The American Dream: A Scenario Of Conventional Social Myth.

Yet he became inflamed and disturbed when he discovered that Carrie was having an affair with his friend, Hurstwood. In many ways like Drouet, Hurstwood too belongs in the web chain of the duplicitous and hypocritical world of Sister Carrie. Hurstwood on his part pretended that he didn't know that Carrie and Drouet are unmarried; he never told Carrie that he was a married man; he neglected the needs of his wife and children, taking the time to secretly visit and write Carrie about his love for her. Hurstwood also views his private life as subordinate to his public life; he does not see men's extramarital affair as censorable as long as they are practiced discreetly. When he and his friends traveled to Philadelphia, they had no qualms whatsoever in engaging in an illicit sexual encounter with other women because nobody knew them there. .
             Also worth noting in Sister Carrie is the fact that the women in Carrie's world have social standing only when the men want them to. Their values are determined not in relations to the content of their character, but on their abilities to role- play or when they are the objects of competition between men. In this regard, Carrie quickly learned the importance and role of artifice and performance in social relations. She cultivated them through listening to gossips about theatre life from Mrs. Hale, her neighbor in Chicago and later from Mrs. Vance, her neighbor in New York. Carrie took the time to imitate and develop the mannerisms that particular men cherish in women. She succeeded this way in her relationship with Drouet and later with Hurstwood. Through her successes, Carrie validated that the dictate and conceptuality about women in her immediate environment and society is marginally circumscribed as objects of artifice and performance; that a woman's identity and role rests on the pedestal of what the men want. We can see notions of these evidently at work when Carrie got a pseudonym in the play at the Earl, to perform the role of a poor girl who got elevated to a higher social standing.