Heads up! This review is far from spoiler free.

The city can be punishing, especially for the innocent. Sister Carrie, published at the turn of the twentieth century, offers a snapshot of life before the world was acquainted with war on a global scale. America was the land of plenty, and there were morsels for those bold and fortunate enough to make their fortunes in the city. It was a time when cities were growing fast, demanding that their dwellers keep up lest they perish.

But it is also a look at how the city consumes, transforms, and spits out its citizens, much like Le Voreux in Zola’s Germinal. Chicago and New York, where the story takes place, do more than contain the action. They also seem to wear the costume of antagonists. There is an almost deliberate deviousness in the way they lead the characters astray, inducing them to make amoral decisions that lead to suffering.

Yet there is something maddening in this novel, a kind of resounding moral hollowness. There are no obvious moral takeaways from Sister Carrie. Dreiser struggled to find publishers for this very reason. But we need to look past that, for there is something melancholic yet glorious in Carrie’s fight for survival.

Losing One’s Innocence in the City

When the eighteen-year-old Carrie Meeber arrived in Chicago, she came penniless and naïve. Her sister Minnie offered her a place to stay, on the condition that she contribute to the household. After finding work in a shoe factory, most of her salary went to pay for board, but she soon lost this backbreaking job after falling ill. After running into an acquaintance she had met on her arrival in the city, she decided to leave this indifferent household.

She became, in effect, Drouet’s kept woman. As a travelling salesman, he was able to give her money, comfort, and a roof over her head. But Carrie soon became unhappy with this arrangement. On meeting Drouet’s acquaintance, the bar manager George Hurstwood, she began a relationship with him. George, a married man with grown children, would eventually do something desperate one night, taking Carrie with him to begin a tempestuous life in New York.

How the City Can Shatter Families

One thing that stood out to me about the novel is its title. After 80 pages, Carrie has practically severed relations with her sister and gone on to lead a life of her own. It is, perhaps, a kind of ironic snub. Much like how The Great Gatsby is not really so great, Sister Carrie is not much of a sister either. In that sense, the title can be read as a sardonic comment on the breakdown of family structures in the city.

Minnie, taking the money from Carrie’s hands, felt more guilt than she cared to show, but still deemed it necessary to take money from her struggling sister. When Carrie left, Minnie mourned her loss unconsciously in her sleep. The family sentiments remain, but the coldness imposed by financial necessity has practically supplanted them.

It is the same for George, with two grown children and a wife at home, he was more than willing to take Carrie as his mistress and succumb to temptation in taking the money from the vault. The man’s moral values, long prized and embodied in the family, disappeared instantly in a stroke (or a few strokes) of bad decision.

Toggling Between Man and Beast

But we need to ask a difficult question here: is it the city itself, that great antagonist, pushing Hurstwood to the limits of his morality, where he ultimately fails? Or is it simply the nature of the man, drawing him toward his own deepest tendencies? Perhaps we cannot generalise. As with most things, the answer depends from person to person.

For Dreiser, the city is a half-formed thing: not quite civilised, yet no longer purely beastly either. This tension is reflected in its dwellers, who also move back and forth between these two states. In a poetic observation, Dreiser reflects on this unstable balance:

“Our civilization is still in a middle stage, scarcely beast, in that it is no longer wholly guided by instinct; scarcely human, in that it is not yet wholly guided by reason. On the tiger no responsibility rests. We see him aligned by nature with the forces of life he is born into their keeping and without thought he is protected.”

This forces us to reflect on whether our society has really moved any further in that “human” direction. I cannot help feeling that, in some ways, we have gone backwards. It is not simply that our instincts still take over, but that something more sinister seems to guide us. Whatever that force may be, I struggle to call it human, because it runs against what I want humanity to mean.

Do not let our fancy clothes and technology fool you. If Dreiser’s America at the turn of the twentieth century was still in a middle stage, then perhaps we have regressed to something even more base.

Face to Face with the Horror of Living

Towards the end, Sister Carrie almost reads like a horror novel. Perhaps in reaching George Hurstwood’s age when the wheels started to fall off, his downfall became a cautionary tale. Having moved to the city, George had to begin anew, with enough money to takeover a bar and make a modest living for a while. However, his project was upended when the landlord of the bar decided to end the lease, leaving George with morsels from the fruits of his efforts.

By this time, Carrie had already discovered the feebleness of his standings, largely built on his finances. Without it, the illusion disintegrates quickly:

“She began to look upon Hurstwood wholly as a man, and not as a lover or husband. She felt thoroughly bound to him as a wife, and that her lot was cast with his, whatever it might be; but she began to see that he was gloomy and taciturn, not a young, strong, and buoyant man.”

Carrie would realize that he was giving her less money, that he wore the same clothes day after day, and that he had lost his confident demeanour. By this point, George’s role as the man of the household was already in question. The gender dynamic had reversed once George lost his bar and Carrie, beginning a career as a chorus girl, started to contribute to the household.

But the old expectations around gender remained. Carrie was expected not only to provide, but also to take care of the house, while George read his newspapers and looked through wanted ads. George remained hopeful for distant promises that never materialised, staying static while Carrie’s star began to rise. This creates a feeling of resentment, leading Carrie to eventually leave George, who had only been dragging her down.

Despite George’s moral laxities before moving to New York, does he deserve our sympathy? Personally, I have sympathy for anybody who had to start again from scratch by no force of their own. In his late age, George is neither too young nor too old. It took him a while before he swallowed his ego to do menial work, which unsurprisingly, he wasn’t very fit for. George will not find another career, becoming a mendicant living off charities.

In the saddest part of the book, he would approach Carrie, years later to ask for a few dollars. She would not recognise him, but was shocked to see his state. After having received a few bills, George would disappear again. When George died, Carrie would not know it, nor if she had heard of his death, would she be greatly affected by it.

Closing note: Should you read Sister Carrie?

Sister Carrie is a difficult read, not because of the language itself, but because of subject matter that can still hit close to home. I also found myself questioning Dreiser’s view of women throughout the novel. His treatment of female desire and ambition may reflect the time in which he was writing, but some of it feels dated and reductive today. Carrie is often presented through a lens that associates women too closely with vanity, emotion, and social display.

When Carrie begins supporting George, she faces a difficult choice between paying debts and buying more clothes, and she chooses the latter. Dreiser presents this as another sign of the household giving way to personal desire. But this is also where the novel’s gender assumptions become especially visible, as he often slips into broad and unflattering generalisations about women. Readers should be aware that there are several passages where those attitudes appear quite openly:

“She might have been said to be imagining herself in love, when she was not. Women frequently do this. It flows from the fact that in each exists a bias toward affection, a craving for the pleasure of being loved. The longing to be shielded, bettered, sympathized with, is one of the attributes of the sex. This, coupled with sentiment and a natural tendency to emotion, often makes refusing difficult. It persuades them that they are in love.”

The critics deemed the novel too realistic, too drab. They weren’t wrong. There is no sugarcoating: the weak are weeded out and the opportunists (or the lucky ones) take themselves to new heights. Carrie’s beauty gave her a leg up in life, but we need to consider that her luck may have been different if her nose had been flatter, or her eyebrows a shade too thick. The society’s standards for beauty favors those endowed with it a little too generously.

But George’s fate haunted me to no end. In a time where more jobs are lost than created every day, the fate of George Hurstwood will be more commonplace. More men and women will die in the gutters unnoticed. They may find small reprieves from day to day, but even in their state, the odds are stacked against them.

There are no easy answers and the book doesn’t pretend to provide any. I cannot help but feel the hollowness echoing through the book.