The forces of fossil capital: Sister Carrie and American literary naturalism’s industrial middle-class ideology

ABSTRACT Through the nineteenth century, Western industrial nations transitioned to fossil fuels following the formation of what Andreas Malm terms ‘fossil capital’, a distinct form of capitalism based on the extraction and consumption of coal, oil, and gas. In America, the industrial operations of fossil capital – in addition to igniting our contemporary climate crisis – reshaped society in the image of a productive engine through social applications of the thermodynamic principles of energy conservation and entropy. Through a reading of Theodore Dreiser’s Sister Carrie (1900), this essay considers American literary naturalism as an aesthetic response to the emergence of American fossil capital. It argues that Fredric Jameson’s understanding of naturalism as a narrative form that expresses class anxieties through an ‘entropic trajectory’ invites a thermodynamic interpretation of American naturalism which foregrounds its relationship to fossil capital’s environmental and socioeconomic transformations. The essay examines how Dreiser’s text naturalises the urbanisation, subjectivities, and class stratification of American fossil capital by framing each as a manifestation of thermodynamic principles. In doing so, this essay proposes a reconsideration of American literary naturalism that highlights the form’s ideological function in the establishment of a fossil-fuelled industrial middle class fixated on productivity.

of liminality that registers the burgeoning transformations of everyday life in America during the nation's transition to fossil fuels. As the story proceeds, Dreiser's naturalist novel not only continues to offer depictions of the profound socioeconomic developments which the industrial consumption of fossil fuels ignited, the aesthetics of the text also reveal how the American literary naturalist form contributed to the subsequent cultural changes through the production of an ideology which naturalisesand thus legitimatesthe forms of work and life to which the proliferation of fossil fuelpowered technologies gave rise.
This reading of Sister Carrie considers the effects of the American naturalist form's utilisation of ideas related to the discourse of thermodynamics during the establishment of a socioeconomic order based on the extraction and consumption of fossil fuels. As Zena Meadowsong asserts, early naturalist narratives 'reproduce […] a world organised and driven by mechanical forces. Determined by the very machines they condemn, and exposing their own aesthetics as machine-made, these novels draw attention to their inevitable complicity in the man-made mechanisms they deplore'. 1 The specific uses of steam-powered machines, of course, were determined by a distinct set of social relations that formed around fossil fuel-based industrial operations. Adding to Meadowsong's assertion, Sister Carrie shows us how American naturalism's aesthetic relationship to applications of steampowered engines serves an ideological function for its implied middle-class reader. By projecting thermodynamic principles onto social phenomena, the text naturalises the period's drive for productivity and class stratification in a reconciliatory act that absolves the industrial middle class of responsibility for the injustices and environmental destruction which maintains its socioeconomic dominance.
Critical interpretations of American literary naturalism, as Bert Bender contends, tend to present the form as a result of tensions between the nation's traditional religious belief systems and the post-Darwinian scientific, economic, and social discourses of the late-nineteenth century. 2 At the thematic level, such Darwinian interpretations posit that the texts of American literary naturalism explore the philosophical, sociological, and psychological implications of evolutionary theory through dramatisations of concepts such as degeneration, determinism, and the effects of heredity and environment. Donald Pizerone of American naturalism's foremost criticsrecognises the significance of Darwinian theories to the literary form, yet he also argues that such limited readings are reductive. Instead, Pizer adopts a more expansive understanding of American naturalism as a form of humanism that emerged from the conflict between the nation's old values and new experiences during its rapid shift to an urban, industrial society. 3 In contrast to Pizer's approach, many critics foreground American naturalism's ideological function in processes of capital accumulation.
Walter Benn Michaels's The Gold Standard and the Logic of Naturalism (1987) offers one of the most prominent examples of such a critique. 4 Through analyses of the gold standard, corporate structures, and predominant ideas about contracts, Michaels argues that naturalist texts actively participate in economic processes as both producers and products of the myriad values of consumer capitalism. The interpretation of American naturalism that I present in this essay identifies a productive tension between these markedly distinct readings through the incorporation of elements from bothnamely, the significance of urbanisation and ideological production. And yet, as I will show, Fredric Jameson's more recent insight into the form constitutes the principal critical foundation on which my analysis of American naturalism builds.
In The Antinomies of Realism (2015), Jameson locates naturalism's inception within the nineteenth century's class tensions. 5 Jameson maintains that naturalism, in contrast to the three other sub-genres of realism emerging in the nineteenth century (the Bildungsroman, the historical novel, and the novel of adultery), signifies a distinct narrative form. For Jameson, naturalism represents 'the literary slot assigned to the fourth great new player in nineteenth-century society: […] the worker and […] the more heterogeneous population of the 'lower depths,' of lumpenproletarians and outcasts generally'. 6 The naturalist form, Jameson continues, registers bourgeois anxieties of collective 'déclassement, of slipping down the painfully climbed slope of class position and business or monetary success, of falling back into […] working class misery itself'. 7 Jameson observes that naturalist texts express this class anxiety through a 'narrative paradigm, which could be described as the trajectory of decline and failure, of something like an entropy on the level of individual destiny'. 8 While Jameson uses the term in its more general sense, his designation of 'entropy' as a central characteristic of literary naturalism invites an analysis of the form in relation to the scientific and economic discourses of fossil fuel consumption from which the concept arose. This essay, then, builds on Jameson's identification of an 'entropic trajectory' to offer a thermodynamic interpretation of American literary naturalism that redefines the form as an aesthetic response to the reorganisation of the nation's class structure during the establishment of what Andreas Malm terms 'fossil capital'.
In Fossil Capital: The Rise of Steam Power and the Roots of Global Warming (2016), Malm counters the prevailing history of Western industrial nations' transition to fossil fuels, which reasons that James Watt's steam engine provided a breakthrough in productivity through which coalpowered machinery naturally supplanted the waterwheel. Malm, however, identifies a crucial flaw in this narrative: during the initial stages of the transition, water power often offered a cheaper and more productive alternative to urban factories. So what triggered the transition? Malm argues that steam powerdespite its costs and inefficienciesallowed industrialists to secure greater control over their labourers. To utilise water power, industries were rooted alongside powerful waterways, and the seasonal variability necessitated that factory owners cooperate with public institutions while also providing their static labour colonies with lodgings, food, and health care. In contrast, coal's mobility allowed owners to construct enormous factories in urban centres from where they could access large pools of cheap, expendable labour. As Malm succinctly concludes, 'steam won because it augmented the power of some over others'. 9 Rather than a mere substitution in primary energy sources, for Malm the transition sparked a formal shift in capitalism that enabled its global ascension during the twentieth century, and which todaythrough the continual rise of atmospheric carbon concentrationsposes an existential threat to our planet's ecological foundations. 10 Fossil capital's early demands for increased productivity, as Cara New Daggett shows, generated the science of thermodynamics. 11 Its second law of entropy delineates how energy tends to have a more diffuse organisation (high entropy) because there are more potential ways for molecules to be distributed randomly through a substance than for them to be in a concentrated form (low entropy). For the practical concerns of fossil capital, entropy identifies wasted energy in productive processes, such as heat that dissipates from a steam engine when it burns coal. In America, this practical understanding of entropy was extended across all domains of human activity through a vocabulary of work and waste that served as a primary tool for 'energopolitics', a political rationality designed to govern a world rapidly forming around fossil fuel technologies. 12 Through their drive to increase productivity, the industries of American fossil capital and the state's energopolitical governance reshaped society in the image of a productive engine by identifying departures from the productive norm as 'entropic' social elements that obstructed the national project of work. This energetic restructuring of American society produced a hierarchisation of life in which a dominant, white, industrial middle class sought to manage or dispose disparate, 'unproductive' individuals and groups, such as the criminalised and destitute, people with disabilities, immigrants, aristocrats, racialised communities, and intractable elements of the working class.
American naturalist novels contributed to the formation of the hegemonic ideology of this context in which social interpretations of thermodynamic principles shaped economic and political activities. Through its middleclass perspective of an 'entropic trajectory', American literary naturalism converts its characters' paths of socioeconomic descent into natural phenomena by framing each as a manifestation of the second law of thermodynamics. The form of American literary naturalism, then, attempts to produce an ideological resolution to the immanent tensions and conflicts of fossil capital's class-based social relations. Many class-based analyses of American literary naturalism trace the ways in which its narratives contributed to the formation of the nation's late nineteenth-century middle-class identity. Jude Davies, for instance, explains how. naturalism played a significant role in forging [a] new middle-class sensibility.
[…] [Naturalist authors] helped shape and solidify this class and ultimately enabled its self-recognition as the cultural and political mainstream […]. Typical naturalist texts helped define an aspirational middle class against existing elites and the industrial working class through their subject matter and mode of address. 13 Moreover, June Howard recognises that naturalist narrators guide an implied middle-class reader through working-class and underclass spaces into which they would fear to venture in real life. 14 The naturalist narrator and implied reader, Howard notes, inhabit the privileged role of spectator, whose middle-class gaze observes and comprehends the misfortunes that befall the text's subjects. By relocating these class-based analyses within the socioeconomic context of American fossil capital, this essay presents a reading of Sister Carrie to argue that the text's entropic trajectory and thematic engagements with thermodynamic concepts expressand seek to reconcilea middle-class fear of the instability of fossil capital's class structure. This interpretation of a key text of American literary naturalism will identify the form's ideological function in the establishment of fossil capital's now global class structure, whichdespite its escalating environmental destruction and socioeconomic exploitationmaintains a culture based on fossil fuel-powered forms of work and life.
Eric Carl Link observes that '[f]or a century, virtually every study of naturalistic fiction in America has had something to say about determinism'. 15 The critical analyses of Sister Carrie which follow this line of inquiry tend to read Carrie's and Hurstwood's paths through the text as dramatisations of vague Darwinian, deterministic 'forces'. In contrast to this, I will forward an interpretation that relocates the text's 'forces' within the discourse of thermodynamics. Following Richard Lehan's assertion that '[Herbert] Spencer […] had more direct influence on the literary naturalists, especially Dreiser, than did Darwin', my reading of Sister Carrie places the text's fossil fuel aesthetics alongside the ideas that constitute Spencer's First Principles (1860), which attempts to construct a unified theory that explains processes of change in physical, psychological, economic, and social phenomena. 16 In a discussion of Spencer's First Principles, Barri J. Gold explains that, for Spencer, all observable processes derive from 'what he called 'the persistence of force', something we recognise […] as the conservation of energy'. 17 Gold further elucidates how thermodynamics generated an understanding of energy as a type of universal currency, so that, Things that look differentmost notably, heat, light, electricity, magnetism, gravitational attraction, and mechanical workcome to be understood as manifestations of the same thing. […] [S]ome will call it force and refer to the conversion and conservation of forces. Eventually, we will […] settle on energy. 18 For Spencer, the thermodynamic conceptualisation of the exchange of energyor 'force'explains all observable processes of exchange. The reading I now present of Sister Carrie traces the narrative role of Dreiser's energy-as-force trope in the text's depictions of Chicago's fossil fuel-based urbanisation, followed by its role in the thermodynamic valences of the city's subjectivities and social relations, and finally how this trope shapes Hurstwood's entropic trajectory from the middle class into destitution and death. In doing so, I will examine the ways in which Dreiser's dramatisation of Spencerian 'force' works to produce ideological resolutions to the tensions and conflicts of American fossil capital's socioeconomic order.

Naturalising Chicago's urbanisation
In its depictions of Chicago's fossil fuel-based urban milieu, Dreiser's Sister Carrie captures the ways in which both the social relations of American fossil capital and naturalist aesthetics formed around applications of thermodynamic principles. Dissatisfied with country life in her hometown, Carrie takes the train to Chicago hopinglike many Americans at the turn of the twentieth centuryto improve her prospects in a rapidly growing, steam-powered city. After briefly working in a shoe factory, Carrie escapes the drudgery of machine-work when she becomes entangled in a love triangle with George Hurstwood and Charles Drouet, the former of which forces her to flee Chicago for New York City. In New York, Carrie finds fame as an actress, but Hurstwood follows naturalism's entropic trajectory. Before fleeing Chicago, Hurstwoodthe productive manager of a successful bar and traditional family manoccupies a stable position in Chicago's middle class. His desire for Carrie, however, disrupts this stability, and he undergoes a downward socioeconomic spiral that results in unemployment, homelessness, and suicide.
In its opening scene, the novel introduces America's transition to fossil fuels through Carrie's nostalgia for the hometown which she leaves for Chicago. While reflecting on her departure from Columbia City, Carrie experiences 'a touch in her throat when the cars clacked by the flour mill where her father had worked by the day'. 19 Carrie's affective response subtly positions the flour mill's water-powered prime mover as a symbol of Carrie'sand America'sfading past, a narrative choice that hints at the defining role of fossil fuel technologies in the urban form of life to which she travels. Yet the text never foregrounds the centrality of these technologies in Chicago's urbanisation. Instead, Dreiser frames the process through which industries organised urban life around coal-powered work as a 'force' that reorders space and redefines identity. Through regular narratorial interjections, Chicago emerges not as an urban environment constructed through human labour, but as an independent entity. The 'large forces which allure' Carrie to Chicago appear in her window as the train approaches the city's outskirts: Across wide stretches of flat open prairie they could see lines of telegraph poles stalking across the fields toward the great city. Away off there were indications of suburban towns, some big smoke stacks towering high in the air. Frequently there were two-story frame houses standing out in the open fields, without fences or trees, outposts of the approaching army of homes. 20 Carrie's introduction to Chicago along the wildland-urban interface evokes that location so prominent in American ideology: the frontier. Although, somewhat misguidedly, the Census Bureau declared the settler-colonial frontier closed around 1890, the final military metaphor of Carrie's first glimpse of Chicago introduces the city's encroachment as a new urban-industrial frontier conquering America's rural landscapes. As we will see, Dreiser conceptualises this frontier as a materio-ideological force that establishes a thermodynamically infused set of social relations.
Once Carrie's train arrives, the narrator sketches Chicago's urban growth for three dense paragraphs which initiate the city-as-force trope. Here, Chicago's expansion appears curiously devoid of human agency, generating a sense that the city's infrastructure is germinating from the prairie's soil. We read how streetcar lines had been extended far out into the open country in anticipation of rapid growth.
[…] There were regions, open to the sweeping wind and rain, which were yet lighted throughout the night with long, blinking lines of gas lamps fluttering in the wind. Narrow board walks extended out, passing here a house and there a store at far intervals, eventually ending on the open prairie. 21 The notable absence of human labour in this image frames the process of urbanisation as a force-in-itself. Beyond the edges of this quiet scene, the sounds of labourhammers, saws, and steam engineswould saturate the urban air, yet Carrie hears only an 'audible murmur of the vast city which stretched for miles and miles in every direction'. 22 Although we eventually meet Chicago's workers, the omission of people from these opening descriptions introduces the urban-industrial environment as an autonomous entity spreading itself out over the prairie.
The narrator conspicuously continues to naturalise the process of fossil urbanisation later in the text, when the sheer size and variety of Chicago overwhelm Carrie, who becomes 'the victim of the city's hypnotic influence, the subject of the mesmeric operations of super-intelligible forces'. 23 The narrator equates these forces to 'the strange power of Niagra, the contemplation of whose rushing floods leads to thoughts of dissolution'. 24 Robert Seguin connects Dreiser's depictions of Chicago to a wider contemporaneous aesthetic trend in which 'popular images of the city, particularly during its phase of spectacular growth […], tended to depict in natural terms (volcanic, oceanic) the city's unleashing of productive energy'. 25 While Sister Carrie's depictions of Chicago partake in this contemporaneous representational tendency, Dreiser's thematic applications of Spencerian force add to it a thermodynamic inflection. Dreiser compares the 'force' of urbanisation to the rushing floods of Niagra because bothas Spencer's interpretation of thermodynamics suggestsare manifestations of the universal principle of energy exchange. Chicago's construction, in Dreiser's rendering, is not a product of human labour and social relations. Instead, fossil urbanisation is another manifestation of the universal force of energy exchange. The Spencerian dynamic which Dreiser attaches to aesthetic representations of Chicago's rapid urbanisation naturalises the spatial development of fossil capital, for it conceals the socioeconomic cause of the city's growth behind an ostensibly scientific discourse.
In the grammatical structures of certain descriptive passages, we can discern how the presentation of Chicago's urbanisation as Spencerian force positions the process in an active, generative role over passive, malleable inhabitants. While still in Chicago, Drouet convinces Carrie to act in a play at Avery Hall, a building which 'had originally been built as part of a large summer garden, when the ground upon which it was located was not more than a mile from the city limits'. 26 In recent years, however, [t]he city had grown so rapidly and extended its borders so far that the summer garden idea had been abandoned and the surrounding ground parceled into one-story store buildings which were largely vacant. The hall itself, like much other Chicago property, was not in demand. It was rented occasionally at a very nominal rate, for lectures, entertainments and theatricals and was really very well adapted for the purpose. 27 This passage exhibits a grammatical strategy which Dreiser frequently implements in descriptions of Chicago's expanding environment, in which the force of urbanisation occupies the subject position of a sentence in the active voice. Conversely, in sentences in which individuals act, the use of the passive voice not only maintains their object position but also omits them from the description. Dreiser's descriptive approach to Chicago's expansion inscribes the power dynamics of fossil capital's social relations in the grammatical structures of such passages by concealing the agency of urbanisation, which appears as an active, naturalised force that shoots up from the soil. This force of urbanisation negates the anonymous owner's original intention for the summer garden, forcing them to adapt to the changing environment. The image of the urban environment encircling and transforming the purpose of Avery Hall offers a metonymic example of how fossil urbanisation subsumes and repurposes the individuals and social systems which it absorbs. From its grammatical level, then, Sister Carrie presents fossil capital's urban development not as a contest between opposing human visions of the uses and forms of social space, but as an unstoppable natural force that disposes of individuals, communities, and sociocultural traditions that stand impotently in its path. With the agency of urbanisation absent, Dreiser's depictions of Chicago's growth reinforce the ideology of fossil capital, for such passages reframe the process through which socioeconomic interests shape the city as a natural phenomenon.
When juxtaposed with the text's depictions of New York City, we can see that Sister Carrie's representation of fossil urbanisation as Spencerian force are distinct to Chicago. Upon arrival in New York, Carrie's and Hurstwood's initial observations of the urban environment differ in a key aspect from the text's opening images of Chicago. As they exit Grand Central Station, Hurstwood announces their next course of action, but 'Carrie hardly heard him, so interested was she in the busy scene. 'How large is New York?' she asked. 'Oh, a million or more,' said Hurstwood. 28 While Hurstwood considers his place in New York's financial milieu, Carrie takes note of the city's people. New York fascinates Carrie, for '[i]ts clear atmosphere, more populous thoroughfares and peculiar indifference struck her. […] [S]he concerned herself over the arrangement of New York flats and marveled at ten families living in one building and all remaining strange and indifferent'. 29 In contrast to the substantial descriptions of Chicago's naturalised urban force, the text immediately identifies New York's character through its inhabitants. By the start of the twentieth century, as Jonathan Levy explains, New Yorkunlike Chicagohad been a financial and commercial centre for over a century. 30 The primary effect which the transition to fossil fuels had on the city was that its consumer culture expanded while the titans of fossil capital -Cornelius Vanderbilt, John D. Rockefeller, J. P. Morgan, and the likeconsolidated their wealth and power in offices along Wall Street. Chicago, meanwhile, was an environment which the drive for greater levels of production defined both economically and socially. The city emerged from industrial developments following the rise of fossil capital to become the primary site of fossil fuel-powered production that fed the nation's growing consumerism and financial growth. The key difference between Dreiser's depictions of the urban environments of Chicago and New York, therefore, lies in their relation to fossil capital.
Sister Carrie's depictions of fossil fuel-driven urbanisation as Spencerian force offer an ideological resolution to the tensions inherent to fossil capital's domination and reorganisation of urban space. Through its thermodynamic framing, the text's naturalised portrayals of urbanisation present the activities of America's industrial middle class as a manifestation of energy exchange devoid of human agency, rather than the operations of an unprecedented economic drive to increase productivity. As we will see in the following sections, within Chicago's urban environment Dreiser's characters not only appear powerless in relation to urbanisation, their exposure to this process also renders them passive receivers of a fossil fuel-powered socioeconomic order that reshapes their identity.

The value of industrial subjectivity
As many critical analyses of Sister Carrie conclude, '[a]lmost everything in Dreiser's novel turns on money'. 31 But how does the novel conceptualise money? In a passage that follows the scene in which Drouet hands Carrie 'two soft, green, handsome ten-dollar bills', the narrator articulates a perception of money which draws a direct connection between the source of its value and the thermodynamic conception of energy. 32 'The true meaning of money', the narrator suggests, 'yet remains to be popularly explained and comprehended'. 33 Money, the narrator continues, 'primarily stands for and […] should be paid out as honestly stored energy and not as a usurped privilege'. 34 Once we accept this, 'many of our social, religious, and political troubles will have permanently passed'. 35 Walter Benn Michaels notes that this description of money embraces the labour theory of valuea cornerstone of Marxian economicsin which money symbolises labour, which is the true determinant of value. 'In an economy in which all commodities were exchanged at […] the amount of labour required to produce them', Michaels explains, 'labour would always be regarded 'honestly'; 'usurped privilege,' the unequal exchange of labour and commodities, would be impossible'. 36 While I concur with Michaels, why does Dreiser choose the word energyand not labour or workto express value? To answer this, we first must examine how the discourse of thermodynamics influenced the word's nineteenth-century etymological developments.
Before scientists formulated thermodynamics, 'energy' had neither a strong association with fuel nor a specific scientific definition. The word was used infrequently, primarily as 'a metaphor, a word to describe people, a pathetic fallacy, a word predominantly for poets'. 37 Tracing 'the historical particularity of energy as we know it', Daggett describes one of the most commonand politically consequentialunderstandings of energy as 'the engineer's' definition, which is the ability to do work. 38 The engineer's definition, Daggett observes, arose at a particular historical moment in which fossil fuels, steam engines, global capitalism, and human terraforming collided. In this collision, Daggett maintains, our modern understanding of energy arose from its 'discovery' during thermodynamic investigations into the efficiency of steam engines in the 1840s. Through these developments, energy evolved into a central object of modern politics, for '[i]t is through thermodynamics that energy became a newly soluble problem for the state, as a unit of work that was amenable to technical governance'. 39 Energy as the ability to do work carried myriad political, economic, and social implications, most notably in the way that this understanding of energy flowed from scientific investigations of steam engines into the analyses of political economists which, as we will see, influenced the understanding of money that Dreiser's narrator espouses.
The engineer's definition of energy created a scientific and cultural basis for a framework through which politicians, industrialists, and social reformers articulated competing visions of social modernity that embraced the resources of nature, industrial activity, and human work under an overarching concept: labour power. In The Human Motor (1992), Anson Rabinbach extracts the ties between the concept of labour power and the emergence of the engineer's definition of energy. Rabinbach contends that the formation of thermodynamics led both the classical traditions of social thought and anticapitalist political economists to share a belief that human society is defined by its capacity for production. These traditions thus envisioned the labouring body 'as the site of conversion, or exchange, between nature and societythe medium through which the forces of nature are transformed into the forces that propel society'. 40 Under their perception of human society as ultimately a productive entity, 'the image of labour was radically transformed. It became labour power, a concept emphasising the expenditure and deployment of energy as opposed to human will, moral purpose, or even technical skill'. 41 Rabinbach identifies Marx as the most prominent analyst of the period to adopt these thermodynamic insights, which had a profound effect on his socioeconomic theories. In the late 1850s, Marx began to articulate. a quantitative equivalence between the "natural" productive force of labour and the productive forces of industry and technology.
[…] Marx substituted the term "labour power" for labour, a move that he and Engels consistently acknowledged as a major, if not primary, conceptual discovery. […] Marx distinguished labour power from the concrete dimensions of work in largely energeticist terms: "the sum total of the physical and mental faculties which exist in the living person of a human being and which he puts into motion when he produces useful values." […] [In] Capital, the discussion of labour power is explicitly drawn from the doctrines of scientific materialism, a development that decisively modified a basic precept of Marx's argument. 42 Thermodynamic investigations into the productive output of fossil fuel technologies, therefore, led to a new definition of energy that informed Marx's understanding of human labour, and thus his delineation of the labour theory of value, which takes us back to the narrator's ruminations on money.
Dreiser's use of energy as a synonym for labour power in the description of money's 'true meaning' implicitly reveals the principal way in which his characters' subjectivities are reflections of their fossil fuel-based environment (or, as the narrator describes, how Carrie, Hurstwood, and Chicago's inhabitants 'are, after all, more passive than active, more mirrors than engines'). 43 Under fossil capital, the productive exchange of fossil fuel energy powered the industrial order around which America's urban environments formed. The social relations of these urban environments took on a similarly quantified order. In America's atomised urban milieus, monetary exchange through the cash nexusin wages, commodity purchases, rent, and so on defined social interactions. Sister Carrie portrays this financial form of exchange as another manifestation of the Spencerian interpretation of energy exchange that shapes the characters' environment. As most events in Sister Carrie turn on money, the novel registers how the foundation of American fossil capital's industrial-economic order proceeded from its sites of production into the nation's social relations. Dreiser's definition denotes the emergence of a cultural context in which individuals became productive units within an image of the social 'engine', and the exchange of money served as a quantifiable measure for energopolitical governance. This understanding of fossil capital's social relations as determined by the thermodynamic principle of exchange manufactured an industrial subjectivity in the inhabitants of America's urban environments which manifests throughout Sister Carrie, for the narrative frames the monetary exchange that dominates the characters' interactions as a product of the energy exchange that shapes their environment.
Monetary exchange-value features as an explicit aspect of almost all of the characters' interactions. A salient example of this occurs when Carrie stays with her sister, Minnie, and Minnie's husband, Hanson, upon arrival in Chicago. Hanson, a character of a 'saving disposition' who plans to build property, offers Carrie accommodation not out of their familial ties, but as her presence, for him, 'would not be a bad investment'. 44 Minnie agrees with Hanson, seeing Carrie's presence in their flat as a financial gain for the couple: 'She had invited Carrie not because she longed for her presence, but because the latter […] could probably get work and pay her board here'. 45 Minnie and Hanson then begin to question their decision when Carrie fails to make expected contributions to the rent. The couple ponders, '[u]nless Carrie submitted to a solemn round of industry and saw the need of hard work without longing for play, how was her coming to the city to profit them?'. 46 Carrie briefly finds work as a machine operator at a shoe factory, but she catches the flu due to her lack of adequate winter clothing during the first cold snap of the season, so she loses her position. With Carrie unemployed, she can no longer contribute to rent, meaning that Minnie and Hanson 'were unwilling to keep her any longer, out of work'. 47 Through Minnie and Hanson, Dreiser introduces us to the industrial subjectivity that dominates Chicago's inhabitants. As Minnie understands, the money which determines characters' interactionsand the value of which, as she demonstrates, transcends familial tiesmust be earned from 'a solemn round of industry'. Minnie grows frustrated with Carrie who, at first, fails to understand the necessity of hard work in urban life. Indeed, Minnie, whose 'manner was one of trained industry' and for whom life 'was a steady round of toil', embodies the industrial drive for productivity, for she understands that, to participate in Chicago's thermodynamic life, the city's industrial subjects must convert their own energy into its exchangeable form: money.
In its thermodynamic conception of money and the central role of exchange in the characters' interactions and relationships, Sister Carrie depicts the ways in which a fossil fuel-based industrial logic surreptitiously structures the city's social relations. Against the narrative backdrop of Spencerian exchange, quantifiable productivity measures the value of Dreiser's industrial subject. Here, the text reveals its implicit understanding of how 'energy was key to yet another […] shift in the work ethic, one that […] buttressed work's cultural value in the West […] with a new scientific justification and language'. 48 Through its thermodynamic aesthetics, Sister Carrie contributes to the wider ideological changes that fuelled this energetic shift in the work ethic. As we saw in Dreiser's depictions of Chicago's fossil urbanisation, the text deploys the Spencerian discourse of force to frame the social relations of fossil capitalwhich, through the central role of monetary exchange, shape individuals' interactions and identitiesas natural, rather than social, phenomena. Within the cultural context of an industrial society which began to investigate and narrativise its own energy-intensive life, Sister Carrie's naturalisation of America's fossil fuel-based social relations manufactures an ideological perception of the intensification of the work ethic under fossil capital's class dynamics as an inexorable process. The next section turns to an examination of Hurstwood's entropic trajectory, which dramatises middle-class anxieties surrounding the security of one's position in this class dynamic shaped by thermodynamic understandings of production and exchange.

Observations of America's entropic underclass
At its core, Sister Carrie is a story of entropy. Hurstwood's entropic trajectory through the narrative registers a middle-class fear of the precarity of one's position in America's socioeconomic hierarchy following the transition to fossil fuels. Daggett explains how, through 'a mania to put the world to work', 'energy laws could be deployed to endorse an ethosthe ethos of the engine, the maximization of work, and the minimization of waste'. 49 Within this metaphor of the social engine, individuals served as energetic units who either contributed to production or deteriorated into an entropic element of the national project of work. Set in this system designed by and for middle-class white men, Hurstwood's socioeconomic descent from a stable position of productivity to a life of destitution that culminates in suicide dramatises the consequences of departing from the productive norm which haunt the text's implied middle-class reader. Yet, the narrative maintains its Spencerian framework as a way to find ideological resolution to such socioeconomic anxieties.
Hurstwood begins the text as a middle-class inhabitant of Chicago whose economic productivity and social reputation are a source of envy for many of his acquaintances. Hurstwood's professional role, 'which was fairly important, was that of managera kind of stewardship which was imposing but lacked financial control. He had risen by perseverance and industry […] from the position of barkeeper in a commonplace saloon to his present altitude'. 50 Indeed, Hurstwood 'was acknowledged, fawned upon, in a way lionized'. 51 Through his industrial subjectivity, Hurstwood initially occupies a stable, enviable position in Chicago's middle class. The narrator also provides substantial descriptions of Hurstwood's family life, which maintains the security of his privileged socioeconomic position.
Prior to the breakdown of his marriage, Hurstwood resides in a comfortable and stable family home with Julia, his wife, and their two children. The first half of the text contains several detailed depictions of the Hurstwood home as an idealised vision of middle-class family life, each of which emphasises that, under fossil capital, a stable nuclear family performs a socioeconomic function for productive individuals such as Hurstwood. As the narrator informs us, '[h]e could not complicate his home life, because it might affect his relations with his employers. They wanted no scandals. A man, to hold his position, must have a dignified manner, a clean record, [and] a respectable home anchorage'. 52 Daggett describes how heteronormative domesticity acquired an energetic valence during the rise of fossil capital, as 'those who operated outside of the 'domestic woman/economic man' partnership […] were […] socially ranked in keeping with their supposed indolence, degeneracy, or deviance from the white work ethic'. 53 During this first section of the narrative, then, Hurstwood represents the paragon of America's urban middle-class culture: the productive white male who maintains positions of professional and personal stability from which he oversees his workers and family. Or, in energetic terms, Hurstwood embodies the first laws of thermodynamics: the conservation of energy. Indeed, Hurstwood's stable professional role and domestic space evokes the sense of harmonious balance within which productive energy is exchanged. Once Hurstwood meets Carrie, however, the specter of entropythe second law of thermodynamicsbegins to emerge. When Hurstwood's attraction to Carrie intensifies, his professional performance and family life begin to destabilise, triggering his entropic trajectory through the text. At the saloon, he begins to arrange 'his hours very much to suit himselftaking now an afternoon, now an evening off', while at home, his behaviour arouses suspicion in Julia, who files for divorce once she discovers her husband's affair. 54 Before Hurstwood manipulates Carrie into running away with him, we read that '[h]is passion had gotten to that stage now where it was no longer coloured with reason'. 55 The absence of reason, as the narrator describes, in Hurstwood's attraction to Carrie constitutes the primary cause of his socioeconomic downfall. Through thermodynamic themes, Sister Carrie captures the quantification of life under fossil capital's social relations in its rigorous documentation of quantified time (working and leisure hours, transportation), space (street numbers), social developments (urban statistics, such as unemployment levels), the gains and losses of divorce, theft, and, centrally, the inescapability of exchange value. Indeed, during his descent into poverty, Hurstwood's quantification of all aspects of his life 'seemed to become a mania with him' as he desperately attempts to re-engage with his urban environments' quantified structures. 56 When Hurstwood acts on his 'irrational' desire for Carrie, he violates these social relations. His previous adherence to a quantified existence had maintained his stable middle-class status, but by indulging his qualitative desire Hurstwood strays from the productive norm to begin his transformation into an entropic element of American society.
The initial disruption to Hurstwood's balanced productivity generates a desperation that convinces him to steal the ten thousand dollars which he discovers in his employers' unlocked safe, then to make Carrie flee to New York with him. Notably, Hurstwood's entropic trajectory unfolds in New York, and not Chicago, which, as we saw in the first section, the text respectively portrays in relation to the financial and productive practices of fossil capital. As Hurstwood abandons his middle-class life in Chicago's productive environment through limited and, crucially, unearned finances, the narrative's switch in location reinforces the ideological emphasis on the necessity of maintaining a productive life for the implied middle-class reader. Ultimately, the growing severity of Hurstwood's entropy works to essentialise the productive role of America's middle class under fossil capital.
In New York, once Carrie finds success as an actress and leaves him, Hurstwood survives through a job at a hotel. His time in this position, however, is brief, for he develops pneumonia while running an errand at 'a large coal company'. 57 Walking through a blizzard, Hurstwood's feet become saturated with icy water, and he returns 'feeling dull and weary. All the next day he felt unusually depressed and sat about as much as possible, to the irritation of those who admired energy in others'. 58 This scene marks the irrevocable moment of Hurstwood's entropic trajectory, and the narration frames it through a lexical constellation of energy. Hurstwood appears a fragile figure in his failed journey to a large coal company. His colleagues, meanwhile, offer him no assistance nor sympathy. Instead, his distinct inability to work renders him an undesirable presence in a socioeconomic environment which reveres 'energy in others'. The hotel's physician sends Hurstwood to hospital, from where he is discharged three weeks later, enervated and out of work: No more weak-looking object ever strolled out into the spring sunshine than the once hale, lusty manager. All his old corpulency had fled. His face was thin and pale, his hands white, his body flabby. Clothes and all, he weighed but one hundred and thirty-five pounds. 59 Here, the narration delineates Hurstwood's etiolated physical characteristics within a degenerationist discourse, a descriptive approach that dominates the scenes in which he joins the population of New York's urban underclass.
While primarily an evolutionary discourse, degeneration, according to Allen MacDuffie, 'was also an industrial discourse, one that used as a metric of assessing 'fitness' the ability to contribute labour power'. 60 During America's rapid urbanisation, discussions and depictions of degeneracy identified individuals and groups who departed from the productive norm as biological 'others' that, if left unmanaged, threatened national productivity. Dreiser first applies a degenerationist framing of social entropy in a passage that outlines Hurstwood's increasing lethargy in New York, in which he becomes 'a fit case for scientific investigation'. 61 The scientific gaze coalesces when the focus shifts to the individuals of the city's underclass who appear as 'some weather-beaten, heavy-footed specimen of humanity, gaunt in countenance and dilapidated in the matter of clothes'. 62 The narrator continues to suggest that, A study of these men in broad light proved them to be nearly all of a type. They belonged to the class that sits on the park benches during the endurable days and sleeps upon them during the summer nights.
[…] They were all pale, flabby, sunken-eyed, hollow-chested, with eyes that glinted and shone, and lips that were a sickly red by contrast. Their hair was but half attended to, their ears anemic in hue, and their shoes broken in leather and run down at heel and toe. 63 The passage's vocabulary -'specimen', 'study', 'type', 'class'objectifies the impoverished urban inhabitants who, under the narrator's 'scientific' observation, constitute a biological category defined by its inability to perform work. As MacDuffie notes, 'defining degeneracy in terms of energy was key to constructing the degenerate as the bogeyman of the middle classes'. 64 Dreiser's strategy of scientific description here reveals American literary naturalism's immanent middle-class ideology, as these descriptions exhibit a desire to categorise an urban underclass 'bogeyman' against which an implied middle-class readership can define itself.
Dreiser's depictions of the underclass draw a clear distinction between observer and observed that positions the latter as the problem, rather than victims of the economic, environmental, and social transformations of fossil capital which, as we saw earlier, the text naturalises. Crucially, the text's distinction between observer and observed occurs through energetic characterisations, as it imagines the urban poorin opposition to the implied middle-class readershipas the embodiment of entropy. This dynamic in which the narrator and implied reader hover above the characters, therefore, offers an ideological alleviation of the middle-class fear of déclassement which Hurstwood's entropic trajectory dramatises. By positioning the implied middle-class reader alongside the narrator, the former is distanced fromand provided with an ostensibly omniscient perspective ofa character whose depletion in productive output triggers a socioeconomic descent into the enervated and torturesome nadir of America's class structure.
After collecting enough change from members of the public to spend the night in 'a lodging house where there were little closed rooms with gas jets in them', Hurstwood escapes his position in American society's urban 'waste' through asphyxiation. 65 In the darkness of his rented room, Hurstwood. In Hurstwood's suicide, Dreiser depicts a fatigued figure whose desire to rest marks the end of his life. As Pizer observes, 'Hurstwood seeks death as a refuge'. 67 Indeed, for Hurstwood, death offers the only refuge from the productive demands of his social environment. At a time when fossil fuel emissions started to saturate our planet's atmosphere, Hurstwood's death in a gas-filled apartment exhibits a metonymic image of how an energy-intensive culture rendered its unproductive citizens disposable in the construction of a national project of fossil fuel-powered work.
In Sister Carrie, we see how American literary naturalism played an ideological role in the emergence of a socioeconomic order based on the extraction and consumption of fossil fuels. Indeed, Dreiser's text exhibits how the form offers resolutions to middle-class anxieties that arise from fossil capital's immanent tensions and conflicts. In its middle-class observer/urbanunderclass observed focal distinction, the novel provides its implied middle-class reader with a privileged perspective from which it can at once define itself against an unproductive class of biological 'others' while experiencing a sense of control over the 'forces' which dominate and destroy the characters. Dreiser uncouples fossil capital's urbanisation, monetary exchange, and class stratification from their social and historical determinants by portraying each as a separate manifestation of Spencerian energy exchange. Through its entropic trajectory and thermodynamic thematic framings, then, Sister Carrie converts fossil capital's socioeconomic order into a natural phenomenon. In doing so, the text reveals how the structures of the American naturalist form produceand not merely reproducean ideology that erases the tensions inherent to the industrial middle class's activities during the formation of, as Daggett describes it, a fossil fuelpowered mania to put the world to work.