“A Very Imposing Procession:” Wealth as Religion in Sister Carrie Anonymous College

The Dream is different every time—a sparkling skyline framed in the glass panes of a downtown penthouse, a rambling, ivy-adorned mansion in the countryside, a cheery bungalow by the sea. There is only one thing that never changes: it’s yours. Or, it will be, after that promotion, bonus, or inheritance from a distant aunt. The Dream is ever-attainable, ever just around the corner. No one understood this better than Theodore Dreiser, who, like many, waited for it all his life. It is fitting, then, that the eponymous main character of Sister Carrie is still waiting at the end of novel, even after she has supposedly gained all the trappings of a rich life. Though Sister Carrie is famously secular, the traditional position of God in the novel is taken by wealth, which is Dreiser’s critique of American worship of money; this becomes evident through the use of personification, religious language, and the presence of ritual. As a framework, this paper employs the theory of consumption presented in chapter four of Jean Baudrillard’s The Consumer Society: Myths and Structures, which posits in part that the myth of egalitarian salvation once promised by religion is now instead embodied by wealth and its accompanying ability to consume. In...