Fallen from fashion
Sister Carrie
by Theodore Dreiser is reassessed by Rhoda Koenig The American Dream — of comfort, power, freedom, beauty, pink Cadillacs, love unending — has been pursued by fictional characters since the beginning of the country founded on the promise of a chance of happiness. Yet no success story, no tale of scheming or industry, conveys that dream as well as a classic novel of one person's accidental rise and another's degradation. That is Theodore Dreiser's first and greatest novel, Sister Carrie.
Though accepted for publication in 1900, Sister Carrie was not widely circulated and reviewed until more than ten years later. The publisher, fearing scandal and possible prosecution, got cold feet, and his lawyer explained to Dreiser a distinction which many other authors have found their pub- lishers to make, though seldom so explicit- ly: that the firm 'was legally obliged to go on with the publication, it having signed a contract to do so, but that this did not nec- essarily include selling.'
What frightened the publisher (who was justified when the novel did become the subject of outraged protest) was not any description of physical love or desire. If you had never heard about sex, you wouldn't find out about it from Dreiser, whose chastity makes Dickens seem almost lewd. It is, rather, that his heroine, who goes to live with a salesman and then elopes with his married friend, suffers few qualms and no retribution — at least, none in a sense that the average reader of the period would recognise. Yet Carrie's success is identical with her punishment: every victory carries her to a point where she understands that her latest triumph is meaningless.
Sister Carrie begins like a conventional melodrama of seduction. A smalltown girl, Carrie goes to Chicago to look for a job, but the best she can find pays her $4.50 a week to bend over a machine ten hours a day in a filthy shoe factory. When she loses even that, she finds it hard to resist the good-natured, generous salesman who slips two ten-dollar bills into her hand (Dreiser describes them, three times in as many pages, as 'soft') and tells her to buy the clothes she needs for winter. But, in living with him, Carrie feels neither voluptuous nor particularly guilty — in fact, she feels hardly anything at all. Her interest in his friend, Hurstwood — whom she does not know is married — is not aroused by pas- sion but by a recognition that he is superior to the salesman: his jokes are more subtle, his clothes better, his manners more refined. Carrie wants to improve herself, and she also wants to enjoy condescending to the salesman she has previously thought worldly and sophisticated.
But what is extraordinary about Sister Carrie is that its heroine is never in love. When Hurstwood tells her he loves her, she simply doesn't disagree when he assumes that she feels the same. She likes him, she is flattered, but the affair remains one of 'his love' and 'her affection'. When he practically abducts her (without saying that he has stolen $10,000 from his employ- er to finance their flight), she goes along out of a desire for change and the security she feels in being mastered by a stronger will. But thereafter the balance begins to swing. Twice her age, cut off from his fami- ly, profession, home, and associations, Hurstwood goes downhill when they start living in New York. Carrie, exposed to more distractions and possibilities, fulfills the logical destiny of a pretty girl who is good at mimicking gestures and emotions. She becomes an actress, rising to the level of a featured player paid $150 a week when we leave her, while Hurstwood, his business a failure and his funds gone, has committed suicide in a 15-cent flophouse.
In both the Chicago and New York set- tings, Sister Carrie gives the lie to the idea that modern technology and entertainment have destroyed the warmth and mutual dependence of the family. Its characters shed their past as if it were yesterday's newspaper: Carrie's mother disappears after kissing her goodbye on page 1, her father is brought to mind once by some- one's passing resemblance, the sister and brother-in-law with whom she lived in Chicago are not given another thought; Hurstwood, in New York, never worries about his two children. After leaving a grim and sullen home, where a mumbled exchange of banalities is the only conversa- tion, Carrie rebels when her life with Hurstwood turns into the same routine. Yet the enticements that spur her on — a new dress, dinner in a restaurant — are always material and petty. Carrie never confesses to feeling incomplete without a man to love, without children; she is not out for wealth or artistic expression. What stirs her restlessness is something vaguer, something she senses when she stares out of the window or hears an unexpectedly touching melody. 'I don't know what it is about music,' she says, 'but it always makes me feel as if I wanted something.' That feeling, a friend tells her, is both her cross and her means of survival. She has a talent for conveying romantic yearning, and
if you turn away from it and live to satisfy yourself alone, it will go fast enough. The look will leave your eyes. Your mouth will change. Your power to act will disappear. You may think they won't, but they will. Nature takes care of that.
Carrie joins a long line of solitary Ameri- can dreamers, personified in purest form by Saul Bellow's Henderson the Rain King: 'I want, I want.'
Carrie begins as, literally, 'Sister Carrie' — so she is greeted at the station in Chica- go by her relative, with whom she feels 'much alone, a lone figure in a tossing, thoughtless sea'. When we last see her, the title has become a metaphor for a woman who, despite luxury and applause, is never to know 'surfeit nor content,' as she waits 'for that halcyon day when she should be led forth among dreams become real'. Flaubert laughed at his Madame Bovary, but Dreiser pitied his Carrie, doomed to a chastity of the soul, nunlike and inviolate in perpetual want.
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