Money and morality in theodore dreiser’s novel " sister carrie" contents

CHAPTER II The theme of American capitalism in Theodore Dreiser's novel An Sister Carrie
2.1. The impact and features of the “Sister Carrie”
Carrey is a 1925 novel by American author Theodore Dreiser . He began writing the manuscript in the summer of 1920, but abandoned most of it a year later. It was based on the 1906 murder of Grace Brown and her lover's trial ⁸. In 1923 Dreiser returned to the project and completed the huge novel in 1925 with the help of his wife Helen and two secretaries, editors Louise Campbell and Sally Cassel . January 1, 2021
Proud, handsome, but uneducated, simple and immature, Clyde Griffiths was raised by poor and devout parents to help with street missionary work . As a young man, Clyde had to do simple things, such as helping feed his family with soda water, and then making phone calls to a high-end hotel in Kansas City . There, his more sophisticated colleagues introduce him to drinking and sex with prostitutes.
Enjoying his new lifestyle, Clyde becomes a fan of manipulator Hortense Briggs and encourages him to buy expensive gifts. Clyde gets jealous when she finds out that Hortense is dating other men. However, Clyde chooses to spend money on Hortense to help her runaway sister get pregnant and be abandoned by her lover.
Clyde's life changed dramatically when his friend Sparser took Clyde, Hortense and other friends out of town for a lonely meeting in his owner's car, taking advantage of them without permission and beating the girl. Running away from the police at high speed, Sparser crashes into a car. All but Sparser and his partner flee the scene. Clyde leaves Kansas City, fearing persecution for helping Sparser. An example of personal irresponsibility and panicky decisions in the life of Clyde is repeated in the story, ending with the central tragedy of the novel.
Chicago , he meets his wealthy uncle Samuel Griffiths, owner of a collar factory in the imaginary city of Lycurgus, New York. Samuel feels guilty for not paying attention to his bad relationship , and offers Clyde a simple job in a factory. He then promotes Clyde to a minor leadership role.
Gilbert Clyde, the immediate superior of Samuel Griffiths' son, warns Clyde not to interfere with the women who work for him as managers. At the same time, the Griffiths pay little attention to Clyde socially. In Lycurgus, he is left alone because Clyde has no close friends. An emotionally weak Clyde falls in love with a poor and innocent farmer, Roberta Alden, who works in his shop. Clyde secretly sues Roberta and eventually convinces her to have sex with him rather than lose him, and she becomes pregnant ⁹.
Meanwhile, another manufacturer, Sondra Finchley , an elegant young socialist daughter of Lycurgus, takes an interest in Clyde, although her cousin Gilbert tries to keep them apart. Clyde's seductive style made him famous through a collection of young Lycurgus smarties; he and Sondra stay close, and he ignores Roberta and denounces her. Roberta expects Clyde to marry her so as not to be ashamed of her unmarried pregnancy, but instead Clyde dreams of marrying Sondra.
Unable to get an abortion for Roberta, Clyde helps Sondra with her living expenses while her relationship progresses. When Roberta threatens to reveal her relationship with Clyde if she does not marry him, she plans to drown him while he is on the boat. He read the news about the shipwreck in the local newspaper.
Clyde takes Roberta in a canoe along an imaginary Great Bitter Lake in the Adirondacks (modeled on New York's Great Elk Lake) and takes her to a secluded spot . He freezes. Sensing that something is wrong, Roberta moves towards him and he unwittingly hits her in the face with the camera, causing her to trip and accidentally capsize the boat. Not knowing how to swim, Roberta drowns, and Clyde swims ashore, not wanting to save her. Legend has it that the strike was accidental, but the panic and clear evidence left behind by the guilty Clyde point to murder ¹⁰.
Local officials want to charge Clyde with providing further evidence against him, but he repeatedly blames himself for his confusing and contradictory statements. Clyde leads a stormy trial before a panel of unscrupulous and unfair judges, mostly from religious conservative peasants. Despite strong (and false) defense by two lawyers hired by his uncle, Clyde was found guilty and sentenced to death and executed in the electric chair after an appeal was denied . Prison scenes and Clyde's correspondence with his mother are examples of pathos in modern literature.
Dreiser wrote a book on a famous criminal case. On July 11, 1906, resort owners found the hull of the boat and the capsized Grace Brown on Great Moose Lake in the Adirondacks , New York . Chester Gillette was arraigned and charged with Brown's murder, although he claimed his death was a suicide. West was executed on March 30, 1908 in the electric chair. [2] When Brown's love letters to Gillette were read in court, the murder trial attracted international attention. Dreiser kept newspaper clippings of the work for several years before writing his novel, and studied the work carefully. He based Clyde Griffiths on Chester Gillette, deliberately giving him the same initials.
The historic setting for many of the pivotal events is Cortland, New York , an area full of place names that resonate with Cortland County's Greco-Roman history. Cities include Homer, Solon, Virgil, Marathon and Cincinnatus. Lycurgus, nicknamed Cortland , was the legendary legislator of ancient Sparta . Grace Brown, a farmer's daughter who lived in the small town of South Otselich in Chenango County , was a factory girl who was Gillette's lover. The place where Grace was killed, Big Elk Lake, a real place in the Adirondacks, is called Big Bitter Lake in Dreiser's novel. The identity of the "rich girl" in the love triangle ( Sondra Finchley in the novel ) is never clearly defined.
A surprisingly similar murder took place in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania when Robert Edwards beat his two mistresses, Freda McKech, and threw her body into a lake. It was so similar that the press at the time referred to the Edwards/ McKech killer as "Kerry's sister". Edwards was eventually found guilty and executed in the electric chair ¹¹.
The novel is literally a tragedy , and Clyde's death is a consequence of his innate weaknesses: moral and physical cowardice, carelessness and indiscipline, confusion of mind and aimless ambition; moreover, the influence of his seductive (Dreiser uses the word "soft") social style tempts him in a way that he cannot resist.
The novel is filled with grotesque depictions of the Clyde's high, gloomy walls as an opportunity for success, from the symbolic depiction of it all to the "electrified" depiction of girls predicting the whereabouts of the Clyde. chair; Dreiser turns everyday simple things into characters.[ quote ]
Dreiser's interest in the long novel (over 800 pages) ranged from a detailed study of their thoughts and motives, to a detailed collection of their thoughts and motives, and a constant shift in "emotional distance" from Clyde and other characters. Araz will continue until the interview .
The novel has been adapted into other forms several times, and the storyline has not always been used as a basis for other works:

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  On October 11, 1926, the first stage adaptation for Broadway , written by Patrick Kearney , premiered at the Longacre Theater in New York City . The cast also included Miriam Hopkins, who had yet to start her film career .
  
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  Sergei Eisenstein wrote the screenplay in the late 1920s and hoped that Paramount or Charlie Chaplin would be photographed in 1930 while Eisenstein was in Hollywood. Dreiser strongly disapproved of the 1931 film version directed by Josef von Sternberg.
  
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  In April 1929, Dreiser made a deal with the German director Erwin Piscator.Making a stage version of Sister Carrie. Piscator's stage adaptation was first performed in Vienna in April 1932 and debuted in April 1935 at the Rose Valley Hedgerow Theater in the United States . The play was also staged in March 1936 by Lee Strasberg at the Group Theatre . Animated by Hedgerow Theater in September 2010 (the original adaptation was erroneously given to Piscator 's wife , Maria Ley ) ¹².
  
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  In the 1940s, the novel inspired the award-winning radio comedy episode Our Miss Brooks , an episode titled "A Weekend at Crystal Lake" or "Sister Carrie". The episode revolved around the main characters' misinterpretation of the intentions of their biology teacher Philip Boyton ( played by Jeff Chandler) and their high school colleague Connie Brooks (Eve Arden) and their love interests. The main characters fear that Boynton plans to kill Miss Brooks at the lake on his master's weekend. The episode aired twice: September 19, 1948 and August 21, 1949. The episode was repeated in 1955 and the show became a radio and television hit . [6]
  
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  Paramount Pictures based on George Stevens ' 1951 film A Place in the Sun and starring Montgomery Clift , Elizabeth Taylor and Shelley Winters.
  
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  subsequent television or film adaptations produced in Brazil (Um Lugar ao Sol , TV series, 1959, director: Dionisio Azevedo ) and Italy (This: Sister Kerry, Paradise 1, 1962, directed by Anton Giulio). Mayano ), Czechoslovakia ( Kerry opa , series, 1976, director: Stanislav Parnicki ), Philippines ( Nakav) No pug-ibig , film, 1980, director: LinoBrock), USSR ( America) tragedy , part 4, Lithuanian Film Studio, 1981, director: Marijonas Gedris ) and Japan ( Hi Ataru) basho , TV series, 1982, directed by Masami Ryuji).
  
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  The composer Tobias Picker adapted General Scheer's material as a libretto opera of the same name . Premiered on 2 December 2005 at the Metropolitan Opera in New York with Nathan Gunn .
  
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  Critics and commentators have compared elements of Woody Allen's " Match Point " (2005) to the central plot of the novel.
  
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  three Tony awards , as a piece of music of the same name . It premiered on March 24, 2010 at Muhlenberg College in Allentown, Pennsylvania.
  
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  Twice adapted and broadcast on Progreso National Radio. In the first version, the roles were played by famous actors such as Raoul Celis (like Clyde), Marta del Rio (). Robert), Miriam Mayer (Sondra). ), Julio Alberto Casanova (Gilbert) and Maggie Castro ( Bertina ) ¹³.
  
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  Jennifer Donnelly 2003 Youth Northern Lights tells the story from the perspective of a young woman working at a local camp.
  

With the help of his wife and other friends, a writer named Arthur Henry; Dreiser began work on his novel. His main source for the novel is the story of his sister Emma's relationship with a married man named L.A. Hopkins, who ran off with Emma with money stolen from her employer in Chicago. Dreiser found a publisher named Doubleday who published his work, but in November 1900 refused to publish the novel. Frank Norris, one of Doubleday's editors, read the book himself, gave the publisher good advice, and was kind. Doubleday owner Frank Doubleday disagreed with Norris' assessment of the book due to its "immoral" nature, as a "fallen" woman can succeed as a protagonist in dark settings. At the time, Dreiser often used the story as a form of censorship.
Although Dreiser refused to change publishers for his book and constantly pressured Doubleday, his lawyer demanded that the publisher remove the book or jeopardize Doubleday's good name. Eventually the book was published, but Doubleday did nothing to sell it or even save it. Frank Norris, who worked with Dreiser at Doubleday, eventually published an edited and abridged version of the novel in the UK in 1901; Sister Kerry's novel received critical acclaim from British commentators ¹⁴.
Sister Kerry is Dreiser's story about an ordinary young Colombian girl, Kerry Meeber , who was invited to Chicago by her sister's family (she, her husband and their little child), who seemed like a stranger to her. Kerry is a middle-class man who grew up in nineteenth-century America and dreamed of Chicago's opulent and flamboyant attractions. However, when it comes down to it, Kerry puts herself at a disadvantage because she works in a sweatshop for a very small salary, she has no money, and when she thinks about visiting beautiful and attractive places, she says so . be .not close. The city of Chicago has to offer.
Things will continue to look bad until Carrie meets several men who are very interested (and generally interested) in helping her. One of them is Charles Drouet , a charming salesman who has a romantic heart in his heart and never takes romance seriously. He helps Kerry get back on her feet, provides her with money and provides housing for her sister to get rid of a boring and stressful life. Another man in Kerry's life is George Hurstwood , a salon manager in Chicago, a wealthy and important man, although he is married. Hurstwood eventually falls in love with Kerry and tells her that he loves her without telling her that he is married; Hurstwood's wife finds out about this and files for divorce. He steals ten thousand dollars from his salon and flees to Montreal with Kerry and they marry before his divorce is finalized. For the remainder of the book, Hurstwood 's mental state continues to deteriorate and gets worse when Carrey leaves him. He eventually becomes a homeless beggar and commits suicide. Over time, Carrie will become a popular actress in New York and finally fulfill her dream of a bright and attractive life.
Sister Carrie makes a breakthrough in American literature because her protagonist, Carrie, has to achieve success in highly immoral ways; she gets her "starter" by sleeping with a middle-class Drouet and then joins the wealthier Herstud in order to get the "big break" she needs, which she uses to launch her career as an actress. This will eventually pay off for him when he becomes rich and famous. Kerry Dreiser and her sister take a more natural approach to the brutal, real details of Chicago city life with their philosophical musings in the era of the Chicago Correspondent.