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.”
About Theodore Dreiser
Theodore Dreiser (1871-1945) was born in Terre Haute, Indiana, the twelfth of thirteen children in a poor German Catholic family. His father was a failed mill owner; his mother was illiterate but fiercely supportive. Several of his sisters became 'fallen women' by Victorian standards -- one ran off with a married man, another became a kept woman in Chicago, another had an illegitimate child. Dreiser drew directly on his sister Emma's experience for the Hurstwood plot: in 1886, Emma Dreiser eloped with L.A. Hopkins, a married man who stole money from his employer's safe. They fled to Montreal and then New York. Dreiser worked as a journalist in Chicago, St. Louis, and New York before writing Sister Carrie in 1899-1900. He submitted it to Doubleday, Page & Company, where Frank Norris championed it. But Frank Doubleday's wife read the galleys, found the novel immoral, and pressured her husband to suppress it. Doubleday technically published the book -- printing 1,008 copies to fulfill the contract -- but refused to distribute or promote it. Dreiser received $68.40 in royalties and fell into a severe depression. The novel was not properly published until 1907 (B.W. Dodge edition) and did not achieve wide readership until the 1920s, when Dreiser was recognized as one of the founders of American literary naturalism.
Life → Text Connections
How Theodore Dreiser's real experiences shaped specific elements of Sister Carrie.
Dreiser's sister Emma eloped with a married man who stole money from a safe -- the direct source for the Hurstwood plot
Hurstwood's theft, the flight to Montreal, the decline in New York follow Emma's actual story with only moderate fictionalization
Dreiser was not imagining the 'fallen woman' scenario. He was describing his own family's experience, which gave him the authority and the motive to refuse moral judgment.
Dreiser grew up in poverty with a pious father and sisters who violated Victorian sexual morality
Carrie's refusal to feel guilt about her sexual choices -- and the narrator's refusal to impose guilt -- comes from Dreiser's lived knowledge that morality and survival operate on different tracks
The novel's most radical quality -- its amorality -- was not a philosophical pose. It was the lesson of Dreiser's childhood: people do what they must, and the moral framework that condemns them is a luxury of those who have never been poor.
Dreiser worked as a journalist in Chicago during the 1890s boom
The documentary precision of the Chicago chapters -- the shoe factory, the department stores, the labor conditions, the salary figures
Dreiser's journalistic training gave him the method of the novel: observation, documentation, analysis. He wrote fiction the way he wrote newspaper articles -- with facts.
The Doubleday suppression effectively ended Dreiser's career for seven years and sent him into depression
The novel that describes how social forces destroy individuals was itself destroyed by social forces -- Mrs. Doubleday's moral objections suppressed a novel about the irrelevance of moral objections
The censorship history is part of the novel's meaning. Sister Carrie could not exist in the America it described -- the same forces that ground Hurstwood down ground the novel down.
Historical Era
Gilded Age America (1890s) -- industrialization, urbanization, consumer capitalism
How the Era Shapes the Book
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 journey of millions of Americans in the 1890s, drawn by the same magnetic force -- the visible display of goods and pleasures that the new economy made possible and the old morality tried to contain. Dreiser's refusal to condemn Carrie is not just a philosophical position; it is a recognition that the entire American economy depends on the desire it simultaneously condemns. The department store window and the moral sermon exist in the same culture and serve opposite purposes. Dreiser chose the window.