Sister Carrie (Barnes & Noble Classics Series)
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15 (p. 403) “I’m living at the Chelsea now”: This apartment building on West Twenty-third Street, between Seventh and Eighth Avenues, later became a somewhat seedy landmark residence hotel for poets, composers, artists, and assorted bohemians.
16 (p. 416) second-hand Hester Street basement collection: This shopping street on the Lower East Side, lined with tenements, was home mainly to Jewish immigrants; its shops sold cheap goods, and the area’s primary food market was located there. Photographs of the period often show the street teeming with pushcarts, horse carriages, and a sea of humanity.
17 (p. 438) “Pere Goriot,” which Ames had recommended to her: Balzac’s famous novel of 1834 is about a father who sacrifices all for his two selfish, ingrate daughters. That Carrie is reading Père Goriot rather than Dora Thome is proof of her desire to improve herself culturally. The influence of Balzac’s writing on Dreiser is something he referred to often.
Inspired by Sister Carrie
The 1950s are regarded as the golden age of melodrama in American cinema, a time when such legendary directors as Douglas Sirk and Vincente Minnelli produced some of their best work. In 1952 William Wyler released his superb Carrie, an adaptation of Theodore Dreiser’s novel of urban plight, and it resonated strongly with contemporary moviegoers.
Carrie stars Laurence Olivier as Hurstwood, Jennifer Jones as Carrie, and Eddie Albert as Drouet. Even though Dreiser named his novel after its female protagonist, critics have always found the author’s rendering of Hurstwood’s tragic downfall the most masterful portion of the book. The same sentiment has been expressed regarding Olivier’s brilliant, show-stealing performance as the disgraced restaurant owner; he portrays Hurstwood’s deep loneliness with grace and subtlety, his sad eyes and desolate expression reflecting his pain and despair. As Carrie, Jones gives a multifaceted performance that only gets better as the movie progresses. Jones shows vulnerability as well as hardness, revealing the emotional development Carrie undergoes during her difficulties and subsequent swift rise. Albert turns in a brilliant performance as Drouet, conveying the fundamental irresponsibility of the man while keeping him, despite his machinations, charming, friendly, and even likable. Miriam Hopkins is also excellent as the shrewish Julie Hurstwood. Carrie capably recreates the atmosphere of the growing cities of Chicago and New York at the turn of the twentieth century. Wyler’s direction is quiet and fluid, allowing the stories and characters to speak for themselves. The film earned Oscar nominations for art direction and costume design.
For Carrie, Wyler teamed with screenwriters Ruth Goetz and Augustus Goetz. The trio had earlier created an outstanding adaptation of Henry James’s novel Washington Square entitled The Heiress (1949), starring Olivia de Havilland in the title role and Montgomery Clift as her penniless suitor. Carrie was Wyler’s fourth effort at bringing a classic novel to life. In 1936 he had adapted Dodsworth, based on the novel by Dreiser’s fellow naturalist Sinclair Lewis, and in 1939 his famed version of Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights appeared, starring Olivier as the doomed Heathcliff opposite Merle Oberon’s Cathy.
The year before Carrie hit the theaters, George Stevens premiered his successful adaptation of a Dreiser novel with the celebrated A Place in the Sun (1951), based on An American Tragedy (1925); it featured superstars Clift and Elizabeth Taylor. Director Josef von Sternberg had made the first film version of An American Tragedy in 1931.
Comments and Questions
In this section, we aim to provide the reader with an array of perspectives on the text, as well as questions that challenge those perspectives. The commentary has been culled from sources as diverse as reviews contemporaneous with the work, letters written by the author, literary criticism of later generations, and appreciations written throughout the work’s history. Following the commentary, a series of questions seeks to filter Sister Carrie through a variety of points of view and bring about a richer understanding of this enduring work.
Comments
THEODORE DREISER
Well, the critics have not really understood what I was trying to do. Here is a book that is close to life. It is 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. To sit up and criticise me for saying “vest,” instead of “waistcoat”; to talk about my splitting the infinitive and using vulgar commonplaces here and there, when the tragedy of a man’s life is being displayed, is silly. More, it is ridiculous. It makes me feel that American criticism is the joke which English literary authorities maintain it to be. But the circulation is beginning to boom. When it gets to the people they will understand, because it is a story of real life, of their lives.
—from the New York imes (January 15, 1901)
DENVER REPUBLICAN
The chief merit of [Sister Carrie] is its photographic descriptions of character. Scenes and incidents are freely localized. The book is unhealthful in tone, however, and its literary quality is not high enough to cover its faults of theme. -January 20, 1901
—January 20, 1901
SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER
The philosophy of [Sister Carrie] is very clear and very interesting. Its incidents, the squalid plane upon which its development takes place, will naturally prevent it from achieving a marked popularity. Even Mr. Dreiser’s antiseptic style cannot make it anything but a most unpleasant tale, and you would never dream of recommending it to another person to read.
—January 20, 1901
LONDON DAILY MAIL
At last a really strong novel has come from America; a novel almost great because of its relentless purpose, its power to compel emotion, its marvellous simplicity. If Mr. Theodore Dreiser obtains the success he deserves, then “Sister Carrie” should make the book not of one but of many seasons.
—August 13, 1901
MANCHESTER GUARDIAN
Rarely, even in modern work, have we met with characters so little idealised, so patiently presented. There is nothing of the showy development of the worse kind of psychological novel ... Mr. Dreiser impresses us by his truthful sequence of events. He is strictly normal, and no fantastic light is shed on the credible steps of vice and crime. He is a faithful student, but his eyes are not fixed dully on the model. He might be called unimaginative by those who see no imagination in the insight which makes its deductions from experience nor in that illuminating intelligence which controls a design.... The effect of the whole is perhaps a little depressing, and Mr. Dreiser has not much charm of style. He has many happy phrases, but we are occasionally oppressed by such “Americanisms” as “eyes snapping” or “when he went home evenings the house looked nice.” His work is faithful, acute, unprejudiced, and it should belong to the veritable “documents” of American history.
—August 14, 1901
THE ACADEMY
Sister Carrie has opened our eyes. It is a calm, reasoned, realistic study of American life in Chicago and New York, absolutely free from the slightest trace of sentimentality or prettiness, and dominated everywhere by a serious and strenuous desire for truth.
—August 24, 1901
THEODORE WATTS-DUNTON
Throughout [Sister Carrie] the phrasing is of the streets and bars—colloquial, familiar, vivid, slangy, unlovely, but intensely real. Of the manner of the book it is not easy to speak favourably; it is strikingly unworthy of the matter thereof. Whilst large, dignified, and generous, the scheme of the story here told is not pretentious, or complex, or ambitious. It is a very plain tale of a plain though eventful life. Between its covers no single note of unreality is struck. It is untrammelled by any single concession to convention or tradition, literary or social. It is as compact of actuality as a police-court record, and throughout its pages one feels pulsing the sturdy, restless energy of a young people, a cosmopolitan community, a nation busy upon the hither side of maturity. The book is, firstly, the full, exhaustive story of the “half-equipped little knight’s” life and adventures; secondly, it is a b
road, vivid picture of men and manners in middle-class New York and Chicago; and, thirdly, it is a thorough and really masterly study of the moral, physical, and social deterioration of one Hurstwood, a lover of the heroine. Upon all these counts it is a creditable piece of work, faithful and real in the interest which pertains to genuinely realistic fiction. It is further of interest by reason that it strikes a key-note and is typical, both in the faults of its manner and in the wealth and diversity of its matter, of the great country which gave it birth.
—from The Athenaeum (September 7, 1901)
NEW YORK TIMES SATURDAY REVIEW
Theodore Dreiser’s frankly realistic story called “Sister Carrie,” originally published seven years ago, is now published by Messrs. B. W. Dodge & Co., and deserves to be received as a new book, for it did not get a chance for recognition when it first appeared....
To an extraordinary degree the book is a photograph of conditions in the crude larger cities of America and of the people who make these conditions and are made by them. There is no attempt to complicate the facts as they are with notions of things as they should be morally, or as they might be sentimentally or aesthetically. People’s feelings are not considered. The author is quite impersonal. Withal, the story is interesting in spite of the commonplace character of the personages and the low plane of the gallery in which they move.... It may be added that the story even upon its first publication seven years ago attracted much attention and won favorable recognition in England. We do not, however, recommend the book to the fastidious reader, or the one who clings to “old-fashioned ideas.” It is a book one can very well get along without reading.
—May 25, 1907
SAN FRANCISCO ARGONAUT
When she eventually leaves Drouet and allows herself not quite unwillingly to be abducted by Hurstwood, a special scarlet label will describe the book as an immoral one, quite unsuited to the perusal of the young person and the boarding-school miss. But these critics will have little to say in condemnation of the immorality of a commercial system which offers young girls a wage of three or four dollars a week in payment for labor as destructive to the mind as to the body.
—August 3, 1907
SHERWOOD ANDERSON
Something gray and bleak and hurtful that has been in the world almost forever is personified in [Dreiser].
—from Little Review (April 1916)
H. L. MENCKEN
[Dreiser’s] aim is not merely to record, but to translate and understand; the thing he exposes is not the empty event and act, but the endless mystery out of which it springs; his pictures have a passionate compassion in them that is hard to separate from poetry. If this sense of the universal and inexplicable tragedy, if this vision of life as a seeking without a finding, if this adept summoning up of moving images, is mistaken by college professors for the empty, meticulous nastiness of Zola in “Pot-Bouille”—in Nietzsche’s phrase, for “the delight to stink”—then surely the folly of college professors, as vast as it seems, has been underestimated....
His books remain, particularly his earlier books—and not all the ranting of the outraged orthodox will ever wipe them out. They were done in the stage of wonder, before self-consciousness began to creep in and corrupt it. The view of life that got into “Sister Carrie,” the first of them, was not the product of deliberate thinking out of Carrie’s problem. It simply got itself there by the force of the artistic passion behind it; its coherent statement had to wait for other and more reflective days. This complete rejection of ethical plan and purpose, this manifestation of what Nietzsche used to call moral innocence, is what brought up the guardians of the national tradition at the gallop, and created the Dreiser bugaboo of today. All the rubber-stamp formulae of American fiction were thrown overboard in these earlier books; instead of reducing the inexplicable to the obvious, they lifted the obvious to the inexplicable; one could find in them no orderly chain of causes and effects, of rewards and punishments; they represented life as a phenomenon at once terrible and unintelligible, like a stroke of lightning. The prevailing criticism applied the moral litmus. They were not “good”; ergo, they were “evil.”
—from Seven Arts (August 1917)
SINCLAIR LEWIS
Now to me, as to many other American writers, Dreiser more than any other man, marching alone, usually unappreciated, often hated, has cleared the trail from Victorian and Howellsian timidity and gentility in American fiction to honesty and boldness and passion of life.
—from “The American Fear of Literature” (1930)
FORD MADOX FORD
And Dreiser has the gift of universality.... If you like to call it Americanness you can—in the sense that a sort of uniform spirit has overrun the Western world so that they are eating nearly as many and nearly as filthy indigestible canned products in Paris and London today as they are in Chicago.
—from Portraits From Life (1937)
MALCOLM COWLEY
Sister Carrie had the appearance of being a naturalistic novel and would be used as a model for the work of later naturalists. Yet it was, in a sense, naturalistic by default, naturalistic because Dreiser was writing about the life he knew best in the only style he had learned. There is a personal and compulsive quality in the book that is not at all naturalistic. The book is felt rather than observed from the outside, like McTeague; and it is based on dreams rather than documents. Where McTeague had been a conducted tour of the depths, Sister Carrie was a cry from the depths, as if McTeague had uttered it.
—from New Republic (June 23, 1947)
LIONEL TRILLING
Mr. Hicks knows that Dreiser is “clumsy” and “stupid” and “bewildered” and “crude in his statement of materialistic monism”; he knows that Dreiser in his personal life—which is in point because [Henry] James’s personal life is always supposed to be so much in point—was not quite emancipated from “his boyhood longing for crass material success,” showing “again and again a desire for the ostentatious luxury of the successful business man.” But Dreiser is to be accepted and forgiven because his faults are the sad, lovable, honorable faults of reality itself, or of America itself—huge, inchoate, struggling toward expression, caught between the dream of raw power and the dream of morality.
—from The Liberal Imagination (1950)
SAUL BELLOW
I often think the criticisms of Dreiser as a stylist at times betray a resistance to the feelings he causes readers to suffer. If they can say that he can’t write, they need not experience these feelings.
—from Commentary (May 1951)
ROBERT PENN WARREN
Sister Carrie was different from anything by [William Dean] Howells or [Frank] Norris. What was shocking here was not only Dreiser’s unashamed willingness to identify himself with morally undifferentiated experience or his failure to punish vice and reward virtue in his fiction, but the implication that vice and virtue might, in themselves, be mere accidents, mere irrelevances in this process of human life, and that the world was a great machine, morally indifferent. Ultimately, what shocked the world in Dreiser’s work was not so much the things that he presented as the fact that he himself was not shocked by them.
—from Homage to Theodore Dreiser (1971)
Question
1. Does Dreiser imply or describe an underlying cause for the economic disparities described in Sister Carrie— something beyond individual fear and desire, something systematic? Does Dreiser imply or advocate a cure for these economic problems? If he offers no solution, does that diminish the power of his description or his criticism?
2. If you were a good friend of Carrie’s, someone who could speak to her frankly, what advice would you give her?
3. Is Dreiser a good psychologist? Do his characters’ motives, their responses to their situations, their thoughts, seem plausible or insightful?
For Further Reading
Biographies
Dreiser, Theodore. Dawn: An Autobiography of Early Youth. 1931. Santa Rosa, CA: Black
Sparrow Press, 1998.
———. Theodore Dreiser: Interviews. Edited by Frederic E. Rusch and Donald Pizer. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2004.
Eastman, Yvette Szekely. Dearest Wilding: A Memoir, with Love Letters from Theodore Dreiser. Edited by Thomas P. Riggio. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1995.
Lingeman, Richard. Theodore Dreiser: At the Gates of the City (1871-1907). New York: Putnam, 1986.
Loving, Jerome. The Last Titan: A Life of Theodore Dreiser. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005.
Matthiessen, F. O. Theodore Dreiser. New York: Sloane, 1951.
Swanberg, W. A. Dreiser. New York: Scribner, 1965.
Criticisms
Fisher, Philip. Hard Facts: Setting and Form in the American Novel. New York: Oxford University Press, 1985.
Kazin, Alfred. On Native Grounds: An Interpretation of Modern American Prose Literature. San Diego, CA: Harcourt Brace, 1995.
Kazin, Alfred, and Charles Shapiro, eds. The Stature of Theodore Dreiser. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1958.
Moers, Ellen. Two Dreisers: The Man and the Novelist as Revealed in His Two Most Important Books: Sister Carrie and An American Tragedy. New York: Viking, 1969.