Sister Carrie
Theodore Dreiser (1900)
“Published in 1900, suppressed by its own publisher, and banned for decades -- because it dared to let a 'fallen woman' succeed and feel no guilt about it.”
At a Glance
Caroline Meeber, an eighteen-year-old girl from small-town Wisconsin, moves to Chicago in 1889 to make her fortune. She finds only sweatshop labor, illness, and poverty -- until she accepts the support of a traveling salesman named Drouet, who sets her up as his mistress. Through Drouet she meets George Hurstwood, a prosperous saloon manager, who becomes obsessed with her and abandons his family, steals money from his employers, and flees with Carrie to New York. In New York, Hurstwood's slow decline into poverty and despair mirrors Carrie's slow rise into theatrical stardom. He ends in a flophouse. She ends in a rocking chair. Neither finds what they were looking for.
Read full summary →Why This Book Matters
Sister Carrie is the founding text of American literary naturalism -- the novel that made it possible for American fiction to describe desire, poverty, and sexuality without moral judgment. Its 1900 publication (and immediate suppression by Doubleday) marked the beginning of a decades-long battle between American naturalist writers and the censorship regime that governed what could be said in print. The novel was not properly available until 1907 and not widely read until the 1920s, but its influence was immediate among writers: Theodore Dreiser became the model for Sinclair Lewis, Sherwood Anderson, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and every American novelist who wanted to describe how people actually lived rather than how moralists said they should live.
Diction Profile
Dreiser's prose is famously awkward -- heavy, repetitive, syntactically clumsy by the standards of his contemporaries. Critics from H.L. Mencken to Lionel Trilling noted the clumsiness and debated whether it was a flaw or a feature. It is both. Dreiser writes like a man thinking aloud in prose, not like a stylist crafting sentences. The effect is cumulative rather than beautiful: each sentence adds weight, and the weight becomes the meaning.
Low. Dreiser avoids metaphor and simile as a matter of philosophical principle -- to compare one thing to another suggests that meaning is transferable, and Dreiser's naturalism insists that each thing is irreducibly itself. The major exception is the rocking chair, which functions less as a metaphor than as a recurring physical fact that accumulates symbolic weight through repetition.