4 In Legal Responsibility in Old Age (1874), the New York neurologist George 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. 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. 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.

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. 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. 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. 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.

Sister carrie 1900