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Sister Carrie

Theodore Dreiser

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Feb 13, 2008 Werner rated it liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: classics

Note, Oct. 27, 2021: Having discovered that the edition to which my review was linked (not sure how that happened!) has a Goodreads description in the Cyrillic alphabet, I switched it to an edition with a description in English. Accordingly, I edited the review slightly, to eliminate references to the description, without changing anything substantive. (I read the book in a nondescript library copy, and don't recall the actual edition.)

This is another book I read for background information on Am Note, Oct. 27, 2021: Having discovered that the edition to which my review was linked (not sure how that happened!) has a Goodreads description in the Cyrillic alphabet, I switched it to an edition with a description in English. Accordingly, I edited the review slightly, to eliminate references to the description, without changing anything substantive. (I read the book in a nondescript library copy, and don't recall the actual edition.)

This is another book I read for background information on American Literature, back when we were homeschooling our girls. I hadn't read any of Dreiser's novels, and chose this over An American Tragedy since I'm not attracted to tragedy, as a rule. The plot here isn't without its tragic elements, but my three-star rating (which actually would be 3 1/2 if I could give half stars), which expresses solid liking, demonstrates that I don't regret the read!

The plot here concerns a young farm girl who comes to Chicago (where a married sister of hers already lives) to seek her fortune and is seduced, early on, into sexual sin. That isn't, however, the whole of the plot; and despite the 12-year delay in publishing the book, for fear its contents would cause "offense," this isn't pretentious smut nor propaganda for sexual licentiousness (quite the contrary, actually). Indeed, its treatment of sexual matters did not appear to me to be any more racy than that of some 19th-century classics that preceded it, and I was a bit at a loss to account for the censorious reaction. To be sure, this is a treatment not directly conceived in Christian terms; like the author, Carrie's orientation is pretty much secular ("Sister Carrie" is just a family nickname used by her siblings, not a religious reference), so unlike Hester in the The Scarlet Letter, for instance, she doesn't interpret her situation in spiritual terms. Also, (view spoiler); while a male's surrender to lust ruins him, which perhaps didn't suit the flagrant double standards of the day in literature and life. But Dreiser's treatment is completely tasteful and restrained, devoid of anything like explicit sex or obscenity. More importantly, while he isn't throwing stones at people, it's clear from the get-go that he doesn't sympathize with sexual predation, and that he regards some of Carrie's choices as mistaken.

That last clause leads into another point that struck me personally. The conventional critical wisdom is that Dreiser is a Naturalist, an exponent of a literary school that portrays humans as puppets of the same purely biological drives and instincts that rule the animals. As Goodreads' "About Theodore Dreiser" quotes Wikipedia, "He pioneered the naturalist [sic] school and is known for portraying... literary situations that more closely resemble studies of nature than tales of choice and agency." Now, this is the only Dreiser novel I've read; my prior acquaintance with him was limited to a couple of his short stories. His larger corpus, considered as a whole, might well place him in the Naturalist camp. But on the narrow evidence of this novel alone, his themes here strike me as, at the crucial points, aware of choice and agency. Of course, he makes the point that humans very often don't really think about their behavior (though he thinks they should), and may lack the psychological equipment to do so; and he doesn't doubt the role of "inborn desire" (referring to it twice in one page). But he also doesn't discount the role of free will; in one of his short philosophical digressions, he suggests that in humans today, it wars with instinct, neither of them having total mastery. (In Darwinist fashion, he looks for the day when "evolution" will give total victory to the will.) His characters here DO make choices, change directions, learn lessons (or fail to learn them); there is a kind of social and psychological inertia and force of habit that can carry them with it but doesn't have to. And the biggest factor in what happens to them is whether they make decisions for themselves --and what sort of decisions they make. So I'd argue that he comes across here as, perhaps, a qualified rather than an extreme Naturalist.

The literary style here is mostly straightforward, realistic narration and dialogue (the author makes a good use of a dream sequence in one place). Drieser's diction is that of the turn of the 20th century, still literate but more simple and direct than that of the early 19th century; it shouldn't be daunting to a modern reader, IMO. His storyline meets Thomas Hardy's dictum, that it must be "worth telling;" and it's told in a way that held my interest. All three main characters are well-drawn and three-dimensional. As a heroine, Carrie (like the rest of us) isn't perfect, and she's so naive in the first half or so of the book that I wanted to shake her by the shoulders a couple of times; but it was a friendly frustration, because I genuinely liked her, cared about her welfare and rooted for her, and greatly enjoyed her personal growth under Dreiser's deft hand. And perhaps ironically, given Dreiser's 12-year battle with censorship and the and the supposed "influence" critics claim for him on later 20th-century writers (whose reading of the book may have been more influenced by preconceived ideas about it than by what it actually says!), I found this a genuinely moral novel with a constructive message. ...more

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