Study Guide to Sister Carrie by Theodore Dreiser
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Study Guide to Sister Carrie by Theodore Dreiser

Intelligent Education

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Study Guide to Sister Carrie by Theodore Dreiser

Intelligent Education

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A comprehensive study guide offering in-depth explanation, essay, and test prep for Theodore Dresier’s Sister Carrie, known by many to be the greatest of the American urban novels. As a novel of the turn of the 20th Century, Sister Carrie moved away from Victorian era values and towards naturalism, realism, and instincts of human thought and behavior. Moreover, this first novel introduces readers to a common theme Dresier addresses: the individual against universal forces. This Bright Notes Study Guide explores the context and history of Dresier’s classic work, helping students to thoroughly explore the reasons it has stood the literary test of time. Each Bright Notes Study Guide contains: - Introductions to the Author and the Work
- Character Summaries
- Plot Guides
- Section and Chapter Overviews
- Test Essay and Study Q&As The Bright Notes Study Guide series offers an in-depth tour of more than 275 classic works of literature, exploring characters, critical commentary, historical background, plots, and themes. This set of study guides encourages readers to dig deeper in their understanding by including
essay questions and answers as well as topics for further research.

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Year
2020
ISBN
9781645424819
Subtopic
Study Guides
Edition
1
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INTRODUCTION TO THEODORE DREISER
 
BIOGRAPHICAL BACKGROUND
Theodore Dreiser, born in Terre Haute, Indiana in 1871, received his early education in the public schools of the state. He attended Indiana University briefly before embarking on the journalistic career (in Chicago, St. Louis, and Pittsburgh) which would also provide the springboard for his fiction. By the time he became editor-in-chief of Butterick Publications (in 1907) in New York City, his first novel, Sister Carrie (1900), had been published. By 1912, when a novel titled The Financier was issued, Dreiser had given up newspaper work and devoted himself to fiction. All of his writings, however, from Sister Carrie to the popular An American Tragedy (1925) to his later works, reflect his Hoosier home life and his early professional experiences. Dreiser was born and brought up in an atmosphere of poverty, rootlessness and religious dogmatism. His father was German, a strict Catholic. He knew what it meant to live on the “wrong side of the tracks,” to hunger for material success and pleasure, and to resent the idealistic religiosity of a father who was an economic failure. In fact, he has related the facts and feelings of his life up to age twenty-three in A Book About Myself, describing autobiographically, with the same documentary honesty and nonmoralizing frankness he always employed in his fiction, the details of a youthful theft; his father’s increasing loss of initiative and ability to cope with the business world; and his tenderness toward his mother, who represented strength and devotion. As Dreiser puts it, his family seemed in retrospect “of a peculiarly nebulous, emotional, unorganized, and traditionless character.” Yet, along with the financial disaster and futility (for even his beloved mother was a poor manager), as well as their being occasionally ostracized by the community for breaking the conventional rules of propriety, there was warmth. Thus much of Dreiser’s fiction is peopled with these figures from his family - father, mother, sisters, brothers - as well as filled with remembered past happenings. After living in New York, and traveling, Dreiser ended his days in southern California, dying in 1945.
DREISER’S WORKS
Dreiser’s major works are Sister Carrie (1900), Jennie Gerhardt (1911), The Financier (1912), The Titan (1914), The “Genius” (1915), An American Tragedy (1925), The Bulwark (1946), and The Stoic (1947). In addition, there are invaluable autobiographic writings which form the following chronological sequence: Dawn (1931), Newspaper Days (1931; first published as A Book about Myself, 1922), A Traveller at Forty (1913), and A Hoosier Holiday (1916). Aside from his journalistic writings, he wrote some essays. It is also worth mentioning that The Bulwark and The Stoic (issued posthumously) display his later interest in religious philosophy.
THEMES: THE INDIVIDUAL AGAINST UNIVERSAL FORCES
Even in Dreiser’s first novel, Sister Carrie (1900), it is possible to trace his lifelong preoccupation with people caught up in forces beyond their control, characters who remain to some extent unaware of their conditions and conflicts and who are to a large degree helpless to change the course of their lives. Dreiser writes of a Carrie or a Clyde Griffiths out of a general sympathy toward such human beings (as well as out of a particular sympathy born of his own experiences) - individuals swirling in the complex of a growing, industrialized, mechanized and impersonal America. In 1921, while he was writing An American Tragedy, and reflecting back upon his thoughts at the time Sister Carrie appeared, Dreiser simply reiterated this theme which governed most of his work: “I never can and never want to bring myself to the place where I can ignore the sensitive and seeking individual in his pitiful struggle with nature - with his enormous urges and his pathetic equipment.” He emphasized this further (in The Story of My Life, 1932), by asserting that “most men and women are haunted by poverty, and all are helpless in the clutch of a relentless fate.” However, his views of the possibility of social amelioration were to become somewhat more optimistic between the time of Sister Carrie and later works such as An American Tragedy.
AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL SOURCES IN DREISER’S WORK
As suggested above, Dreiser’s childhood and early adulthood in Indiana was a not uncommon mixture of poverty and puritanical religiosity (in this case, the stern Catholicism of his German father), from which his brothers and sisters in their varying ways rebelled and escaped - the sisters in a manner not unlike the situation of Sister Carrie. Dreiser himself first followed the American materialistic dream to Chicago, at fifteen, where he attempted to lift himself out of poverty through a variety of jobs, like dishwashing and selling hardware. In addition, he tried, perhaps, to “find himself” in a year spent at Indiana University. The road to success he did find, however, was in journalism (his first job with the Chicago Daily Globe as reporter led to better ones); and his inclination toward reportorial detail threads throughout his work, especially in the courtroom documentation of An American Tragedy, Book III.
Dreiser’s temperament and background were well suited to the type of journalism required by the papers he worked for (and eventually, to the fiction he produced). His employers asked for and got from the young journalist vivid, detailed pieces about all the aspects of city life, from social and business levels to the sordid depths of metropolitan poverty and despair. By the time he moved to New York and editorial work in 1894, Dreiser was a successful, skilled reporter, and was in an excellent position to draw upon all his former experiences for the fiction he then began to write - first a cautious series of short stories, the success of which pleased and surprised him, and then Sister Carrie. Thus many of the aspects and episodes of Sister Carrie (as well as his other fiction) can be considered autobiographical, from the Midwestern heroine and her two lovers (associated with exactly similar incidents in the lives of Dreiser’s sisters, for example) to the streetcar strike which resembles one covered by the author while he worked for the Toledo Blade.
HISTORICAL BACKGROUND: DREISER’S PICTURES OF AMERICA
It is very clear, however, that in addition to the source of autobiography, Dreiser in his writings drew upon his acute awareness of the growing America of his time: his novels provide a carefully detailed, often almost documented picture of his own American society, as he saw it. It is as if he felt the pressure, the responsibility - perhaps because of his many and varied youthful experiences - to expose a new and rather monstrous America which found its gigantic, sprawling expression around 1900 and thereafter. This America was an industrialized, urban society which had developed as rapidly as the huge fortunes (in oil, meatpacking, steel, railroad speculation etc.) which supported it. Unfortunately such rapid transformation of a country was bound to carry with it the extremes of poverty, and Theodore Dreiser was no stranger to the slums of the cities he knew - especially Chicago and New York. What disturbed Dreiser most (and many another observer of the era) was the huge gap between good old American ethics and religious standards still being preached daily, and the actual practices of those who yet listened complacently and comfortably to the preachers. In short, it is the theme of hypocrisy which Dreiser took up as a cause in his writing; and it is this hypocrisy - the false front, the appearance of virtue and the practice of ruthless realities - which he undertook to expose in such writings as Sister Carrie. Dreiser had come to believe that the society, not its people individually, was corrupt; or rather, he disbelieved that men are born sinful, suggesting (to the discomfort of some of his earlier readers) that hypocrisy, corruption, not to mention sheer poverty, are not conducive to building character or strength of will - the lack of which we see so demonstrated in the structure of Sister Carrie’s personality. Such a society is more likely, instead, to produce seduction, adultery, crime, selfishness, waste. And Dreiser saw such results so inevitable as to rule out the possibility of condemning the actors and actresses in his tragedies although the reasons for their decline or ultimate unhappiness are always carefully spelled out.
DREISER’S NON-JUDGMENTAL ATTITUDES
Dreiser’s consistently humane and sympathetic attitude toward his material - his characters, their stories - throughout his writing career should be stressed. No doubt such an attitude is due in part to the lack of prevailing conventional propriety in his own early life, which is just what he claims for Sister Carrie, upon the occasion of her first acceptances of favors from Drouet; there were no strong home traditions to hold her. Dreiser presents the facts of life as he sees them - that is, pragmatically - not as readers especially of his own era) would expect them to be. Such matter-of-fact presentation of the experiences of his characters, however, combined with his indifference toward the conventions of reward and punishment, indicate that his attitudes (while born of his own autobiographical background, personally, and nurtured on the hypocritical materialism of his times) deepened into “philosophy”: the belief that any ethic, any sense of love or justice, must spring from the individual’s actual experience with forces both inside and outside himself combined with his own growing awareness of self (the cultivation of intellect and sensibilities), in order to make judgment - reasoned action - possible, a state which no fully developed characters created by Theodore Dreiser ever reach.
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SISTER CARRIE
SUMMARY
 
Dreiser’s first picture of human and social conditions, however, reflecting this very indifference toward conventional morality and toward the traditions of reward and punishment - Sister Carrie - encountered difficulties of publication, although Doubleday had been formally committed to publish it. Not only that Carrie escaped punishment, but that Dreiser did not look upon her life as sinful, was an insult to late nineteenth century conventionality (expressed, for example, in the horrified response of Mrs. Doubleday to the novel). However, Mrs. Doubleday’s horror may have been exaggerated in the tale retold so often as to have become a legend, partly through the interest and friendship of such writers as H. L. Mencken. A young novelist, Frank Norris, as editorial reader for Doubleday, helped in the original acceptance of the novel for publication. Norris’ own work would so resemble Dreiser’s in its frankness and exposure of the hypocrisies and inequalities of American life that it was inevitable he should heartily applaud this author. Dreiser’s publishers issued a minimum number of copies, without advertisement, and the author netted less than a hundred dollars from the novel. A decade or so would have to evolve (during which the author suffered depression and futility at the reception of Sister Carrie, and found himself less and less able to attempt more fiction) before the book would receive its proper critical acclaim; in 1907, when the novel was reissued, and thereafter, the public was more receptive to Sister Carrie.
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SISTER CARRIE
TEXTUAL ANALYSIS
CHAPTERS 1 - 7
CHAPTER 1: THE MAGNET ATTRACTING: A WAIF AMID FORCES
From the first paragraph of Theodore Dreiser’s Sister Carrie the reader learns, importantly, that Caroline Meeber, eighteen years old, is just another poor girl headed for the big city and some kind of new life materially better than the one she is leaving behind. Her satchel is imitation; she brings her own lunch; she carries with her very little money. Furthermore she is “bright, timid, and full of the illusions of ignorance and youth.” Her farewell to the flour mill where her father works is easy, rather than regretful.
Dreiser quickly hints of what is to come: “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.” But when a country girl leaves home for the city, “there are large forces which allure with all the soulfulness of expression possible in the most cultured human.... Half the undoing of the unsophisticated and natural mind is accomplished by forces wholly superhuman. A blare of sound, a roar of life, a vast array of human hives, appeal to the astonished senses in equivocal terms.” Caroline Meeber’s story, then, is also to be an account - a damaging one - of social conditions in an American city. It is Chicago, though it could have been New York or any metropolis during the period which Dreiser pinpoints as 1890 - 1900. The forces which act upon the individual are often described in great detail.
In short, we find out in Chapter One where Caroline comes from, what she may be up against in the big, strange city, what she herself is like, and how she at first responds to people and scenes. That Caroline has been called “Sister Carrie” by h...

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