Sister Carrie (Barnes & Noble Classics Series)

by Theodore Dreiser

  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.

  Carrie is a pitiable, not a tragic character. She lacks dimension, an active will, a daring imagination, and a reasoning faculty that might lead her to spiritual enlightenment. In the novel, she is bruised by experience, but never smitten by a passion, love, or moral betrayal that shakes her to the core of her being, as, say, Isabel Archer is in Portrait of a Lady. Dreiser originally ended Sister Carrie with Hurstwood’s suicide, but he decided to add a coda that sums up Carrie’s emotional impasse—and his verdict. Although pitying “the blind strivings of her heart,” he condemns her to pursue “that halcyon day when she should be led forth among dreams become real” (p. 445). In the prime of life, she rocks poignantly like an old grandmother on a Maine porch, her memories mostly ashes. Spoken in the voice of a biblical prophet, Dreiser’s final words clang shut the gates that bar her entry into the “vale of soul-making” (to use Keats’s beautiful phrase) that she desires: “In your rocking chair, by your window, shall you dream such happiness as you may never feel.”

  Dreiser’s portrait of Hurstwood, by contrast, is haunting and harrowing. The slow disintegration—or decomposition—of his personality is a triumph of the novelist’s art. As his business prospects in New York turn sour—he lacks the effrontery and drive to get ahead in its highly competitive atmosphere—Hurstwood begins to flounder. He fitfully seeks employment, timidly reenacting Carrie’s discouraged moods when she searched for work in Chicago: hesitant, fearing rejection, inventing pretexts to stay home. One by one, the gregarious, confident layers of his self peel off, and he surrenders to longer and longer bouts of inaction and brooding. Like Carrie, he sits in a rocking chair, absorbed in the flow of random thoughts and jumbled feelings. Each stage of his decline is marked by some physical gesture: his shabby clothes, stubbly beard, and haggard face; his insatiable scanning of newspapers; his long hours lounging in hotel chairs in order to keep warm and pass the long afternoons; his demented counting of his money as it dwindles, especially after his desperate attempt to recoup at the poker table fails; and his scrimping on food to save pennies. As Hurstwood turns into a debased version of his former self—uncouth, surly, pathetic, repulsive—Carrie feels increasingly alienated from, then ashamed of, him. Their relationship unravels with neither protest nor self-justification from him. At the nadir of his degradation, he decides to ask her for money, but gazing at her lionized image in front of the theater, he knows that they now inhabit separate spheres, that her orbit is remote from his, and he slinks away. “What’s the use?” he mutters (p. 443), the same words he utters before taking his own life.

  Hurstwood rallies once when he trudges to Brooklyn to sign up as a scab during the trolley strike (it is the most vivid scene in Sister Carrie). With stoic mien, he endures the taunts and violence directed at him by the hostile, frustrated workers; but his threadbare clothes cannot protect him from the cold. That demoralizing episode is Hurstwood’s last glum hurrah before he annihilates himself. He is corrosively lonely, like a Christ in a Pietà without a merciful mother to grieve for or console him. The ultimate indignity is that he is buried in a potter’s field grave. In death, he has become, literally, a nobody, a cruel symbol of the peculiarly American theme Emily Dickinson posed with mocking humor: “I’m nobody. Who are you?” For Dreiser, obscurity in America is a mortifying fate; distinction is the summum bonum, the Holy Grail. How it is to be attained is the process that Dreiser dissects with the analytical skills of a forensic anthropologist.

  In Sister Carrie, there is no iron law or invisible hand that determines character, no single implacable force that governs human relations. To be sure, although no disciple of Karl Marx, Dreiser graphically depicts the grim conditions that limit and burden the lives of the proletariat (the word had little currency in America, except in socialist circles). If, like Hurstwood, he sided more with the workers than with the capitalists, he did not underestimate the will of the latter to crush the laborers. Some of the novel’s most memorable scenes visit the lower depths—Dreiser is kin to the Ashcan School of painters—where the desperate, broken ranks of the defeated loiter: the homeless lining up for a loaf of bread or shivering in frigid weather while a maverick social worker flits in from the shadows and solicits coins from affluent passersby to house the men in a Bowery flophouse for the night. Dreiser does not flinch from exposing the raw, suppurating wound of the body politic, though he pushes no reform agenda. There are no settlement houses in Sister Carrie to succor the despised, the losers, the pariahs. Faith also plays no role, since religion is virtually absent from the lives of his characters (the rich do not flock to fashionable churches on Sunday, nor is God blamed or appealed to for help; the God most worshiped is Mammon).

  The closest Dreiser comes in Sister Carrie to a philosophical absolute or a social theory is his statement that mankind is stranded in evolutionary limbo: too far removed from natural instinct to behave according to its dictates, and too inchoate to govern the self according to the dictates of reason. This belief is played out and tested in the pivotal chapter in which Hurstwood debates whether or not to steal money from the safe at Fitzgerald and Moy’s. Dreiser builds the scene shrewdly. Although secure in his position as manager, which affords him a comfortable income and a small cachet, Hurstwood has grown estranged from his wife and children. Mrs. Hurstwood, “a pythoness in humor,” is content so long as her social-climbing ambitions for herself and her daughter Julia are indulged with a season ticket at the racetrack, chic clothes, or a holiday at a fancy Wisconsin resort, where she can maneuver, like Mrs. Bennet in Pride and Prejudice, to marry her daughter to the son of a prestigious family. (Using Julia’s beauty as passport, she succeeds. In a brief scene near the end of the novel, the triumphant mother and daughter, rich trophy husband in tow, lounge on a Pullman train and chat about their imminent sojourn in Rome—a cameo that ironically reminds the reader of Hurstwood’s furtive nocturnal flight from Chicago after he steals the money.) Once news of her
husband’s courtship of Carrie reaches Mrs. Hurstwood, she lashes out like an avenging Fury. Since ownership of their house is legally in her name, Hurstwood is without a weapon to fight back. Faced with an ultimatum from his wife’s lawyer that he pay her a large sum or face public exposure as an adulterer, he wavers. At this point, an element of chance becomes a crucial variable: The safe, normally locked, is left ajar. Hurstwood wrestles with the angel of moral quandaries: Should he take the money or not? He knows that there will be disastrous consequences if he’s caught—humiliation and disgrace, even jail—but although he can still distinguish between good and evil, the habit of virtue has loosened its hold on him. Reason deserts him. He “drifts” into his momentous decision, and that verb “drifts” is Dreiser’s metaphor for the wayward impulses and rhythms of the passive, yearning, befuddled, half-conscious mind. (Carrie often succumbs to this maundering state, too.) After an agonizing inner debate, Hurstwood steals $10,000, spirits Carrie away by the ruse that Drouet has been hospitalized, promises to marry her, and runs off like a criminal to escape detection. This ethical lapse sets in motion Hurstwood’s downward spiral from “fastidious comfort” to death by asphyxiation in a room on skid row. In etching the wreckage of Hurstwood’s life, Dreiser finds his own compelling voice and reveals the pity and terror in an American tragedy.

  Herbert Leibowitz is the editor and publisher of Parnassus: Poetry in Review. His books include Fabricating Lives: Explorations in American Autobiography and Hart Crane: An Introduction to the Poetry. He is currently writing a critical biography of William Carlos Williams.

  A Note on Hotels, Homes,

  Restaurants, and the Theater

  Dreiser’s Sister Carrie is a rich mother lode of information about American social history. As a newspaper reporter in Pittsburgh, Chicago, and St. Louis, Dreiser met people of all classes. He interviewed factory girls and bosses in sweatshops, and dandies, merchants, salesmen, and actors in fancy bars, and he listened to quack spiritualists spin their webs of deception. He observed where the people with money shopped, dined, entertained, socialized, and vacationed, what material possessions they coveted and purchased to decorate their homes, what newspapers they read, what clubs they joined, what they wished for their children. But he was also a connoisseur of the economy of scarcity; he wrote of the poor who struggled to keep their heads above water—toiling long hours for low wages, being maimed in workplace accidents, dying young.

  After the fire of 1871, Chicago rose from the ashes and grew at an amazingly rapid pace into a modern city. It was a brash frontier for advanced ideas about architecture, merchandising, transportation, and social work. For those who sipped of the heady brew of success, it was bliss to live in such times. But of course many fortunes were built on the backs of the workers, often immigrants, who flocked to Chicago in search of employment. This vast under-class daily faced a series of grim realities; in their short, brutalized lives, they experienced extremes of deprivation and despair. All this Dreiser chronicled in his novels with little editorializing. For him, images of gaunt homeless men scavenging for food and shivering in the cold were worth pages of polemics.

  One of the signs of a secure or unsheltered life was the home you lived in or the hotel you stayed in when you were traveling. Throughout Sister Carrie Dreiser describes the interiors of residences, from the cramped quarters of Carrie’s brother-in-law, Hanson, who works at the stockyards, to Hurstwood’s comfortable bourgeois house, to the cozy flat Drouet rents for Carrie. And although Dreiser never takes us inside the plutocrats’ mansions, they were a point of civic pride and envy: Carrie drives by these symbols of material success in a carriage and marvels at them, much as tourists in Hollywood gawk at the homes of actors.

  In Sister Carrie, one can almost compile a directory of Chicago and New York hotels that would accurately track the fortunes and status of the novel’s characters. When ambitious, confident traveling salesmen like Drouet traveled to Milwaukee or St. Paul on business, they measured their success not only by how many orders their customers placed but by how grandiose the hotel they stayed in was. When Hurstwood’s wife forces him out of their home, he consoles himself by spending the night at Palmer House, Chicago’s most elegant hotel. On the lam, Hurstwood chooses a hotel in Montreal that he hopes will conceal his identity (detectives are on his trail). Arriving in New York, he registers in a hotel, respectable but not expensive, that his friends are unlikely to frequent (he is mortified at the prospect of encountering old acquaintances who will know the reason for his flight). When Hurstwood’s fortunes begin to decline, he idles away wintry afternoons in a lounge chair at the newly constructed Broadway Central Hotel, keeping warm. When he becomes indigent, he seeks work at this same hotel; he performs menial tasks in the basement. The irony of his drastic change of fortune is not lost on Hurstwood. Freefalling into the social abyss, he passes a night in a third-rate hotel on Bleecker Street or an unheated Bowery fleabag hotel, in the company of bums and other lost souls. He turns on the gas jets in just such a squalid room.

  By contrast, as Carrie’s reputation as an actress grows, she is courted by such posh hotels as the Wellington and the Waldorf to move into their spacious suites with all the latest amenities. Caught up in the machinery of publicity and status, the hotels are eager to associate their names with Carrie’s glamour and celebrity, and so they offer her a handsome discount. In the novel’s last image, Carrie sits by a window in a rocking chair, lost in reverie. The space she occupies in the Waldorf is sizable, but she remains trapped in a gilded cage.

  Restaurants are another pivotal setting in Sister Carrie. At Carrie’s sister Minnie’s home, the meals are simple and monotonous, if adequate. Part of Drouet’s campaign to woo Carrie entails treating her to meals in restaurants like the Old Windsor, which served robust fare like sirloin steak, roast chicken, and asparagus in an ambience that was warm and welcoming. For Carrie it is like being a guest at a royal banquet. The prices astonish her, but the glowing lights, the food, and the attentive service, Dreiser stresses, awaken other desires and hungers. In the New York section of the novel, a dinner at Louis Sherry’s is an important set piece, with Mr. Vance playing the knowing host, and Ames, Dreiser’s stand-in as acerbic culture critic. The Gilded Age was notable for excess and extravagant self-indulgence, its Lucullan feasts rivaling those of the ancient Romans. A stern moralist, Dreiser makes no bones that he disapproves of the immoderate eating: seven-course meals that featured oysters, foie gras, roasts, rich sauces and desserts, champagne and vintage wines. The decor at Sherry’s is equally a gaudy display of luxurious good taste—Tiffany lamps, fine china, glassware, and cutlery—all meant to flatter the restaurant’s upper-class clientele for their “superiority” in patronizing it. Carrie is enthralled by this gastronomic temple, but her enthusiasm is tempered by Ames’s disgust with the vulgar wastefulness. What especially peeves him is the ostentation: the expensive clothes and jewels, the enormous effort and cost to strut and be seen, as if Americans were copying the chic Parisians of la Belle Epoque. Dreiser’s growing up hungry doubtless affected his harsh view of the pretentious upper classes and his empathy for the poor who barely can find a crust of bread to sustain them.

  Theater of all genres—vaudeville, Shakespeare, musicals in which choruses of scantily clad girls danced in ranks like the Rockettes, melodramas, drawing-room comedies—was immensely popular in America after the Civil War. However, the country did not produce a single major playwright in the nineteenth century. The old Puritan hostility to theater as Satan’s way to corrupt morals weakened but did not disappear. Great theater requires a unified culture, and America in many ways was a splintered society. Theatergoers clamored for entertainment and uplift, romances and laughs. Many Western towns sported an opera house on whose stage road companies might perform Dion Boucicault’s London Assurance, Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, or lurid melodramas and sentimental plays about love betrayed and redeemed. Audience’s tastes were promiscuous and undiscriminating; they rare
ly wanted to be challenged. Although theatergoers in big cities like Chicago and New York may have been more prosperous and sophisticated than, say, their Central City, Colorado, counterparts, they too enjoyed spectacle: gorgeous costumes, colorful sets, and musical ballads, as well as elaborate dance routines, risque repartee, or the tale of a villain saved by the love of a virtuous woman. The tired businessmen who go to Carrie’s musicals adore her as a charming, comely woman whom they dream of making their mistress. Women of wealth and leisure, the chief consumers of theater, were perfectly content with conventional drama. Dreiser contemptuously describes one example: “The play was one of those drawing-room concoctions in which charmingly overdressed ladies and gentlemen suffer the pangs of love and jealousy amid gilded surroundings.... They have the charm of showing suffering under ideal conditions” (p. 278). For Dreiser the realist, such pandering to illusions was base and offensive. Ames serves as his mouthpiece to skewer such meretricious theatricals.

  The theater on the streets, particularly on matinee days, eclipsed the tepid or silly dramas inside the playhouses. Dreiser is fascinated by the smart set’s ritual pageant as its members strolled down Broadway:

  There gathered, before the matinee and afterwards, not only all the pretty women who love a showy parade, but the men who love to gaze upon and admire them. It was a very imposing procession of pretty faces and fine clothes. Women appeared in their very best hats, shoes, and gloves, and walked arm in arm on their way to the fine shops or theatres strung along from Fourteenth to Thirty-fourth streets (p. 275).