Sister Carrie
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| Sister Carrie | |
 Sister Carrie first edition 1900. The publishers kept the cover intentionally bland in order not to promote what was seen as a controversial work.[1] |
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| Author | Theodore Dreiser |
|---|---|
| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Genre(s) | Novel |
| Publisher | Doubleday |
| Publication date | 1900 |
| Media type | Print (Hardback) |
| Pages | 557 pp |
| ISBN | NA |
| OCLC | 11010924 |
Sister Carrie (1900) is a novel by Theodore Dreiser about a young country girl who moves to the big city where she starts realizing her own American Dream by first becoming a mistress to men that she perceives as superior and later as a famous actress.
Dreiser and his wife significantly altered the original manuscript to make it more palatable to the prevailing sensibilities of the day, but even this toned down version caused a minor scandal, and Dreiser had difficulty finding a publisher for it. While first published in 1900, it was withdrawn after the publisher's wife declared it to sordid.[2] This was due to the blurred division line between good and bad in the plot. Although Dreiser's moralizing narrator does assert that, despite the fame and the money she has amassed, Carrie will not be able to achieve peace of mind in her life, the apparent lack of poetic justice – the notion that immorality should lead to some form of punishment in the end – was a concept the reading public were altogether unused to at the time. Between 1900 and 1980, all editions of the novel were of a second altered version. Not until 1981 did Dreiser's unaltered version appear when the University of Pennsylvania Press issued a scholarly edition based upon the original manuscript held by The New York Public Library. It is a reconstruction by a team of leading scholars to represent the novel before it was edited by hands other than Dreiser's.
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[edit] Plot
Caroline Meeber, a.k.a. Carrie, arrives in Chicago and she stays at her sister, Minnie Hanson's, house in an attempt to get ahead in her life.
Dissatisfied with life in her rural Wisconsin home, 18 year-old Caroline "Sister Carrie" Meeber takes the train to Chicago, where her older sister Minnie, and her husband Sven, have agreed to take her in. On the train, Carrie meets Charles Drouet, a travelling salesman, who is attracted to her because of her simple beauty and unspoiled manner. They exchange contact information, but upon discovering the "steady round of toil" and somber atmosphere at her sister's flat, she writes to Drouet and discourages him from calling on her there.
Carrie soon embarks on a quest for work to pay rent to her sister and her husband, and takes a job running a machine in a shoe factory. Before long, however, she is shocked by the coarse manners of both the male and female factory workers, and the physical demands of the job, as well as the squalid factory conditions, begin to take their toll. She also senses Minnie and Sven's disapproval of her interest in Chicago's recreational opportunities, particularly the theatre. One day, after an illness that costs her job, she encounters Drouet on a downtown street. Once again taken by her beauty, and moved by her poverty, he encourages her to dine with him, where, over sirloin and asparagus, he persuades her to leave her sister and move in with him. To press his case, he slips Carrie two ten dollar bills, opening a vista of material possibilities to her. The next day, he rebuffs her feeble attempts to return the money, taking her shopping at a Chicago department store and securing a jacket she covets and some shoes. That night, she writes a good-bye note to Minnie and moves in with Drouet.
Drouet installs her in a much larger apartment, and their relationship intensifies as Minnie dreams about her sister's fall from innocence. She acquires a sophisticated wardrobe and, through his offhand comments about attractive women, sheds her provincial mannerisms, even as she struggles with the moral implications of being a kept woman. By the time Carrie meets George Hurstwood, the manager of Fitzgerald and Moy's - a respectable bar that Drouet describes as a "way-up, swell place" – her material appearance has improved considerably. Hurstwood, unhappy with and distant from his social-climbing wife and children, instantly becomes infatuated with Carrie’s youth and beauty, and before long they start an affair, communicating and meeting secretly in the expanding, anonymous city.
One night, Drouet casually agrees to find an actress to play a key role in an amateur theatrical presentation of Augustin Daly’s melodrama, “Under the Gaslight,” for his local chapter of the Elks. Upon returning home to Carrie, he encourages her to take the part of the heroine, Laura. Unknown to Drouet, Carrie long has harbored theatrical ambitions and has a natural aptitude for imitation and expressing pathos. The night of the production – which Hurstwood attends at Drouet’s invitation – both men are moved to even greater displays of affection by Carrie’s stunning performance.
The next day, the affair is uncovered as Drouet discovers he has been cuckolded, Carrie learns that Hurstwood is married, and Hurstwood’s wife, Julia, learns from an acquaintance that Hurstwood has been out driving with another woman and deliberately excluded her from the Elks theatre night. After a night of drinking, and in despair from his wife’s financial demands and Carrie’s rejection, Hurstwood stumbles upon a large amount of cash in the unlocked safe in Fitzgerald and Moy’s offices. In a moment of poor judgment, he succumbs to the temptation to embezzle a large sum of money. Under the pretext of Drouet’s sudden illness, he lures Carrie onto a southbound train and escapes with her to Canada. Once they arrive in Montreal, Hurstwood’s guilty conscience – and a private eye - induce him to return most of the stolen funds, but he realizes that he cannot return to Chicago. Hurstwood mollifies Carrie by agreeing to marry her, and the couple move to New York City.
In New York, Hurstwood and Carrie rent a flat where they live as George and Carrie Wheeler. Hurstwood buys a minority interest in a saloon and, at first, is able to provide Carrie with a satisfactory – if not lavish – standard of living. The couple grow distant, however, as Hurstwood abandons any pretense of fine manners toward Carrie, and she realizes that Hurstwood no longer is the suave, opulent manager of his Chicago days. Carrie’s dissatisfaction only increases when she meets Bob Ames, a bright young inventor from Indiana and her neighbor’s cousin, who introduces her to the idea that great art, rather than showy materialism, is worthy of admiration.
After only a few years, the saloon’s landlord sells the property and Hurstwood’s business partner expresses his intent to terminate the partnership. Too arrogant to accept most of the job opportunities available to him, Hurstwood soon discovers that his savings are running out and urges Carrie to economize, which she finds humiliating and distasteful. As Hurstwood lounges about, overwhelmed by apathy and foolishly gambling away most of his savings, Carrie turns to New York’s theatres for employment and becomes a chorus girl. Once again, her aptitude for theatre serves her well, and, as the rapidly aging Hurstwood declines into obscurity, Carrie begins to rise from chorus girl to small speaking roles, and establishes a friendship with another chorus girl, Lola Osborne, who begins to urge Carrie to move in with her. In a final attempt to prove himself useful, Hurstwood becomes a scab driving a Brooklyn streetcar during a streetcar operator’s strike. His ill-fated venture, which lasts only two days, prompts Carrie to leave him; in her farewell note, she encloses twenty dollars.
Hurstwood ultimately joins the homeless of New York, taking odd jobs, falling ill with pneumonia, and finally becoming a beggar. Reduced to standing in line for bread and charity, he commits suicide in a flophouse. Meanwhile, Carrie achieves stardom, but finds that money and fame do not satisfy her longings or bring her happiness and that nothing will.
[edit] Characters in "Sister Carrie"
- Caroline Meeber, a.k.a. Carrie, a young woman from rural Wisconsin; the protagonist.
- Minnie Hanson, Carrie's dour elder sister who lives in Chicago and puts her up on arrival.
- Sven Hanson, Minnie's husband, of Swedish extraction and taciturn temperament.
- Charles H. Drouet, a buoyant traveling salesman Carrie meets on the train to Chicago.
- George W. Hurstwood, a well-to-do, sophisticated man who manages the Fitzgerald and Moy resort.
- Julia Hurstwood, George's strong-willed, social-climbing wife.
- Jessica Hurstwood, George's and Julia's daughter, who shares her mother's aspirations to social status.
- George Hurstwood, Jr, George's and Julia's son.
- The Vances, a wealthy merchant and his wife, who live in Hurstwood's and Carrie's first flat in New York City.
- Bob Ames, Mrs. Vance's cousin from Indiana, a handsome, young, Thomas Edison-like inventor whom Carrie regards as a male ideal.
- Lola Osborne', a chorus girl Carrie meets during a theatre production in New York, who encourages Carrie to become her room-mate.
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[edit] Literary significance & criticism
In his Nobel Prize Lecture of 1930, Sinclair Lewis said that "Dreiser's great first novel, Sister Carrie, which he dared to publish thirty long years ago and which I read twenty-five years ago, came to housebound and airless America like a great free Western wind, and to our stuffy domesticity gave us the first fresh air since Mark Twain and Whitman".
[edit] Film
Laurence Olivier and Jennifer Jones starred in the 1952 film version, Carrie, directed by William Wyler.
[edit] Bibliography
Sources
- Theodore Dreiser, Neda Westlake (ed.). Sister Carrie. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1981. A reconstruction by leading scholars to represent the novel before it was edited by hands other than Dreiser's. Including annotations and scholarly apparatus. Also available online, see External links below.
- Theodore Dreiser. Sister Carrie: Unexpurgated Edition. New York Public Library Collector's Edition. 1997 Doubleday. ISBN 0-385-48724-X - text based on the 1981 University of Pennsylvania Press edition.
- Theodore Dreiser, Donald Pizer (ed.). Sister Carrie. Norton Critical Edition, 1970. Authoritative edition of the censored version plus a lot of source and critical material.
Criticism
- Miriam Gogol, ed. Theodore Dreiser: Beyond Naturalism. New York University Press, 1995. The first major collection of scholarly articles on Dreiser to appear since 1971.
- Donald Pizer, ed. New Essays on Sister Carrie. Cambridge University Press, 1991. A recent collection of articles about Sister Carrie.
- James West. A Sister Carrie Portfolio. University Press of Virginia, 1985. A companion volume to the 1981 Pennsylvania edition. A pictorial history of Sister Carrie from 1900-1981.
[edit] External links
Sources
- Sister Carrie, restored text, 1981 Pennsylvania Edition. A reconstruction by leading scholars to represent the novel before it was edited by hands other than Dreiser's. Online edition, for print edition see "Sources" in "Bibliography" above.
- Sister Carrie, available at Project Gutenberg. Plain text.
- Sister Carrie, available at Internet Archive. Scanned illustrated original edition books.
- Sister Carrie, available at The Online Books Page. HTML web and other formats and editions.
Commentary
- Sister Carrie from the Dreiser Web Source. Commentary from the authors of the University of Pennsylvania edition (see Bibliography sources above).
- Shawcross, Nancy M. "Sister Carrie: 'A Strangely Strong Novel in a Queer Milieu". A virtual exhibition.
- Sister Carrie, Spark Notes study guide.
- "Why did they ever ban a book this bad?", by Garrison Keillor, Salon Magazine, October 13, 1997.
[edit] Notes
- ^ *Theodore Dreiser. Sister Carrie: Unexpurgated Edition. New York Public Library Collector's Edition. 1997 Doubleday. ISBN 0-385-48724-X - see "Introduction"
- ^ Books of the Century, Random House, 1998 NY Times Co. (pg 6) ISBN 0-8129-2965-9
