Sister Carrie is a bizarre book, obsessed with fashion, offering a clash between form and content.

Naturalism always revels in a preposterous sense of essentialism and determinism. Case in point: Theodore Dreiser’s heroine has an atavistic instinct for shopping. In fact, the obtrusive narration of Sister Carrie keeps making osten-tedious arguments about women and fashion. The whole sex is is accused of mindless consumption, passive complicity with capitalism, blah blah blah… I turn the pages and roll my eyes. While Carrie is herself an involuntary siren, singing men to their doom with the magic of her young body, she is repeatedly lured by the flattering calls of department stores and talking raiments, who empty her mind and her pockets.

Yet, something weirder slowly begins to creep into the text. The narration so aggrieved by Carrie’s propensity for window shopping reveals its own, discriminating taste for fine clothes. In picking apart Carrie’s outfit, it lays bare its encyclopedic knowledge of the latest fashions and its personal preferences. And it relishes every opportunity to compose flowing lists of garments, adorned in cascades of lavish and sensual details. Reading Sister Carrie is not so unlike perusing the pages of Harper’s Bazaar.

The narrative voices of naturalist novels are strange Cassandras. They hang above the characters, godlike, and observe them as some many ants squirming on a dirty floor. From this august situation, they deliver judgments with the clean allure of neutrality. It is the posture of the modern scientist, standing outside and above his experiment.

Sister Carrie‘s narration, however, opens itself to contamination. It exposes its vulnerable flesh to the vices gnawing at the characters; it adopts their manias. Dreiser was reportedly the model for Carrie’s sensual intelligence and lack of formal education. His sister, who unhappily eloped with a married man, provided the plot. This time, there is no cordon sanitaire between the experimenter and his mice. Nothing human is alien to this narrator.

Accordingly, fashion drives the story.