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Forgetting the Uncomfortable: Reading the Shadows of Retail Labor in Sister Carrie and Susan Lenox

When Susan Lenox walks into Sternberg’s department store with money to spend, she restricts herself to quiet purchases, selecting “plain, serviceable things,” including “the simplest of simple hats” (I, 387–8). This restrained scene of consumption from David Graham Phillips’ novel Susan Lenox: Her Fall and Rise (1917) interrupts a trying stretch of poverty for Susan. Earlier that evening, Susan and her friend Etta—cold, penniless, and out of work—had been “gazing hungrily” (I, 377) at luxurious items on display in a department store window. Shopping, even modestly, moves a previously broken-down Susan to a state of pleasure. Warm and relaxed inside the store, she laughs and jests with her shopping companion and john for the evening—the aptly named John—until her pleasure is interrupted when John alludes to the forces of labor enabling her late-night diversion, observing, “I’m glad these poor tired shopgirls and clerks are set free.” John’s reminder that the exhausted staff is still working late into the night evokes for the “conscience-stricken” (I, 388) Susan the underside of consumption. Their captivity at work in the store recalls Susan’s own prior sense of imprisonment as a factory worker, and she confronts the need to compartmentalize the struggles of the working class away from the pleasures of consumption.