ABSTRACT

This chapter turns to the works of a series of writers—Theodore Dreiser, Stephen Crane, George Moore, Edith Wharton, and George Gissing—whose narratives show fewer signs of mechanical disorder than those of Hardy, Norris, and Zola. In these novels, the social environment operates like a monstrous machine, and the narratives that represent it relentlessly expose their own aesthetic effects as mechanical in origin: In Sister Carrie, the heroine begins her career as an actress in the shoe factory, enslaved to the machinery responsible for the stuff of her eventual material well-being; in Maggie, the title character begins in the collar-and-cuff factory, churning out the materials of an illusory feminine glamor to which she later succumbs as a prostitute; in Wharton’s The House of Mirth and Moore’s A Mummer’s Wife, Lily and Kate confront, in the millinery and draper’s shop, the stifling conditions of their own bourgeois finery; and in Gissing’s New Grub Street, Marian feels herself turned into a writing machine by the literary trade responsible for producing the novel itself. Operating on their heroines with the unrelenting tenacity of the machines to which they are subjected, these novels insist upon their own implication in the man-made, mechanically determined circumstances they represent.