Sister Carrie

The nineteenth century witnessed a great deal of change in the American landscape. As industrialism and capitalism transformed agrarian rural life into industrial urban life, so, too, they transformed the heart and soul of a generation. In Theodore Dreiser's Sister Carrie, we follow the development of three main characters: Carrie Meeber, Charles H. Drouet, and George W. Hurstwood. Drouet and Hurstwood will both succumb to their desires for Carrie, but her insatiable desires will not be satisfied by another human being.

Carrie, like many women and men of the era, migrates to the city at a young age. On the way to Chicago she meets Drouet, a man whose clothing and manners makes an impression on her. She encounters the cruel realities of capitalism when she realizes the family members she intends to stay with view her as a source of income. The trials and tribulations Carrie experiences in industrial Chicago are similar to those faced by many women and men of her era. She is forced to accept work that is menial, difficult, involves long hours and pays wages that do not cover the basic costs of her food and clothing needs. Down and out and about to return to her sister's discouraged, Carrie accidentally encounters Drouet. When he tries to give her money, buy her clothes, and rent her an apartment, Drouet meets with reluctance from Carrie initially but she soon succumbs to her desires to have the material luxuries capital can provide.

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espect for him because she realizes he will never be the answer to her desires, either materially or as a person. Carrie succumbs to work and becomes quite successful as a performer, but she keeps this from Hurstwood in order to buy clothes and others things she desires. He takes a job as a scab and meets with violence, another typical experience for many men looking for work during the labor disputes of early industrialism. Hurstwood loses his apartment and becomes a homeless bum. He eventually commits suicide by gassing himself. Drouet returns to New York where Carries has become an overnight success and the toast of the town, but his efforts to reestablish his relationship with Carrie fail when she dismisses him. At the end of the novel, Carrie laments that she would prefer to do tragedies than comedies and sounds like the individual who has won the world but lost her soul, "'Now I am happy.' But since the world goes its way past all who will not partake of its folly, she now found herself alone" (Dreiser 369). Instead of trying to better herself through hard work and sacrifice, Carrie depended on using others and winds up alone with the trail of the destruction of Hurstwood in her wake. As Dreiser appeals to his fic

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