Sister Carrie (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) Read online

  1910 A romance with the seventeen-year-old daughter of one of his associates forces Dreiser’s resignation as Butterick’s editor. In New York City the Manhattan Bridge opens. Emma Goldman’s book Anarchism and Other Essays appears.

  1911 Jennie Gerhardt is published to critical praise and support for its author. Marie Curie is awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry. Standard Oil’s largest remaining company is dissolved by the Supreme Court. In Manhattan the Triangle Shirtwaist Company sweatshop catches fire, killing 146 young immigrant workers.

  1912 The Financier, the first of the “Trilogy of Desire” series about a ruthless American tycoon (based on transportation magnate Charles T. Yerkes), is published. After years of unhappiness, Dreiser and his wife permanently separate. The Titanic sinks after striking an iceberg on her maiden voyage, killing 1,500 people.

  1913 “On the Banks of the Wabash, Far Away,” a popular song written by Dreiser’s older brother Paul, is adopted as the state song of Indiana. Dreiser publishes A Traveler at Forty, a travelogue of his journey to Europe. Carl Jung publishes The Theory of Psychoanalysis.

  1914 World War I breaks out in Europe. The second “Trilogy of Desire” installment, The Titan, is published. American novelist Booth Tarkington publishes Penrod.

  1915 Dreiser publishes The “Genius,” a semi-autobiographical novel. It is censured by the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice and removed from bookshelves. Albert Einstein introduces his General Theory of Relativity.

  1916 Dreiser’s memoir A Hoosier Holiday is published, as well as Plays of the Natural and Supernatural. Carl Sandburg publishes Chicago Poems. Nine days after Margaret Sanger opens the nation’s first birth-control clinic in Brooklyn, she is arrested and the clinic is shut down.

  1917 The United States enters World War I. Poet T. S. Eliot publishes Prufrock and Other Observations. The Bolshevik Revolution in Russia topples the czar and installs V. I. Lenin as the first head of the Soviet state. H. L. Mencken publishes A Book of Prefaces, a collection of literary essays that includes a positive assessment of Dreiser.

  1918 Dreiser publishes Free and Other Stories and the novel The Hand of the Potter, whose central character is a child molester. H. L. Mencken publishes In Defense of Women.

  1919 World War I ends. Twelve Men, Dreiser’s collection of fictional biographical portraits, appears. He begins a relationship with actress Helen Richardson, his cousin, and moves to Hollywood with her. Sherwood Anderson publishes Winesburg, Ohio, a collection of interconnected stories. Booth Tarkington wins the Pulitzer Prize for The Magnificent Ambersons.

  1920 F. Scott Fitzgerald publishes This Side of Paradise. Dreiser publishes a collection of philosophical sketches titled Hey-Rub-a-Dub-Dub. Sinclair Lewis publishes Main Street. Playwright Eugene O’Neill wins the Pulitzer Prize for his drama Beyond the Horizon. Congress passes the Nineteenth Amendment, giving women the right to vote.

  1922 Dreiser publishes a second memoir, A Book About Myself, on his newspaper days. T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land appears. Ulysses, the avant-garde novel by James Joyce, is published but is burned by the U.S. Post Office. The American stock market takes off, giving rise to the nickname “The Roaring Twenties” for this high-flying decade.

  1923 Dreiser publishes The Color of a Great City, a paean to New York. Sigmund Freud publishes The Ego and the Id.

  1925 An American Tragedy is published. Based on the actual murder of Grace Brown and the subsequent trial of Chester Gillette, the novel is Dreiser’s first major success. American novelist John Dos Passos publishes Manhattan Transfer. Biology teacher John Scopes is convicted of violating Tennessee state law by teaching evolution in public school. Bell Telephone Laboratories is founded.

  1926 Moods, Cadenced and Declaimed, an unremarkable book of Dreiser’s verse, appears

  1927 At the invitation of the Soviet government, Dreiser goes to Moscow for the celebration of the tenth anniversary of the October Revolution. Virginia Woolf publishes To The Light-house. The Jazz Singer, starring Al Jolson, introduces talking motion pictures.

  1928 Dreiser Looks at Russia, an account of Dreiser’s visit to the Soviet Union, is published.

  1929 Dreiser publishes A Gallery of Women, a two-volume collection of fifteen fictionalized profiles of women he has either known or wants to celebrate. The American stock market collapses, initiating the Great Depression. Thomas Wolfe publishes Look Homeward Angel. By observing distant galaxies, Edwin Hubble determines that the universe is expanding.

  1931 Dreiser publishes the anti-capitalist treatise Tragic America and a memoir titled Dawn: An Autobiography of Early Youth. He delivers a speech at New York’s Town Hall characterizing the Alabama rape trial of the Scottsboro boys as legal lynching. Josef von Sternberg’s film version of An American Tragedy opens. Robert Frost’s Collected Poems wins the Pulitzer Prize. The Empire State Building, the tallest skyscraper ever built, opens.

  1938 Dreiser settles in California permanently with Helen Richardson.

  1939 World War II breaks out in Europe. John Steinbeck publishes The Grapes of Wrath. Film classics Gone with the Wind and The Wizard of Oz premiere.

  1941 The Japanese attack Pearl Harbor, bringing the United States into World War II.

  1942 Sara White Dreiser dies after thirty years of separation from her husband.

  1944 Dreiser marries his longtime companion Helen Richardson. Tennessee Williams debuts his play The Glass Menagerie on Broadway. On June 6 U.S. forces land at Normandy.

  1945 After joining the Communist Party early in the year, Theodore Dreiser dies on December 28, in Hollywood, California. Richard Wright publishes Black Boy. The United States drops atomic bombs on Japanese cities Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In Europe, World War II ends on May 8.

  1946 The Bulwark is published.

  1947 The Stoic, the last novel in Dreiser’s “Trilogy of Desire,” is published. A collection of Dreiser’s short fiction, The Best Short Stories, is published.

  1951 A Place in the Sun, a film adaptation of An American Tragedy, starring Montgomery Clift and Elizabeth Taylor, opens.

  1952 William Wyler’s film Carrie opens, starring Laurence Olivier as Hurstwood, Jennifer Jones as Carrie, and Eddie Albert as Drouet.

  Introduction

  Since its publication in 1900, Sister Carrie, Theodore Dreiser’s first novel, has incited two kinds of controversy: moral and artistic. When Dreiser submitted his book to the respectable publishing firm of Doubleday, Page and Co., it was initially met with enthusiasm. Serving as a reader, the novelist Frank Norris strongly recommended that the book be acquired. Walter Page also admired the novel. But when Mrs. Doubleday read the manuscript, she argued vehemently that it was an immoral work and urged her husband Frank not to publish it. Why? Because the author did not punish Carrie, a kept woman, with death or disgrace, as the wages of sin deserved, but rewarded her with success in the theater and material comfort. Mrs. Doubleday would not have been swayed by the blunt judgment of an interviewer for the New York Herald in 1907: Sister Carrie “reverses the canting code of the cheap novelist—the woman transgresses, but the man pays.” A disinterested judge might construe Carrie’s failed pursuit of happiness as a harsh fate, but to the custodians of conventional morality that argument countenanced exposing vulnerable young women like Carrie to a life of vice. Even in the wake of the Gilded Age’s sensational scandals—the Beecher-Tilton trial, in which influential Brooklyn preacher Henry Ward Beecher was accused of adultery with one of his parishioners, and the murder of the distinguished architect Stanford White by Harry Thaw, a jealous husband—sex was a taboo subject for novelists, to be treated, if at all, obliquely. To his credit, Dreiser stubbornly refused to bow to the publisher’s pressure either to withdraw the novel or tamper with its moral vision. When the company’s legal department advised that Doubleday, Page was contractually bound to publish Sister Carrie, it did so—albeit in a stingy edition of 1,000 plus copies. Norris, however, managed to send the novel to reviewers across the country, so it was
read, mainly by writers. In 1901 the British publisher William Heinemann published Sister Carrie to widespread acclaim, and by 1907, after B. W. Dodge and Company reprinted the novel in a substantial edition, Dreiser’s American readership had also grown.

  In affluent periods like the 1950s, the book’s reputation dropped because critics savagely attacked Dreiser’s artistry, often measuring his flaws against the subtle art of Henry James. Where James was a cynosure of formal innovation and complex presentation of consciousness, Dreiser played the omniscient author in a ponderous didactic style, they grumbled, seldom allowing his characters’ traits and choices to unfold organically from the dramatic action. They considered it a blunder to announce in the early chapters of Sister Carrie that his protagonist would never find happiness. Moreover, where James’s prose was intricate and radiant as spun gold, Dreiser’s was pedestrian and maudlin. Dreiser was the inferior novelist.

  Such charges would not have fazed the author. Sister Carrie, he remarked in a 1907 New York Times interview, was “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.” Indeed, during times of depression, when the country was wracked with social and economic conflict, bringing hardship and ruin in its wake, Dreiser’s novels moved readers because they brilliantly demonstrated the human costs of an unregulated system that enabled “the high and the mighty” to flourish while a huge segment of the population struggled merely to subsist. Dreiser understood that the dirty secret of American society was class—not only its injustices and injuries, but the dreams of power and money, status and fame that it inspired. Nonetheless, it would be foolish to ignore his detractors’ misgivings or to dispute Dreiser’s occasional clumsiness: his tedious repetitions of words and motifs, his fondness for pontificating about women’s emotional makeup, and the banality of some of his images—for example, he describes Carrie several times as a wisp in a vast sea.

  But Dreiser’s faults, though noticeable and annoying, count for little when weighed against his strengths: among them his psychological acumen (he grasps the elemental force of self-interest and illusion—he calls it “Elfland”—that drives people’s lives), and the sturdy structure he devises for Sister Carrie (Carrie rises from poor, unformed waif to theatrical celebrity, while her lover, Hurstwood, falls from prosperous tavern manager to beggar and suicide). Despite chapter headings that spell out explicitly, as in a popular melodrama, the war between desire and conscience, flesh and spirit, Dreiser refuses to accept William Dean Howells’s bromide that American novelists should focus on “the smiling aspects of life.”

  Beautiful factory girls from down-at-heels families do not in Dreiser’s novels defend their virtue and then at the curtain marry the handsome scion of a rich industrialist and live happily ever after. Morality, in Sister Carrie, consists of shades of gray. Dreiser is a sober, uncompromising realist.

  Above all, Dreiser excels at anatomizing the pathologies and inequities of American life—in particular, the profound gulf between rich and poor. Like his contemporary, the pioneering social worker Jane Addams, he deplored the fact that a small number of people accumulated enormous wealth, while the vast majority of citizens lived in abject poverty, working long hours at dangerous, soul-killing jobs for meager pay. When Carrie is hired by a shoe factory, at a salary of $4.50 a week, to stamp holes in uppers, she recoils from being a cog in the machine, one of several nondescript “clattering automatons.” The prospect of a future shackled to dull routine demoralizes her. It does not take her long to notice and envy the conspicuous consumerism on a grand scale that surrounds her in Chicago (and later in New York): “the magnificent residences, the splendid equipages, the gilded shops, restaurants, resorts of all kinds; ... the flowers, the silks, the wines” (p. 260). For Carrie, Chicago’s Vanity Fair, with its array of showy goods, promises unimaginable satisfactions. For Dreiser—and this is the solemn major theme of Sister Carrie—money confers neither freedom nor spiritual contentment. Sister Carrie is the fictional complement to Thorstein Veblen’s sociological classic The Theory of the Leisure Class and the American cousin of Flaubert’s Madame Bovary.

  There is a clear-cut autobiographical basis to these attitudes. Dreiser’s childhood and young manhood schooled and scarred him. He was born in 1871, in Terre Haute, Indiana, into a large impoverished family. His father, a German Catholic, was barely able to scrape together a living, so that his pious Mennonite mother took in washing. It was not uncommon for the children to go to bed hungry. Theodore was a shy, repressed child who spent hours reading or, like Carrie, whiling away time daydreaming. His four older sisters and two brothers all rebelled against the puritanical morality of the Dreiser household. Without moral qualms, the sisters traded sex for fashionable clothes, jewels, and creature comforts—all the traditional perquisites of status. In fact, the plot of Sister Carrie is closely modeled on the love life of one of those sisters, Emma, who eloped with tavern manager E. A. Hopkins. (Dreiser’s 1911 novel Jennie Gerhardt centered on the life of another sister, Mary Frances, “Mame.”). His brother Paul changed his last name to Dresser and became the celebrated songwriter of “By the Banks of the Wabash, Far Away” and other popular ditties—and a successful lady’s man.

  Theodore, by contrast, patched together a ragged education, attending public schools, where he did not distinguish himself as a student, and, for one wasted year, Indiana University before dropping out. Sex obsessed and tortured him. For a few years he knocked about, supporting himself with odd jobs until he finally found a vocation as a journalist, a major turning point in his life. His stint as a reporter on newspapers in Chicago, Pittsburgh, and St. Louis honed his writing skills and gave him a daily front-row seat to witness—and to reflect on—the casualties of social turmoil. He covered the bitterly violent tram strike in Akron, Ohio, and sympathized with the plight of the exploited workers and their families who fought the intransigent corporations, Pinkerton guards, and scabs so desperate for work they would risk their lives for a paltry few dollars.

  Dreiser’s beat ranged far and wide. He prowled city streets and ethnic neighborhoods in search of human-interest stories, talking to prostitutes, maids, clerks, actors, doctors, teachers, and people who bought furniture on the installment plan. He interviewed ruthless financiers whose meteoric rise was due to an aggressive will, a monomaniacal ego, and an eye for the main chance—men who did not shy away from resorting to bribery or other corrupt practices in order to acquire and wield power. Chicago’s economic and social stratifications were as familiar to Dreiser as his own hands.

  America, Sister Carrie suggests, is a divided nation. The residents already inside “the walled city” are dominated by the moneyed class. They flaunt their wealth like peacocks and dine in ornate restaurants (Dreiser despised the “unwholesome,” gargantuan meals, “enough to feed an army,” devoured in these elegant culinary palaces). Next in importance are the politicians who control patronage, dole out jobs for their needy constituents, and line their own pockets with graft. And then come the celebrities whose pictures adorn theater posters and the rotogravure sections of Sunday newspapers. Dreiser likens the powerful and rich to whales, lords of the sea. “A common fish must needs disappear wholly from view—remain unseen” (p. 260). Carrie’s almost blind instinct helps her to avert this hapless destiny. Instead, it is Hurstwood who drowns in that sea.

  On nearly every page of the novel, Dreiser evokes the spell wealth casts on his characters. Cities, he notes again and again, are magnets—and thus social laboratories—for all sorts of people looking to improve their lot. In the 1890s, Chicago’s expansion accelerated at a frenzied pace; new buildings sprang up on every block. The cocky city seemed to offer unprecedented opportunities for success to those who could ride the crest of this wave. In the first half of Sister Carrie, the lower rungs of the social hierarchy—the factory workers and the large armies of the unemployed, the ill, the petty criminals, the unassimilated immigrants,
and the poor unable to fend for themselves—lurk in the shadows of Dreiser’s canvas. But in the second half, when economic distress spreads hunger and despair across New York City, they occupy more of the foreground.

  Into this volatile urban atmosphere steps Carrie Meeber, a naive, wide-eyed wayfarer from a small town in Wisconsin, eager to escape the boring parochialism of her upbringing. She has no marketable skills to win the notice of prospective employers—she is morbidly shy and afraid of rebuffs—and she possesses little more to distinguish her than a pretty face and a trim figure. A brief taste of her sister’s narrow existence, all toil and no pleasure, and of the monotony of factory work distresses her. Privation staring her in the face, she is “rescued” by Drouet, a “drummer” (traveling salesman) who had befriended her on the train from Wisconsin. A glib, good-natured egotist who enjoys the company of women and flirts in a style of superficial gallantry, Drouet coaxes her into letting him buy her a skirt, jacket, and hat at one of the glamorous new department stores and setting her up in a charming, airy flat. Carrie feels no passion for Drouet; what seduces her are the material things he lavishes on her: clothes, pleasant rooms looked after by a maid, dinners at brightly lit restaurants, evenings at the theater, and carriage rides through Lincoln Park.

  When Hurstwood and Carrie meet, he woos her in a wily campaign to detach her from Drouet. Weak-willed and unworldly, Carrie cannot see through Hurstwood’s suave niceties; she is flattered by his solicitude, by the flowers he sends, clandestine meetings in the park, discreet love letters. She is mildly uneasy at their liaison, but her conscience does not nag at her. At Fitzgerald and Moy’s, a fancy saloon where he serves as manager, Hurstwood is adept at “small palaver” and bonhomie, his manners more polished than his rival Drouet’s. He knows when to drink with his customers and when to keep his distance. Dreiser describes this male preserve, another layer of social life in Chicago, in detail because it furnishes clues to Hurstwood’s character. Hurstwood delights in looking around the posh watering hole and watching boxing champ John Sullivan hold court at the bar, while in the back room, ward bosses drink whiskey, smoke cigars, gossip, tell risque stories, and cut (shady) deals. Hurstwood owns a piece of the American dream of success.