Sister Carrie

“Men and women hurried by in sifting lines. She felt the flow of the tide of effort and interest—felt her own helplessness without quite realizing the wisp of the tide she was on.”

For Dreiser, the critical moral issue facing humanity in the closing decades of the 19th century is the loss of individual humanity. Americans of that era face growing populations, the construction of sprawling cities, and the increasing reliance on technology, machines, and industrial production. As a result, they feel anxiety over their smallness and helplessness.

“Transplantation is not always successful in the matter of flowers or maidens. It requires sometimes a richer soil, a better atmosphere to continue even a natural growth.”

Dreiser, the diligent, observant scientist, proposes that the story of Carrie Meeber is, at its heart, a lab experiment in transplantation. Within Dreiser’s dark vision of the naturalists, the concept of a character is less a person than a thing. This is suggested by the comparison of Carrie moving to the city to a plant being tested in different environments.

“There is nothing in the world more delightful than that middle state in which we mentally balance at times, possessed of the means, lured by desire, and yet deterred by conscience or want of decision.”

The narrative authority introduces the novel’s investigation into the tension between flesh and spirit. Ideally, the author acknowledges, the flesh and the spirit, the body and the conscience, work in harmony. But as the characters in the novel reveal, that splendid balance is rare.

“The nature of Carrie’s mental state deserves consideration. Actions such as hers are measured by an arbitrary scale. Society possesses a conventional standard whereby it judges all things. All men should be good, all women virtuous”

The narrator sets out one of the critical issues the novel tests. Within the logic of Dreiser’s era, it matters that Carrie finds her niche, as well as success and celebrity, independent of, or really despite, men. Because Dreiser approaches morality like a lab experiment, he sets up here the hypothesis Carrie’s story will test for its relevance and viability.

“It was the ancient attraction of the fresh for the stale.”

The novel anatomizes the unfolding relationship between the much older, married Hurstwood and Carrie, who is already involved with Drouet. Here, the narrator offers a clinical initial hypothesis that dismisses the idea of love. Hurstwood is attracted to Carrie because she represents something new compared to the woman he has been married to for ten years.

“People attach too much importance to words…As a matter of fact, words are…the shallowest portion of all the argument. They but dimly represent the great surging feels and desires.”

This is ironic given Dreiser’s critical reputation for voluminous writing and his own love of terraced and involved sentences. Here, the narrator dismisses words as inelegant and often distracting. He suggests that at critical emotional moments, words fail. This is in keeping with Dreiser’s naturalist views—as animals, people are most eloquent when they act, not when they speak.

“Now you’re my own girl.”

Hurstwood never understands what he has found in Carrie. He attempts to measure his attraction for the young woman as a conventional affair that involves the conventional lying, furtive rendezvouses, and a clandestine half-life in the shadows. Here, after he practically forces Carrie to profess her love for him, he believes the strong, independent Carrie is now his.

“[Carrie] was possessed of that sympathetic, impressionable nature which […] has been the glory of the drama. She was created with that passivity of soul which is always the mirror of the active world.”

As her success in the theater will attest, Carrie is so entirely devoid of an identity that she thrives in the theater world where every part offers her a chance to be that character. She mimics the actors whose work she admires. What makes for a shoddy and insincere person renders Carrie a superstar in the theater.

“Hurstwood realized he was seeing something extraordinary…She seemed to be drawing power, gaining feeling. Now that the play was drawing to its close…He could almost feel as if she were talking to him.”

This passage, in which Hurstwood falls under the spell of Carrie’s stage performance, sounds as if Hurstwood is falling in love. The sentiment, diction, exaggeration, and exploitation of emotion all mark the moment of falling in love. But, much as he does with Carrie herself, what Hurstwood falls in love with is a character, not the real Carrie, because that thing does not exist.

“Carrie was now experiencing the first shades of feeling of that subtle change which removes one from the ranks of the supplicants into the lines of the dispensers of charity. She was, all in all, exceedingly happy.”

For the first time, Carrie, who came to the big city penniless and jobless, is beginning to feel the reward of wealth. She is no longer part of the masses begging for a handout to survive. Now she is among those dispensing money (she has just given money to a beggar). The virtue of that act of generosity is undercut because Carrie admits she has been charitable because it makes her feel good.

“You do not know what will come. There are miserable things outside. People go a-begging. Women are wretched. You can never tell what will happen. Remember the time you were hungry? Stick to what you have.”

As Hurstwood spirals into financial distress and depression, Carrie gives herself a pep talk. As her own inspirational life-coach, she counsels herself to be practical. She must never forget what happens when the money runs out. Her allegiance, she admits, is to herself, not to the increasingly desperate Hurstwood.

“By the time he reached his own street he was keenly alive to the difficulties of his situation and wished over and over that some solution would offer itself, that he could see his way out.”

Hurstwood now faces the quiet wrath of his vindictive wife. He tries to approach his situation—a married man obsessed with a much younger woman—by pretending his life is a math problem with an answer, or a lab experiment with linked cause and effect. As a character in a naturalist novel, however, where characters are at the mercy of forces they cannot control much less solve, Hurstwood will be frustrated and finally overwhelmed.

“But she was alone. That was the greater thought just at present. How about that?”

Because the novel resists the conventions typical of a romance, one of the foundational epiphanies for Carrie is how, once she is distanced emotionally from both Drouet and then Hurstwood, she can begin to assess herself as an individual. This rejects the notion typical in turn-of-the-century American culture that viewed a woman as an extension of a man. Dreiser begins to explore the concept of an empowered woman.

“Never in his experience had he found anything out of order, not tonight…he came out and tried the safe. His way was to give it sharp pull. This time the door responded.”

It is debatable whether Hurstwood is a criminal. His theft of the cash receipts at the bar is less criminal as it is clumsy; he is inebriated, he flips through the cash bundles absently without criminal intent, and then he fumbles with the safe, accidentally pushing it shut. Within the naturalist vision, characters do not command circumstances. Rather, like Hurstwood, they are victims of bad luck, poor decisions, and comic accidents.

“The dullest specimen of humanity, when drawn by desire toward evil, is recalled by a sense of right […]. [M]en are still led by instinct before they are regulated by knowledge.”

Dreiser asks what comes first: temptation or conscience. He wonders if the reality of trespass and sin predate the intellect and the soul? Hurstwood’s clumsy embezzlement raises this question. Compromised by alcohol, Hurstwood falls awkwardly but absolutely into an act that is both a crime and a sin. Yet he is neither a hero nor a particularly convincing criminal.

“She seemed the one ray of sunshine in all his trouble. Oh, if she would only love him wholly—only throw her arms around him in the blissful spirit in which he had seen her in the little park in Chicago.”

Hurstwood wants Carrie to be someone he can rely on, control, and direct. He needs her to be his mistress and lover who simply but absolutely devotes herself to him. It is a role fit for the theater melodramas that they attend—in fact, it is the lesson that Drouet does not learn as he sits bored in the audience. But within the real world of the narrative present, Hurstwood’s fantasy simplifies Carrie and creates about their affair the awkward feeling of this weak man being in charge.

“Two persons cannot long dwell together without coming to an understanding of one another […]. [T]rouble gets into the air and contributes gloom, which speaks for itself.”

Is love possible in a novel governed by the vision of naturalism? Because this observation comes from the narrator-voiceover, the bleak assessment of marriage weighs down the novel into a pessimistic view of that most sacrosanct relationship, marriage itself. The Hurstwood marriage had cooled into convenience and routine before Carrie’s involvement turns that relationship vicious.

“At the same time she longed to feel the delight of parading here as an equal. Ah, then she would be happy.”

One of the ongoing dramas is Carrie’s preoccupation with happiness, a condition she never achieves. She watches the wealthy parade the swanky streets of Manhattan and knows in her heart if she could just be that wealthy, then she would be happy. This moment needs to be weighed against the closing pages when Carrie tries to figure out why wealth has not brought her happiness.

“I sometimes think it is a shame for people to spend so much money this way.”

Bob Ames, the graduate student from Indiana visiting Carrie’s neighbor, becomes Carrie’s moral conscience. At dinner, Carrie, just beginning to conquer Broadway, goes on about the fancy restaurant, the wealthy customers, and all their finery. Bob, pragmatic and unimpressed, raises the possibility that wealth is illusory.

“It didn’t matter about him. She was not going to be dragged into poverty and something worse to suit him. She could act.”

In this moment of reflection, Carrie honestly acknowledges that her relationship with Hurstwood is practical, not romantic. By applying Darwinian logic, Carrie, absent any consideration of love, is determined not to go down with Hurstwood, whose emotional and psychological collapse concerns her only in how she avoids getting entangled in it.

“Dear George, I’m going away. I’m not coming back any more. It’s no use trying to keep up the flat; I can’t do it.”

This is Carrie’s “Dear John” letter to Hurstwood. Because Hurstwood is circling the drain, a victim of bad choices and bad luck, the tone and the manner of communication is cold. She tells Hurstwood that their relationship is over in a letter she leaves as she walks out with all her stuff, without warning, to move on up to the spacious accommodations the theater provides her.

“She smiled to think that men should so suddenly find her so much more attractive. It incited her to coolness and indifference.”

Because Carrie is most passionate on stage, she admits that the adulation of her fans after the performances makes her feel cold and distant. She understands that admiration from fans validates only the persona she creates. She is beginning to sense the depth of her loneliness.

“What’s the use?”

It is worth noting that in the original completed manuscript Dreiser sent to Doubleday, this line, spoken by Hurstwood’s prior to his death by suicide, was the end of the novel. Fearing the sales potential of such a depressing ending, the publishers asked Dreiser to write the concluding scene in which Carrie, though alone and disillusioned with wealth, is gifted with awareness.