Sister Carrie (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) (68 page)

15
(p. 403)
“I’m living at the Chelsea now”:
This apartment building on West Twenty-third Street, between Seventh and Eighth Avenues, later became a somewhat seedy landmark residence hotel for poets, composers, artists, and assorted bohemians.

16
(p. 416)
second-hand Hester Street basement collection:
This shopping street on the Lower East Side, lined with tenements, was home mainly to Jewish immigrants; its shops sold cheap goods, and the area’s primary food market was located there. Photographs of the period often show the street teeming with pushcarts, horse carriages, and a sea of humanity.

17
(p. 438)
“Pere Goriot,” which Ames had recommended to her:
Balzac’s famous novel of 1834 is about a father who sacrifices all for his two selfish, ingrate daughters. That Carrie is reading
Père Goriot
rather than
Dora Thome
is proof of her desire to improve herself culturally. The influence of Balzac’s writing on Dreiser is something he referred to often.

The 1950s are regarded as the golden age of melodrama in American cinema, a time when such legendary directors as Douglas Sirk and Vincente Minnelli produced some of their best work. In 1952 William Wyler released his superb
Carrie,
an adaptation of Theodore Dreiser’s novel of urban plight, and it resonated strongly with contemporary moviegoers.

Carrie
stars Laurence Olivier as Hurstwood, Jennifer Jones as Carrie, and Eddie Albert as Drouet. Even though Dreiser named his novel after its female protagonist, critics have always found the author’s rendering of Hurstwood’s tragic downfall the most masterful portion of the book. The same sentiment has been expressed regarding Olivier’s brilliant, show-stealing performance as the disgraced restaurant owner; he portrays Hurstwood’s deep loneliness with grace and subtlety, his sad eyes and desolate expression reflecting his pain and despair. As Carrie, Jones gives a multifaceted performance that only gets better as the movie progresses. Jones shows vulnerability as well as hardness, revealing the emotional development Carrie undergoes during her difficulties and subsequent swift rise. Albert turns in a brilliant performance as Drouet, conveying the fundamental irresponsibility of the man while keeping him, despite his machinations, charming, friendly, and even likable. Miriam Hopkins is also excellent as the shrewish Julie Hurstwood.
Carrie
capably recreates the atmosphere of the growing cities of Chicago and New York at the turn of the twentieth century. Wyler’s direction is quiet and fluid, allowing the stories and characters to speak for themselves. The film earned Oscar nominations for art direction and costume design.

For
Carrie,
Wyler teamed with screenwriters Ruth Goetz and Augustus Goetz. The trio had earlier created an outstanding adaptation of Henry James’s novel
Washington Square
entitled The Heiress (1949), starring Olivia de Havilland in the title role and Montgomery Clift as her penniless suitor.
Carrie
was Wyler’s fourth effort at bringing a classic novel to life. In 1936 he had adapted
Dodsworth,
based on the novel by Dreiser’s fellow naturalist Sinclair Lewis, and in 1939 his famed version of Emily Brontë’s
Wuthering Heights
appeared, starring Olivier as the doomed Heathcliff opposite Merle Oberon’s Cathy.

The year before
Carrie
hit the theaters, George Stevens premiered his successful adaptation of a Dreiser novel with the celebrated A
Place in the Sun
(1951), based on
An American Tragedy
(1925); it featured superstars Clift and Elizabeth Taylor. Director Josef von Sternberg had made the first film version of
An American Tragedy
in 1931.

Well, the critics have not really understood what I was trying to do. Here is a book that is close to life. It is intended not as a piece of literary craftsmanship, but as a picture of conditions done as simply and effectively as the English language will permit. To sit up and criticise me for saying “vest,” instead of “waistcoat”; to talk about my splitting the infinitive and using vulgar commonplaces here and there, when the tragedy of a man’s life is being displayed, is silly. More, it is ridiculous. It makes me feel that American criticism is the joke which English literary authorities maintain it to be. But the circulation is beginning to boom. When it gets to the people they will understand, because it is a story of real life, of their lives.

—from the
New York imes
(January 15, 1901)

 

The chief merit of
[Sister Carrie]
is its photographic descriptions of character. Scenes and incidents are freely localized. The book is unhealthful in tone, however, and its literary quality is not high enough to cover its faults of theme. -January 20, 1901

—January 20, 1901

The philosophy of [Sister
Carrie
] is very clear and very interesting. Its incidents, the squalid plane upon which its development takes place, will naturally prevent it from achieving a marked popularity. Even Mr. Dreiser’s antiseptic style cannot make it anything but a most unpleasant tale, and you would never dream of recommending it to another person to read.

—January 20, 1901

 

At last a really strong novel has come from America; a novel almost great because of its relentless purpose, its power to compel emotion, its marvellous simplicity. If Mr. Theodore Dreiser obtains the success he deserves, then “Sister Carrie” should make the book not of one but of many seasons.

—August 13, 1901

 

Rarely, even in modern work, have we met with characters so little idealised, so patiently presented. There is nothing of the showy development of the worse kind of psychological novel ... Mr. Dreiser impresses us by his truthful sequence of events. He is strictly normal, and no fantastic light is shed on the credible steps of vice and crime. He is a faithful student, but his eyes are not fixed dully on the model. He might be called unimaginative by those who see no imagination in the insight which makes its deductions from experience nor in that illuminating intelligence which controls a design.... The effect of the whole is perhaps a little depressing, and Mr. Dreiser has not much charm of style. He has many happy phrases, but we are occasionally oppressed by such “Americanisms” as “eyes snapping” or “when he went home evenings the house looked nice.” His work is faithful, acute, unprejudiced, and it should belong to the veritable “documents” of American history.

—August 14, 1901

 

Sister Carrie
has opened our eyes. It is a calm, reasoned, realistic study of American life in Chicago and New York, absolutely free from the slightest trace of sentimentality or prettiness, and dominated everywhere by a serious and strenuous desire for truth.

—August 24, 1901

 

Throughout
[Sister Carrie]
the phrasing is of the streets and bars—colloquial, familiar, vivid, slangy, unlovely, but intensely real. Of the manner of the book it is not easy to speak favourably; it is strikingly unworthy of the matter thereof. Whilst large, dignified, and generous, the scheme of the story here told is not pretentious, or complex, or ambitious. It is a very plain tale of a plain though eventful life. Between its covers no single note of unreality is struck. It is untrammelled by any single concession to convention or tradition, literary or social. It is as compact of actuality as a police-court record, and throughout its pages one feels pulsing the sturdy, restless energy of a young people, a cosmopolitan community, a nation busy upon the hither side of maturity. The book is, firstly, the full, exhaustive story of the “half-equipped little knight’s” life and adventures; secondly, it is a broad, vivid picture of men and manners in middle-class New York and Chicago; and, thirdly, it is a thorough and really masterly study of the moral, physical, and social deterioration of one Hurstwood, a lover of the heroine. Upon all these counts it is a creditable piece of work, faithful and real in the interest which pertains to genuinely realistic fiction. It is further of interest by reason that it strikes a key-note and is typical, both in the faults of its manner and in the wealth and diversity of its matter, of the great country which gave it birth.

—from
The Athenaeum
(September 7, 1901)

 

Theodore Dreiser’s frankly realistic story called “Sister Carrie,” originally published seven years ago, is now published by Messrs. B. W. Dodge & Co., and deserves to be received as a new book, for it did not get a chance for recognition when it first appeared....

To an extraordinary degree the book is a photograph of conditions in the crude larger cities of America and of the people who make these conditions and are made by them. There is no attempt to complicate the facts as they are with notions of things as they should be morally, or as they might be sentimentally or aesthetically. People’s feelings are not considered. The author is quite impersonal. Withal, the story is interesting in spite of the commonplace character of the personages and the low plane of the gallery in which they move.... It may be added that the story even upon its first publication seven years ago attracted much attention and won favorable recognition in England. We do not, however, recommend the book to the fastidious reader, or the one who clings to “old-fashioned ideas.” It is a book one can very well get along without reading.

—May 25, 1907

 

When she eventually leaves Drouet and allows herself not quite unwillingly to be abducted by Hurstwood, a special scarlet label will describe the book as an immoral one, quite unsuited to the perusal of the young person and the boarding-school miss. But these critics will have little to say in condemnation of the immorality of a commercial system which offers young girls a wage of three or four dollars a week in payment for labor as destructive to the mind as to the body.

—August 3, 1907

 

Something gray and bleak and hurtful that has been in the world almost forever is personified in [Dreiser].

—from
Little Review
(April 1916)

 

[Dreiser’s] aim is not merely to record, but to translate and understand; the thing he exposes is not the empty event and act, but the endless mystery out of which it springs; his pictures have a passionate compassion in them that is hard to separate from poetry. If this sense of the universal and inexplicable tragedy, if this vision of life as a seeking without a finding, if this adept summoning up of moving images, is mistaken by college professors for the empty, meticulous nastiness of Zola in “Pot-Bouille”—in Nietzsche’s phrase, for “the delight to stink”—then surely the folly of college professors, as vast as it seems, has been underestimated....

His books remain, particularly his earlier books—and not all the ranting of the outraged orthodox will ever wipe them out. They were done in the stage of wonder, before self-consciousness began to creep in and corrupt it. The view of life that got into “Sister Carrie,” the first of them, was not the product of deliberate thinking out of Carrie’s problem. It simply got itself there by the force of the artistic passion behind it; its coherent statement had to wait for other and more reflective days. This complete rejection of ethical plan and purpose, this manifestation of what Nietzsche used to call moral innocence, is what brought up the guardians of the national tradition at the gallop, and created the Dreiser bugaboo of today. All the rubber-stamp formulae of American fiction were thrown overboard in these earlier books; instead of reducing the inexplicable to the obvious, they lifted the obvious to the inexplicable; one could find in them no orderly chain of causes and effects, of rewards and punishments; they represented life as a phenomenon at once terrible and unintelligible, like a stroke of lightning. The prevailing criticism applied the moral litmus. They were not “good”; ergo, they were “evil.”

—from
Seven Arts
(August 1917)

 

Now to me, as to many other American writers, Dreiser more than any other man, marching alone, usually unappreciated, often hated, has cleared the trail from Victorian and Howellsian timidity and gentility in American fiction to honesty and boldness and passion of life.

—from “The American Fear of Literature” (1930)

 

And Dreiser has the gift of universality.... If you like to call it Americanness you can—in the sense that a sort of uniform spirit has overrun the Western world so that they are eating nearly as many and nearly as filthy indigestible canned products in Paris and London today as they are in Chicago.

—from
Portraits From Life
(1937)

Sister Carrie
had the appearance of being a naturalistic novel and would be used as a model for the work of later naturalists. Yet it was, in a sense, naturalistic by default, naturalistic because Dreiser was writing about the life he knew best in the only style he had learned. There is a personal and compulsive quality in the book that is not at all naturalistic. The book is felt rather than observed from the outside, like
McTeague;
and it is based on dreams rather than documents. Where
McTeague
had been a conducted tour of the depths,
Sister Carrie
was a cry from the depths, as if McTeague had uttered it.