Thoughts on Sister Carrie, by Theodore Dresier

There are so many different ways to read novels.

One, of course, is to just let yourself be carried (no pun intended) along by a story.

Now that I have a few years under my belt, I also really enjoy reading novels because of the clues they reveal about authors’ minds.

I’ve written, before, about the similarities between writing fiction and dreaming. (My longish essay on that topic, Writing, Dreams, and Consciousness, is available for Kindle here although, full confession, I haven’t looked at it for years. Probably should pull it up and rewrite it!)

I’ve also touched a bit on philosophical idealism, which I think is the most plausible metaphysical framework for describing reality. At some point I’ll post more about that topic (I have a post in draft that riffs off the works of Bernardo Kastrup, who has made the case to my satisfaction for idealism) but the short version is that we humans are participating in an interconnected dream or mental simulation. The seeming “solidity” of reality is a function of how it is generated; even though our interaction with reality is entirely subjective, none of us as individuals “owns” it or controls it. It is generated collectively and that mass attention to “what is real” stabilizes it.

What is fascinating about this, to me, is that “other people” are known to us via an interface between their minds and our own. If I encounter another person, talk to that person, form a relationship with that person, everything I experience is a mix of perception and projection — and probably a lot more projection than most of us realize.

So, within this framework: when we dream, the figures in our dreams are almost certainly psychological projections (I say “almost certainly” to make room for the possibility that in at least some cases, other individuals’ minds might “enter” or intrude upon one’s dreams, meaning that we might be perceiving something “external to me” versus 100% projecting creations of our own subjective consciousness).

Characters in novels fall into this same category. They’re psychological projections.

Therefore, it’s possible to peer “through” characters into the mind of the author.

(Maybe that’s why authors feel so vulnerable and exposed when they share their fiction. On some level we know we’re not sharing words on a page. We’re opening a door into which other people can see our minds…)

Sister Carrie

I was mulling about these ideas over the last few days because of a novel I was reading: Sister Carrie, by Theodore Dreiser.

I enjoyed it. Although Dreiser’s prose comes across as heavy and plodding by today’s standards (the novel was published in 1900) the plot moves along; the chapters are typically short, only 6-10 pages each.

(Spoiler alert — major plot twists discussed below!)

The novel opens on the day that Carrie, a young (late teens) single woman, arrives in Chicago. It follows her life over the next several years as she tries to find her way in her new, urban environment (first Chicago, then New York).

It’s interesting to see how the novel is described by others. The jacket copy of my edition makes it sound like the story is about Carrie being preyed upon by men. Other descriptions I found online suggest the opposite — that she uses men, sleeping with them in exchange for their financial protection / her social betterment and tossing them aside when they aren’t useful any more.

So which is it? And what does the answer tell us about Dreiser?

Dreiser was a socialist, back when being a socialist meant being deeply concerned about the well-being of the working class poor. He was also a journalist and didn’t have a college degree (so whatever his conclusions about the world, they were his own, not the result of academic indoctrination wise and all-knowing guidance).

The novel is classified as a work of naturalism. Per Wikipedia, naturalism is “similar to literary realism” in that is rejects Romanticism,

but distinct [from literary realism] in its embrace of determinism, detachment, scientific objectivism, and social commentary. 

This accounts, in part, for the rather plodding style (because reality is generally a plodding and tedious thing, right?) but also for how matter-of-fact Dreiser is, as a storyteller. He is relating “how things are.” There is no God in this novel, no afterworld — nothing beyond material reality. Humans are animals, although with a slight upgrade in that we are capable of rational thought. We spend our lives bumbling through a wilderness of constantly threatening physical hardship. Although rational thought can be helpful in negotiating our lives, most of us lack the intellect or strength of character to make full use of it. Instead we vacillate continually under the influence of our emotions and subjective mental impressions.

And so Carrie, lacking the moxie, experience, and toughness to survive as a single working woman, has sex out of wedlock with one man, then enters an adulterous relationship with another.

She doesn’t know, at first, that the second man is already married, but later agrees to marry him herself even though he is not yet divorced (as far as she and we know). I.e. she becomes a bigamist.

None of this is presented in what we’d call “moral” terms. Carrie is, in Dreiser’s telling, doing the best that she can, given her lack of worldliness and her susceptibility to others’ manipulations (to be fair, those manipulations are also not, for the most part, presented in moral terms, either; the other characters in the novel are also doing the best they can given their situations and perceptions).

“Mind,” Dreiser writes in one of the handful of passages where he intrudes himself into the novel, “is a mere reflection of sensory impressions.”

It’s an odd thing to say; it suggests none of us has real agency.

Oh, the tangle of human life! How dimly yet we see.

Dreiser illustrates this notion in a scene where Carrie’s future husband steals a large sum of money from his employer. It’s an act that leads to his eventual dissolution and ruin, but the man isn’t depicted as choosing to steal — at least, not exactly.

First, Dreiser shows the man become increasingly agitated and distressed. This takes place over the span of several weeks as the man’s infatuation with Carrie grows and his wife becomes increasingly suspicious. Ultimately the wife discovers the affair and sues for divorce. The man realizes he is about to be ruined financially but is unable to work himself up to fight back.

Then, one evening he drinks more than usual and, alone in the club he manages, discovers the safe has been left open.

He never decides to steal the money. He removes it and puts it back — multiple times — as his mind wavers, gripped successively by alternating “sensory impressions.” “A voice” intrudes on his thought, posing apparently innocent questions (“Did you ever have ten thousand dollars in ready money?”) and innocent observations (“The safe is open”). One moment he “knows” that taking the money will be an easy thing to do and will solve all of his problems. The next moment, he is overcome by fear and revulsion, thinking of the scandal it would cause, recoiling from stealing as an act of evil.

He is also aware that his mind is stuck in a trap. “He wanted to think about it,” Dreiser writes, “to ponder over it, to decide whether it were best.” But he’s unable to break free of this seesaw of impressions. He lacks the mental strength.

And then: “While his money was in his hand,” Dresier writes, “the [safe] lock clicked.”

The man didn’t even register consciously that he’d closed the safe; it happened to him — passive voice. But at that moment, the thing was done. The man could no longer choose to put the money back. His course was set. He’d become a thief.

Dreiser, in this same scene, makes some observations about evil, and about conscience. “The dullest specimen of humanity, when drawn by a desire toward evil, is recalled by a sense of right.”

But from where does evil and “right” come? Recoiling from evil, Dreiser continues, is not based on “a knowledge of right.” Men are “led by instinct.”

[I]t is instinct (where highly organized reasoning is absent) which gives the criminal his feeling of danger, his fear of wrong.

So there you have it. The human mind is a collection of sensory impressions. Morality may be, in some people, “regulated by knowledge” but in those incapable of rational thought, it is a function of instinct.

Carrie is also incapable of making decisions via rational thought. She’s never shown to wrestle with her choices on moral grounds (and Dreiser took criticism in his day for that). She becomes outraged and aggrieved when she learns men have deceived her; she understands that a married man who courts another woman is committing an immoral act. But Dreiser doesn’t depict her as feeling regret for walking out on either of the men she sleeps with, or for committing adultery herself — not because she’s amoral but because she doesn’t rationally consider her actions and their consequences. It’s just not in her make-up to do so.

(Interestingly, there is never a suggestion that she risks becoming pregnant. Dreiser is clearly attuned to the awful conditions of 19th sweatshops, the suffering of poor shop girls, and the grinding, soul-killing effects of inescapable poverty — but he never brings into the picture the added burden that would befall Carrie or others like her should they become unmarried mothers.)

And Dreiser closes the novel with a couple pages of expository writing — observations on the human condition — in which he essentially excuses Carrie for any moral transgressions she might have committed.

If honest labor be unremunerative and difficult to endure; if it be the long, long road which never reaches beauty, but wearies the feet and the heart; if the drag to follow beauty be such that one abandons the admired way, taking rather the despised path leading to her dreams quickly, who shall cast the first stone? Not evil, but longing for that which is better more often directs the steps of the erring. Not evil, but goodness more often allures the feeling mind unused to reason.

Socialism is, of course, a model predicated on a materialist worldview. It proposes that humanity’s problems can be solved by re-organizing humans socially. There is no need for God or an afterlife or anything beyond the material world, because The Good is to be achieved in this world, not by following the rules of some other plane or order of being.

And Dreiser’s descriptions of human suffering in the urban environments of 1899-1900 are poignant. Many people migrated to our American cities during that period, took jobs in factories and sweatshops, toiled long hours under difficult if not dangerous conditions, were broken down (gradually then all at once) by exhaustion or illness or old age or bad luck, and suffered and died anonymously and alone.

Reading what he wrote 120 years ago reminds us that the problems we face in our cities today are not new ones.

It is also a window into the early days of our experiment in applying materialism to problems like homelessness and poverty.

I’m tempted to characterize Dreiser’s concept humanity as grim and hopeless — except I can’t. Because there’s something else in his depiction of Carrie: he shows her as continually longing for something better.

It is what, within the world of this novel, redeems her.

“Man ever errs the while he strives,” writes Goethe in Faust, and when Faust’s soul is carried to heaven, the angels sing: “Whoever strives in ceaseless toil / him we may grant redemption.”

And so I ask: despite himself, did Theodore Dreiser realize that his Sister Carrie had a soul?