Reviewing the 100 Best Novels of the 20th
Century
by
Annette Ferran
Sister
Carrie
Number
33 on the Modern Library’s list is a novel by Theodore Dreiser called Sister Carrie. Dreiser has another novel
on the list, called An American Tragedy (#16).
He could as well have given Sister Carrie
that title. Instead he named it
for not just the main character, but for the main character held in a certain
perception. Carrie Meeber is someone’s little sister. The name Sister Carrie
also invokes religious sisters—nuns. Both little sisters and nuns are pure and
uncorrupted, which Sister Carrie is not.
I
imagine this story’s attitude is one of disapproval or disappointment about the
track Carrie’s life took. I imagine Sister Carrie in the eyes of this novel is
seen as a fallen woman. I read her
more as an admirable character, a woman who followed her own bliss and did for herself. Carrie is also a typical woman of her
time—not a traditional one, but a representative one—making her own way in the
world rebelliously and without apology. Carrie is a triumphant character.
The
second main character, George Hurstwood, is a tragic character. When applied
correctly, “tragic” doesn’t mean merely sad or heartbreaking. It means also something
born of destiny. A tragic
character is one whose fate is in some way preordained by his own decisions and
actions, maybe by his own personality. When the tragic end comes, especially in
well-wrought literature, its heartbreaking qualities and its inevitability
arrive together. Pathos is suffering of the innocent; tragedy is suffering of
the not-innocent, who are not the same as “bad” (their suffering would be
something else—justice, maybe). George
is a not-innocent who sets his own destiny in motion by a bad decision.
The
novel also tracks the idea of the American Dream—great fortune achieved by a
person not born to it. This ideal set America off from the old countries, where
birthplace was seemingly immutable: If you were born a younger daughter to a
small-town working class family (as Carrie is), you grew up to be a woman who
married a small-town working class man and produced more of your same kind (as
her sister attempts to do). Carrie achieves instead a certain flavor of the
American dream, reaching fame and fortune through strategic relationships. She
meets along the way similar self-made people, men especially, including
George. Her sister and
brother-in-law disapprove, and their disapproval also serves to push Carrie
into the very realms they look down on, or perhaps are jealous of, as they
struggle in maintaining their class standing as the country industrializes and
the cities, where the work is, become like testing grounds for surviving or thriving,
or neither.
George started out a man who could help Carrie achieve the
material lifestyle she desired, but as Carrie rises, George declines. He commits a theft in the service of
his wooing of Carrie, and the rest of his life unfolds from the basis of that act.
Carrie acts in an amoral fashion, some would say; George acts criminally. Carrie
treats people callously; George puts his future at risk for the sake of
pleasing her. Carrie gains the material success she desired. George loses his
comfort and the dignity and respect he once had. Their fates do not seem to fit,
moralistically speaking. They are literary fates, and also true and
realistic.
Sister Carrie is a powerful story with
indelible characters. It gives a very interesting portrait of America at a
turning point in the country’s economic (and thus social) development. Of the many vibrant scenes, one sticks
in my mind especially: George is destitute in New York City, hoping to have a
place to sleep that night, and he encounters a man who is a huskster for the
homeless. This man stands in the
middle of Times Square and cajoles, like a carnival barker, passers-by to
donate the price of a bed in a flophouse, and thereby one by one gets this long
line of homeless men off the street for the night. Here are the rich and the
poor, the fortunate and the forgotten, the capitalistic and the socialistic, the
flip sides of the coin that is America, illustrated in 1900 as vibrantly as
they play out even today.
Annette
Ferran lives in King of Prussia, Pennsylvania, and
works in Philadelphia as an editor for a medical publisher. She is also the Associate Editor
for 10,000 Tons of Black Ink, a
Literary Writers Network publication. She has a degree of dubious practical
use, in German, and is a lifelong avid reader of fiction and lover of lists.
She has had a few short stories published, most recently in RE:AL.
