53 pages • 1 hour read
Theodore DreiserSister Carrie
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1900A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Character Analysis
Caroline Meeber
Caroline “Carrie” Meeber is often selfish and unimpressed with her lack of education. Certain that money will bring her contentment and happiness, she is easily distracted by the trappings of wealth. Carrie is better able to express emotions as a character on stage than in her actual relationships, and she is willing to use men in her efforts to secure materialistic comforts, indifferent to the catastrophic emotional damage she causes. Ultimately, she closes the novel alone and trying to understand why all her success never brought her happiness. Carrie’s obsession with fashion, hairstyles, restaurants, houses, and furnishings has brought her only awareness—except that her experience teaches her little. In the end, the narrator—and by extension the reader—learns the moral insight, not Carrie.
Carrie represents a type, a “fair example of the middle American class” (4). She is not presented as a character with a complex psychology whose motivations are layered and subtle. To the author, she is a test case and a study in cultural sociology, demonstrating a premise foregone before Carrie steps on the train to Chicago. The narrator says as much early on:
When a girl leaves her home at eighteen, she does one of two things. Either she falls into saving hands and becomes better, or she rapidly assumes the cosmopolitan standard of virtue and becomes worse. Of an intermediate balance, there is no possibility (3).
Dreiser uses Carrie Meeber to teach readers a lesson. Her restlessness, discontent, and grass-is-always-greener mantra evidences the impact of a culture built around the premise of material success. The turn-of-the-century Gilded Age that Dreiser observed made restlessness a virtue and dismissed love and happiness as alluring distractions. Carrie is the inevitable consequence of that culture, a cautionary tale that the culture itself must reconsider its values or face generations of Carrie Meebers.
Charles Drouet
Charles Drouet guides a shy and uncertain Carrie through her difficult adjustments to life in the big city, providing her with the means to escape the dingy world of factory work. In joining in her first sexual experience, he introduces her to the complex world of desire and sexual identity. He is instrumental in exposing her to the stage and, in turn, giving her the opportunity to earn the financial stability and celebrity she dreams of. He introduces her to George Hurstwood who offers her, in a world of charade and deceptions, authentic unconditional love.
The narrator cautions early on that Drouet is emptier than he may appear: “Good clothes, of course, were the first essential without which he was nothing” (5). Drouet is a travelling salesman who perceives people as elements of his predatory urge to exploit their weaknesses to secure personal reward. He is a player, always calculating his next move. He plays to Carrie’s small-town innocence to get from this young woman exactly what he wanted. To the narrator, he is no monster, however: “There is nothing evil in the fellow” (46). Drouet is genial, good-natured, gently boastful, and funny. He is a soft-hearted, happy-go-lucky raconteur and a “bundle of enthusiasm” (118) with lots of friends and a fondness for pretty things—including women—to whom he means no harm.
But Drouet is incapable of authentic emotions. His emotions are uncomplicated by awareness. His experience with Carrie teaches him nothing—in the closing chapter, he is still working his sales territory and remains on the hunt for the next handsome woman. He is exactly what a consumer culture shaped by acquiring things would produce. Drouet is a nice suit, trim fingernails, a cocked hat, and a charismatic smile. Unable to connect with others, he flawlessly executes snappy conversation with the goal of getting something in return. To him, bedding a winsome Wisconsin small town girl is different only in degree to making a sale at one of the Chicago department stores on his route.
George Hurstwood
George Hurstwood is at once the epitome of the successful American capitalist and a victim of its absolute commitment to financial security as an end in itself. He begins as the savvy manager of a high-class saloon. Committed to the value of work, Hurstwood uses his stature and business success to provide for his family. Before he meets Carrie, he embodies the upper middle-class iteration of the American Dream by “dint of his perseverance and industry” (32). Rich but not too rich, Hurstwood is able to live in a handsome three-story brick townhouse on the North Side, as he enjoys the comfortable life promised by capitalism.
That he collapses so quickly into poverty and self-harm becomes both a personal tragedy and a cautionary story of how measuring success by the metrics of capitalism leads to sorrow. In a novel where emotions are often elaborate theater or conniving maneuvers, George falls under Carrie’s spell. Like a character in the Broadway melodramas that he attends, Hurstwood sees the emptiness of his sham marriage only after he feels the seemingly authentic urgencies of love. But love within the American capitalist culture, in which reputation and self-esteem are measured by acquisitions and financial stability, fails him. Hurstwood must gauge his love against his profound fear of being stripped of his material comforts. Divorce would mean a considerable reduction in his financial status.
Watching helplessly as his financial profile dwindles, Hurstwood emerges as a victim not of love—that is the romantic fluff of the Broadway melodramas—but rather of the capitalist culture itself. He is helpless as his bar closes and his investment in the New York restaurant folds. Hurstwood is unable to find work at a time of economic downturn, leading to his disastrous experience as a scab trolley driver. He is no villain; he is a victim. Even the great moment of his moral downfall, embezzling $10,000 from the bar’s safe, is clumsy and careless. Hurstwood is inebriated, and the safe door shuts accidentally. Moreover, Hurstwood immediately regrets the theft: “He did not want the miserable sum he had stolen” (190).
As Hurstwood slides into poverty and despair, joining the soup lines and resorting to gambling and then alcohol abuse, he reminds the reader of the tragedy of boom-and-bust capitalism and how it can destroy the spirit of its most devout believers.
Bob Ames
It may be easy for readers to overlook Bob Ames, the young graduate student in electrical engineering visiting one of Carrie’s neighbors in New York. He does not come into the novel until Chapter 32 when he meets Carrie at a lavish dinner. Yet it is Bob Ames, with his distrust of material trappings and his suspicions over the shallowness of the wealthy, who reveals to Carrie the superficiality of the life she pursues. An “exceedingly genial soul” (217), Ames emerges as Carrie’s conscience. He cautions her that money cannot bring happiness. He stares about the restaurant, at the opulence of the diners and their expensive meals, and observes that "[a] man doesn't need this sort of thing to be happy" (217).
Alone among the men in Carrie’s life, Bob Ames talks with her, not to her. He treats her not as a woman or a sexual conquest but rather as a person capable of being so much more than she is. He tells her that as an artist she should portray characters who face real-life dilemmas and must make difficult choices because of who and what they are, rather than participate in the silly escapist fare of the comedies where she has found her niche. To Ames, the world is a serious place with serious problems, and art should reflect that moral and ethical complexity. As an electrical engineer (Dreiser modeled Bob Ames on a young Thomas Edison), Ames thinks pragmatically, like an inventor not a philosopher, and he sees the world, including the upper-class socially mobile world of New York, as a problem with a solution. Ames has neither the time nor the inclination for fantasy or frivolity. Carrie senses that gravitas. Unlike Hurstwood or Drouet, Ames is a person interested in her, not a man enamored with her beauty. And she listens to him. Ames senses the sadness in her; he tells her the first time they met that, for all her fancy clothes and flashy smiling, he thought “she was about to cry” (331). His dismissal of comedy in the theater as frivolous opens Carrie’s eyes to the possibility that her wealth and celebrity might be empty and even toxic. “If I were you,” he tells her, “I’d change” (332).
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By Theodore Dreiser
