Desire and Shadows

I had but one jaw dropping moment in the whole of Sister Carrie.  This moment came when Hurstwood deceived Carrie concerning Drouet, dragging her all the way to Montreal, and finally to New York. 

It is strange, this novel, everyone gets what they want.  I find that often life can be like that: you get everything you want, but it is not at all what/how you think it would be or should be.  Carrie achieved fame and fortune but (classically) found it empty.  Drouet continues doing what he always did.  The Hurstwood family went about their ways pretending the father no longer existed; Jessica becomes an expert flirt, while the missus tags along with her daughter and son-and-law (I’m sure they love that).  Hurstwood himself escaped on the immediate consequences of his crime, started over with Carrie, and ultimately failed.  Everything you want and more is in the making of a decision, no?

But Carrie’s position is different.  Indeed, she has it all in meaningless fashion, yet she is aware there is more to life.  A part I found so interesting in Dreiser’s description of Carrie’s dreamy nature was this:

“Thus in life there is ever the intellectual and the emotional nature—that mind that reasons, and the mind that feels.  Of one come the men of actions—generals and statesmen; of the other, the poets and dreams—artists all” (353).

I keep trying to decide if Dreiser favors one over the other, the intellectual or the emotional.  And if he does, that means he is more connected to his characters than I originally thought.  Carrie is an obvious dreamer.  If Dreiser favors the emotional, then he is sympathetic to her; if he favors the intellectual, then he is either indifferent or antagonistic.  In my opinion, indifference to one’s characters is disrespectful as an author; as with people, we must come to a place where we like or dislike/love or hate characters.

  

Characters shadow and imitate reality, and Dresier embodies that in Carrie throughout the novel.  From the start Carrie acts as a chameleon in her surroundings, adjusting herself with each turn of the page.  Dreiser ends the novel acknowledging Carrie’s potential to move out of the emptiness, but I question her subconscious motives.  Women of her track record tend to become the projection of whatever man holds her attention at the time, and Sister Carrie ends with Ames.

I read this novel too fast, and it will take a lot longer for it to really sink it.  But I enjoyed it nonetheless.  In class, perhaps let us discuss how Dreiser uses and writes about contrasts in the novel.  I think this becomes a more acknowledged trend toward the end of the novel; at the very least I noticed it more when he started mentioning it.