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The Language of Clothes in “Sister Carrie” by Theodore Dreiser

Article  in  The International Journal of the Book · January 2012

DOI: 10.18848/1447-9516/CGP/v09i03/36949

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The Language of Clothes in “Sister Carrie” by Theodore
Dreiser
Olivera Stankovic, SUNY Potsdam, New York, USA

Abstract: This study of Dreiser’s novel will focus on a semiotic approach to show the reader how
Dreiser’s delicate description of clothes signifies their multifaceted meaning, and the reader’s quest
for interpreting the language of clothes that convincingly narrates their own story on an individual’s
change amid economical circumstances. The clothes “speak” in multilingual language and influence
on the characters’ actions. Simultaneously, the clothes articulate to the reader a tapestry of meaningful
messages. The clothes of Dreiser’s characters represent symptoms of social inequality as well as a
desire for shaping and transforming their behaviours. As a semiotic theorist Marcel Danesi puts,
“clothing is a sign system that is interconnected with other social codes of a society through which
social variables such as attitudes, gender, age, class, status, and political beliefs can be encoded.”
The paper will analyse how clothes in the role of an independent narrator in Dreiser’s novels connects
the body experience to the body of material culture testifying Dreiser’s unconditional acceptance of
human beings with all their flaws and virtues, their expectations, and alienation from the world they
live in.

Keywords: Language, Clothes, Material Culture, Consumption, Signifier, Signified, Communication

When Caroline Meeber boarded the afternoon train in Chicago, her total outfit consisted
of a small trunk, a cheap imitation alligator-skin satchel, a small lunch in a paper box,
and a yellow leather snap purse, containing her ticket, a scrap of paper with her sister’s
address in Van Buren Street, and four dollars in money (Dreiser 1).

T
HIS EXAMPLE FROM the novel Sister Carrie signifies Theodore Dreiser’s pro-
found interest in the language of material things. He depicts them tirelessly in photo-
graphic detail. In a certain sense, Dreiser acts as a professional fashion designer in
the way he describes each accessory Carrie and other characters possess. He carefully
distinguishes Carrie’s lower social status by ‘zooming in’ on the very fabric of the clothes
she wears, comparing it with people who are financially better off than she is, such as her
first lover Drouet. Dreiser composes Drouet’s suit “of a striped and crossed pattern of brown
wool… The low crotch of the vest revealed a stiff shirt bosom of white and pink stripes…
The whole suit was rather tight-fitting, and was finished off with heavy-soled tan shoes,
highly polished, and the grey fedora hat” (3). By displaying Drouet’s modern and expensive
outfit, Dreiser makes Carrie “conscious of an inequality,” dressing her in “plain blue dress,”
that is old and “shabby,” matching the “worn state of her shoes” (4). Linguistically, Dreiser’s
description of the clothes is so convincing that it plays with the readers’ senses allowing
them to visualize a dynamic cinematic picture. Relying on Jean Baudrillard’s critique of
consumer society and system of sign systems, this study will focus on the meaning of clothes
in Dreiser’s Sister Carrie through semiotic analysis in order to show how Dreiser’s delicate

The International Journal of the Book

Volume 9, Issue 3, 2012, http://www.Book-Journal.com, ISSN 1447-9516
© Common Ground, Olivera Stankovic, All Rights Reserved, Permissions:
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THE INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF THE BOOK

description of clothes in his novel displays their multifaceted meaning, and the reader’s quest
for interpreting the language they speak.

Dreiser’s Journalism and the Meaning of Fashion in Sister Carrie

Despite the observation of a literary critic who claims that Dreiser, “tells of a common ex-
perience [of a young and poor girl], as too often the daily newspapers witness,” Dreiser’s
journalistic experience actually enhanced his knowledge of clothing and encouraged him to
present the reader the multilingual function of clothes (qtd. in Robertson 185). Some literary
critics neglected the fact that Dreiser’s experience in journalism gave him a unique perspective
of ordinary people providing him with firsthand knowledge of how they dress, their class
struggles, and reckless misadventures in an exploitive environment in which they had the
misfortune of living. As a journalist, Dreiser cultivated his strong and enthusiastic interest
in investigating and deciphering the signs of people’s slavery to material things and worldly
corruption of their spiritual values. By describing clothes and accessories the characters wear
or desire, Dreiser magnifies the destructive power of their massive consumption. He lays
out the stages of Carrie’s compulsive shopping for clothes that leads her to a dead end life
filled with unhappiness and despair.
His newspapers days were the first opportunity for Dreiser to write professionally, to de-
scribe people’s appearance and behavior in the street, offices, department’s stores, apartments,
restaurants, their ups and downs, turmoil, success, sacrifice, life and death. Besides their life
stories, Dreiser induces a powerful need to depict his characters’ clothes and their appealing
accessories by emphasizing how much these materials take part in everyday life, how long
these objects of mass production and consumption have had impact on shaping people’s
identity, and social acceptance, or exclusion.
Working as an editor-in chief for one of the most prestigious women’s fashion magazines
The Delineator in 1907, Dreiser learned a lot about clothes and fashion. His experience with
fashion enabled him to explore the clothes’ influence on people’s actions, decisions, failures,
and expectations. Consequently, he sympathized with the poor and their lack of the luxurious
things. Being himself raised in poverty, Dreiser also understood their compulsive desire for
the gain of material things and improvement of their social and economical situation. Sorting
out the quality of the fabric, garment, its purpose, expression, representation, perfidy and its
seduction, Dreiser offers a rich clothing vocabulary by enabling the reader to be actively
engaged in translation of the language of clothes into myriad meanings.

The Language of Clothes Translated by Semiotics

The language of clothes of Dreiser’s major protagonist Carrie speaks to the reader about her
lower socioeconomic conditions. Her “cheap imitation alligator-skin satchel,” in the example
mentioned above, does not tell a story of her lack of taste, but her willingness to blend in
and fulfill a metropolitan high requirement. It also describes her anticipation and fear of
poverty of her sister and family with whom she will stay for a while when she comes to
Chicago. The vocabulary of her clothes is restricted and situated in one social group: working
class. The clothes she wears at the same time allow the reader to predict Carrie’s further
actions such as window shopping. The small amount of money that she has in her purse re-
minds her on her limits, but also it fuels her vision of getting more of it to buy expensive

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clothes. Carrie’s shabby and worn clothes may announce her desire for the improving of her
living standard while she is observing nicely dressed people in the streets, department stores,
restaurants, and offices. As Paula Geys explains, “the clothes are useful primarily as indicators
(or in Veblen’s terms, as objects of pecuniary emulation) … of what Carrie is not, of her
class-bound status as a daughter of working-class parents” (419). The clothes play as actors
in a movie convincingly narrating their own story on an individual’s change amid econom-
ical circumstances. There is a sort of active reciprocate interaction between the subject, in
this case, a new consumer such as Carrie and the clothes she wants to buy so that the objects
(clothes), as Jean Baudrillard asserts, “become complex beings, and consequently purchasing
and consumption must have the same value as any human relation” (“The System of Objects”
15). The clothes speak in multilingual language and dictate the characters’ actions in their
hunt for a job, or love affair, or dream for success. Simultaneously, the clothes articulate a
tapestry of meaningful messages. The clothes of Dreiser’s characters represent symptoms
of social inequality as well as a desire for shaping and transforming their behaviors and
identity. Interestingly, Dreiser’s language of clothes offers to an ordinary reader a free access
to the exploration of conditions with the American culture due to a tremendous shift from
an agricultural to industrial age, from rural to urban configuration of citizens in the late
nineteenth century. By furnishing his novel with fancy or shabby clothes, dull or patent
leather shoes, cheap or expensive apartments and furniture, dirty factories or polished marble
offices, Dreiser paints an image of an economic and social imbalance reconciled in an insa-
tiable desire for mass consumption of material things. As a semiotic theorist Marcel Danesi
puts, “in the semiosphere, clothing is more than just bodily covering for protection. It is a
sign system that is interconnected with other social codes of a society through which social
variables such as attitudes, gender, age, class, status, and political beliefs can be encoded”
(143). Moreover, according to Jane Schneider and Annette B. Weiner, “cloth has often become
a standard of value, circulating like money, [becoming] a metaphor for society, thread for
social relations… The softness and ultimate fragility of these materials capture the vulnerab-
ility of humans, whose every relationship is transient, and destined to be vanished and for-
gotten” (2). By personifying human characteristics, clothes act as an experienced manipulator
“to reveal and conceal identities and values” (2). However, besides being translated as ma-
nipulation or separation, the language of clothes, in the role of an independent narrator in
Sister Carrie, serves to connect the body experience to the body of material culture. It also
testifies and verifies Dreiser’s unconditional acceptance of human beings reconciling their
differences flaws and virtues, expectations, and alienation from the world they live in. On
the one hand, Dreiser creates a unique identity for Carrie by diagnosing her innate desire for
purchasing fancy clothes. Carrie hopes that her new clothes will become an essential means
for achieving a higher social status and having a better and happier future. On the other hand,
Dreiser presents Carrie’s antagonists, her lovers Drouet and Hurstwood, as representatives
of a Machiavellian tendency to deceive and manipulate people by parading their flashy
clothes and polished shoes, referents to the wealth and mass consumption of various com-
modities.
When Carrie meets her lover Drouet, and later Hurstwood, she compares them, measuring
their financial situation by looking at their clothes. While Drouet is showing off “the purse,
shiny tan shoes, the smart new suit,” Carrie is giving a privilege to more sophisticated and
richer taste of Hurstwood’s dress code:

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The coat lapels stood out with that medium stiffness which excellent cloth possesses.
The vest was of a rich Scotch plaid, set with a double row of round mother – of – pearl
buttons… Hurstwood’s shoes were of soft, black calf, polished only to a dull shine.
Drouet wore patent leather, but Carrie could not help feeling that there was a distinction
in favor of the soft leather, where all else was so rich (Dreiser 69).

By comparing and contrasting the clothes of her lovers, Dreiser exposes Carrie’s desire for
a luxurious life. Dreiser also reveals Carrie’s inability to detect Hurtswood’s perfidy and his
dishonest intentions towards her. Hurstwood’s clothes cover up his lust, and persuade Carrie
that Drouet is less worthy of her than Hustwood. “In contrast to Drouet’s flashiness, Hurst-
wood’s clothes convey stability” (Elahi 86). Unfortunately, Carrie is not aware of false rep-
resentation of Hurstwood’s unstable personality beneath his polished and expensive clothes.
Dreiser acknowledges “Carrie’s keen eye for fashion,” as an innate force in her, and the
irony is that Carrie’s sophisticated taste for fashion does not offer a deeper insight to reveal
her lovers’ true intentions (Elahi 88). Eventually, Carrie realizes that their clothes blur her
picture of reality, and she decides to rely on herself while she has already experienced the
turmoil of being used by her lovers. Ironically, when she becomes an actress and starts
earning her own money, she is, just like Drouet and Hurstwood, ‘drowning’ into the sea of
mass consumption and seduction by clothes. According to Jessica Lyn van Slooten, fashion
in Dreiser’s Sister Carrie “communicates socioeconomic identity; enacts aesthetic idealism…
reveals tensions… speaks to its multivalent semiotic possibilities” (250). In the novel, the
language of clothes shapes Carrie’s misperception of life, manipulates, challenges her pathos,
and forces her to make bad choices.
Dreiser positions penniless Carrie amongst an alluring display of clothes, and she struggles
against the desire for an instant gratification: “Fine clothes to her [Carrie] were a vast per-
suasion; they spoke tenderly and Jesuitically for themselves. When she came within earshot
of their pleading, desire in her bent a willing ear…

“My dear,” said the lace collar she secured from Partridge’s, I will fit you beautifully;
don’t give me up.”
“Ah, such little feet,” said the leather of the soft new shoes; “how effectively I cover
them.
“What a pity they should ever want my aid.” (72)

Not only do they personify, but also the clothes translate: the new clothes seem to be incom-
patible companions with the old ones. They may also signify enlargement of need for con-
sumption, imitation, and manipulation as referents to social pretenders who imitate the
wealthy, and the tendency for climbing up the social ladder. As Joanne Finkelstein attributes,
“fashion is an arcane sign system whose silent and authorless protocols are used by some
for their own purposes, such as to exclude others or exaggerate social differences” (qtd. in
Slooten 250). Ferdinand de Saussure’s theory of the sign may be useful to clarify the com-
plexity of the language of clothes, and how Carrie interprets this language. According to
Saussure, “the sign is composed of the signifier (the word or sound – image) and the signified
(the concept or meaning) bound together and linked to the referent (the thing referred to by
the sign)” (qtd in Geyh 419). Hurstwood’s soft leather shoes, introduced earlier, represent
the signifier that consists of three words soft + leather + shoes. It can also refer to the sound

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(think about squeaking or tapping with your shoes on a tile floor), and of course, it can be
associated with the image. The readers do not have the photo of the shoes, but they can
imagine how these shoes look like through the eyes of the viewer like Carrie. The meaning
of these shoes and clothes may be in general persuasion + seduction + consumption + imit-
ation + manipulation = reconciliation through desire regardless of the referent by the sign.
The referent could be a social status, money, power, and luxury. All these features of the
clothes are phonetically paradigmatic (differential), and yet strongly connected in syntagmatic
(combinatory) structure that results as a new feature like the word reconciliation, mentioned
above; it is distinctive in its nature but qualifies for complementary to the previous terms.
This also applies to the combined meaning of the words: seduction, consumption, imitation,
and manipulation. They are similar, but different, and when they are used in a combination,
in a relation to one another, they create a new sign, and at the same time they register a new
significance.
When Carrie stares at shoes and clothes through the windows of the department she is
persuaded by their powerful appearance. Dreiser writes,

Carrie passed along the busy aisles, much affected by the remarkable displays of trinkets
and dress goods, stationery, and jewelry. Each separate counter was a show place of
dazzling and attraction. She could not help feeling the claim of each trinket and valuable
upon her personally, and yet she did not stop. There was nothing there which she could
not have used – nothing which she did not long to own (16).

In the chapter of his book titled “From Clothing to Nothing: Annihilating the Self in Sister
Carrie,” Babak Elahi asserts, “Carrie’s finds clothes to be ‘a vast persuasion,’ to speak to
her, and to elicit desire and give pleasure” (82). Elahi explains that, “not only are objects
persuasive in Sister Carrie, they have power over individual characters, they have personal
persuasion. As characters become consumers, they are themselves consumed by the objects
they desire,” which might be translated that the language of the clothes and accessories
communicates persuasively and effectively blurring the characters’ sense of reality (Elahi
83). In that way this language takes control over their rational thinking and the characters
like Carrie. Hence, she becomes addicted to these persuasive non verbal signs that represent
the most powerful rhetoricians of mass consumption. It looks like Carrie associates the shoes,
accessories, clothes with comfortable faithful companions. Her emotional needs are measured
by the consumption of these commodities, by ‘intimate cuddling’ with material things like
clothes and shoes. She is seduced by the image of these signs. The little trinket interpellates
Carrie into buying it. It appears to personify a human’s ontological characteristic by seducing
the shopper like Carrie. And as such, the trinket is positioned, as Baudrillard clarifies, “in a
controlled, cycling mode, symbolically transcending a real existence the irreversibility of
whose progression [s]he [the consumer] is powerless to effect” (“A Marginal System: Col-
lecting” 267). Besides this strong impact of mass consumption on the consumer in reality,
Dreiser’s language of clothes rhetorically insists on emphasizing the control of material
things over his characters in his fiction flooding them with the feeling of sensation and fever
for shopping. Dreiser’s consistent personification of the objects through the whole novel
might demonstrate how hard is for the consumer to ignore the force of material things that
appear to be real, so alive in the world. Dreiser’s fictional department stores overloaded with
the clothes and accessories appear to reflect metaphysical or ontological energy that threatens

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to stir rationality of an individual, particularly the logos of Dreiser’s readers. To stress an

enormous discrepancy between a suspicious mass consumption of various goods by the rich,
and the hunger of the poor, Dreiser personifies the objects, the clothes so that they welcome
all people together, the rich and the poor, and they make them feel uncontrollably thirsty for
consuming inventory.
Dreiser episodically introduces Carrie to the material world. Constantly, as a tourist guide,
he takes her to many excursions visiting myriad isles in the shops in order to show the
readers how mass consumption, advertisement, display of clothes, all of them together become
money value, replace human value, and offer, according Baudrillard, a false feeling of “lib-
eration,” “self-fulfillment,” and integrity (“The System of Objects” 15). As Dreiser describes,

With a start she awoke to find that she was in fashion’s crowd, on parade in a show
place – and such a show place! Jewelers’ windows gleamed along with the path with
remarkable frequency. Florist shops, furriers, haberdashers, confectioners – all followed
in rapid succession… (218).

The objects Carrie sees reflect a magnetic energy she is attracted to. Dreiser illustrates vividly
Carrie’s fascination with the things she can only dream of, and simultaneously he reveals
the materialistic structures lined up purposely to lure in compulsive shoppers.
As Rachel Bowlby asserts,

Modern consumption is a matter not of basic items bought for definite needs, but of
visual fascination and remarkable sights of things not found at home. People go out of
their way to look at displays of the marvels of modern industrial production: there is
nothing obviously functional in a tourist trip (1).

The language of the fancy clothes, hats, women in elegant skirts, furry coats, men in business
suits and polished shoes, makes Carrie believe in fantasies. She is blinded by these magic
signs and at the same time she is aware of her inability to resist their domination over her
rational thinking. The invasion of signs provokes and reinforces Carrie’s desire for more
things than are necessary. Consequently, Carrie’s overconsumption of luxurious goods be-
numbs her feelings. She becomes emotionally indifferent and inert to her lovers. She is em-
ployed in rethinking her actions and reminding herself of bad decisions, yet unable to resist
disbursement of herself flowing into a sidetrack of a commodity itself. While she was ob-
serving the crowd, the windows loaded with expensive items, “Carrie found herself stared
at and ogled” (Dreiser 218).
Dreiser continues painting the power of mass culture over Carrie and his readers too. As
he declares,

There is nothing in this world more delightful than the middle state, in which we mentally
balance at times, possessed of the means, lure by desire, and yet deterred by conscience
or want of decision. When Carrie began wandering around the store amid the fine dis-
plays she was in this mood. Her original experience in this same place had given her a
high opinion of its merits. Now she paused at each individual bit of finery, where before
she had hurried on. Her woman’s heart was warm with the desire for them. How would
she look in this, how charming that would make her! She came upon the corset counter
and paused in rich reverie as she noted the dainty concoctions of color and lace there

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displayed… She lingered in the jewelry department. She saw the earrings, the bracelets,
the pins, the chains. What would she not have given if she could have them all! (49)

Using the pronoun we in this example, Dreiser intentionally addresses the reader about the
power of mass consumption over the consumer’s mind. Dreiser offers a dazzling image of
clothes and accessories in the store. In a certain way, Dreiser seems to justify Carrie’s sub-
ordination to mass consumption to disparage the capitalist exposure and control over the
consumers, as well as the consumers’ inability to resist it. As Baudrillard confirms, “the
display of a window, the advertisement, the manufacturer, and the brand name play an essen-
tial role in imposing a coherent and collective vision, like an almost inseparable totality”
(Readings 262). Even though she is subordinate and absorbed by the goods, Carrie wants to
merge with these objects, unconsciously identifying herself with them.
According to Bowlby, the display of clothes represents to the consumer “the fantasy world
of escape from dull domesticity,” and in that world “the real woman” feels like “a queen”
wanted and “treated like royalty” (4). Through the consumers’ desire for spending and con-
suming material things Dreiser warns the readers about the consequences of mass consumption
such as “exchange value” so that the consumers eventually, as Baudrillard observes, “integrate
themselves into the structure of the commodity” and become the commodity themselves
(“The Political Economy of the Sign” 74). Dreiser sees people as consumers, tiny ingredients,
being consumed by a mysterious and giant universe in which life brings hope, love, profes-
sional success, failure, death, and unexpected overturns from the rags to the riches and vice
versa. Accordingly, Dreiser’s vision might be applicable not only to the era of the most
powerful and influential economy and politics of new industrialized country in the world,
the United States of America in the early 20th century, but also to modern times when
American political, economical, social, and cultural environment is in crisis. Dreiser is simply
trying to tell the reader the irony of life, the tremendous and rapid rise of American capitalism
in which some people lose an American dream of prosperous future, and others do accomplish
it. However, they pay a big price becoming somebody whose urge for happiness, fulfillment,
and emotional maturity turns into a long-term numbness, emptiness, or hopelessness.
The language of Carrie’s lovers’ clothes is secretive. It hides their egoistic and hedonistic
aspirations from revelation of their perfidy and moral corruption. On the surface, they appear
to be generous and good hearted gentlemen, but they are actually wolves in a lamb’s skin
wrapped in polished, clean, and neat garments. In her book titled The Language of Clothes,
Alison Lurie states that clothes represent a certain means of communication; it is recognition
of somebody’s intimate, psychological, social, or professional status and position. However,
the clothes might appear as total camouflage, “misinformation” about the person we meet
(272). As Ronald Barthes observes, the language of clothes works as a system integrating a
myriad of signs:

Calculating, industrial society is obliged to form consumers who don’t calculate; if

clothing’s producers and consumers had the same consciousness, clothing would bought
(and produced) only at the very slow rate of its dilapidation; Fashion like all fashions,
depends on a disparity of two consciousnesses, each foreign to the other. In order to
blunt the buyer’s calculating consciousness, a veil must be drawn around the object –
a veil of images, of reasons, of meanings (xi).

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In the novel, these signs are working united by manipulating and interpellating the consumer,
observer like Carrie. The displays of clothes on the windows of the department stores as
well as their exhibition on business people and wealthy ladies speak various languages, and
they succeed to convey metaphorically speaking an imaginative photo of clothes with numer-
ous messages on the reader. According to Lurie, “within every language of clothes there are
many different dialects and accents, some almost unintelligible to members the mainstream
culture” (185). Accordingly, the vocabulary of clothes Carrie wears is limited. It is yearning
for help, protection, and financial support from her lovers. In Dreiser’s novel, Carrie finds
clothes appealing, flattering her vanity which immediately underlines not just one but multiple
layers of the language possibilities to convey an ambivalent, ambiguous, and rich translation
of only one word persuasion, for instance. It might indicate Carrie’s irresistible desire to
buy the clothes, her aspiration for improvement of her social status, her tendency to imitate
the ladies who have been already privileged to wear these clothes, her hope for finding
happiness, stability, and pleasure. It might be translated consequently that persuasion and
consumption go hand in hand, and provide the reader an ability to understand Carrie’s desire
for buying clothes. Her shopping addiction makes her an avid and ‘loyal’ consumer who
insatiably hopes that her identity is improving by buying her clothing, and as such she believes
she would able to enter into a new world in which competition to get better and newer
clothing items never stops, and returns to the previous ‘recycling’ signs: persuasion + con-
sumption + imitation + competition = reconciled commodities. As a result, Carrie herself
becomes a new commodity.
In order to give the reader a panoptical dimension of everyday life struggles, Dreiser au-
thorizes clothes and other accessories to personify human virtues and flaws, and to translate
to the reader persuasively about social and economical discourses and relationships. According
to Jane Schneider and Annette Weiner, “cloth is a metaphor for society, thread for social
relations [but it] expresses more than connectedness, however. The softness and ultimate
fragility of these materials capture the vulnerability of humans.” They also illuminate their
participation in utilizing the cloth not only for protection and expression of their own values
and beliefs, but also for manipulation in order to cover up their true identity and intentions
(2–3).

Conclusion
Dreiser’s novel Sister Carrie offers to the reader a world condensed with the tapestry of
signs and symbols. It engages the reader into rethinking the importance of semiotic engage-
ment of their decoding. The clothes, as referents to the material things, serve to protect
against the weather conditions, but also as decoration, or expression of somebody’s identity.
It also refers to a unique system of communication which vocabulary is growing by crashing
the boundaries of conventional understanding and reaching out to the reader, the viewer with
their mysterious, powerful, and persuasive manipulation. Therefore, the language of clothes
speaks a lot by itself; By depicting a colorful vocabulary of the dress of his characters, Dreiser
tends to register the history of socioeconomic discourses so that the reader is able to connect
with the social problems still present and enlarged in the modern era. However, unlike in
Dreiser’s time, the language of clothes now communicates in less demanding and restricted
code, and as such it helps ordinary people to assimilate and overcome social differences,
although it still serves as a seductive and persuasive force. Even though the tremendous

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abyss between the rich and the poor does not disappear, the present language of clothes is
trying to resend to the receiver the most important message – reconciliation among their
consumers. Unlike Carrie, modern ordinary consumers might not feel a desire to imitate or
compete with the people who dress expensively, but they do not give up easily from their
habits to buy the clothes they do not need. In other words, the clothes as a product of mass
production continue to be consumed greedily and misrepresented perfectly. As Shakespeare
concludes, “All the world is a stage, and the men and women are merely players.” They have
exits and they have entrances. Whether they go to the exit or the entrance they often change
clothes. On the one hand, the clothes speak up about people, about who they are, what they
are, and yet they succeed to trick the viewers enabling them to dwell in their fantasies. On
the other hand, the clothes, in a text such as Sister Carrie, when decoded by semiotic tools,
allow the readers to rethink and reexamine other literary works that describe and criticize
cultural environments.

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About the Author

Olivera Stankovic
I am an English and Communication graduate at SUNY Potsdam, New York, United States.
I am finishing a Master of Arts in English. My Master Thesis is about the interpolation of
mass culture and gender inequality in Theodore Dreiser’s major fictional works. Besides
American literature of the twentieth century, I am very passionate about researching other
famous writers such as Chaucer, Shakespeare, Virginia Woolf, and Ralph Emerson. I have
a desire to continue being engaged in literary criticism regarding books and movies. I also
write poetry. I have written over 50 poems which I hope to publish.

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