53 pages • 1 hour read
Sister Carrie
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Background
Historical Context: American Realist Novelists
By 1900, when Dreiser published Sister Carrie, the United States had already produced a generation of historical novelists. These pioneering authors, among them Nathaniel Hawthorne, James Fenimore Cooper, and Washington Irving, recreated earlier eras within the American experience, bringing to their contemporary audience a vivid sense of America’s historical roots.
Theodore Dreiser, along with other realist novelists of his era including Henry James, William Dean Howells, and Stephen Crane, represented a different take on the novel by casting a careful eye on their own era. As a realist novelist, Dreiser records the sights, sounds, and smells of the city. as well as the deplorable conditions of Chicago’s and New York’s working-class neighborhoods and the seamy underworld of New York’s saloons and theaters.
Although it captures with voluminous detail and journalistic verisimilitude turn-of-the-century Chicago (Dreiser was working as a journalist in Chicago), Sister Carrie is also an exercise in psychological storytelling. With the diligence of a scientist, Dreiser uses characters to test how people react to those specific conditions that define an era. In this case, Dreiser explores how money affects ordinary people in an era in which America had a growing and influential upper class. Dreiser explores the lure and the impact of social climbing through material acquisition and how money bankrupts morality. At the core of Dreiser’s novel is an investigation into the mores of an era.
Cultural Context: The American Dream
Carrie Meeber leaves her Wisconsin home and heads to the city, certain that her confidence will bring her success because she lives in a nation that believes in upward mobility. Such financial success promises to bring her happiness, self-respect, and moral reward.
These are the familiar elements of “The American Dream.” Although it has become a cliché of American culture, the term American Dream was not coined until the 1930s at the depths of the Depression by historian James Thurlow Adams. Adams argued that the rich natural resources, geographical isolation from Europe, a national program for public education, and a government template founded on equal opportunity gave each American a chance to secure a better, richer, and happier life.
Dreiser, in testing the viability of this concept, was something of a John the Baptist figure to a generation of social realist novelists. These authors came of age during the manic ostentation of the Roaring ‘20s only to be pitched into the economic gloom of the Depression—most notably Sinclair Lewis, F. Scott Fitzgerald, John Dos Passos, Sherwood Anderson, and John Steinbeck. Much like these later novelists, Dreiser uses Carrie Meeber to explode shoddy fantasy of the American Dream by showing how the unrealistic expectation of success and wealth only creates heartache, depression, low self-esteem, and the dark brooding pessimism that closes the narrative of Carrie Meeber. Dreiser’s exposure of the American Dream as nightmare rests on the story of George Hurstwood. Hurstwood fails in one business after another and measures his financial setbacks as moral failures, evidence of his inability to provide the woman he loves with the trappings of wealth promised by the American Dream.
As a novel about the American Dream, Sister Carrie is a cautionary parable. Carrie achieves everything that the American Dream promises—she is successful, wealthy, and famous—but she is empty and aching and does not even know why.
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By Theodore Dreiser
