Sister Carrie:
A Dramatic Story of Real Life Choices
A young woman takes the train to Chicago in search of workv in 1889, thus setting in motion a chain of events that will lead her to fame and fortune in New York's glittering theater world. While the plot of Sister Carrie may sound like a fairy tale, Theodore Dreiser was actually trying to write a work of literary realism. He filled the pages of the novel, first published in 1900, with the harsh details of everyday life, and generated controversy for the veiled but potent depiction of Carrie's sexual experiences with the dapper traveling salesman and the "respectable" saloon manager, who both try to seduce her.
The story of Dreiser's Carrie resembles that of the melodramatic "damsel in distress," especially when she realizes that sin may be her only option for survival. And yet there was one aspect of melodrama that Dreiser purposely left out of Sister Carrie: Carrie neither agonizes over her choices, nor expresses regret for her actions. In fact, at times it seems she is not even aware that she is acting badly. Dreiser emphasizes that Carrie acts as she does simply because she wants to be comfortable. Perhaps even more scandalously, Dreiser's novel implies that most people, if faced with the same choices Carrie faces, would do exactly the same.
It was a shocking message. Americans had read tales of "fallen women" before, but they were hesitant to embrace fiction that showed people acting immorally without any kind of consequence. (Consider that, up until the mid-1960s, films made in the United State were governed by a production code requiring films to portray immoral behavior with a tone of disapproval, emphasizing its undesirability.) Fueled by his background as an urban reporter, Dreiser felt that literature that bound itself to upholding moral standards was dissatisfying. He wrote Sister Carrie to defy such standards and to offer readers a glimpse of how Americans living and toiling in the rapidly expanding urban industrial centers really lived. Inspired by the true-life story of his own sister, Emma Dreiser, who had made Chicago headlines when she ran away with a married man, Dreiser wrote Sister Carrie to make a statement about what literature was for.
Though realism was becoming more popular as a style at the time, Dreiser's particular version of realistic fiction initially won few fans. Aware that he might have trouble finding a publisher, Dreiser cut his manuscript substantially, following the suggestions of a well-meaning friend and editor, Arthur Henry. Even so, the press that agreed to print the novel later tried to recant its offer. Though an agreement was reached, the publisher released only a limited number of copies, fearing scandal. In recent years, literary scholars have attempted to restore the text to its original condition, publishing "unexpurgated" editions. The edition included here, however, shows what readers found when they opened the novel in 1900, and what Dreiser himself continued to reissue during his lifetime. It is a text that both reflects and challenges the standards of a turn-of-the-century audience.
The Life and Work of Theodore Dreiser
Dreiser came to his career as a novelist slowly. The child of a German-Catholic immigrant father and a German-American mother, Dreiser was born in Terre Haute, Indiana, in 1871. He grew up in a large family that struggled with poverty and drifted apart, moving in and out of the booming city of Chicago. Dreiser's older sisters had affairs and out-of-wedlock children that would inspire the stories of "immoral" women in the author's later work. After dropping out of school, he slowly found his way to work as a reporter, taking jobs with newspapers in Chicago, St. Louis, Toledo, Pittsburgh, and finally New York, where he became interested in documenting the kind of urban poverty his own family had endured. Dreiser would later reflect that reading the philosophy of evolution-oriented Herbert Spencer at a Pittsburgh public library in 1894 shattered the Catholic ideals with which he had been raised, creating his interest in writing literature that examined what, if not God, accounted for human action and social development. Though often inspired by true-life events, his work was not portraiture but instead dramatization that considered fundamental questions about human behavior.
The failure of Sister Carrie upon its initial publication proved emotionally devastating for Dreiser. Despite the support of his wife, Sara White, who had helped him to edit the novel, Dreiser sank into a depression. His older brother Paul, who took the last name "Dresser" during his rise to fame as a popular songwriter, gave Dreiser the money to stay at a sanatorium, where he recovered his health. For a while, he tried to earn his living by catering to more popular taste, taking on work as an editor and writer for popular publications. He and his wife separated, and Dreiser took part in a number of scandalous affairs, including one that cost him a lucrative job as an editor at a publishing company.
This ended up being the push he needed to reinitiate his work in fiction, and before his death in 1945, he would write seven more novels. The first of these, Jennie Gerhardt, was published in 1911, eleven years after Sister Carrie. It drew from another sister's experiences, taking as its subject a young woman who has borne the illegitimate child of a prominent man. Dreiser's later novels, including the wellknown An American Tragedy (1925), continued to employ provocative story lines, and his work was often the target of obscenity charges. Sympathetic to the plight of the working class in which he was raised, Dreiser joined the Communist Party shortly before his death. His work grew in stature, and he died a famous writer.
Historical and Literary Context of Sister Carrie
Toward an Urban Consumer Society
Readers see the impact of Chicago's and New York's modernization in Sister Carrie through Carrie's adjustment from small-town life to the fast pace of a big city. She suffers through an intense job search, hoping to find work that will enable her to afford the material temptations she discovers on the shelves of a new American institution: the department store. Americans of this era were, like Carrie, severing their ties to a "homemade" agrarian past, becoming instead consumers in an industrial economy and experiencing what Dreiser calls the "drag of desire" for mass-produced goods.
Both Carrie's temptations and her limited ability to satisfy her desires testify to the particular circumstances faced by a young single woman during this era of change. While Carrie is able to find factory work upon her arrival in Chicago, it is worth noting that women gained access into unsafe and hostile factory workplaces precisely because they could be paid less than men. They had little choice but to accept such conditions: they might hope for life as a wife and mother, but this is an option in which Carrie, having observed her older sister's experiences, is quick to see limitations. And many women, such as those who had recently immigrated to the United States, as well as African Americans, expected to toil for pay as well as in the home, regardless of their marital status. For women who could not secure even low-paying factory work, prostitution served as a last resort.
The urban life that dazzles Carrie, with its horse-drawn streetcars and dressed-up theatergoers, may seem quaint or old-fashioned to readers today. But Dreiser's contemporaries likely viewed his urban settings as seedy and threatening, a reputation upheld by other writers in this era. Ten years before Sister Carrie was published, Jacob Riis published his shocking collection of documentary photographs of immigrants to New York, How the Other Half Lives. Stephen Crane's Maggie: A Girl of the Streets, published under a pseudonym and amid controversy in 1893, also portrayed gritty urban life, examining in particular its consequences for women. Dreiser took the portrayal of the city's underside in a slightly different direction, toward the consciousness of the people who lived there, without moral judgment or pleadings for sympathy.
History-oriented readers of Sister Carrie will likely note that Dreiser's urban settings are the very ones that attracted Progressive reformers like Jane Addams, who sought to remedy the harsh conditions of urban life through exposing political corruption, enacting protective labor legislation, or creating reform homes for "wayward" women. And those familiar with the women's rights movement of the era will see in Carrie's limited options the incentives for the Suffrage Amendment, for which women labored until it finally passed in 1920. But Dreiser's work can be better understood as a tribute to the common people of this era of change, rather than a rallying cry on their behalf.
Naturalism
Dreiser's approach to writing has rightfully earned him a place in the school of American naturalism. This style emerged in the United States in the late 1800s, inspired by French realism, and placed an emphasis on a depiction of life as a natural process. Some writers, such as Jack London, took this style in the direction of "wilderness tales" aimed at showing man's place within the basest laws of nature. Others, like Stephen Crane and Frank Norris, extended the laws of the animal kingdom to an urban setting.
A simple characterization of naturalistic literature is that it attempts to demonstrate "survival of the fittest," a phrase coined by philosopher Herbert Spencer (who was much admired by Dreiser) and associated with evolutionary scientist Charles Darwin. Like "Social Darwinists," who justified cutthroat business competition with the theory of evolution, literary naturalists applied the theory to the contemporary urban world. Sister Carrie, however, focuses less on animalistic survival strategies than...
