Sister Carrie (3 page)

Introduction

Since its publication in 1900,
Sister Carrie,
Theodore Dreiser’s first novel, has incited two kinds of controversy: moral and artistic. When Dreiser submitted his book to the respectable publishing firm of Doubleday, Page and Co., it was initially met with enthusiasm. Serving as a reader, the novelist Frank Norris strongly recommended that the book be acquired. Walter Page also admired the novel. But when Mrs. Doubleday read the manuscript, she argued vehemently that it was an immoral work and urged her husband Frank not to publish it. Why? Because the author did not punish Carrie, a kept woman, with death or disgrace, as the wages of sin deserved, but rewarded her with success in the theater and material comfort. Mrs. Doubleday would not have been swayed by the blunt judgment of an interviewer for the
New York Herald
in 1907:
Sister Carrie
“reverses the canting code of the cheap novelist—the woman transgresses, but the man pays.” A disinterested judge might construe Carrie’s failed pursuit of happiness as a harsh fate, but to the custodians of conventional morality that argument countenanced exposing vulnerable young women like Carrie to a life of vice. Even in the wake of the Gilded Age’s sensational scandals—the Beecher-Tilton trial, in which influential Brooklyn preacher Henry Ward Beecher was accused of adultery with one of his parishioners, and the murder of the distinguished architect Stanford White by Harry Thaw, a jealous husband—sex was a taboo subject for novelists, to be treated, if at all, obliquely. To his credit, Dreiser stubbornly refused to bow to the publisher’s pressure either to withdraw the novel or tamper with its moral vision. When the company’s legal department advised that Doubleday, Page was contractually bound to publish
Sister Carrie,
it did so—albeit in a stingy edition of 1,000 plus copies. Norris, however, managed to send the novel to reviewers across the country, so it was read, mainly by writers. In 1901 the British publisher William Heinemann published
Sister Carrie
to widespread acclaim, and by 1907, after B. W. Dodge and Company reprinted the novel in a substantial edition, Dreiser’s American readership had also grown.

In affluent periods like the 1950s, the book’s reputation dropped because critics savagely attacked Dreiser’s artistry, often measuring his flaws against the subtle art of Henry James. Where James was a cynosure of formal innovation and complex presentation of consciousness, Dreiser played the omniscient author in a ponderous didactic style, they grumbled, seldom allowing his characters’ traits and choices to unfold organically from the dramatic action. They considered it a blunder to announce in the early chapters of
Sister Carrie
that his protagonist would never find happiness. Moreover, where James’s prose was intricate and radiant as spun gold, Dreiser’s was pedestrian and maudlin. Dreiser was the inferior novelist.

Such charges would not have fazed the author.
Sister Carrie,
he remarked in a 1907
New York Times
interview, was “intended not as a piece of literary craftsmanship, but as a picture of conditions done as simply and effectively as the English language will permit.” Indeed, during times of depression, when the country was wracked with social and economic conflict, bringing hardship and ruin in its wake, Dreiser’s novels moved readers because they brilliantly demonstrated the human costs of an unregulated system that enabled “the high and the mighty” to flourish while a huge segment of the population struggled merely to subsist. Dreiser understood that the dirty secret of American society was class—not only its injustices and injuries, but the dreams of power and money, status and fame that it inspired. Nonetheless, it would be foolish to ignore his detractors’ misgivings or to dispute Dreiser’s occasional clumsiness: his tedious repetitions of words and motifs, his fondness for pontificating about women’s emotional makeup, and the banality of some of his images—for example, he describes Carrie several times as a wisp in a vast sea.

But Dreiser’s faults, though noticeable and annoying, count for little when weighed against his strengths: among them his psychological acumen (he grasps the elemental force of self-interest and illusion—he calls it “Elfland”—that drives people’s lives), and the sturdy structure he devises for
Sister Carrie
(Carrie rises from poor, unformed waif to theatrical celebrity, while her lover, Hurstwood, falls from prosperous tavern manager to beggar and suicide). Despite chapter headings that spell out explicitly, as in a popular melodrama, the war between desire and conscience, flesh and spirit, Dreiser refuses to accept William Dean Howells’s bromide that American novelists should focus on “the smiling aspects of life.”

Beautiful factory girls from down-at-heels families do not in Dreiser’s novels defend their virtue and then at the curtain marry the handsome scion of a rich industrialist and live happily ever after. Morality, in
Sister Carrie,
consists of shades of gray. Dreiser is a sober, uncompromising realist.

Above all, Dreiser excels at anatomizing the pathologies and inequities of American life—in particular, the profound gulf between rich and poor. Like his contemporary, the pioneering social worker Jane Addams, he deplored the fact that a small number of people accumulated enormous wealth, while the vast majority of citizens lived in abject poverty, working long hours at dangerous, soul-killing jobs for meager pay. When Carrie is hired by a shoe factory, at a salary of $4.50 a week, to stamp holes in uppers, she recoils from being a cog in the machine, one of several nondescript “clattering automatons.” The prospect of a future shackled to dull routine demoralizes her. It does not take her long to notice and envy the conspicuous consumerism on a grand scale that surrounds her in Chicago (and later in New York): “the magnificent residences, the splendid equipages, the gilded shops, restaurants, resorts of all kinds; ... the flowers, the silks, the wines” (p. 260). For Carrie, Chicago’s Vanity Fair, with its array of showy goods, promises unimaginable satisfactions. For Dreiser—and this is the solemn major theme of
Sister Carrie
—money confers neither freedom nor spiritual contentment.
Sister Carrie
is the fictional complement to Thorstein Veblen’s sociological classic
The Theory of the Leisure Class
and the American cousin of Flaubert’s
Madame Bovary.

There is a clear-cut autobiographical basis to these attitudes. Dreiser’s childhood and young manhood schooled and scarred him. He was born in 1871, in Terre Haute, Indiana, into a large impoverished family. His father, a German Catholic, was barely able to scrape together a living, so that his pious Mennonite mother took in washing. It was not uncommon for the children to go to bed hungry. Theodore was a shy, repressed child who spent hours reading or, like Carrie, whiling away time daydreaming. His four older sisters and two brothers all rebelled against the puritanical morality of the Dreiser household. Without moral qualms, the sisters traded sex for fashionable clothes, jewels, and creature comforts—all the traditional perquisites of status. In fact, the plot of
Sister Carrie
is closely modeled on the love life of one of those sisters, Emma, who eloped with tavern manager E. A. Hopkins. (Dreiser’s 1911 novel
Jennie Gerhardt
centered on the life of another sister, Mary Frances, “Mame.”). His brother Paul changed his last name to Dresser and became the celebrated songwriter of “By the Banks of the Wabash, Far Away” and other popular ditties—and a successful lady’s man.

Theodore, by contrast, patched together a ragged education, attending public schools, where he did not distinguish himself as a student, and, for one wasted year, Indiana University before dropping out. Sex obsessed and tortured him. For a few years he knocked about, supporting himself with odd jobs until he finally found a vocation as a journalist, a major turning point in his life. His stint as a reporter on newspapers in Chicago, Pittsburgh, and St. Louis honed his writing skills and gave him a daily front-row seat to witness—and to reflect on—the casualties of social turmoil. He covered the bitterly violent tram strike in Akron, Ohio, and sympathized with the plight of the exploited workers and their families who fought the intransigent corporations, Pinkerton guards, and scabs so desperate for work they would risk their lives for a paltry few dollars.

Dreiser’s beat ranged far and wide. He prowled city streets and ethnic neighborhoods in search of human-interest stories, talking to prostitutes, maids, clerks, actors, doctors, teachers, and people who bought furniture on the installment plan. He interviewed ruthless financiers whose meteoric rise was due to an aggressive will, a monomaniacal ego, and an eye for the main chance—men who did not shy away from resorting to bribery or other corrupt practices in order to acquire and wield power. Chicago’s economic and social stratifications were as familiar to Dreiser as his own hands.

America,
Sister Carrie
suggests, is a divided nation. The residents already inside “the walled city” are dominated by the moneyed class. They flaunt their wealth like peacocks and dine in ornate restaurants (Dreiser despised the “unwholesome,” gargantuan meals, “enough to feed an army,” devoured in these elegant culinary palaces). Next in importance are the politicians who control patronage, dole out jobs for their needy constituents, and line their own pockets with graft. And then come the celebrities whose pictures adorn theater posters and the rotogravure sections of Sunday newspapers. Dreiser likens the powerful and rich to whales, lords of the sea. “A common fish must needs disappear wholly from view—remain unseen” (p. 260). Carrie’s almost blind instinct helps her to avert this hapless destiny. Instead, it is Hurstwood who drowns in that sea.

On nearly every page of the novel, Dreiser evokes the spell wealth casts on his characters. Cities, he notes again and again, are magnets—and thus social laboratories—for all sorts of people looking to improve their lot. In the 1890s, Chicago’s expansion accelerated at a frenzied pace; new buildings sprang up on every block. The cocky city seemed to offer unprecedented opportunities for success to those who could ride the crest of this wave. In the first half of
Sister Carrie,
the lower rungs of the social hierarchy—the factory workers and the large armies of the unemployed, the ill, the petty criminals, the unassimilated immigrants, and the poor unable to fend for themselves—lurk in the shadows of Dreiser’s canvas. But in the second half, when economic distress spreads hunger and despair across New York City, they occupy more of the foreground.

Into this volatile urban atmosphere steps Carrie Meeber, a naive, wide-eyed wayfarer from a small town in Wisconsin, eager to escape the boring parochialism of her upbringing. She has no marketable skills to win the notice of prospective employers—she is morbidly shy and afraid of rebuffs—and she possesses little more to distinguish her than a pretty face and a trim figure. A brief taste of her sister’s narrow existence, all toil and no pleasure, and of the monotony of factory work distresses her. Privation staring her in the face, she is “rescued” by Drouet, a “drummer” (traveling salesman) who had befriended her on the train from Wisconsin. A glib, good-natured egotist who enjoys the company of women and flirts in a style of superficial gallantry, Drouet coaxes her into letting him buy her a skirt, jacket, and hat at one of the glamorous new department stores and setting her up in a charming, airy flat. Carrie feels no passion for Drouet; what seduces her are the material things he lavishes on her: clothes, pleasant rooms looked after by a maid, dinners at brightly lit restaurants, evenings at the theater, and carriage rides through Lincoln Park.

When Hurstwood and Carrie meet, he woos her in a wily campaign to detach her from Drouet. Weak-willed and unworldly, Carrie cannot see through Hurstwood’s suave niceties; she is flattered by his solicitude, by the flowers he sends, clandestine meetings in the park, discreet love letters. She is mildly uneasy at their liaison, but her conscience does not nag at her. At Fitzgerald and Moy’s, a fancy saloon where he serves as manager, Hurstwood is adept at “small palaver” and bonhomie, his manners more polished than his rival Drouet’s. He knows when to drink with his customers and when to keep his distance. Dreiser describes this male preserve, another layer of social life in Chicago, in detail because it furnishes clues to Hurstwood’s character. Hurstwood delights in looking around the posh watering hole and watching boxing champ John Sullivan hold court at the bar, while in the back room, ward bosses drink whiskey, smoke cigars, gossip, tell risque stories, and cut (shady) deals. Hurstwood owns a piece of the American dream of success.

When Carrie wins plaudits in her stage debut before an audience of Masons, it is Hurstwood who, acting as impresario, brings a friendly claque to the amateur theatrical night. With consequences he cannot foresee, he boosts her self-esteem and plants in her mind the seed of the idea that she might have a career on the gilded stage. Throughout the novel, theater fuels in her a love of the limelight and of the magical “paraphernalia of disguise.” Carrie may seem like an implausible candidate to make a splash in the big city pond: At first, as a mere member of the chorus line, she is, Dreiser comments dryly, “absolutely nothing.” But her pert appearance soon lands her more substantial roles in trivial entertainments, and through a combination of luck and an appealing stage presence, she gradually rises into the empyrean of minor stardom. The gates of the walled city now swing open to admit her as one of the privileged. As Carrie Madenda, her name appears in gossip column squibs, and her face is prominently displayed on flyers and theatrical placards, and in the glossy brochures the publicity mills print. But while she takes pleasure in what money buys her—a suite in the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel, a carriage to take her to and from the theater, elegant frocks hanging in her closet, adulation—her inner life alters in only small ways. She is glad to have sloughed off the identity of a “servile petitioner,” but her fantasies of happiness lie beyond her grasp to fulfill. When the idealist Ames criticizes the creaky dramatic vehicles she plays in as popular rot of the times built to hackneyed formulas, Carrie earnestly “longs for that which is better.” She grows smart enough to brush off the sycophants and gigolos who send her mash notes and promise her the moon; she appreciates refinement and “the force of a superior man” like Ames, a cool moralist and occasional mentor, who observes the Gilded Age’s excesses without being disordered by them. But he ventures no romantic approach toward her, as if she is a curious, if sympathetic, victim and specimen of the zeitgeist’s skewed values. Wishing to improve herself culturally, Carrie takes his recommendation that she read Balzac’s
Père Goriot.
But she cannot escape her fate of permanent loneliness.