ABSTRACT
Theodore Dreiser is the first American writer to view the abundant materialism of late nineteenth-century America from within the perspective of the have-nots. Dreiser exposed the enormous gulf between the conventions of orthodox morality and the realities of life as these were experienced by the urban masses in America. In Sister Carrie, perhaps more interestingly, it is the tragic disintegration of such a character that we witness and pity. In conventional moral terms, Carrie and Hurstwood are equally culpable, but Carrie's fortunes rise, while those of Hurstwood decline. For Whitman, freedom, democracy and the rights of man remained central to the meaning of America; for Dreiser such ideals have ceased to exist, swept away by the tide of an apparently scientific naturalism. In Dreiser's often clumsy hands, realism, by accident or design, became a tool for undermining the orthodox moral assumptions which still underpinned official, American culture.
