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.
Themes
The Emptiness of Materialism
Born to a low-income family, Carrie Meeber loves acquisition. She studies the hairstyles of the rich women she sees strolling along Broadway; she covets the handsome homes near Lincoln Park; she peruses with care all the furnishings in Mrs. Vale’s townhouse; she is mesmerized by the elegant appointments in the restaurants along Fifth Avenue; and she dreams of jewelry and stylish dresses. The narrator says, “Her mind delighted itself with scenes of luxury and refinement, situations in which she was the cynosure of all eyes, the arbiter of all fates” (110).
Carrie believes that materialism equates to social standing and community respect. Although she accumulates the trappings of wealth she has always desired, she cannot understand her unhappiness. This suggests that Dreiser separates himself from his character’s conspicuous consumerism. Carrie arrives in Chicago “ambitious to gain in material things” (4). The steak dinner and his two crisp ten-dollar bills convince Carrie to trust Charles Drouet. Her embarrassment over Hurstwood’s tiny flats convinces Carrie to leave him.
Ultimately, Carrie is both wealthy and miserable. Once she is established on Broadway and when she “had attained that which in the beginning seemed life’s object…her gowns and carriage, her furniture and bank account” (342), she feels indifferent to their charms and decidedly “lonely” (342). In a cliché of capitalism, Carrie must learn through bitter experience that money cannot buy love, much less happiness. That she is programmed to dream of acquisition raises culture-wide questions the novel cannot answer: In a capitalist culture, material success does not bring emotional fulfillment. If materialism fails to provide meaning and purpose other than the predatory hunt for stuff, then capitalism may be no good at all? At mid-life, part owner of a swanky bar and living in a spacious three-story home in an upscale Chicago neighborhood, Hurstwood is a success, epitomizing the ascent of the middle class. Yet material comfort gives him no emotional comfort. He lives only in fear of losing it and transforming into exactly what he becomes: an indigent vagrant, part of the underclass that exists outside the locked doors of Carrie’s theater-world. This is the novel’s stinging indictment of materialism: the more Carrie gets, the less she has.
The Tension between Flesh and Spirit
In examining the relationships that Carrie develops with first Drouet and then Hurstwood, Dreiser asks if love is possible in a capitalist culture. Given the weight placed on acquisition and ownership, a person may struggle to separate that mindset from the dynamics of falling in love. Drouet does not fall in love. Spurred by his carnal eye for young and comely girls, Drouet is driven less by the spirit and more by the flesh. He roams his sales territory like a predatory creature looking to take advantage of women. Hurstwood sees his marriage as a performance piece maintained for more than ten years to prolong his family’s social standing. And Carrie fuses love with material comforts.
Thus, American culture is suspended between the flesh and the spirit. The characters want to fall in love; they want to experience that illogical emotion and find reward in that feeling. But love for the characters becomes more of a game, a strategic maneuvering for control or ownership, played out against and informed by economic concerns. The sweet ideal of traditional love—the romantic notion of how love spiritually animates the heart—becomes more an expression of physical love without the splendid complexity of the spirit. Carrie has sex for the first time with Drouet, and then, living in a sham marriage, she shares a bed with Hurstwood.
In Sister Carrie, love is a negotiation—a desperate and ultimately futile pipedream, the pain of which is only increased by the naïve belief that somehow love is real, near, and possible. “I want you to love me,” Hurstwood declares to Carrie shortly after they meet. “You don’t know how much I need to have someone waste some affection on me” (90). It is telling that Hurstwood uses the word “waste.” For Dreiser’s characters, love is either a toxic fantasy promulgated by the empty romanticism of Carrie’s stage world, or a polite social convention that inevitably stales into indifference or becomes a Machiavellian game of control. Hurstwood could be speaking for all of Dreiser’s characters: “I could be content if I had someone to love me” (91).
Love then becomes a cycle of yearning and disappointment. Carrie is too materialistic to allow love; Hurstwood is too bound by his social status to trust love; and Drouet is too infatuated with freedom. In the end, Dreiser’s characters are incapable of love.
The Inevitability of Loneliness
In a voluminous novel, the last sentence is among the most quoted in all of Dreiser works. The narrator directly addresses Carrie who contemplates, from the vantage point of her rocking chair, how her life, despite all its outward signs of success, disappoints her. “In your rocking-chair, by your window,” the narrator intones, “shall you dream such happiness as you may never feel” (344).
In the last stages of negotiation with a publisher growing ever more resistant to the idea of releasing the novel, Dreiser agreed to add the entire closing section as a way to obviate what the publishers felt was an overwhelmingly pessimistic ending. The original manuscript closed with a desperate Hurstwood turning on the gas in his Bowery flat, stretching out on his bed, and preparing to die by suicide.
For all the furious activity of Carrie and her whirlwind rise to the top of Broadway, and for all the efforts of the principal characters to find their way to something like love, the novel deflates such expectations. It exposes a dark reality in keeping with Dreiser’s embrace of the unsettling vision of naturalism. Decidedly unheroic characters struggle against their basest instincts; they gracelessly fight against bad luck, blind chance, and a material universe, uncomplicated by any god—or, if there is a god, it is indifferent to their ambitions and their idealism. Ultimately, the characters are born alone and die alone.
The novel leaves its characters lonely: Drouet happily works the women he meets on his sales routes; Hurstwood disappears behind his newspaper every evening to shut out the bleak reality of his dysfunctional world; and Carrie, the consummate actor, is unwilling or unable to express anything but a convincing performance in any of her relationships. Conversations are disconnected and fragmented; relationships are built on lies and sustained by the emotional terrorism of silences. The novel even undermines the reader-character bond, an essential expression of literature in which the reader sympathizes with the characters. Dreiser, with his withering critique of his own characters’ emotional shortcomings, diminishes the possibility of admiring the characters or sympathizing with their plights. For all its controversial exploration into the carnality and lust, the novel sustains a feeling of distance and a cloaking sense of loneliness.
The Role of Women in Turn-of-the-Century America
If Sister Carrie were only about the moral damage of capitalist consumerism, the inevitable loneliness of contemporary life, or the tension between what the heart yearns for and what the body needs, Dreiser would not have needed to use a woman as his central character. The idea of a male novelist repositioning a narrative to create a female sensibility is not without controversy, although cross-gender narratives have been an element of English-language novels since Daniel Defoe’s Moll Flanders. For a male author to write from the perspective of a female (or vice versa) raises critical questions about whether a male author can understand the motivations, the psychology, and the emotional range of a female character.
Setting those questions aside, Dreiser’s decision to coopt the feminine perspective in his story of a young woman late asserting her right to independence in Gilded Age America raises a critical theme not ignored by his own era. 21st-century readers, nearly a century after Dreiser, are accustomed to the concept of an empowered female character. That was not the case in the 1890s. In Dreiser’s era, women in the novels of male writers who dared do what Carrie Meeber does—avoid the soft prison of family, find her way to wealth and success, and establish the integrity of a social and cultural identity without a husband—would inevitably involve some kind of punishment by novel’s end. Carrie flaunts her sexuality, dismisses codes of conduct for young women, uses men as part of her ambitious plan to succeed, and in the end secures celebrity and wealth despite—not because of—the men in her life.
Carrie, according to the turn-of-the-century protocols of women who dare to stand apart from the patriarchal structures, would have to suffer. Such female characters would be declared “mad” or end up dead (often by suicide), or perhaps they would be imprisoned for some drummed-up violation of the law or at least disgraced. With Sister Carrie, Dreiser rejects the unwritten code of fiction up to Dreiser’s time, which stated that independent women needed to be punished.
In this, Sister Carrie foreshadows the post-World War II evolution of the strong, independent female character who must learn to handle the emotional complexities of success.
Related Titles
By Theodore Dreiser
