The Slope of the Years: Sister Carrie and Narratives of Aging in Late Nineteenth-Century American Literature

In the thirty-third chapter of Sister Carrie (1900), subtitled "The Slope of the Years," Theodore Dreiser writes that "a man's fortune or material progress is very much the same as his bodily growth. Either he is growing stronger, healthier, wiser, as the youth approaching manhood, or he is growing weaker, older, less incisive mentally, as the man approaching old age. There are no other states."¹ In Sister Carrie, George Hurstwood rises and falls in just this way, adhering to what Philip Fisher and June Howard call the "plot of decline," a feature of the novels of literary naturalism in the late nineteenth-century United States in which characters follow a deterministic path to their own destruction.² In addition to identifying the narrative arc of naturalist novels like Sister Carrie, the plot of decline, as Margaret Morganroth Gullette has shown, also reflects an underlying expectation about the process of aging.³ By entangling age and economy in his description of the slope of the years, Dreiser responds to a widespread fear depicted by many American cultural narratives that anticipated the concurrence of old age and poverty. In contrast to Lydia Maria Child's "The New-England Boy's Song about Thanksgiving Day" (1844), in which children giddily traverse "over the river, and through the wood" to "grandfather's house," Will M. Carleton's poem, "Over the Hills to the Poorhouse," which appeared on the cover of the June 17, 1871, edition of Harper's Weekly, describes how an old woman is forced to enter a poorhouse after her children desert her.⁴ In Legal Responsibility in Old Age (1874), the New York neurologist George M. Beard identifies "the law of the relation of age to work," which emphasizes how the elderly grow increasingly and inevitably unfit as they age.⁵ Without pensions, retirement, or other forms of social security, many Americans perceived the threat of increasing economic precarity in the descending phase of their lives.

The proliferation of rejuvenation cures and success manuals attempted to assuage this fear, promising one's body could be restored and one's savings could be secured, respectively.⁶ And their immediate assurances were improved on by popular novels that catalogued the fortunes of men in business, which showed how capitalizing on a younger generation could create a more lasting solution, not merely deferring the plot of decline momentarily but avoiding it entirely. Though Dreiser insists that there are no other temporal states besides the rising and falling slope of the years, he does admit one exception to the plot of decline: "If its process of accretion is never halted, if the balancing stage is never reached, there will be no toppling. Rich men are, frequently, in these days, saved from this dissolution of their fortune by their ability to hire younger brains" (316). Rich men can preserve their youth, avoiding the climactic point on which the slope of the years pivots, by utilizing younger people. Like biological reproduction only on a larger, more abstract scale, the amplification of one's fortune ensures that generations will bear the name of the father. The businessman turned philanthropist, whose wealth was so inexhaustible that it could be given away and whose name was so well known that even after he died it lived on, epitomizes Dreiser's exception to the rule. The fantasy of perpetual youth—which drives the narrative trajectory that aspires to escape from the plot of decline—simultaneously reconstitutes one's body and preserves one's wealth.

Though they promise opposite outcomes, the plot of decline and the fantasy of perpetual youth reinforce the transitive logic governing age and economy, naturalizing the correlation between bodily health and material wealth. One is either staying rich and young or growing poorer and older. Drawing on business writings of the late nineteenth-century—including George Horace Lorimer's "Letters from a Self-Made Merchant to His Son" series and Henry B. Fuller's With the Procession (1895), as well as Andrew Carnegie's "Gospel of Wealth" (1889)—I argue that...