Gender as Performance in Sister Carrie and The House of Mirth

Introduction: Parallel Morals in Two Novels

Theodore Dreiser's 1900 novel Sister Carrie is in style and tone radically different in many ways from Edith Wharton's The House of Mirth, published just five years later. And yet there is in both works a similar core — what might be called a parallel moral — for both novels explore the ways in which gender is performative in the societies depicted within each. While gender is in many ways what we are born with, it is also, just as clearly for these two writers (as it would be for any anthropologist), part of the performance of self: the way in which each person in these books presents herself or himself both to the world at large and internally. Both novels allow their authors to tell a compelling story while simultaneously exploring the gender roles expected of men and women in the last years of nineteenth-century American society. This paper examines how Dreiser and Wharton each interrogate and manipulate ideas about femininity and masculinity, and the ways in which their characters perform their gender in these two tales.

Wharton's novel presents us with the downward social — and psychological — spiral of Lily Bart, our well-born but penniless heroine, who begins the novel as a guest in various luxurious homes but ends — dead of a sleeping-draft overdose — in a poor boarding house. Lily, raised to be the ornament on a man's arm, never finds the man that society would have her be defined by. Her inability to conceive of herself as an agent — combined with her gambling debts, which we might from our twenty-first-century vantage point read as a kind of crying out to be rescued by a man — ensures her self-destruction. She is not, in the end, capable of performing the role of a woman alone, a part that her society saw as quite unnecessary.

The character of Carrie is different from Lily in many ways. This innocent country girl, as Dreiser presents her, comes to Chicago and finds poverty and loneliness — but also a man willing to rescue her. She is later "rescued" again by a wealthy, married man, George Hurstwood, who effectively embezzles money to take her to New York, where Carrie becomes a successful actress even as Hurstwood himself falls into despair and suicide. Lily combines the trajectories of both Hurstwood and Carrie, which makes her story the sadder of the two. But Carrie, too, is unhappy, and Dreiser — like Wharton — suggests that it is impossible for women to be happy in a society in which the presentation of self as a woman is always, to use Erving Goffman's model, far less sincere than the self-presentation of men.

We should here elaborate Goffman's concept of the self as performance. Goffman contributed to twentieth-century — and now, of course, twenty-first-century — sociology an insistence on the usefulness of dramaturgical analysis to the human condition, yet he was also careful to note that such an analysis should be more literal than metaphorical. We are not so much players involved in great artistic works as working actors forced to do the best we can while operating within conditions set by those who came before us and those who hold more power than we do.

Goffman was interested in examining society from the perspective of the individual rather than that of the collective — a very micro-level approach — arguing that we should seek to understand human motivation and action as "the organization of experience — something that an individual actor can take into his mind — and not about the organization of society" (Stones 351).

Self as Performance

Goffman's value as a theoretician lies in the careful way he examines how we are shaped by social structures even as we try to change them to meet our own needs — and, when they cannot be changed, how we reshape our understanding of them so that they become significant and meaningful to us. Dreiser and Wharton are themselves offering — in the form of their characters and the ways in which those characters act — an analysis of the societies about which they write, presenting those societies as performances to be analyzed.

Especially in The House of Mirth, Wharton places the idiosyncratic qualities of each main character within a framework determined by the culturally and socially designated gender roles of her era (Elbert 258–60). Part of the reason she did so, we cannot help but think, is that she wished to demonstrate exactly how depressing — in large part because of how constrained — life was for women of all classes and temperaments.

One of the compelling aspects of this novel — and indeed of Wharton's work in general (Segalla 22–24) — is that Wharton has a deep understanding of the ways in which men, too, are constrained in her society. It is a common argument of twenty-first-century feminism that sexism harms both men and women, although this can be difficult to see clearly in our own time. However, it is quite easily seen in Wharton's depiction of American society before the Great War changed everything. The men in her fiction are constrained by the expectations of how men are supposed to present themselves; they cannot act as they wish, cannot be true to themselves, because to do so would violate social expectations. The conflicting demands of their own consciences and those social expectations can break men entirely. This capacity of public expectations of propriety to break the human spirit is a constant theme in Wharton's works and gives them their overall sense of grimness and realism (Caserio 193). Both Lily and Hurstwood are, in many ways, sacrificed to the social ideals of a gender role that they are unfit to play.

The dominant themes of this work run throughout Wharton's opus as well as through Sister Carrie, though they are expressed with particular brilliance and clarity in The House of Mirth. Major themes in Wharton's work include the effects of class on both behavior and consciousness (divorce, for example, often horrifies the established upper class as much for its offense against taste as for its violation of moral standards); the American belief in progress as actual and good; the contrast between European and American customs, morality, and sensibility; the confinement of marriage, especially for women; women's desire for and right to freedom in general, and particularly sexual and economic freedom, and the reality that this desire and right are usually thwarted; the preference of powerful, white, typically upper-class men for childish, dependent women; and the complexity and pain of relationships between women within patriarchal culture, including rivalry and animosity among women.

The world that Wharton and Dreiser present in these two novels is one in which the geography of the big city — whether Chicago or New York — is divided very clearly into gendered spaces. In this world, men are responsible for everything that lies beyond the front door, while women are confined to — and responsible for — domestic, interior spaces. Women in this world are supposed to be intellectually weak and socially, economically, and politically powerless, and so Lily fits the model of how a woman is supposed to behave.

Gendered Spaces and Social Constraint

But women are also supposed to marry — for the purpose of bearing children — and thus to expose themselves to the physical dangers of childbirth, a contradiction that goes generally unremarked upon in Victorian American society, as Ammons (1980) argues. It was only in those rare cases in which a woman's own desires happened to mesh with her assigned social roles that she could escape the trap that ensnares both Lily and, to a lesser extent, Carrie (Herman 6).

The society in which Lily, Carrie, and Hurstwood live is one in which men are privileged as agents while women are designated as witnesses, as watchers. Much of the force of these plots — more so in Wharton's novel — derives from the fact that Lily and Carrie are the most forceful personalities in their stories, yet rather than having their strength of personality rewarded, they are simply punished for it because of their gender (Gill 20–22).

We see the embeddedness of gender in each character's sense of self, for example, on the very first page of Sister Carrie, where Dreiser introduces Carrie as a living embodiment of a certain kind of female — not a certain kind of person, but a certain kind of female:

"When a girl leaves her home at eighteen, she does one of two things. Either she falls into saving hands and becomes better, or she rapidly assumes the cosmopolitan standard of virtue and becomes worse. Of an intermediate balance, under the circumstances, there is no possibility. The city has its cunning wiles, no less than the infinitely smaller and more human tempter" (pp. 1–2).

Conclusion: Rebels Who Rebel Too Little

The House of Mirth and Sister Carrie never rise to the level of tragedy. This is not through any fault of Wharton's: this work is not a failed tragedy in any sense. Rather, she presents us with a story in which terrible things happen to people largely as a result of their own limitations. We sympathize with these characters to some extent because we understand that they are constrained by ideas about the proper behavior men and women of each class must abide by.