53 pages • 1 hour read
Theodore DreiserSister Carrie
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1900A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 10-19Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 10 Summary: “The Counsel of Winter: Fortune’s Ambassador Calls”
Now set up by Drouet, Carrie sees herself as compromised morally. The feeling is underscored when Drouet asks her to pretend to be his wife when she is to meet Hurstwood, even though his friend will know it is a pretense. Drouet begs her to play along, promising that he will marry her as soon as he completes a major real estate deal.
When Carrie meets Hurstwood, she is impressed. Drouet has begun to wear on her. She is “more clever than he in a hundred ways” (68). When the three play cards, Carrie and Hurstwood form an alliance and outplay a hapless Drouet. At Hurstwood’s invitation, they head to the theater. Hurstwood tells Drouet how intriguing Carrie is and how happy he would be to show her around town when Drouet is busy with work.
Chapter 11 Summary: “The Persuasion of Fashion: Feeling Guards O’er Its Own”
Carrie dreams of becoming a better woman. She studies the fashion and hairstyles of other women. Listening to a neighbor play piano, Carrie wishes she knew how to play, seeing in piano an elegance and sophistication.
Hurstwood cannot stop thinking about Carrie, certain that the philandering womanizer Drouet is only stringing her along. It would be easy, he decides, to make Carrie his own. He invites the couple to go to the theater and regales Carrie with amusing stories while Drouet, “dull in comparison” (78), sits apart silently. Carrie begins to feel Drouet “sinking in her estimation every moment” (78).
Chapter 12 Summary: “Of the Lamps of the Mansions: The Ambassador’s Plea”
Hurstwood’s son sees his father at the theater and alerts his mother. Flustered, George says he was entertaining a couple as part of his job. His wife does not believe him.
Meanwhile, a wealthy neighbor of Carrie, Mrs. Hale, takes Carrie for a carriage ride about Chicago’s most affluent neighborhoods along Lincoln Park. Carrie, now aware of the shabbiness of her flat, is much taken by the huge mansions, the manicured landscaping, and the elegant carriages.
When Drouet is out of town, Hurstwood visits Carrie. Impulsively, Hurstwood strokes Carrie’s hand and notices that Carrie does not object. After he departs, Carrie lets her hair down and regards herself in the mirror: “I don’t know what I can do” (85).
Chapter 13 Summary: “His Credentials Accepted: A Babel of Tongues”
Hurstwood shows up at Carrie’s door two days later. Carrie is emotionally conflicted, feeling loyalty but not love for Drouet. They take a carriage ride, and Hurstwood tells Carrie that he loves her. He can tell she is unhappy, and he is tired of being lonely. When pressed, however, Carrie cannot tell him that she loves him back. Carrie, more out of sympathy than desire, lets Hurstwood kiss her. “You’re my own girl now” (92), he says.
Chapter 14 Summary: “With Eyes and Not Seeing: One Influence Wanes”
As the busybody women in her apartment building begin to gossip about Hurstwood’s repeated visits, Carrie weighs her feelings. When Drouet returns home, she tells him about their meetings, but Drouet shows no interest.
When Drouet offers yet another reason for delaying their marriage, Carrie accuses him of never intending to go through with his promise. The next day when they attend the theater with Hurstwood, the play, about a husband who ignores the emotional agonies of his own wife, does not enlighten Drouet. He prattles on that the husband should pay more attention to his wife “if he wants to keep her” (97).
Chapter 15 Summary: “The Irk of the Old Ties: The Magic of Youth”
Hurstwood, obsessed with Carrie, drifts away from his wife, who senses something is amiss. One afternoon as he and Carrie walk around a park, Hurstwood asks her to move in with him. She says she could only do that if they got married and left Chicago—she does not want to hurt Drouet. Her response emboldens Hurstwood, and he begins to plot how to do just that.
Chapter 16 Summary: “A Witless Aladdin: The Gate to the World”
One night at his lodge meeting, Drouet volunteers Carrie to take a small part in a local theater production in need of actors. At first reluctant, Carrie agrees. To avoid any problems if Carrie does not pan out, Drouet tells his lodge brothers that the girl’s name is Carrie Madenda. Carrie warms up to the production, diligently learning her lines and practicing them with Drouet, who is impressed by Carrie’s flair for the theatrical: “Carrie,” as it turns out, “was possessed of that sympathetic, impressionable nature, which…had long been the glory of the drama” (109).
Chapter 17 Summary: “A Glimpse through the Gateway: Hope Lightens the Eye”
Carrie loves being involved with the stage production. Hurstwood, who is not a member of the lodge, persuades Drouet to invite him to attend the play’s premiere.
In rehearsal, Carrie struggles against a tyrannical director who keeps interfering in her delivery, giving her pointers: “Put expression in your face. You don’t want to stand like that” (115). Frustrated, Carrie finally tells him to let the cast go through the play without his interference. The rehearsal runs smoothly after that.
When Drouet attends a rehearsal, Carrie stuns the director with her natural flair for the theater. Drouet, however, is unmoved by the performance. Carrie is hurt: “She felt his indifference keenly” (118).
Chapter 18 Summary: “Just Over the Border: A Hail and Farewell”
It is the night of the play’s premiere. Hurstwood, using his influence, has secured a sold-out house for the tiny lodge theater. His friends and neighbors gather about him. In the lobby, Hurstwood is “in his element” (122). He feels important and “lionized” (123).
Chapter 19 Summary: “An Hour in Elfland: A Clamour Half Heard”
As the play begins, the cast of neighborhood amateurs suffer from stage fright. Carrie seems tentative, aware of the audience, and hesitating in her delivery. Drouet heads backstage during her break and reassures Carrie that she can do this, adding that he has seen her act with confidence. Carrie rises to the challenge and dazzles the tiny audience with her flair. Hurstwood is so moved he heads backstage during the intermission.
With Drouet already there, however, Hurstwood keeps his enthusiasm in check and returns to his seat. As the second act moves toward Carrie’s scene-stealing soliloquy—in which her character responds to her husband’s pathetic request to come back to him—the two men in her life have similar epiphanies: Drouet decides he will stop messing around and marry Carrie. Meanwhile, Hurstwood decides to leave his wife and take Carrie for his own, believing that the “fool” (133) Drouet does not deserve her.
Chapters 10-19 Analysis
In these chapters, Hurstwood emerges as Carrie’s suitor. Taken aback by her theatrical performance, he decides to risk his home, marriage, and family to be with Carrie, certain that this girl, a virtual stranger half his age and living with his friend, is somehow the key to his happiness.
“In the light of the world’s attitude toward woman and her duties, the nature of Carrie’s mental state deserves consideration,” the narrator begins Chapter 10. As this section opens, Dreiser focuses initially on Carrie and her determination to be a socially aware and conventionally defined woman typical of her era. She believes this role will bring her happiness, stability, and identity. In trying to mimic the fashionable women she sees along the streets of Chicago, Carrie tries to define for herself the role of women in turn-of-the-century America. She checks out their stylish clothes, pricey coiffures, and elegant carriages. She yearns to play the piano not because of any love of music but because playing the piano would make her look more sophisticated.
Carrie is now aware she is a kept woman. A traveling salesmen with a reputation as a player is paying her rent. She frets over what that arrangement will entail. She has conversations with the voice in her head, a “different voice” (66) that is less susceptible to the charms and compliments of the calculating Drouet. She knows what she feels for Drouet is not love—at least not the emotional swooning she believes love to be. Drouet is not clever. His dullness begins to wear on Carrie. His tendency to lay on the flattery smacks Carrie as obvious desperation. If only she did not see his flaws, she thinks, then she should “adore him” (68). But she does see his flaws. Carrie is left then in a dilemma: As a woman, she needs to validate this immoral arrangement by marrying a man who so completely falls below her standards. That is the role of women, she believes: be content with a man, whatever his deficiencies, if he can provide a stable home.
Before her introduction to the fantasy play-world of the theater frees her emotionally, her initial involvement with Hurstwood introduces her to a dilemma that Drouet’s arrangement did not. Hurstwood understands Carrie only through the cultural template he has followed his entire life. She must be made into his wife—she be made his. Carrie does not know he is married. His obsession with Carrie can be expressed in the only way he understands: He must marry her, claim her, and possess her.
After the theater performance, Hurstwood impulsively decides, without talking to Carrie, he will leave his wife and marry Carrie. In the carriage ride, when he slips his arm around her waist and “seizes” (91) with his free hand her fingers, Hurstwood presses the point: “By the Lord, he would have that lovely girl if it took his all” (132). At last, Carrie feels she will be validated. She will take the role a woman is supposedly destined to want: She will be a wife. Hurstwood, with his earnest promises, will “rescue her” (106).
The novel, however, complicates this apparent love story because the narrator (and the reader) know what Carrie does not: Hurstwood is a calculating coward and a hypocrite. He is a married man who finds in the young Carrie an emotional outlet his marriage no longer provides him. Even as Carrie falls under his charismatic spell, the reader understands the lies and the pathetic reality of Hurstwood’s foolish delusion that he and Carrie could ever be happy together. The narrator’s assessment of Mrs. Hurstwood is chilling as it forecasts the failure of Hurstwood’s romantic plans: “She was a cold, self-centered woman […]. [S]he would not delay to inflict any injury, big or little, to wound the object of her revenge and still leave him uncertain as to the source of the evil” (79).
Thus, even as this section tracks Hurstwood’s pursuit of Carrie and exposes Drouet as irrelevant, the love story it seems to promise collapses of its own irony. For all the romantic dates, lingering dinners, nights at the theater, carriage rides, and strolls in the park—all typically promising signs of love and romance—these chapters place the three lovers into positions of alienation, to the point where the word lovers itself demands air quotes. Love is simply not possible between these three. Carrie is too caught up in what society expects a young, comely woman to do; Drouet is obsessed with the game of sexual liaisons in a consequence-free environment; and Hurstwood is too terrified of his wife to ever have the temerity to break free into authentic passion. They each tap into what the novel defines as the emotional and spiritual condition of humanity in the new century: The Inevitability of Loneliness, suggested by the fulfillment that Carrie feels as an actress, playing at emotions, alone on stage.
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