Though an-house reader, novelist Frank Norris, enthusiastically recommended it, one executive or another must have had second doubts after taking it on, as Doubleday tried to offload it on another firm, until author Theodore Dreiser insisted that they were contractually obliged to put it out.
Praise on
both sides of the Atlantic didn’t help the reception of the fictional debut of
journalist Dreiser. Only a third of its first printing of 1,000 copies were
sold, and Doubleday turned over what was left to a remainder house.
Little did
anyone know that Sister Carrie would become a landmark in American
literature, highlighting the rise of naturalism—a movement that viewed human
beings as animalistic, subject to environmental and heredity forces, usually
beyond their control. Free will played little to no role in characters’
actions.
If this sounds like a vision colored by Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution, you would be right. In depicting situations with the exactitude and objectivity of a scientist, Dreiser found a writing mode in which he could use to best advantage his skill as a fact-gathering journalist.
(One key scene in Sister Carrie
was based on a five-week Brooklyn trolley strike he had covered in 1895 for the New York
World, when he actually rode the rails and observed clashes between union
workers and scan drivers.)
Along with
his champion Norris and Stephen Crane (another reporter-turned-fiction writer),
Dreiser was one of the primary exponents of naturalism, revealing life
among the lower classes to a degree most readers had never experienced.
As
critical acceptance of this novel grew, it found its way into academe. Its
relatively moderate length (roughly 500 pages) has facilitated its listing in
many college American literature survey courses, and despite its massive size
(900-plus pages), Dreiser’s later An American Tragedy also continues to
be regarded as a classic.
Still, it
is doubtful that any reader has enjoyed Sister Carrie. It’s not just
that Dreiser lacked a sense of humor that could occasionally brighten his
unrelentingly grim subject matter and worldview.
No, unlike
Crane, Jack London, or European practitioners of naturalism like Emile Zola or
Guy de Maupassant, Dreiser could not resist a hopelessly verbose, ham-fisted
style, with clotted, cliched sentences.
When he
mounted a rhetorical soapbox, not only do his chapter titles induce cringes
(e.g., “When Waters Engulf Us We Reach for a Star”), but longer passages can
strain credulity, as in this one introducing the title character, inexperienced
teenager Carrie Meeber, traveling to the big city:
“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.”
In tone,
that was out of sync with a quiet mastery of detail that lent his narrative
believability.
No
stranger to temptations of the flesh, Dreiser recorded, with a candor unusual
for the time, his characters’ sexual desire. Even before publication, he had only
reluctantly yielded to the urging of his wife Sara and friend Arthur Henry to
tone down some passages.
Originally,
for instance, he wrote of Carrie, “Her dresses draped her becomingly, for she
wore excellent corsets and laced herself with care….She had always been of
cleanly instincts and now that opportunity afforded, she kept her body
sweet."
Sara
revised it to read, “Her dresses draped her becomingly. . . . She had always
been of cleanly instincts. Her teeth were white, her nails rosy."
(Readers would not know what Dreiser originally intended his book to convey until 1981, when the University of Pennsylvania Press published an edition based on the author's uncut holograph version, containing 36,000 words more than what Doubleday released.)
Indeed,
Dreiser made no moral comment on Carrie (or most of his characters, for that
matter). He outraged self-professed guardians of public morality especially by
not punishing her for living out of wedlock.
As time
went on, Dreiser pushed harder against such censors, observing in one 1940
letter, “Any writer, artist, painter or sculptor, or thinker of any breadth of
mind who wants to present reality is now being presented by a kept Press."
Readers
should not be left with the impression that the sense of authority Dreiser displayed
derived solely from his skill as a reporter. He also understood all too well,
through his own situation and that of family members, the quandaries that
Carrie and her lovers faced as they reached for opportunities for love and
money in a big metropolis:
*Like
Carrie, Dreiser left home as a teenager for life in a large city;
*His
sister Emma, like Carrie, caused a scandal by eloping with a married man;
*Like Carrie’s
lover George Hurstwood, Lorenzo A. Hopkins, the man whom Emma ran off to
Montreal with, absconded with his employer’s money, before dying, broken and
alcoholic, in New York.
*Like Hurstwood,
Dreiser himself loved possessions and fancy restaurants.
Sister
Carrie concluded
in tragedy, with Carrie triumphant as a Broadway actress but unable to shake
the emptiness inside, while Hurstwood killed himself in a flophouse. Real life
mirrored fiction for the author: A year consumed by bitter quarrels with
Doubleday ended even more bleakly, as Dreiser’s often improvident father died
on Christmas Day.
With a
plot and style unrelieved by humor, even of the dark variety, Sister Carrie
is about as lighthearted as Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher.”
While this
flaw can frustrate readers, it doesn’t negate what a milestone and achievement
the book represented in American literature. As Dreiser’s biographer Richard Lingeman
noted, the novelist exhibited "sympathy with the outsiders looking in,
those who didn't belong, who desire the light and warmth inside the walled city."
(The image
accompanying this post comes from William Wyler’s 1952 adaptation of Dreiser’snovel, with the title shortened to Carrie. Jennifer Jones, as the title
character, sits between her current lover, Charles Drouet, played by Eddie
Albert, on the right, and her future one, George Hurstwood, played by Laurence Olivier.)
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