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 31-40Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 31 Summary: “A Pet of Good Fortune: Broadway Flaunts Its Joys”
A year passes. Carrie is increasingly distressed over her life with Hurstwood, who struggles to make his bar succeed. A couple moves into their complex, the Vances, and Carrie sees that Mrs. Vance, stunningly beautiful and an accomplished pianist, enjoys the wealthy life Carrie always dreamed would be hers. Mrs. Vance takes Carrie to dinner at a swanky restaurant on Broadway, and Carries feels immersed in the energy of privilege and its “showy parade” (212). But given the reality of her marriage, she feels out of place amid the “riches and show” (213).
Chapter 32 Summary: “The Feast of Belshazzar: A Seer to Translate”
When Mrs. Vance takes Carrie to a matinee performance on Broadway, Carrie feels at home in the theater. As she returns home, the performance still playing her head, she is more discontented than ever with her life.
The next time Mrs. Vance takes Carrie to the theater, she is introduced to Mrs. Vance’s young cousin, Bob Ames, a graduate student in electrical engineering. Carrie is enchanted by Ames—he is genial, well-dressed, articulate, and so much younger than Hurstwood. With enthusiasm, he talks to Carrie about big ideas, which suggests that he respects her. When she returns to her flat, she does not join Hurstwood in bed but rather spends the night in her rocking-chair: “Through the fog of longing and conflicting desires, she was beginning to see” (223). She decides how much better her life would be if she could be on the stage.
Chapter 33 Summary: “Without the Walled City: The Slope of the Years”
As Carrie begins to feel alive with new hope, Hurstwood declines, his spirits ebbing. His personality at the bar reflects his melancholy. He alienates customers and co-workers with his sour attitude. His responsibilities are cut to the point that he and Carrie must move to a smaller flat.
Even after they move to a smaller flat, Hurstwood finds out the owner of the property where the bar stands is determined to upcycle the neighborhood and will not be renewing the bar’s lease. Hurstwood is broke and unemployed. He tries to conceal this reality from Carrie, pooling the money he has saved and leaving the flat every morning as if he is still working. But after a month, he tells Carrie the truth.
Chapter 34 Summary: The Grind of the Millstones: A Sample of Chaff”
After the lease on the bar runs out and Hurstwood collects what he is owed, he realizes he must now find work. Hurstwood assures Carrie that once he works for a bit, he will have the capital to start a new investment. But several days of looking for work prove fruitless. In dismal spirits, Hurstwood feels close to giving up. Instead of working the streets, he stays home and reads the newspaper: “He read, read, rocking in the warm front room near the radiator and waiting for dinner to be served” (236).
Chapter 35 Summary: “The Passing of Effort: The Visage of Care”
Weeks pass, and winter approaches. A fierce winter storm keeps Hurstwood home. When he finally gets back out, he quickly catches a bad cold. Even before he recovers, he has all but decided to stop looking for work, “each day the need to hunt paining him, and each day disgust, depression, shamefacedness driving him into lobby idleness” (239). He starts cutting back on household expenses. Carrie grows irritated. The two seldom talk, and Carrie begins sleeping in the front room alone.
Chapter 36 Summary: “A Grim Retrogression: The Phantom of Chance”
Hurstwood turns to gambling, but he loses more than he wins. One day, Carrie’s friend Mrs. Vance shows up when Carrie is out shopping. Mrs. Vance is stunned to see how Hurstwood has slipped and how broke the couple is. When Carrie learns that Hurstwood did not even try to resolve their predicament, the two have a heated argument. Over the next several days, a despondent Hurstwood pursues gambling but keeps losing. When he finally returns to their flat, Carrie tells him the rent is due. They now have less than $100.
Chapter 37 Summary: “The Spirit Awakens: New Search for the Gate”
Desperate for money, Carrie tells Hurstwood she will try to get work in the theater. Her initial search is frustrating. She has no real stage experience, and any agent willing to represent her wants security up front.
Chapter 38 Summary: “In Elf Land Disporting: The Grim World without”
Finally, Carrie secures a job in the chorus line at the Casino Theater. Rehearsals do not go well. The director is demanding, and for the first weeks Carrie practices the dance routine in their flat at night. Hurstwood, even when he tells Carrie that his money is gone and that she is now the breadwinner, refuses to search for a job.
The night of the premiere, Carrie is nervous until she realizes that, as part of the chorus, she is just background and that no one is watching her. But from her position in the back, she realizes that she could do the lead roles much better. Back home, she is elated and determined to succeed in the theater. When Hurstwood asks for some money, she refuses, telling him he needs to go get work.
Chapter 39 Summary: “Of Lights and Shadows: The Parting of Worlds”
Other girls in the chorus assure Carrie that, with her talent, she could get lots of parts and be paid much better. The play’s director notices Carrie’s high-energy chorus performance and promotes her to the front of the chorus line, increasing her pay. She decides not to tell Hurstwood and squirrels away the extra money to buy trinkets for herself.
When girls in the chorus invite Carrie out for a night on the town, she has a wonderful time, forgetting about Hurstwood waiting for her at home.
Chapter 40 Summary: “A Public Dissension: A Final Appeal”
While Carrie’s career begins to take off, Hurstwood applies for a position driving a trolley car. He read in the paper that a strike is imminent, and that the company is offering work and protection to any driver willing to cross the picket lines. Although he has no experience as a motorman, Hurstwood is hired.
Chapters 31- 40 Analysis
In this penultimate section, with love having been transformed into a cutthroat chess-game of domination and control, Dreiser explores the ascent of Carrie into authentic power and success, thus redefining the role of women in turn-of-the-century America. But even as the novel offers a counterpoint to Hurstwood’s spiral into alcohol and gambling addiction with Carrie’s first successes on Broadway, Dreiser brings to the forefront the theme of The Emptiness of Materialism. Hurstwood is destroyed by his sudden impoverishment; Carrie is destroyed by her sudden wealth.
For Dreiser, Hurstwood’s destruction comes about because of economic conditions. His partnership in the Broadway saloon collapses not because of poor management or Hurstwood’s inattention to details or laziness. The first domino to fall in his descent into poverty is the real estate agent’s decision to pursue bigger wealth opportunities by selling the entire block, in an effort to capitalize on the city’s emerging middle-class. In this, Hurstwood is a passive victim of rapacious capitalism. His attempts to challenge that threat of ruin are doomed. He has neither the resources nor the connections. His attempts to mask his misfortune do not deceive Carrie for very long.
Meanwhile, Carrie comes under the influence of Mrs. Vance, a thorough-going materialist who enchants an impressionable Carrie by taking her to lavish restaurants and sponsoring extravagant shopping sprees. Carrie listens to Mrs. Vance as she critiques, often with caustic wit, the outfits of other women—“their very best hats, shoes, and gloves” (212). Mrs. Vance awakens Carrie to the importance of being shallow, showing her how people can be judged by any “tendency to fall short in dressiness” (213). Carrie begins to buy into what she has long resisted because of her limited financial circumstances, first back in Wisconsin, then in the flat Drouet provides her, and now in the tiny apartment she shares with Hurstwood. In turn, she sees herself as others see her and understands how her appearance creates a shoddy image: “It cut her to the quick, and she resolved that she would not come here [the sidewalks of Broadway] until she looked better” (213).
Her investment in meaningful consumerism and her faith in the gospel of materialism—not her devotion to the arts or her passions—drives Carrie to seek work in the theater. As her impoverished husband disappears behind his precious newspaper, Carrie reacts not by concern for the emotional and psychological well-being of her husband but rather with the sink-or-swim survival-of-the-fittest attitude. She has no real job skills, but she did have success in the small-scale theater of Chicago. Money is what she needs, and the theater will be avenue to the material comforts Mrs. Vance has revealed to her.
In this decision, Bob Ames, an otherwise minor character who appears only in three scenes, emerges to offer unexpected wisdom. Ames, a character modeled by Dreiser’s admission on the young inventor Thomas Edison, offers Carrie an alternative gospel in which the gaudy and glittery things of wealth are distractions, deformed by greed and by the capitalist urgency to acquire stuff. His conversation with Carrie in the restaurant could have been Carrie’s tipping point, but she ignores his pleas.
Later, Carrie’s sudden income makes her sees Hurstwood in an entirely different light: “She began to feel as if she had made a mistake. Incidentally, she also began to recall the fact that he had practically forced her to flee with him” (228). Abandoning the for-better-or-worse love of conventional romance, Carrie sees how little she cares for Hurstwood now that she, not he, is bringing in the paychecks.
Hurstwood’s gradual withdrawal from the job search, his disastrous stint as a scab working for the city’s transit system, and finally his preference to spend long afternoons in Carrie’s rocking-chair reading the newspaper measures how emotionally distant he becomes. He has defined himself by his material acquisitions, and, now denied that status, he has nothing to fall back on. Overlooking the street, Hurstwood settles into the comfortable world created by the tidy columns and neat sentences of the newspaper. Denied access to the comforts of materialism, he has no virtue, no self-reliance, and no self-esteem to fall back upon. The toxic emptiness of materialism destroys Hurstwood’s capacity to respect himself.
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By Theodore Dreiser
