Sister Carrie (Criticism)

Criticism

Diane Andrews Henningfeld

Henningfeld is an associate professor at Adrian College. She holds a Ph.D. in literature and writes widely for educational publishers. In this essay she examines Sister Carrie as a tragic novel, focusing on Carrie's use of sex as capital.

Sister Carrie, written by Theodore Dreiser from 1899 to 1900, was published by Doubleday, Page in 1900. The novel created a stir from the moment of its publication, caused in part by a supposed attempt by the publisher to suppress the novel. The truth behind the "suppression" of Sister Carrie is difficult to uncover. Regardless, the novel met with mixed reviews from contemporary readers, who found the book unpleasant and gloomy. Some critics suggest that these initial negative reviews were because Sister Carrie was a novel ahead of its time. The novel has grown in stature over the years until it has come to be considered one of the most important American novels of the twentieth century.

Sister Carrie is the story of young Carrie Meeber, who comes to Chicago in 1889 to make her fortune. Chicago is not as she envisions it, however. In her desire for material possessions and success, she begins and leaves two different illicit affairs. By the close of the book, she is in New York, having embarked on a highly successful stage career. Even this success does not bring her happiness; the novel closes with Carrie rocking in her chair, considering her sense that there is more to life than she has experienced.

While the book received many negative reviews upon publication, it nonetheless attracted the attention of the literary establishment, igniting a controversy that still has fire. Stuart P. Sherman, in the famous and much-anthologized essay "The Barbaric Naturalism of Mr. Dreiser," takes Dreiser to task for his naturalism. He distinguishes between realism and naturalism, finding realism an acceptable form of literature and naturalism unacceptable. He writes,

A realistic novel is a representation based upon a theory of human conduct. If the theory of human conduct is adequate, the representation constitutes an addition to literature and to social history. A naturalistic novel is a representation based upon a theory of animal behavior. Since a theory of animal behavior can never be an adequate basis for a representation of the life of man in contemporary society, such a representation is a blunder.

H. L. Mencken, one of Dreiser's earliest supporters, wrote at length in response to Sherman and about Sister Carrie and its contribution to American literature. He writes of Sherman's criticism in "The Dreiser Bugaboo," "Only a glance is needed to show the vacuity of all this irate flubdub," before going on to connect Dreiser's realism with the classical Greek writers. He argues, "In the midst of democratic cocksureness and Christian sentimentalism, of doctrinaire shallowness and professorial smugness, he stands for a point of view which at least has something honest and courageous about it; here, at all events, he is a realist."

It is important to understand what these writers mean when they use the term "naturalism." The Harper Handbook to Literature states that naturalism, a literary movement of the late nineteenth century, grew out of realism, but preferred to focus on "the fringes of society, the criminal, the fallen, the down-and-out, earning as one definition the phrase sordid realism." Further, naturalism grew as an interest in science and Darwinism grew. "Darwinism was especially important, as the naturalists perceived a person's fate as the product of blind external or biological forces, chiefly heredity and environment, but in the typical naturalistic novel chance played a large part as well." Dreiser's novels are nearly always critiqued through the naturalistic lens. Critics point to Carrie's upward rise and Hurstwood's downward spiral as the result of forces beyond their control. The chance event, such as the open safe at Hurstwood's saloon, lead him to take actions resulting in negative consequences. Carrie's chance meeting with Drouet on the street when she is out of money and looking for a job leads to her involvement with both Drouet and Hurstwood.

Although it cannot be denied that Sister Carrie is a good example of early twentieth-century naturalism, it is also possible for the novel to be read in different ways. Karl F. Zender, for example, argues, in Studies in the Novel, that the emphasis on circumstance and the de-emphasis on character "is adequate neither to the artistic power nor to the culture implications of Sister Carrie." Zender goes on to examine the novel as a tragedy of character caused by emotional repression. Other critics have examined the tragic nature of the novel as well. However, in general, critics see the novel as the story of Hurstwood's tragedy. It is possible to examine the novel as a tragedy in another way, one that focuses on Carrie as capitalist, engaged in the exchange of goods.

The circumstances that swirl Carrie through the novel are largely economic. The great life she imagines for herself in Chicago centers on the attainment of material goods. It is this desire that drives her away from her small town in Wisconsin and toward the bright lights of Chicago. Once in Chicago, she discovers that her sister and her husband see her as the means for their own economic security. In exchange for her small room, Carrie must produce enough capital to help her sister meet their rent.

Carrie has few resources to produce this capital. She hits the streets of Chicago, looking for work. She finally finds a job, producing shoes on an assembly line. The assembly line, as a means of production, removes the worker from the product. She is responsible for running a machine that punches the lace holes in the right upper half of a man's shoe. She becomes a machine herself, fitting leather to machine, over and over. In exchange for the mechanization of her life, she receives four dollars and fifty cents per week. She must turn over four dollars per week to her sister, leaving her with little capital or hope for economic advancement.

If, therefore, it is economic forces that allow a person to rise or fall in the culture presented in the novel, Carrie's problem becomes one of economics. What does she have that can be exchanged for the goods she wants? Clearly the money she earns at the factory will never keep up with her material desires. When Carrie accepts the astronomical sum of twenty dollars from the drummer Drouet, she is doing more than accepting a loan. She is embarking on an economic arrangement, the first step in an exchange of capital. Quite simply, Carrie discovers that she has capital in the form of sex. In a materialistic society, sex becomes a commodity, something that can be bought, sold, and exchanged for goods.

Carrie's rise, then, is directly linked to the way she barters her sexual capital. Her appearance in the lodge theatre performance offers her the opportunity to market her sexual capital. The men in the audience all represent potential buyers. The competition for Carrie's capital renders her as a more attractive commodity to Hurstwood. As a result of her appearance on stage, Carrie finds that she can trade upward. Hurstwood offers better material conditions than those she enjoys with Drouet.

While it is true that Carrie continues to trade in on her own sexual capital throughout the book, leading eventually to her rise as a famous stage star, the story is nonetheless a tragedy. Looking at the novel as Hurstwood's tragedy, however, is too limiting. The novel as a whole can be read as the tragic results of making sex a commodity.

Dramatic literature can usually be divided into two categories, comedy and tragedy. Comedy is characterized by young love, sex, fertility, marriage, spring, and birth. Tragedy, on the other hand, is characterized by sterility, waste, and death. While comedy rejoices in each new generation, tragedy marks the end of the generation without progeny. The tragedy of Sister Carrie is one of sterility and death. Although sex is at the foundation of the novel, there are no pregnancies and no births. Carrie's sister and her husband are childless, and Carrie remains childless and unmarried throughout the novel. Carrie's rocking chair, in this reading, takes on new significance. Rocking chairs are often associated with nursing mothers. Carrie, however, rocks incessantly in her chair without purpose. While she wants marriage, what she obtains in exchange for her sexual capital is a place to live and clothes to wear. Her liaisons with Drouet and Hurstwood are sterile. Although there is a hint that she would like to start a relationship with Ames, that relationship remains platonic. Indeed, it is Ames himself who tells Carrie that he sees her more as the star of a drama than of the comedies she has been playing. Ames reads Carrie well. As the novel ends, Carrie is in her rocking chair, reading a tragic novel. While Hurstwood's suicide seems the more apparent tragedy, Carrie, too, is a tragic figure, locked in sterile longing and futile hope.

In sum, it is possible to read Sister Carrie as a cautionary tale, a lesson in what happens when a culture reduces all human interactions to the exchange of capital. In such a culture, intimate emotional and physical bonds are reduced to tradable commodities, sex can be traded for material goods, and comedy is no longer possible. Instead, what remains is a bleak and desolate picture of a fallen society, a landscape of waste and sterility.

Source: Diane Andrews Henningfeld, in an essay for Novels for Students, Gale, 2000.

What Do I Read Next?

• Like Sister Carrie, Dreiser's second novel, Jennie Gerhardt, draws from experiences in Dreiser's sisters' lives. Published in 1911, the story centers on Jennie, the poor and immoral daughter of an immigrant who detests the methods by which his daughter tries to achieve happiness.
• Jennie Gerhardt has been compared to Thomas Hardy's 1919 classic, Tess of the D'Urbervilles, if only because of the similarities between their main characters. Like Jennie, Tess comes from a common background. She admits to her husband that she has had a child out of wedlock, who died in infancy. Her husband leaves her. In order to save her family, she goes to live as the mistress of the wealthy Alec D'Urberville, the father of the dead child.
• Jude the Obscure, another of Thomas Hardy's books, is similar to Sister Carrie. Published in 1919, the story is about a young man and his unhappy experiences with love, sex, destiny, and social status.
• The Awakening, Kate Chopin's highly controversial novel published in 1899, tells the story of Edna Pontellier, a married woman who experiences a summer romance and returns to the city a changed woman. She turns her back on her old life — family, social involvement, and traditional morals — to search for self-fulfillment through new love, life ventures, and sexual activity.