Women characters in Theodore Dreiser's novel Sister Carrie and Jennie Gerhardt. Contents Introduction

Chapter II. Women characters in Theodore Dreiser's novel Sister Carrie and Jennie Gerhardt.
2.1. Analysis of Sister Carrie and Jennie Gerhardt.
Theodore Dreiser was arguably the most important figure in the development of fiction in the twentieth century. In this Library of America volume are presented the first two novels and a little-known collection of biographical sketches by the man about whom H. L. Mencken said, “American writing, before and after his time, differed almost as much as biology before and after Darwin.”
Dreiser grew up poor in a series of small Indiana towns, in a large German Catholic family dominated by his father’s religious fervor. At seventeen he moved to Chicago and eventually became a newspaper reporter there and in St. Louis, Pittsburgh, and New York. Reaction to his first book, Sister Carrie (1900), was not encouraging, and after suffering a nervous breakdown, he went on to a successful career editing magazines. In 1910 he resumed writing, and over the next fifteen years published fourteen volumes of fiction, drama, travel, autobiography, and essays.
“Dreiser’s first great novel, Sister Carrie …came to housebound and airless America like a great free Western wind, and to our stuffy domesticity gave us the first fresh air since Mark Twain and Whitman,” Sinclair Lewis declared in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech in 1930. Carrie Meeber, an eighteen-year-old small-town girl drawn to bustling Chicago, becomes the passionless mistress of a good-humored traveling salesman and then of an infatuated saloon manager who leaves his family and elopes with her to New York. Dreiser’s brilliant, panoramic rendering of the two cities’ fashionable theaters and restaurants, luxurious hotels and houses of commerce, alongside their unemployment, labor violence, homelessness, degradation, and despair makes this the first urban novel on a grand scale.
In a 1911 review, H. L. Mencken wrote, “Jennie Gerhardt is the best American novel I have ever read, with the lonesome but Himalayan exception of Huckleberry Finn.” Beautiful, vital, generous, but morally naïve and unconscious of social conventions, Jennie is a working-class woman who emerges superior to the succession of men who exploit her. There are no villains in this novel; in Dreiser’s view, everyone is victimized by the desires that the world excites but can never satisfy.
Dreiser’s embracing compassion is felt in Twelve Men (1919), a collection of portraits of men he knew and admired. They range from “My Brother Paul” (Paul Dresser, vaudeville musical comedian and composer of “On the Banks of the Wabash” and “My Gal Sal”) to “Culhane, the Solid Man,” a sanatorium owner and former wrestler. Without sentiment but with honest emotion and respect for the bleak and unvarnished truth, Dreiser recalls these anomalous individuals and the twists of fate that shaped their lives.⁵
Richard Lehan, volume editor, is emeritus professor of English at the University of California, Los Angeles. He is the author of Theodore Dreiser: His World and His Novels and The City in Literature: An Intellectual and Cultural History, as well as studies of F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway.
Sister Carrie (1900) is a novel by Theodore Dreiser about a young woman who moves to the big city where she starts realizing her own American Dream. She first becomes a mistress to men that she perceives as superior, but later becomes a famous actress. It has been called the "greatest of all American urban novels".
In late 1889, dissatisfied with life in Columbia City, Wisconsin, 18-year-old Caroline Meeber, "Sister Carrie" to her family, takes the train to Chicago, to live with her older sister Minnie and Minnie's husband. On the train, Carrie meets Charles Drouet, a traveling salesman who is attracted to her because of her simple beauty and unspoiled manner. They exchange contact information, but upon discovering the "steady round of toil" and somber atmosphere at her sister's flat, she writes to Drouet and discourages him from calling on her there.
Carrie soon finds a job running a machine in a shoe factory and gives most of her meager salary to the Hansons for room and board. One day, after an illness costs her her job, she encounters Drouet. He persuades her to leave her dull, constricted life and move in with him. To press his case, he slips Carrie two ten dollar bills, opening a vista of material possibilities to her. The next day, he rebuffs her feeble attempt to return the money and retain her virtue, taking her shopping at a Chicago department store and buying her a jacket and some shoes. That night, she moves in with him.
Drouet installs her in a much nicer apartment. She gradually sheds her provincial mannerisms. By the time he introduces her to George Hurstwood, the manager of Fitzgerald and Moy's – a respectable bar that Drouet describes as a "way-up, swell place" – her material appearance has improved considerably. Hurstwood, a married man with a social-climbing wife, a 20-year-old son and a 17-year-old daughter, becomes infatuated with Carrie, and before long they start an affair, meeting secretly while Drouet is away on a business trip.
One night, Drouet casually agrees to find an actress to play Laura in an amateur theatrical presentation of Augustin Daly's melodrama Under the Gaslight for his local chapter of the Elks. He encourages a hesitant Carrie to take the part. Carrie turns out to have acting talent, and her ambition is born. Initially, she falls victim to stage fright, but Drouet's encouragement between acts enables her to give a fine performance that not only rivets the audience's attention, it inflames Hurstwood's passion, and he decides to take Carrie away from Drouet.
The next day, Drouet finds out about the affair, while Hurstwood's wife Julia learns that Hurstwood has been seen with another woman. Hurstwood makes advances, and when Carrie asks if he will marry her, he says yes. Later, Drouet confronts Carrie and informs her that Hurstwood is married, then walks out on her. After a night of drinking, and despairing at his now-emboldened wife's demands and Carrie's rejection letter, Hurstwood finds that the safe in Fitzgerald and Moy's offices has accidentally been left unlocked. When he inadvertently locks the safe after taking the money out, he drunkenly panics and steals the day's proceeds - more than $10,000. Under the false pretext of Drouet's sudden illness, he lures Carrie onto a train and takes her to Canada. In Montreal, Hurstwood is found by a private investigator; he returns most of the stolen funds to avoid prosecution. Hurstwood mollifies Carrie by arranging a marriage ceremony (though he is still married to Julia), and the couple move to New York City.
They rent a flat, where they live as George and Carrie Wheeler. Hurstwood buys a minority interest in a saloon and, at first, is able to provide Carrie with an adequate – if not lavish – lifestyle. The couple grow distant, however, as their finances do not improve much. Carrie's dissatisfaction only increases when she makes friends with a new neighbor, Mrs. Vance, whose husband is prosperous. Through Mrs. Vance, Carrie meets Robert Ames, a bright young scholar from Indiana and her neighbor's cousin, who introduces her to the idea that great art, rather than showy materialism, is worthy of admiration.
After only a few years, the saloon's landlord sells the property, and Hurstwood's business partner decides to terminate the partnership. Too proud to accept any of the limited job opportunities available to him, Hurstwood watches his savings dwindle. He urges Carrie to economize, which she finds humiliating and distasteful. As Hurstwood gradually sinks into apathy, Carrie becomes a chorus girl through her good looks. While he deteriorates further, she rises from the chorus line to small roles. Her performance as a minor, non-speaking character, a frowning Quakeress, greatly amuses the audience and makes the play a hit. She is befriended by another chorus girl, Lola Osborne, who urges Carrie to become her roommate. In a final attempt to earn money, Hurstwood becomes a scab, driving a Brooklyn streetcar during a streetcar operator's strike. His ill-fated venture lasts only two days, ending after a couple of violent encounters with the strikers. Carrie, unaware of Hurstwood's reason for quitting, leaves him.
Hurstwood ultimately becomes one of the homeless of New York, taking odd jobs, falling ill with pneumonia, and finally becoming a beggar. He ultimately commits suicide in a flophouse. Carrie achieves stardom, but finds that, even with fame and fortune, she is lonely and unhappy.
At the urging of his journalist friend Arthur Henry, Dreiser began writing his manuscript in 1899. He frequently gave up on it but Henry urged him to continue. From the outset, his title was Sister Carrie, though he changed it to The Flesh and the Spirit while writing it; he restored the original name once complete.
Dreiser had difficulty finding a publisher for Sister Carrie. Doubleday & McClure Company accepted the manuscript, but the wife of one of the publishers declared it to be too sordid. Dreiser insisted on publication, and Doubleday & McClure were legally bound to honor their contract; 1,008 copies were printed on November 8, 1900, but the publisher made no effort to advertise the book and only 456 copies were sold. However, Frank Norris, who was working as a reader at Doubleday, sent a few copies to literary reviewers.⁶
Between 1900 and 1980, all editions of the novel were of a second altered version. Not until 1981 did Dreiser's unaltered version appear when the University of Pennsylvania Press issued a scholarly edition based upon the original manuscript held by the New York Public Library. It is a reconstruction by a team of leading scholars to represent the novel before it was edited by hands other than Dreiser's.[8]
In his Nobel Prize Lecture of 1930, Sinclair Lewis said that "Dreiser's great first novel, Sister Carrie, which he dared to publish thirty long years ago and which I read twenty-five years ago, came to housebound and airless America like a great free Western wind, and to our stuffy domesticity gave us the first fresh air since Mark Twain and Whitman."
In 1998, the Modern Library ranked Sister Carrie 33rd on its list of the 100 best English-language novels of the 20th century.
In 2013, Black Balloon Publishing released Clementine Classics: Sister Carrie by Theodore Dreiser, a new version of Sister Carrie annotated by Tumblr literary critic Clementine the Hedgehog.