53 pages • 1 hour read
Theodore DreiserSister Carrie
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1900A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 1-9Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 1 Summary: “The Magnet Attracting—A Waif amid Forces”
At age 18, Caroline Meeber, or Sister Carrie as her family calls her, boards the train from her small-town home of Columbia City, Wisconsin to Chicago. Although she has no work experience and only a high school education, Carrie is undaunted; she is a “half-equipped little knight” (2) on a mission to succeed. Initially, she plans to stay with her sister, Minnie, and her family.
On the train, Carrie chats with a man sitting behind her. She is impressed by his sharp suit, easy conversation, and suave confidence. He introduces himself as Charles H. Drouet, a traveling salesman. They chat for nearly the entire train ride, and Drouet, smitten by the pretty girl’s charming innocence, promises to look her up. Carrie gives him her sister’s address, and they plan to meet in a few days.
Minnie meets Carrie at the bustling station. Carrie, despite her sister, feels alone amid the press of the city.
Chapter 2 Summary: “What Poverty Threatened—Of Granite and Brass”
Carrie’s reunion with her sister is uncomplicated by emotions. Minnie’s small and cluttered house is a disappointment to Carrie. Minnie expects Carrie to pay rent once she has found work. Embarrassed by her sister’s house, Carrie writes a letter to Drouet telling him not to visit.
Carrie awakens early the next morning and heads into the city to find work. The growth of Chicago in the late 19th century—the “sound of the hammer engaged upon the erection of new structures” (12)—signals Chicago’s future. The size, noise, and confusion of the city unsettles Carrie as she contemplates “entering any one of these mighty concerns and asking for something to do” (13).
Chapter 3 Summary: “Wee Question of Fortune: Four-Fifty a Week”
Carrie’s efforts to find work are unsuccessful. She has no experience. What jobs she can do are low-paying, or the business is not hiring. As she returns to her sister’s house, Carrie notices a small shoe factory. Exhausted physically and emotionally, she goes in and finds the manager is hiring. At $4.50 per week, the pay is not good, but it is something. Carrie accepts the job.
Chapter 4 Summary: “The Spendings of Fancy: Facts Answer with Sneers”
Minnie and her husband are happy that Carrie finds work so soon. To celebrate, Carries suggests going to the theater, but Minnie and her husband discourage the idea as they see the world of the theater as morally corrupt.
Early Monday morning, Carrie heads to the factory. She is given tedious and dangerous work: She stretches leather pieces on a machine that cuts the leather. It is an assembly line, and the line depends on Carrie doing her job efficiently and effectively. The pace is quick, and she worries about being cut by the machine. She stays apart from the other women. She finds their conversations coarse and their attitudes vulgar. She keeps to herself despite the men who make lewd comments about her. She cannot get home fast enough.
Chapter 5 Summary: “A Glittering Night Flower: The Use of a Name”
Carrie’s letter canceling their meeting does not concern Drouet. With free time, he hangs out in Fitzgerald & Moy’s, a swanky saloon near Broadway known for serving the theater crowd. Drouet greets the manager, George Hurstwood, a friend Drouet describes as “shrewd,” “clever,” and “capable of creating a good impression” (32). Hurstwood confides in Drouet that the bar’s manager is getting old and might die soon, giving Hurstwood the chance to take over. Before Drouet departs, he tells Hurstwood that he met a “little dandy” (36) while coming in from Wisconsin.
Chapter 6 Summary: Summary: “The Machine and the Maiden: A Knight of Today”
Carrie tells her sister that she is already disenchanted with the factory job. The next morning, Carrie walks to work—the trolley costs too much. When she is paid, all but 50 cents goes to her sister. Carrie considers what the other girls in the factory have told her—that they have boyfriends who support them, buying them fancy meals and nice clothes.
Conditions on the factory floor worsen as winter approaches. Carrie catches a bad cold and stays home for three days, for which she is summarily fired.
Carrie begins searching for work when she runs into Drouet. Drouet offers to buy her a steak dinner, a grand extravagance that impresses Carrie. Drouet assures her that factory work is no place for her. He offers her two $10 bills, “soft and noiseless” (44), to buy herself some new clothes. He asks her to meet him the next afternoon at the theater down the street.
Chapter 7 Summary: “The Lure of the Material: Beauty Speaks for Itself”
Although Carrie loves the feel of “relief” (48) she gets from Drouet’s money, she knows she will have to return it. If she spends it, her sister will ask questions. She feels in her heart that Drouet is a good man and that his intentions are honorable. Carrie cannot stand living in her sister’s home. If she cannot find work, she decides she will return to Wisconsin.
The next morning, Carrie resumes looking for work. She stops at an upscale department store and is tempted to spend Drouet’s money on a pretty jacket but does not. When she meets Drouet for their date, he insists on buying her the jacket and an entire outfit. Carrie is delighted.
Drouet argues that Carrie should move into her own apartment. He offers to help by covering the rent. Carrie agrees. The next morning, she departs her sister’s place, leaving a note that assures Minnie she knows what she is doing.
Chapter 8 Summary: “Intimations of Winter: An Ambassador Summoned”
Neither Carrie’s sister nor her husband much care when they find Carrie’s note. In fact, her sister decides Carrie has gone off to be with some man and feels sorry for her lost sister. Later, she will have a disturbing dream in which she watches helplessly as Carrie disappears into the pit of an open mine shaft.
Spending the first night in her new flat, Carrie worries what Drouet will expect in return and frets that she still has no job. When Drouet arrives, he dismisses Carrie’s anxiety. It is also implied that Carrie and Drouet’s relationship becomes sexual in nature on this day.
Later, Drouet treats Carrie to a day of sightseeing. Carrie loves the energy of the city; she is a “victim of the city’s hypnotic influence” (57). The whirlwind tour of Chicago includes seeing a grand production of Gilbert and Sullivan’s light opera The Mikado. Carrie is mesmerized by the production.
The following day, Drouet meets with George Hurstwood and invites him to have dinner with Carrie and him at his apartment.
Chapter 9 Summary: “Convention’s Own Tinder-box: The Eye that Is Green”
George Hurstwood, though comfortable, is not part of Chicago’s upper-crust society. He, his wife, and their two teenaged kids live in a modest ten-room house. His wife, something of an aristocratic wannabe, dreams that her two children, if they marry right, will be the family’s key to status. Charles is unhappy with his marriage; his wife is everything he does not want, but he is too concerned about his precarious financial situation to consider an extramarital dalliance. That would be financially ruinous, although it is hinted that Charles may have been unfaithful during a business trip to Philadelphia, and that perhaps even his wife has had a lover or two.
Chapters 1-9 Analysis
The novel is spin-off on a genre familiar to Dreiser’s readers: the successful young adult novels of Horatio Alger (1832-1891). Those works are rags-to-riches tales of plucky young boys from low-income families who find success and happiness through hard work. Dreiser, however, introduces a radical twist: His protagonist is a woman, allowing him to explore the theme of The Role of Women in Turn-of-the-Century America in the success stories of capitalism.
Like Alger’s young heroes, Carrie comes to the city as an idealistic dreamer, confident in the opportunity to succeed despite having little experience and minimal education. Dreiser, however, undermines the premise of the Alger’s novels. Carrie finds little opportunity, and the job she takes forces her to work in deplorable and dangerous conditions. The job search is frustrating and demeaning in part because as a woman she is seen as qualified for a limited range of work— basically mindlessly repetitive assembly line labor: “She labored incessantly for some time, hours, finding relief from her own nervous fears and imaginings of injury in the humdrum, mechanical movement of the great noisy machine itself” (27). Because she is pretty, Carrie is subjected to leers and crude comments by men. And because she is a woman, the pay is low. At that time, workers were perceived to be interchangeable. When the freezing conditions on the factory floor give her pneumonia, Carrie is fired simply for missing three days.
Short of marriage, which these opening chapters expose as a convention devoid of emotion or passion, or short of having a gentleman foot her bills in return for sexual favors, Carrie will struggle to find access to the wealth men take for granted. Struggling to find decent employment, hired for a pittance wage, and then terminated because she contracts pneumonia at work reveals the role of women in Dreiser’s city. The cultural assumptions at the heart of the Alger myth about the value of work and the reward for industry applied to men, not women.
In introducing the two men who will shape Carrie’s emotional life in the city—the traveling salesmen Charles Drouet and the charismatic yet married George Hurstwood—the novel explores a tension, with a candor that Dreiser’s era found scandalous, the tension between flesh and spirit. Readers are given details about two conventional marriages: Carrie’s sister and her husband, and George Hurstwood and his wife. In both cases, love has long gone stale. Both relationships are sustained because of economic necessity. The marriages are performance pieces; the couples stay together because of the fear of scandal or the absence of money needed to divorce.
Sister Carrie is regarded as one of the most accomplished works of literary naturalism. Naturalism began as a philosophical response to the rise of science in mid-19th-century Europe, with its commitment to observing the human condition, uncomplicated by the biases of religion. Literary naturalists studied humanity and recorded with objectivity the reality of behavior and extrapolated from that data observations about what it means to be human. In America, literary naturalism found its voice in Dreiser’s turn-of-century generation, most prominently in the fiction of Stephen Crane, Jack London, Frank Norris, and William Dean Howells.
Within this construct, Carrie is a case study in how humans respond to certain conditions—in this case the new reality of the city. The voiceover authority says in the first chapter that readers will watch what happens to a young country girl when she heads to the city: Either she will withstand the temptations of the city, or she will surrender to them. As an expression of naturalism, the novel is akin to a lab experiment. Because naturalists drew their model of the universe from science not religion, Carrie faces a universe indifferent to her existence. There is no God overlooking the entire enterprise. Readers watch, with the benign curiosity of scientists, as Carrie struggles to thrive within an urban environment that diminishes her stature at every turn. As an animal gifted with intellect, Carrie wrestles with her basest desires and the problematic logic of her own intellect.
Finally, Carrie, from the moment she steps off the train into the hustle and shuffle of the Chicago train station, feels alone. For Dreiser, the tale of the city, of Carrie’s multiple relationships with men, and of her rise to stunning success in the theater is about the inevitability of loneliness. In Dreiser’s view, individuals living at the beginning of the modern age that are more alone than ever before, despite the press of people in the modern city. Characters cannot sustain meaningful relationships. They are driven by material concerns, and hence they must come to terms with a chilling reality: People are born alone, they live alone, and they die alone. As Carrie feels when she greets her sister at the train station, she is a “lone figure in a tossing, thoughtless sea” (9).
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By Theodore Dreiser
