Sister Carrie
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Theodore Dreiser, in Sister Carrie, portrays work as a meaningless waste of time and effort---as long as it is undertaken only to achieve material ends. Carrie is a completely self-centered character driven only by material goals. Work means nothing to her except as a means of achieving those goals. It is no surprise, then, to find that she is miserable because of the work she does. She is the embodiment of everything wrong with an acquisitive society. Of course, to be fair to her, it is in part because she is trapped in that acquisitive society that she is such a shallow person with such a shallow attitude toward work. She does not even consider that there might be a sort of work which could give her a sense of self-esteem and self-fulfillment while still earning her a decent living. As it is, Carrie' work in the factory brings her nothing but misery. She is at the bottom of the workworld in terms of both income and prestige; she has no chance at the factory of winning for herself the material success and security she desperately wants; she has no respect for herself or her fellow workers for the tedious and monotonous work they do. Because Carrie is a shallow human being, it is no surprise that she has no meaningful life either at work or away from work. She has no internal life, except for trying to dream up schemes to get what she wants from the material world. Because she has no internal, creative or moral compass, hates her work, has no life of her own at work or at hom
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Carrie has no self-esteem as she goes to the city, as she looks for work, as she fails to find work, and finally as she finds work. Again, society and its opinion of her work will never give her true self-esteem. That can only come through self-examination, self-knowledge and self-actualization. A person could conceivably have self-esteem and manage to keep some of it in an alienating job such as Carries's---but only if he or she had that self-esteem before he or she started the job. Carrie, again, has no self-esteem before she got the job, and she will never have any because she values herself not on the basis of what is in her mind and heart and soul, but by what she has, who she knows, what she wears.
We see her looking for work and she is shown to be powerless and hopeless. Clearly, as self-centered as Carrie might be, the author has sympathy for her and her dwindling sense of herself in the big world of the city:
On every hand, to her fatigued senses, the great business portion grew larger, harder, more stolid in its indifference. It seemed as if it was all closed to her, that the struggle was too fierce for her to hope to do anything at all. . . . She cast about vainly for some possible place to apply. . . . She . . . be
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Some common words found in the essay are:
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Approximate Word count = 1710
Approximate Pages = 7 (250 words per page)
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