Sister Carrie

Sister Carrie is a künstlerroman, a genre of literature that tracks the evolution of an artist. The novel is informed by the theater. As a journalist working in Chicago and then New York, Dreiser understood the power and reach of the theater. Carrie finds her financial security by becoming a comic actor. Later, her conversation with Bob Ames about the purpose of the theater nearly becomes the tipping point in Carrie’s eventual epiphany into the shallowness of her success.

In keeping with Dreiser’s perception of the theater as a potentially powerful tool for social instruction, the author employs the theater and Carrie’s discovery of the world of make-believe as a teaching tool. Carrie Meeber becomes Carrie Madenda. Many of her experiences in both Chicago and New York center on her working her way into a career as a headliner in Broadway comedies. Along the way, several theater works from the era symbolically resonate with Carrie’s evolution, including: Gilbert and Sullivan’s comic opera The Mikado, with its hyperromantic tale of a young suitor willing to die to spend a single month with the woman he loves; King Lear, with its dramatic tale of a dysfunctional royal family and a father who is never content with the love of his daughters; Rip van Winkle, the American folk tale about a lazy husband who creates an outlandish story of meeting ghosts in the Catskills to cover 20 years of freedom from his shrewish wife; and the staggeringly popular melodrama Under the Gaslight, with its story of an imperiled woman, left by her lover, who faces a villainous stalker.

In each storyline, the plays expose significant social and economic problems, including: the lack of communication in a relationship, the distracting pull of the flesh, the impact of emotional bullying and the harm done by the threat of violence, the helplessness of women preyed on by men, and the dangerous endgame of isolation. But the plays fail to offer practical teachable moments that would allow art to be a vehicle for genuine change. Instead, theater becomes a refuge from such realities.

From the moment she first attends a theater performance, Carrie cannot—or perhaps will not—separate the illusions of the stage from the real-life world. Her success on stage is a way for her to distance herself from her identity. She plays emotions on the stage she never expresses with either Drouet or Hurstwood. She is enthralled by the fancy costumes, the stage sets, and the pretend elegance of props. Dreiser damns Carrie the only way he can: He makes her a gifted actor, a natural on the stage. As a creature of artifice, at home only within the spectacle faux-reality of the stage, Carrie is seduced by the escape implicit in the protective insulation of a theater. She delays engaging the world as it is—when Carrie is ushered out of the theater after one of her stunning performances, she is only vaguely aware of the lines of unhoused vagrants hoping for some handouts. And caught up in glitter and artifice, Carrie Madenda never needs to confront whatever happened to Caroline Meeber.

Like some Medieval allegorist, Dreiser uses the city as a moral construct. To him, it is a nested world of carnal temptations, moral and spiritual emptiness, emotional isolation, and economic inequities. The plot of the novel is deceptively simple: A girl goes to the city to find success. The novel never shares much about Carrie Meeber’s youth growing up in rural Wisconsin nor much about the decision she makes to move in with her sister in a city she has never visited. In turn, her life’s emotional and psychological journey is shaped by cities—first Chicago, then Montreal, and finally New York.

For Dreiser’s generation, the city was still a relatively new concept. As America only gradually eased away from its cultural identity as an agrarian nation, the construct of the city began to define America’s economic clout and its future as a global player. Born in rural Indiana, Dreiser found the complexity of the city—its sheer size, noise, pollution, and chaos—a freighted, hellish landscape that challenged the moral integrity of even the most moral who came within reach of its Boschian environment.

Carrie is not immediately enthralled by the city. Her initial job search dispels any notion that the city is a paradigm of virtue, civility, hospitality, and opportunity. The managers who interviews her are rude. The crowds on the sidewalks convince her of her insignificance. What little attention she receives comes from misogynistic men commodifying her as a sexual object. For Dreiser, the city emerges as the antagonist in the story of Carrie’s rise to success. Withstanding the city’s temptations, maintaining the integrity of her small-town morality, and trusting in the viability and value of herself would guarantee Carrie’s spiritual victory.

That she does none of these is her downfall. She falls so completely under the spell of Fifth Avenue, Plaza Square, and Broadway that she is left in the closing chapters empty, aching, and lost. That she falls under the spell of the city—with its ostentatious homes, flashy restaurants with marble-lined sinks, and shallow residents are dressed in costumed finery—speaks to her surrender to the malignant power of the city. This marks Sister Carrie as a cautionary tale told to a culture just beginning to define the implications of the cities springing up around it.