At the end of the 19th century, young women began to renounce the rigid gender roles of the Victorian era, disassociating themselves from the inflexible differentiations between domestic and public spheres and, ultimately, from notions of motherhood. Countless young women arrived every day at the train stations of large cities, each of them cut off from their families, struggling for their personal fortunes, seeking material happiness and a fulfilled life in seemingly auspicious environments. Popularly called the “adrift woman”, as described in the work of Joanne Meyerowitz, or, as in the latest academic work, the “new woman”, however, she has not been able to go from rags to riches, and quite he often had to dwell in poor living conditions (xvii). The American dream therefore remained just another great myth that arose with the emergence of the consumer society. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an original essay Theodore Dreiser's debut novel, Sister Carrie, published in 1900, closely follows the above development and elaborates the image of the "new" independent and liberated woman. However, Dreiser's portrayal does not remain one-dimensional; it focuses not only on Carrie and her immoral struggle for material wealth, but also develops into a three-fold illustration of the liberated woman. Aside from the flat and rather questionable protagonist Carrie, Dreiser also presents the subculture of the vast majority of girls rather unfortunate of the sweatshops and, in the second third of the novel, with Mrs. Hurstwood an irresistibly liberated wife who - with the unconscious support of the femme fatale Carrie - pushes her unfaithful husband into a “crisis of masculinity” (Gammel 77). of his novel, Dreiser critically discusses the perception of the "adrift woman", rejects the apparent social dominance of the male gender and shows the fatal meander of immorality and insatiable desire. With the introduction of the novel's protagonist Carrie, Dreiser presents an infamous depiction of the liberated young woman, which caused objections from critics and contemporary readers alike. How could any writer dare to tell the seemingly successful story of the American Dream, achieved by an immoral, sexualizing woman with no genuine personality? Yet Dreiser does not hide the materialistic success of Carrie, his cunning and imitative “new woman” who has completely succumbed to the “wiles” of the city (SC 1), falls victim to consumer society and lives a life of desire and falsehood. Despite all the obvious criticisms, Dreiser remains relatively passive in his judgment, as his protagonist thrives and evolves into a notable figure of fictional New York society; Carrie becomes financially independent because of her ingenious imitation skills and not because of an extraordinary intellect. After unknowingly exploiting and ultimately destroying one of her wealthy lovers, Carrie's insatiable desire ultimately threatens to devour her. After meeting Ames, Dreiser's almost surreal idealist, a sudden awareness of the intangible and non-material things of life is evoked in Carrie, suffusing her mind with a psychological void. “Know then,” begins Dreiser in his farewell to the melancholy and depressed Carrie, “that for you he is neither satiated nor content. In your rocking chair, by the window dreaming, you will wish, alone […], you will dream of a happiness that perhaps you will never feel” (SC 487). For Dreiser, only "adrift women", honest and hardworking, are certainly able to achieve happiness in life, while they will almost certainly not be able to achieveCarrie's material happiness. Living the American dream, Dreiser suggests, is therefore reduced to physical satisfaction and will never produce emotional pleasure. Directly juxtaposed to Carrie – and in some ways closely related – are the exploitative girls of Chicago, the vast majority of “women adrift.” Who own nothing material, yet are much richer. Toiling in miserable, excruciatingly poor conditions and “[conforming] to the discipline of machines” (Fleissner 16), they represent everything that Carrie is not. With this comparison between two unequal social forces, Dreiser explicitly examines the myth of the American dream. These liberated, working young women have little chance of achieving materialistic wealth and, like so many others, will lead a life of poverty at the lowest levels of society. Especially, Carrie is aware of these poor girls to whose group she once belonged: “She knew that just today in Chicago the same factory room was full of poor, simply dressed girls working in long lines in front of noisy machines; that at noon they would eat a miserable lunch in half an hour; that Saturday they would gather, as when she was one of them, and accept the small pay for work a hundred times harder than what she did now” (SC 441). Ultimately, there are a few reasons why exploitation girls will never succeed like Carrie did: most notably, most of them don't have Carrie's imitation and adaptation skills; furthermore, they are not as susceptible to the “wiles” of consumer society as Carrie is, and even if they are, they dismiss reluctant desires as delusions. Putting these traits together, the broad mass of Dreiser's “new women” possess a much more genuine personality than Carrie's, true to herself, supported by acquired virtues, religion, or the simple desire to be a good person. These assumptions consolidate considerations regarding Carrie's imperfect and fragmented identity, confirming that these different natures lead to very different destinies in life at the turn of the century, thus making Carrie the winner of the purely worldly Darwinist struggle in Dreiser's naturalist universe, the only woman soul to experience the dark sides of the American dream. Where does Mrs. Hurstwood, Dreiser's third representation of the liberated female gender, fit in as a wife and mother? Her image diverges somewhat from the commonly used expression of the "adrift woman", as she is presented to the reader as a stable wife, mother of two children in a wealthy family and domestic ruler of the Hurstwood family - therefore as a woman who already she lives the dream to which others aspire, but which depends on her husband, who moves in the public and male sphere of society. It must be said that, unlike today, husbands committing adultery were commonly but silently tolerated, as wives were financially and socially dependent on their sole source of income (Gammel 77). Yet she frees herself from rigid expectations, because when she discovers her husband's affair, she consults her lawyer, asking for a divorce. Although Mrs. Hurstwood seems to belong to the Victorian representation of the classical wife, she emancipates herself by becoming a prototype of the liberated modern woman who no longer obeys the supposedly dominant male. When one assumes that the notion of the American dream is an idea somehow associated with male power, Mrs. Hurstwood, in her liberating progress, deals the first blow to the previous idea, which is illustrated by the wavering George Hurstwood. After the next scene, the latter's collapse is made imminent and inevitable: “I'm not telling you anything,” [Mrs., 1992.