Sister Carrie

Sister Carrie (1900) is a novel by Theodore Dreiser about a young country girl who moves to the big city where she starts realizing her own American Dream by embarking on a life of sin rather than by hard work and perseverance.

Plot

Leaving her rural Wisconsin home, 18 year-old Caroline Meeber heads for Chicago, Illinois, where she wants to live with her older sister's family. Soon, however, Carrie finds out that working in a sweatshop and living in a squalid and overcrowded apartment is not what she wants. When she meets a man named Drouet, a travelling salesman whose acquaintance she already made on the train to Chicago, she readily leaves behind her family—they never see "Sister Carrie" again—when he offers to look after her.

Related Topics:
Wisconsin - Chicago, Illinois - Sweatshop - Salesman

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Drouet installs her in a much larger apartment in return for her favours. Through Drouet, Carrie meets Hurstwood, the manager of a respectable bar. From the moment he sets eyes on her, Hurstwood is infatuated with the young girl, whereas for Carrie, Hurstwood is just a wealthy man past the prime of his life. Before long they start an affair, communicating and meeting secretly in the expanding, anonymous city. Although Hurstwood has a family and Carrie might conclude that he does, the lovers never talk about it and it never seems to occur to Carrie to ask.

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One night, at his job, Hurstwood is presented with the opportunity to embezzle a large sum of money. He succumbs to the temptation and decides, on the spur of the moment, to leave everything behind and start a new life with Carrie. Under a pretext, he lures Carrie onto a northbound train and escapes with her to Canada. After a while, his guilty conscience makes him pay back most of the money, but there is no way he could return to his former life so the couple eventually decide to move to the East coast.

Related Topics:
Embezzle - Canada

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The second part of the book is set in New York City. Hurstwood and Carrie rent a flat where they live as man and wife under an assumed name. Gradually, Hurstwood realizes that finding a new job is not easy at all. As his money is slowly running out, the couple have to start economizing, which Carrie does not like at all. She starts looking for a job herself and finds employment at one of the many theatres. Her rise to stardom is sharply contrasted with Hurstwood's downfall: she leaves him, and the rapidly ageing Hurstwood, overwhelmed by apathy, is left all alone, without a job and without any money. At one point, during a strike, he even works as a scab driving a Brooklyn streetcar. He joins the homeless of New York and finally, in a cheap hotel, puts an end to his life.

Related Topics:
New York City - Strike - Scab - Brooklyn - Streetcar - Homeless

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In his Nobel Prize Lecture of 1930, Sinclair Lewis said that "Dreiser's great first novel, Sister Carrie, which he dared to publish thirty long years ago and which I read twenty-five years ago, came to housebound and airless America like a great free Western wind, and to our stuffy domesticity gave us the first fresh air since Mark Twain and Whitman".

Related Topics:
Nobel Prize - 1930 - Sinclair Lewis - Mark Twain - Whitman

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