Making It New: 1900–1945 337Dreiser was born the ninth child of German-speaking parents in Terre Haute,
Indiana. He was profoundly affected by the poverty of his upbringing, the harsh
bigotry of his father and by the character of his mother, whom he later called “a
dreamy, poetic, impractical soul.” After briefly attending university, he became a
reporter, working in Chicago, St. Louis, and Pittsburgh before moving to New York
City in 1894. Dreiser’s experiences as a journalist, the habit of a careful notation of
detail, fed into his writing of Sister Carrie. So did his interest in “the exploration of
the familiar” in the documentary photography of Alfred Stieglitz (1864–1966), who
stalked the streets of New York with a handheld “detective” camera, as well as in the
“Ashcan School” of painters, “New York Realists” like Robert Henri (1865–1929) and
John Sloan (1871–1951), who specialized in bold, rough renderings of low-life
scenes. Arriving in Chicago in 1890, Dreiser had fallen in love with its boom and
bustle – what he was later to call, in his novel The Titan (1914), “this singing flame
of a city, this all-America, this poet in chaps and buckskin, this rude, raw Titan, this
Burns of a city!” And in Sister Carrie, which begins in Chicago and ends in New York,
Dreiser recorded his impression of cities that, like life itself, glitter, beckon, seduce,
and destroy without reference to notions of justice and desert. The result was and
remains a novel remarkably free from moralizing. Carrie Meeber, a Midwestern
country girl, moves to Chicago, becomes the mistress of a salesman, Charles Drouet,
then the mistress of a middle-aged, married restaurant manager, George Hurstwood.
Hurstwood embezzles money; they flee to New York, where Hurstwood gradually
sinks into failure, becoming a drunken beggar on Skid Row. Carrie, meanwhile,
becomes a chorus girl, deserts Hurstwood and, although she fails to find the
happiness of which she dreams, not only survives but is launched on a successful
career. With a natural buoyancy, like a cork bobbing on water, Carrie is ambitious
and, like so many of Dreiser’s outcasts and waifs, given to moral expediency. When,
for instance, her “average little conscience” questions her about what she is doing,
the reply is simple: “the voice of want made answer for her.” “Not evil,” Dreiser
suggests, “but longing for that which is better, more directs the steps of the erring.”
By the end of the novel, Carrie is still longing, destined to know “neither surfeit nor
content” as she sits dreamily in her rocking chair. But that, Dreiser intimates, is the
human condition, not a punishment for the errant protagonist. Unlike the morally
aberrant heroines of other, roughly contemporary novels, like Chopin’s The
Awakening, Crane’s Maggie, or Wharton’s The Custom of the Country, Carrie does
not die or lose her looks, starve or become pregnant. She has vague regrets but no
anguished repentance, and retribution does not overtake her. When Sister Carrie
was first published this absence of a conventional moral code led the publisher,
despite Norris’s enthusiasm for the book, to provide it with only limited publicity
and distribution. The positive critical response to an English edition in 1901 led to
its reissue in the United States in 1907. Even then, though, it was more of a scandal
than a success; or, as Dreiser, himself put it later, “the outraged protests far
outnumbered the plaudits.”
Continuing to work as a journalist, Dreiser took ten years to publish his next
novel, Jennie Gerhardt (1911). The heroine of this book is another orphan in theGGray_c04.indd 337ray_c 04 .indd 337 8 8/1/2011 7:53:48 AM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 53 : 48 AM