Sister Carrie by Theodore Dreiser - Essay Example

Sister Carrie by Theodore Dreiser Order No. 410252 February ‘10 Sister Carrie by Theodore Dreiser Sister Carrie is Theodore Dreiser’s first novel and was published in 1900. The novel which is about Carrie Meeber, a pretty 18-year-old country girl who moves to Chicago and her subsequent life in late-19th-century America, proved to be quite revolutionary. The book is based on the American naturalistic movement and depicts the vagaries of urban life. The story is about a country girl, Carrie Meeber, who comes to a big city to seek fame and fortune. She comes to Chicago, to find work, and in the meantime she lives with her sister and her husband. Carrie soon discovers that life in a big city is tough. She is bored to death in her sisters house. When she finds work in a shoe factory, this too turns out to be drudgery. She does have enough money to buy some decent clothes as she has to pay four dollars a week as rent to her sister. Carrie begins to hate her co-workers and tries to get out of the boredom by spending most of her free time watching people as they pass on the street outside her sisters house. Carrie loses her job after an illness. It looks like she has to forget her big dreams of becoming rich and famous and return home. However she meets, George Drouet, a successful salesman, who she had earlier met in a train, by chance, a second time. Carrie leaves her sisters house and lives with George. In the meantime Carrie meets George Hurstwood, a friend of Drouet and a wealthy manager of a Chicago tavern. After a string of misunderstandings and errors in moral judgments, Carrie and Hurstwood move on to bigger and better lives in the big city of New York. Capitalism in America brought one of the biggest changes to American culture and that was the trend of “conspicuous consumption". Carrie in the novel represents consumerism and the American middle class. Carrie is shown as being "ambitious to gain in material things." (Dreiser,1900) And her personality reflects the American middle class growing desire for material things. Carrie wants to accumulate material things because she desires a higher status in society and she is aware that this will undoubtedly ensure her a higher status. Dreiser emphasizes this fact by giving us specific details about everything Carrie owns. Carrie has an imitation alligator-skin bag. She cannot afford a real alligator skin bag but still has an imitation one as she wants the status that goes with conspicuous consumption. As one reads the novel one can see the transition in Carries character while trying to adjust to the fast life of a big city. She suffers from what Dreiser calls the "drag of desire" for material goods. This desire and her not being able to satisfy her desires represent the typical circumstances faced by young single women of that era which then was undergoing a change. In that period women could get jobs only in places that were hostile and unsafe like a factory because here they could be paid fewer wages than men. They were forced to accept this as there was very little choice. Carrie, having seen her older sister suffer quickly becomes aware of the limitations and decides to use other means to acquire what she desires. Again while living with Hurstwood Carrie is stifled by the conventional domestic atmosphere of the house and decides to “revolt". She decides that she will not "live cooped up in small flat" (Dreiser, 1900) with a person who considers her to be a "servant". For the second time in her life she decides to go to work switching roles with Hurstwood who is unemployed at that time. There is a reversal of gender roles and Carrie asks, "Was she going to act and keep house?” with Hurstwood waiting to “live upon her labor". (Dreiser) At this point Carries "dawning independence gave her more courage" (Dreiser, 1900) and she becomes bold enough to move away from the oppressive domestic atmosphere altogether. Here Carrie is rebelling not only against her husband but more importantly against the traditional role supposed to be followed by women. Those days’ women were supposed to be domestic and submissive. During the 1880’s another model emerged in the U.S. that of the he "New Woman” who had a career and economic independence. Carrie represented this model but the difference was that the New Woman was better educated than Carrie. Therefore it can be said that Carrie represented the transition of the Victorian woman to the modern New Woman. Sister Carrie is often referred to as the quintessential modern American novel. The characters and the story of the book illustrate and portray very well the effects of the changing economic conditions of the century on American culture. Carrie Meeber here represents the thousands of people who came to Chicago seeking jobs during the economic boom that came after the Civil War. Sister Carrie is an instructive tale, with a lesson about how a culture becomes responsible for reducing all human interactions to a mere exchange of capital. In this kind of culture, emotional and physical relations are reduced to commodities that can be traded. In this instance it is sex being traded for material goods. The book is all about the dehumanizing side of capitalism and how in a capitalist society people are treated as objects or commodities. Carrie in the book represents a part of a system where people are treated as commodities and where human relations are mere exchanges of goods. When Carrie goes in search of a job her employers assess her as if they are assessing a commodity while deciding whether she is worth the wages they are going to give here. Here Carrie is treated more like a commodity demonstrating the inhuman side of capitalism. Carries visit to the department store demonstrates her fascination with conspicuous consumption. Even though she cannot afford any of the fancy trinkets on display she is consumed by desire. Dreiser here refers to the psychology of desire as "the innate trend of the mind . . . to emulate the more expensively dressed." A capitalist economy enhances the desire of the consumer even though it may not provide ways to satisfy it. It is this unfulfilled desire that drives Carrie to work long hours at a job she does not like. The constant frustration of her not being able to satisfy her desires makes her miserable and finally leads her into becoming a commodity of trade in the hands of wealthy men who desire her. Here Dreiser’s description of the hardships Carrie faces is excellent. The worn out looks on the women’s faces, the tedious, repetitive movements and the physical pain of sitting on a stool the whole day and the slow speed with which each hour passes is beautifully portrayed. Sister Carrie also demonstrates how sometimes money and the earning power of an individual govern the relationship in a family. Minnie and Hanson invite Carrie to live with them not because she is a member of the family but because they want to make some profit by taking rent from her. This demonstrates Hanson and Minnie’s “commoditization” of Carrie. Carries attraction to Drouet is largely because of his buying power. In his flashy lifestyle she sees the pleasures of material wealth. This is one more instance in the book which demonstrates how consumerism affects interpersonal relationships. Carrie is driven to think that what physical attributes she possesses can be exchanged for the material goods she desires. When Carrie accepts from Drouet a huge sum of twenty dollars she is getting into an economic arrangement where there is an exchange of capital. Carrie discovers that her capital is sex and that it can be traded as a commodity. She realizes that in a capitalistic and a materialistic society, sex is a commodity that can be sold and bought in exchange for material goods. Carries rise in society is entirely dependent on the way she trades her “sexual capital”. Her theatre performances provide her the opportunity to trade her sexual capital. The men in the audience are all potential buyers. She is able to move upwards because of this. She becomes an attractive commodity for Hurstwood and she finds that Hurstwood can offer better material wealth than Drouet. In conclusion one can say that Dreiser does not consider Carrie as immoral or a “fallen woman”. Instead he focuses on the circumstances that led her to become what she is, a commodity to be traded. References 1. Dreiser Theodore (1900), Sister Carrie, New York: Penguin, 1986. Read More