Contenu
"In the opening sentences of Theodore Dreiser's Sister Carrie (1900), eponymous protagonist Caroline Meeber boards the afternoon train from Columbia City, Wisconsin, to Chicago. She is heading for a city whose fame has fascinated her "since infancy." Sixty years before Carrie's journey, set in 1889, Chicago was a frontier outpost at the head of a portage route linking the Great Lakes to the Mississippi basin. It was home to a handful of Native Americans, French hommes des bois, frontier traders, and members of the Fort Dearborn garrison. Dreiser's late-1880s Chicago, on the contrary, is aweinspiring, the more so as it is not fully formed. Having recovered from the 1871 fire, it is, in Dreiser's conservative estimate, "a city of over 500,000, with the ambition ... of a metropolis of a million." As such, it acts upon its surroundings as "a giant magnet." Ominously, the metropolis's "roar of life, ... [and] vast array of human hives" breathe "falsehoods" into "the unguarded ear" of Midwesterners like Carrie herself. Dreiser's heroine is not the first literary migrant from the prairie hinterland to face what Hamlin Garland called the "appalling and unimaginable presence of Chicago." Dennis Fleet, Jr., in Edward Payson Roe's Barriers Burned Away (1872), one of the first Chicago novels, left his parents' prairie farm for the metropolis a few years before the great fire"--