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.”
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Sister Carrie
Theodore Dreiser (1900) · 557pages · American Realism · 5 AP appearances
Summary
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.
Why It 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...
Themes & Motifs
Diction & Style
Register: 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.
Narrator: Third-person omniscient with heavy philosophical editorializing. Dreiser's narrator is not invisible -- he is a persi...
Figurative Language: 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.
Historical Context
Gilded Age America (1890s) -- industrialization, urbanization, consumer capitalism: Sister Carrie is a novel about what happens when an agricultural society becomes a consumer society almost overnight. Carrie's journey from small-town Wisconsin to Chicago to New York is the journe...
Key Characters
Talking Points
- Dreiser opens the novel with a precise inventory of Carrie's possessions -- 'a small trunk, a cheap imitation alligator-skin satchel, a small lunch in a paper box, and a yellow leather snap purse, containing her ticket, a scrap of paper with her sister's address in Van Buren Street, and four dollars in money.' Why does Dreiser begin with an inventory rather than a description of Carrie's character or feelings?
- When Carrie becomes Drouet's mistress, Dreiser does not condemn her. He also does not celebrate her. What is the effect of this narrative neutrality? How would the novel change if the narrator judged her?
- The safe scene -- where Hurstwood takes the money and the lock clicks shut -- is constructed so that it is impossible to say whether Hurstwood chose to steal or was trapped by circumstance. Why does Dreiser make this scene ambiguous rather than clear?
- The rocking chair appears repeatedly -- Hurstwood rocks in paralysis, Carrie rocks in dissatisfaction at the Waldorf. What does the rocking chair represent, and why is the same symbol used for both characters?
- Carrie's talent as an actress is described as 'emotional greatness' -- not intelligence, not training, but an instinctive ability to project feeling. How does this talent connect to the same quality that makes her a restless, unsatisfied person in private life?
Notable Quotes
“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 ...”
“She was too full of wonder and desire to be greedy.”
“He was not a man who traveled much, but when he did, he took his wife. She did not object to it. She was rather fond of being seen with him.”
Why Read This
Because it is the first great American novel about wanting things -- and about what happens when you get them. Because Carrie's story is the story of every person who has ever moved to a city believing it would make them happy. Because Hurstwood's...