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Sister Carrie (Penguin Classics) [Paperback] [1994] (Author) Theodore Dreiser, John C. Berkey, Charles D. Winters, James West, Alfred Kazin
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September 29, 2024theodore dreiser they could never make me love you
March 13, 2024
Sister Carrie is a distinctly different book compared to today's fiction. Theodore Dreiser is not dealing with interior dialogue or emotional responses. These are life stories of two people in the last 1800s being propelled and buffeted by social forces and their character - one to grandeur, the other to destitution.
"Carrie" ( Caroline Meeber) at age 18 leaves her village home near Columbia City for a more exciting life in Chicago. On the train, she meets Charles Drouet, a charming salesman who has an eye for pretty, young girls. Although cool to his advances, she keeps his card. She is to board with her married sister whose husband works in a factory. Carrie, with no skills or experience, gets her first job in a sweatshop of a shoe factory. Sickness makes her unemployed and inexperience makes her unemployable. Drouet reappears and she succumbs to his enticements. On moral grounds, the book was roundly criticized when published in 1900 for such behaviour. Carrie in all her affairs does what a girl has to do to survive.
Drouet introduced her to George Hurstwood, a well-established, smooth manager of a bar, who, unbeknownst to himself, was in the thick of a mid-life crisis. He too is a womanizer and fancies an extramarital affair with Drouet's lovely companion. Carrie is the prey again, and so naive she thought the older Hurstwood was single. Hurstwood's weakness and poor judgement spins the pair into a bigamous marriage and a flat in New York. For a time they settle into the husband-and-wife routine in Hurstwood ran a bar and Carrie made dinner.
The story becomes one about the decline of Hurstwood from middle-class manager to tramp, unable to cope with adversity in New York, and the rise of Carrie, whose youth, beauty, some talent and drive for the "good" things in life won her a place on the stage.
Throughout Dreiser provides careful and detailed descriptions of urban life and economic conditions: working girls in factories contrasted with the comforts of the middle-class home, the destitute on New York streets compared to performers backstage at the theatre, the wealthy eating oysters in opulent restaurants and ignoring the beggars at the door. Conspicuous consumption prevails - consumerism threads through the book.
Thorstein Veblen had written The Theory of the Leisure Class, An Economic Study of Institutions in 1899. Consumption was on the minds of many in this heyday of the Gilded Age. Veblen championed the worker over the "predatory" classes. Dreiser became a Communist in his later years.
Dreiser writes as a realist - the bald facts, unadorned with moralistic reflections, and influenced by the scientific approach and current scientific theories. Many have observed that Dreiser was influenced by the writings of Herbert Spencer. Dreiser is quoted as saying that Spencer blew him, "intellectually, to bits" and left him "numb." ... "[Spencer] nearly killed me, took every shred of belief away from me; showed me that I was a chemical atom in a whirl of unknown forces; the realization clouded my mind."" [Sister Carrie and Spencer's First Principles
Author(s): Christopher G. Katope -https://www.jstor.org/stable/2924347 "] Dreiser's view that mechanistic or scientific forces shape people places him as a naturalist - the characters are subject to the "laws of nature".
An excellent book in which observations on life's extremes will always serve to inform us about the human condition.
"Carrie" ( Caroline Meeber) at age 18 leaves her village home near Columbia City for a more exciting life in Chicago. On the train, she meets Charles Drouet, a charming salesman who has an eye for pretty, young girls. Although cool to his advances, she keeps his card. She is to board with her married sister whose husband works in a factory. Carrie, with no skills or experience, gets her first job in a sweatshop of a shoe factory. Sickness makes her unemployed and inexperience makes her unemployable. Drouet reappears and she succumbs to his enticements. On moral grounds, the book was roundly criticized when published in 1900 for such behaviour. Carrie in all her affairs does what a girl has to do to survive.
Drouet introduced her to George Hurstwood, a well-established, smooth manager of a bar, who, unbeknownst to himself, was in the thick of a mid-life crisis. He too is a womanizer and fancies an extramarital affair with Drouet's lovely companion. Carrie is the prey again, and so naive she thought the older Hurstwood was single. Hurstwood's weakness and poor judgement spins the pair into a bigamous marriage and a flat in New York. For a time they settle into the husband-and-wife routine in Hurstwood ran a bar and Carrie made dinner.
The story becomes one about the decline of Hurstwood from middle-class manager to tramp, unable to cope with adversity in New York, and the rise of Carrie, whose youth, beauty, some talent and drive for the "good" things in life won her a place on the stage.
Throughout Dreiser provides careful and detailed descriptions of urban life and economic conditions: working girls in factories contrasted with the comforts of the middle-class home, the destitute on New York streets compared to performers backstage at the theatre, the wealthy eating oysters in opulent restaurants and ignoring the beggars at the door. Conspicuous consumption prevails - consumerism threads through the book.
Thorstein Veblen had written The Theory of the Leisure Class, An Economic Study of Institutions in 1899. Consumption was on the minds of many in this heyday of the Gilded Age. Veblen championed the worker over the "predatory" classes. Dreiser became a Communist in his later years.
Dreiser writes as a realist - the bald facts, unadorned with moralistic reflections, and influenced by the scientific approach and current scientific theories. Many have observed that Dreiser was influenced by the writings of Herbert Spencer. Dreiser is quoted as saying that Spencer blew him, "intellectually, to bits" and left him "numb." ... "[Spencer] nearly killed me, took every shred of belief away from me; showed me that I was a chemical atom in a whirl of unknown forces; the realization clouded my mind."" [Sister Carrie and Spencer's First Principles
Author(s): Christopher G. Katope -https://www.jstor.org/stable/2924347 "] Dreiser's view that mechanistic or scientific forces shape people places him as a naturalist - the characters are subject to the "laws of nature".
An excellent book in which observations on life's extremes will always serve to inform us about the human condition.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews