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Dreiser drew heavily upon his youthful experience of the theater in creating his first novel. His characters are as foolishly enamored of the false glamor and factitious realities of the stage as he himself had once been. By the time he wrote Sister Carrie, however, he had achieved a mature perspective and control which allowed him to use the theater for his own artistic purposes. He characterizes his heroine's fantasy life by showing how she constantly associates the stage (gaslight) with Aladdin's treasure cave (magic lamp). At the same time he emphasizes the inadequacy of these fantasies by creating a network of ironic parallels between the plays his characters attend or act in, and their actual situations in his story. The most elaborate of these ironies involves Augustin Daly's Under the Gaslight, the play-within-the-play which gives Carrie her first taste of acting. The reactions of Dreiser's three principal characters to Daly's play offer a suggestive paradigm of their general psychology throughout the novel—a sadly immature, almost infantile, psychology.

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