life to become a theatrical "star". The irony of Carrie's rise to fame, then, is that while it provides her with financial security, it does not lead her to a full realization of her individuality because the necessary precondition of stardom--or the apparent triumph of select individuals and individualism itself--is the commodification of personality. This process, in turn, reduces individuals from people to things, even if they are talking things not unlike the fetishized goods that seductively whisper to Carrie in the retail palaces of America's new mass culture. While Carrie avoids the hardships of life as a factory girl, she cannot escape the logic of capitalism itself, remaining an object to be consumed by the audiences who claim temporary ownership of her by purchasing tickets to her performances.
I'm finally getting around to
Sister Carrie this weekend on this recommendation.
_________________
Molly Lambert wrote:
The future holds the possibility to be great or terrible, and since it has not yet occurred it remains simultaneously both.
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