In the late 19th century, young women began to renounce the rigid gender roles of the Victorian era, dissociating themselves from the inflexible differentiations of the domestic and public spheres, and ultimately notions of motherhood. Countless young women arrived daily at the train stations of major cities, each of them cut off from their families, struggling for their personal fortunes, seeking material happiness and a satisfying life in seemingly conducive environments. Popularly described as a "drifting woman", as she is described in the work of Joanne Meyerowitz, or, as in the latest scientific works, as a "new woman", she was however incapable of going from rags to riches and had to often live in poor living conditions (xvii). The American dream therefore remained just another great myth born with the emergence of the consumer society. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned”?Get the original essay Theodore Dreiser's first novel, Sister Carrie, published in 1900, closely follows the aforementioned development and expands on the image of “new” independent and liberated. woman". Yet Dreiser's portrayal does not remain one-dimensional; he focuses not only on Carrie and her immoral struggle for material wealth, but also develops into a triple illustration of the liberated woman. Besides the flat and rather objectionable protagonist by Dreiser, Carrie, it also introduces the subculture of the vast majority of rather unhappy sweatshop girls and, in the second third of the novel, with Mrs. Hurstwood, an irresistibly liberated wife who - with the unconscious support of the femme fatale Carrie — jostles her unfaithful husband in a “crisis of masculinity” (Gammel 77), Dreiser critically discusses the perception of the “adrift woman,” rejects the apparent social domination of the male gender. and demonstrates the fatal twists and turns of immorality and insatiable desire With the introduction of the novel's protagonist, Carrie, Dreiser presents a notorious depiction of the liberated young woman, which aroused objection from contemporary critics and readers. Because how could any writer dare to tell the apparently successful story of the American dream, realized by an immoral and sexualizing woman who lacks a real personality? Yet Dreiser does not hide the materialistic success of Carrie, his cunning and imitative "new wife" who has completely given in to the "cunning tricks" of the city (SC 1), is a victim of the consumer society and lives a life of desire and desire. lie. Despite all the obvious criticism, Dreiser remains relatively passive in his judgment, as his protagonist thrives and evolves to become a notable figure in the fictional society of New York; Carrie becomes financially independent through her ingenious imitation skills, not through any extraordinary intellect. Having unknowingly exploited and ultimately destroyed one of her wealthy lovers, Carrie's insatiable lust ultimately threatens to devour her. Upon meeting Ames, Dreiser's almost surrealist idealist, a sudden awareness of the non-tangible and non-material things in life is evoked in Carrie, imbuing her mind with a psychological emptiness. “Know then,” Dreiser begins his farewell to the melancholy and depressed Carrie, “that for you this is neither excess nor contentment. In your rocking chair, near your window, dreaming, for a long time, alone […], you will dream of a happiness that you will perhaps never feel” (SC 487). For Dreiser, only “drifting women”, honest and hardworking, are certainly capable of achieving happiness in life,while they will almost certainly fail to achieve Carrie's material happiness. Living the American dream, Dreiser suggests, is therefore reduced to bodily satisfaction – and will never produce emotional pleasure. Directly juxtaposed with Carrie – and somewhat closely related – are the sweatshop girls of Chicago, the vast majority of "drifting women", who own nothing material, and yet are far wealthier. Working hard in miserable conditions, extremely poor, and “[complying] with machine discipline” (Fleissner 16), they represent everything that Carrie is not. With this confrontation of two unequal societal forces, Dreiser explicitly examines the myth of the American dream. Because these young, liberated and hard-working women have little chance of accessing materialistic wealth and will, like so many others, lead a life of poverty at the lowest social level. Oddly enough, Carrie knows these poor girls from the group to which she once belonged: “She knew that on this very day in Chicago, the same factory was full of poor, modestly dressed girls who worked in long lines in front of noisy machines; that at noon they would eat a miserable lunch in half an hour; that Saturday they would come together, as they did when she was one of them, and accept the small wage for work a hundred times harder than she was doing now” (SC 441). Ultimately, there are several reasons why sweatshop girls will never succeed like Carrie: most notably, the majority of them lack Carrie's imitative and adaptive skills; Furthermore, they are not as susceptible to the "tricks" of consumer society as Carrie, and even if they are, they dismiss reluctant desires as illusions. Bringing these traits together, the vast majority of Dreiser's "new women" possess a much more authentic personality than Carrie's, true to herself, supported by acquired virtues, religion or the simple desire to be a good person. These hypotheses consolidate considerations regarding Carrie's imperfect and fragmented identity, confirming that these different natures lead to very diverse fates in life at the turn of the century, thus making Carrie the winner of the purely mundane Darwinist struggle in the universe. Dreiser's naturalist, the only woman soul to discover the dark sides of the American dream. Where does Mrs. Hurstwood, Dreiser's third representation of the liberated female gender, fit as wife and mother? Her image departs somewhat from the commonly used "drifting woman", since she is presented to the reader as a sedentary wife, mother of two children in a wealthy and sovereign household of House Hurstwood - therefore as a woman living already the dream that others aspire to, while being dependent on her husband, who operates in the public and masculine sphere of society. It is worth mentioning that unlike today, husbands committing adultery were generally tolerated, but silently, since wives were financially and socially dependent on their sole source of income (Gammel 77). Yet she frees herself from rigid expectations, because when she discovers her husband's affair, she advises her lawyer and files for divorce. Even though Mrs. Hurstwood seems to belong to the Victorian representation of the classic wife, she emancipates herself as the prototype of the modern liberated woman who no longer obeys the so-called dominant male. When one assumes that the notion of the American Dream is an idea somewhat associated with male power, Mrs. Hurstwood, in her liberating progress, deals the first blow to the first idea, exemplified by George Hurstwood's hesitation. After the next scene,., 1992.