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.”
Character Analysis
Not a heroine in any conventional sense -- she is passive, reactive, and driven by desire she cannot articulate. She does not scheme or strategize; she drifts toward whatever seems more comfortable, more beautiful, more alive. Dreiser refuses to make her either virtuous or villainous. She is an organism responding to stimuli, and the stimuli are the material seductions of American consumer culture. Her great talent -- the ability to project emotion on stage -- is the public expression of the same formless longing that governs her private life. She ends the novel with everything and nothing.
Minimal dialogue -- Carrie rarely speaks at length. Her inner life is rendered through Dreiser's narration, not through her own words. When she does speak, the language is simple, unformed, reaching for expressions she does not quite have.