Read Sister Carrie (1991)

Sister Carrie (1991)

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Author

Theodore Dreiser

Genre

Fiction

Rating

3.69 of 5 Votes: 1

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ISBN

0393960420 (ISBN13: 9780393960426)

Language

English

Publisher

w. w. norton & company

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Sister Carrie (1991) - Plot & Excerpts

Sister Carrie is one of a specific handful of American novels that I learned about in school, but (until now) never actually read. Along with those of Upton Sinclair, H.L. Mencken, Sinclair Lewis, Edward Bellamy and to a certain extent Stephen Crane, the works of Theodore Dreiser were always presented to me as more important to history than interesting as literature - not exactly the kind of ringing endorsement that inspires a person to run out and buy a book today. These authors were exposing social ills and introducing literary naturalism; they were unafraid to confront the American public with previously-taboo topics like the lives of prostitutes, or corrupt business interests. But lord, implied my high-school textbooks, were they ever dry and boring. Even in English classes, these authors were lauded mainly for paving the way for those writing after them, who took the social freedoms they pioneered and added a livelier prose style and a more compelling cast of characters. Recently, thinking about everything ELSE my high-school textbooks got wrong, I began to wonder if this generation of authors are really as unreadable as all that, and figured I should do my own bit of experimentation. Sister Carrie was my first foray into this early-20th-century American naturalist enclave, and it was an enlightening journey.First of all, let me say that I can understand why Dreiser has been neglected. I would describe his prose as "utilitarian": it gets the job done, but doesn't involve any pyrotechnics. With the likes of Hemingway and Welty bursting onto the American scene a few short decades later, I can see why Dreiser's businesslike approach came to seem outdated and clunky. It's an odd, transitional-seeming style: more journalistic and less ornamented than your purple Victorian prose, yet not so aggressively streamlined or giddily experimental as the work of many Modernists. The place smelled of the oil of the machines and the new leather - a combination which, added to the stale odours of the building, was not pleasant even in cold weather. The floor, though regularly swept every evening, presented a littered surface. Not the slightest provision had been made for the comfort of the employees, the idea being that something was gained by giving them as little and making the work as hard and unremunerative as possible. What we know of footrests, swivel-back chairs, dining-rooms for the girls, clean aprons and curling irons supplied free, and a decent cloak room, were unthought-of. The washrooms were disagreeable, crude, if not foul places, and the whole atmosphere was sordid.(I chose this passage because it gives a fair idea of Dreiser's style, but also because I think it's hilarious that "clean aprons and curling irons supplied free" would be an item on the agenda for workers' rights. Where have my free curling irons been all these years of working, I'd like to know?)I can also understand the criticism of Dreiser's characters for being undeveloped or unsympathetic, but I think he's actually making a conscious choice here: his super-naturalistic narrative method, combined with some cynicism about people rationalizing their own laziness, means that this is more a novel about circumstances acting on players than about individuals taking control of their own destinies. The young protagonist, Carrie, moves to the big city and quickly becomes overwhelmed with how hard a working-class woman has to labor in order to earn her living. When she's presented with the opportunity of being taken care of by a man and living with him out of wedlock, she drifts into it without ever taking decisive action. Similarly, Drouet (the young man) never plans to lure Carrie into a life of sin; he just finds it distasteful to be tied down in a real marriage, and so puts off the wedding indefinitely. The other characters drift similarly through their lives, finding reasons not to disrupt the momentum that has built up around them. I think Dreiser, like many socially- or socialist-minded writers, is using Carrie, Drouet and Hurstwood as Everyman characters; his book is more a portrait of the material conditions and social forces in turn-of-the-century Chicago and New York than of particular individuals within those cities. I wrote in my thoughts on The Good Earth that this universalizing approach is not my favorite novelistic technique; I tend to prefer stories with highly-individualized characters and distinctive narrative voices, not to mention innovative, well-crafted prose. Nevertheless, it's a tribute to Dreiser's storytelling ability that I had a hard time putting Sister Carrie down. He uses the tools at his disposal in compelling, sometimes surprising ways: one of my favorites was the way in which he played the characters off each other, enlisting the reader's sympathy first for one, then for another. All three of the main characters act very poorly at certain points, and all three fall prey to the lure of habit and drift along in their unsatisfactory lives for painfully long periods before they are finally spurred to make some kind of change. As a reader, I found myself either frustrated with or cheering for all three characters in sequence as the novel progressed. And although any given character may be acting badly at a certain juncture, the fact that I had been rooting for them only fifty pages earlier meant that none of the three was every wholly unsympathetic. In fact, Dreiser works so hard to keep Carrie, Drouet and Hurstwood emotionally accessible to the reader, even at their most selfish and unlikeable, that I was reminded of the work of contemporary writers like Toni Morrison and Dorothy Allison - writers who make a point of empathizing with characters usually beyond the pale. I remember how conflicted I felt, reading Morrison's The Bluest Eye, at the author's empathic portrayal of a father who rapes his own daughter, and I wonder whether readers in 1900 would have found Dreiser's subject matter to be equally shocking and conflicting. Probably so, judging by its history: it was withdrawn from publication for being "too sordid," and only after Dreiser cut many suggestive passages did Doubleday agree to publish the expurgated version. In another triumph for Norton Critical Editions, I read the appended catalog of the passages cut in the initial publication, which was fascinating. To my surprise, many of them involved scenes in which Carrie gets cat-called and solicited on the street - surely the fact that this happens is no mystery to any urban woman? I certainly deal with it whenever I walk downtown. But maybe, at the turn of the century, men only felt confident cat-calling women who looked working-class, so the middle-class readers of Sister Carrie would not have encountered the behavior? I'm not sure how to feel about the suggestion that public humiliation of women has been democratized in American cities over the past century, but it's interesting to think about.But cat-calling is just one small aspect of the loving-yet-critical portraits of 1890s New York and Chicago in this novel. Dreiser is at his most vivid when depicting the inhumane conditions of city life and the unfettered, dog-eat-dog realities of pre-regulation American capitalism. It's this, along with the frank portrayals of cohabiting out of wedlock, that made the book famous, and I think the urban landscape is really the star of Dreiser's show. The reader gets a strong sense of a world full of possibility ripe for the picking - all the young men, like Drouet, streaming in from the countryside to secure sales positions, the newly-constructed glass-fronted buildings housing newly-incorporated retail firms, the movers, shakers, and hangers-on in the untamed melee of exponential urban growth. And one also sees vividly how the skirmish-and-grab for that pool of possibility creates a class of casualties, left even more to their own devices than the modern urban homeless. Dreiser does a good job of communicating the extent to which all his characters are performing without a safety net, and even the highest is capable of a dramatic fall. I think I preferred Sister Carrie to The Good Earth because Dreiser's cities-as-characters are so dynamic. I'm not sure turn-of-the-century American urban literature will become my new favorite genre, but Sister Carrie was certainly enough to convince me to give it another try.

Sister Carrie was published in 1900, so I suppose it still qualifies as nineteenth century literature. There's a tendency in works of that time to tell the readers what the characters are feeling rather than showing them in scenes and this book is a good example. It took me awhile to get used to the style. Also, the prejudices of the era are obvious to a modern reader, since we've moved on to an entirely different set of bigotries. In this case it is mostly sexism. Here is Theodore Dreiser's early description of his main character:Caroline, or Sister Carrie, as she had been half affectionately termed by the family, was possessed of a mind rudimentary in its power of observation and analysis. Self-interest with her was high, but not strong. It was, nevertheless, her guiding characteristic. Warm with the fancies of youth, pretty with the insipid prettiness of the formative period, possessed of a figure promising eventual shapeliness and an eye alight with certain native intelligence, she was a fair example of the middle American class—two generations removed from the emigrant. Books were beyond her interest—knowledge a sealed book. In the intuitive graces she was still crude. She could scarcely toss her head gracefully. Her hands were almost ineffectual. The feet, though small, were set flatly. And yet she was interested in her charms, quick to understand the keener pleasures of life, ambitious to gain in material things. A half-equipped little knight she was, venturing to reconnoitre the mysterious city and dreaming wild dreams of some vague, far-off supremacy, which should make it prey and subject—the proper penitent, grovelling at a woman's slipper.Yet, Carrie, with her rudimentary mind, does fairly well for herself as the story goes on. At first I thought she was, like Ado Annie in Rogers and Hammerstein's Oklahoma, a girl who can't say no. But Dreiser describes her “go with the flow” mentality in a better way when he says: Carrie had little power of initiative; but, nevertheless, she seemed ever capable of getting herself into the tide of change where she would be easily borne along.Yet even though Carrie is the title character and the only one who is in the entire novel, I don't think this is her story as much as its the story of the people around her, mostly George Hurstwood. Carrie doesn't treat the people around her badly. She isn't very nice to her sister, Minnie, and she uses Lola Osborne later on in the book, but she's more than fair to Hurstwood and can't be blamed for what happens to Charlie Drouet, who doesn't appear to care anyway.The other aspect of Dreiser's writing that took some getting used to, is his tendency to lecture. Here's an example:A man's fortune or material progress is very much the same as his bodily growth. 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. There are no other states. Frequently there is a period between the cessation of youthful accretion and the setting in, in the case of the middle-aged man, of the tendency toward decay when the two processes are almost perfectly balanced and there is little doing in either direction. Given time enough, however, the balance becomes a sagging to the grave side. Slowly at first, then with a modest momentum, and at last the graveward process is in the full swing. So it is frequently with man's fortune. If its process of accretion is never halted, if the balancing stage is never reached, there will be no toppling. Rich men are, frequently, in these days, saved from this dissolution of their fortune by their ability to hire younger brains. These younger brains look upon the interests of the fortune as their own, and so steady and direct its progress. If each individual were left absolutely to the care of his own interests, and were given time enough in which to grow exceedingly old, his fortune would pass as his strength and will. He and his would be utterly dissolved and scattered unto the four winds of the heavens. I'm not sure Dreiser was an expert on aging, but he seemed to be confident in his beliefs.Steve Lindahl – author of Motherless Soul and White Horse Regressions

What do You think about Sister Carrie (1991)?

3/7 - This is a little slow so far, mostly because of the number of words Dreiser uses to say something simple - about three words to every one an author of today would use. The words themselves aren't particularly difficult, it's just that there's a lot of them. The story itself is interesting, though, so will push through all the words. To be continued...4/7 - Drouet is exactly the kind of man/person I don't like. The kind who puts famous and/or more wealthy people on pedestals. Like, just because they're a famous opera singer or own a department store means they couldn't possibly commit a heinous crime, and if they did there must have been exceedingly understandable extenuating circumstances - they didn't do anything wrong, in fact they did the world a favour when they ran down that little old lady while driving drunk - and their pal the Chief of Police or the mayor will make sure they don't do any time. I really dislike the glorification of famous people just because they're famous, just because of the luck of the draw of being spotted by a talent agent in the local diner or ice skating rink - they're no better than any other person on the street, they just have more money than most other people on the street. Note: My view of Drouet's character may be slightly coloured by a recent Law and Order: Criminal Intent marathon. To be continued...7/7 - It's funny, what Drieser wrote about Carrie's struggle to get work 114 years ago completely applies to what today's younger generations (makes me sound like I was around when this book was first published) are going through. Their wages don't pay enough to cover rent/mortgage, bills, food, transport, and other bare essentials. Companies aren't looking for inexperienced school/university graduates, they want employees with experience in their chosen industry. But the age old question of how anyone can get experience if no one will hire them and give them the opportunity to gain that experience in the first place, continues to be asked. It's not fair and it's a never-ending circle that's only going to get worse as year after year of highly educated, but inexperienced, uni graduates are forced into basic admin or data entry positions. The country is going to end up with a work force of entry-level workers and no one qualified to manage the more specialised positions - one of the many worrying trends that disturbs me about the direction the country's headed in. To be continued...Page 91 - I don't know how they did things in 1900, but what Drouet just invited Hurstwood to sounds like some kind of orgy or some other situation that's going to involve the seduction (really should be rape, but I don't think it'll be described as such) of Carrie and her introduction to the world of 'kept women' or mistresses (not necessarily for Drouet's exclusive use). Oh dear! To be continued...9/7 - I must be dense, for I seemed to have missed the hint, or the spot in the narrative where you're supposed to assume that Drouet and Carrie are now having sex, living together as 'man and wife'. Some pages back, when he first offered her a place to stay, there was mention of him not wanting to hurt Carrie and I took that to mean physically, mentally, and reputationally. That he would keep their relationship platonic, just one friend helping another (not that he wouldn't want more, just that it wouldn't be expected). That's why I wrote what I did about the supposed upcoming seduction of Carrie by Drouet and Hurstwood, I didn't understand that it was assumed that it had already happened. Damn these overly prudish classic books, not saying what they mean, leaving things to the reader's imagination. Now I have to wonder what hasn't been said about Carrie and Hurstwood's relationship, if we're supposed to assume that they're having sex as well. Although, if they are having sex I don't see where they could have realistically fit it in as they've had very little time alone. To be continued...18/7 - I enjoyed this, but can't really say why. It was quite slow, certainly slower than my normal reading choices; there were no big events and no climatic ending; and none of the main characters were people I wanted to barrack for, for more than a few pages at a time. Carrie had her sympathetic moments, but there were times when I wanted to sit her down and explain the ways of the world or shake some sense into her. I was happy that Carrie finally managed to 'make it' on her own without the help of a man (what I imagine would have been a minor miracle in those days), and almost wanted to say to her "See, you can do it on your own. Drouet and Hurstwood were just dragging you down and holding you back." It was a blessing in disguise that neither of them actually married her.If you read my reviews regularly you might have read my views on themes and messages within books - that they're not for me and tend to go straight over my head - I just don't see them, unless they're shoved down my throat (and books that do that are another story altogether). So, I don't really know what Dreiser might have been attempting to say with this book, but I did get a feeling of feminine empowerment from Carrie's ability to survive with or without the two men who came into her life. If that's not what Dreiser was trying to say then obviously I wasn't meant to understand it, but I still managed to find enough to interest me and keep me reading (which was a feat in and of itself as at 557 pages this is now the longest book I've read this year).
—Sarah

When a girl leaves her home at eighteen, she does one of two things. Either she falls into saving hands and becomes better, or she rapidly assumes the cosmopolitan standard of virtue and becomes worse.That I prioritized 'Sister Carrie' over at least fifty other books high on the ever-expanding tbr list can be imputed to a matter of false advertising. The blurb hails Carrie as a modern woman in American fiction, a first of her kind (think Kate Chopin's The Awakening released just a year prior to this). A heroine who may have plummeted to the depths of social and moral ignominy and eventually died or killed herself, following the inexorably harsh laws governing 'fallen women' in literature, had she not achieved independent success in the end. And as a woman I am interested in categorizing male authors according to their handling of women characters. Sue me! Yet contrary to what indicated by the deceptive title, the book features very little of the eponymous heroine's trajectory often deviating to chronicle the narrative arcs of her lovers who, by turns, unwittingly aid and thwart her. In fact this is as much about Carrie Meeber's rise to prominence as a Broadway actress as it is about Hurstwood's downward spiral into eventual vagrancy and death on the streets of New York - a slow and gradual process which makes for a terrifying, bone-chilling spectacle and, for a while, threatens to steal the limelight from Carrie's growth story in entirety. In the sunshine of the morning, beneath the wide, blue heavens, with a fresh wind astir, what fears, except the most desperate, can find a harbourage? In the night, or the gloomy chambers of the day, fears and misgivings wax strong, but out in the sunlight there is, for a time, cessation even of the terror of death.That a male author condemned a male character to a fate of complete but uneventful ruination while simultaneously elevating a woman to a position of significance in society is a literary feat worthy of applause. And yet something about this book leaves one unsatisfied, a little deceived, a little cheated, with a distinct feeling of 'isn't there more?' She wanted pleasure, she wanted position, and yet she was confused as to what these things might be. Every hour the kaleidoscope of human affairs threw a new lustre upon something, and therewith it became for her the desired-the all.Carrie never acts out of her own conviction in any goals, always, inevitably letting circumstances coerce her into action when all other avenues which allow her to maintain a glamorous, hassle-free existence have been exhausted. She lets desperation be her guide instead of some 'soul hunger' (yes I am still suffering from a Middlemarch hangover) or a conscious desire for personal liberty. She is also never proactive in pursuing love, only ever responding to the advances of those who express romantic interest. Carrie's awakening is shown to be in its initial stages, never attaining maturation. And this is why I can't help but prefer assertive Edna over dilly-dallying, uncertain, easily-swayed-by-another's-opinion Carrie. The pitfalls of a lack of narrative focus and the structurally awkward, dry, doctor's-prescription-like prose notwithstanding, the novel has its redeeming facets. Dreiser's gift for character analysis is astonishing. With surgical precision he exposes the motivation at work behind every action and thought. As a consequence, the inner lives of all the characters are brilliantly replicated for the reader's benefit. In addition, the novel seems like a mild indictment of the fatal lure of the big city with its frenetically-paced industrial hubs, jam-packed shopping districts and flourishing neighborhoods, the deceptive grandeur with its promise of wealth and social relevance to the starry-eyed, penniless newcomer that remains only ever that - a promise. Not all women are as lucky as Carrie, pretty enough to attract the attentions of rich men, willing to fund her wardrobe and house her, and eventually the stage. Ah, she was in the walled city now! Its splendid gates had opened, admitting her from a cold, dreary outside. She seemed a creature afar off-like every other celebrity he had known.That Carrie was created by a male novelist in 1900 remains an impressive fact though. For that, I doff my hat..er...hairband to you, Mr Dreiser!____P.S.:-From the desultory tone of my review and its utter lacklustreness you can probably infer how underwhelming I found the book.
—Samadrita

Seminal American literature, and yet the simplest occurrence in Sister Carrie -- such as Carrie requesting meat -- reads like this:He caught himself looking at her smiling and she was the very picture of youth and uprightness and the tendency toward productivity and mirth and joviality, all of which were produced from her in a very feminine manner. Yet thoughts dashed inside his mind in a very tumultuous fashion, tumultuous like the threshings of torrents. Carrie has not asked for meat before, Hurstwood remarked upon himself to himself for himself. What could this mean to her demeanor and charm and circumstance, her carriage and her sprite and her nature and her duties to such a member of this sex of the woman?Carrie: "Good then."And Carrie fretted then because she would not want to ask him for more than one thing a day, especially this one day, to-day. As a matter of the fact which bears witnessing, that she had spoken about the meat moments ago may have spoiled him on her, or so she perchance thought that he might be thinking about her thinking about him. Perhaps she would descend from his gracious graces. She wondered and looked at him just so. And he looked askance at her just so, or so she thought, but she did not deign to ask. And then he looked like he was going to ask, but she looked away, and then he looked at an advertisement for meat further compounding his own uncertainties which were unknown to Carrie, so Hurstwood thought he knew but did not know. It was just too much, just too much, she thought. How she would like to get out to the theatre. How her heart was filled with gloom and darkness and woe and despair that Hurstwood would look and then not look at her and then look at her again. She could only respond with a look, but with the fear that not looking would require her to speak, and then where would she be? She was not that kind of woman, and did not regard herself to be so.Hurstwood: "Alright."That handsome couple then traversed the streets of the great city in a car to the theatre in the middle of the afternoon, while both of them are without the employment and could not find something, asked around for something, looked for something, and no one gave them something, not a thing.Carrie: "You thief, you cad, you lying cadding thief! I want to file the works of paper which would thenceforth move one in a legal fashion toward the challenge of a divorce or other dissolution of the marriage that you and I have between each other with one another."Hurstwood: "I never once loved you, except when I was married to my wife."Carrie: "I don't know, I don't know ... if I could or should or would. I've never ... known."Hurstwood: "Let's run away together to Montreal."Carrie: "No."Hurstwood: "Your husband has been injured! He's in hospital! Come quickly! I've outfitted us with the equipages! Grapple your bespoke cloaklets and we can get on with our barouches and moil with the attitude of a multitude of avoirdubois!Hurstwood and Carrie -- in their finest clothes purchased at the most opulent department stores in the city -- both together rush to the train station and board a train for Montreal and it scuds across the inky black dark night of black darkness of Canada.Carrie: "I've a sneaking suspicion that you've not taken me to see my husband."Hurstwood tries to think of some fib. Hurstwood describes his surroundings silently within his brain, retelling stories to himself of when he was in Chicago, before he thought about other things, things to which he is not concerned anymore and things which he was concerned about moments ago andCarrie: "Hurstwood, I ... I don't know."Hurstwood: "We're off to Montreal. Your husband was never sick. You divorced him. You were never married to him. He left you. Your last name is now Murdock."Carrie: "I don't like that one. Any one but that. Murdock is awful."Hurstwood: "Alright, Wheeler, then."Carrie: "It's settled."
—Barrett

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