Sister Carrie

“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.”

Dreiser, as overarching narrator, introduces Carrie as an experiment in what happens when a girl goes to the city. The choices he offers present an either/or outcome, making Carrie Meeber less a character and more a philosophical question. Through her, the author asks whether innocence can survive in the modern city?

“Men and women hurried by in sifting lines. She felt the flow of the tide of effort and interest—felt her own helplessness without quite realizing the wisp of the tide she was on.”

For Dreiser, the critical moral issue facing humanity in the closing decades of the 19th century is the loss of individual humanity. Americans of that era face growing populations, the construction of sprawling cities, and the increasing reliance on technology, machines, and industrial production. As a result, they feel anxiety over their smallness and helplessness.

“Transplantation is not always successful in the matter of flowers or maidens. It requires sometimes a richer soil, a better atmosphere to continue even a natural growth.”

Dreiser, the diligent, observant scientist, proposes that the story of Carrie Meeber is, at its heart, a lab experiment in transplantation. Within Dreiser’s dark vision of the naturalists, the concept of a character is less a person than a thing. This is suggested by the comparison of Carrie moving to the city to a plant being tested in different environments.