Sister Carrie By Theodore Dreiser
Μια ιστορία με μια νεαρή κοπέλα η οποία θα εγκαταλείψει την επαρχία και θα μετακομίσει στο Σικάγο θέλοντας να ζήσει και η ίδια το Αμερικάνικο Όνειρο.
Μια ιστορία αφύπνισης από το συγκεκριμένο όνειρο όπου η πραγματικότητα αποδεικνύει πόσο εύκολα το όνειρο γίνεται εφιάλτης.
Η Κάρι θα βρεθεί αντιμέτωπη με την ανεργία, το νοίκι και τους λογαριασμούς και την ώρα που είναι έτοιμη να εγκαταλείψει την προσπάθεια της θα βρεθεί ένας σωτήρας. Ένας νεαρός, όμορφος ευεργέτης ο οποίος είναι διατεθειμένος να της παρέχει σχεδόν κάθε άνεση με αντάλλαγμα μόνο την ομορφιά της.
Μια σχέση σαν αυτή -συγκατοίκηση θα το λέγαμε σήμερα- φαντάζει σκανδαλώδες για την κοινωνία του 1890 όπου διαδραματίζεται το βιβλίο.
Ο Dreiser όμως πετυχαίνει κάτι εξαιρετικό. Κάθε κίνηση από τους βασικούς του ήρωες (Υπάρχει άλλος ένας χαρακτήρας με πρωταγωνιστικό ρόλο που εμφανίζεται αργότερα στο έργο), όσο ανήθικη και αν φαίνεται με μια πρώτη ματιά, δικαιολογείται απόλυτα από τις καταστάσεις. Επομένως δύσκολα αποδίδεις κατηγορίες στους ήρωες για την συμπεριφορά τους. Οι ήρωες διακατέχονται από ένα Δίκαιο το οποίο παραμένει αμετάβλητο στο χρόνο.
Παρ’ όλο που το έργο ονομάζεται Η Κάρι μας (Sister Carrie στο πρωτότυπο) και επομένως ίσως θεωρηθεί γυναικείο βιβλίο και απορριφθεί από το αντρικό αναγνωστικό κοινό, πρέπει να αναφερθεί ότι από την μέση του βιβλίου εμφανίζεται ένας δεύτερος ήρωας με πρωταγωνιστικό ρόλο, άντρας αύτη τη φορά.
Ο ήρωας αυτός έρχεται σε αντιδιαστολή με την Κάρι και ουσιαστικά αντιπροσωπεύει την άλλη πλευρά του νομίσματος. Οτιδήποτε προσωποποιεί η Κάρι στο έργο, ο δεύτερος αυτός ήρωας, χωρίς να επισκιάσει την Κάρι, ενσαρκώνει το αντίθετο.
Θα λέγαμε ότι αν η Κάρι είναι το όνειρο, αυτός είναι ο εφιάλτης.
Πολλοί έχουν πει ότι ο Dreiser χρησιμοποιεί σαν αφορμή την Κάρι προκειμένου να πει την Ιστορία του δεύτερου ήρωα και σε μερικές σελίδες ένιωσα ότι κάτι τέτοιο είναι αληθές. Παρ’ όλ’ αυτά διατηρώ τις αμφιβολίες μου καθώς η Κάρι είναι ουσιαστικά η ιστορία μιας από της αδερφές του συγγραφέα.
Προσωπικά το απόλαυσα με το παραπάνω το βιβλίο και το προτείνω σε όσους θέλουν να ρίξουν μια ματιά στο χρόνο: Στην καθημερινότητα της Αμερικής του 1890-1900, στις εργασιακές συνθήκες του τότε και κυρίως στην θέση της γυναίκας.
(4.5 αστέρια) Theodore Dreiser One of those rare, unique ocassions when I genuinely liked what fate a male writer had in store for a heroine in the book. Immoral girl who hardly has any admirable features instead of getting her deserved comeuppance reaches astounding success and lives rolling in luxury and fame? Probably scandalous for the 1900s.
Don't we know now that good girls go to paradise and bad girls go wherever the hell they want 😌😇 Theodore Dreiser The more Effi Briest's, Anna Karenina's and Madame Bovarys' and their ilk I read the more Sister Carrie stands out as a thematically exciting book. The woman who makes a success of herself through an unconventional lifestyle but doesn't have to die is sharp and amusing departure from many earlier novels. Instead it is the men left in her wake who suffer. Hurstwood's collapse and inability to adapt from Chicago to New York is still fascinating.
Dresier's novel came a year too late to save Edna Pontellier in Kate Chopin's The Awakening, she still has to die. Theodore Dreiser This is a classic that I could read over and over again. What a story! If you haven't read it, you should! The story not only captures the reader into the story, it gives you a deep sense of mans crazy nature.
I just finished reading this one again. I first read it 7 years ago, and felt is was time to try it again. Dreiser really speaks to my soul!!
Oh Carrie, Carrie! Oh blind strivings of the human heart! Onward onward, it saith, and where beauty leads, there it follows. Whether it be the tinkle of a lone sheep bell o'er some quiet landscape, or the glimmer of beauty in sylvan places, or the show of soul in some passing eye, the heart knows and makes answer, following. It is when the feet weary and hope seems vain that the heartaches and the longing arises. Know, then, that for you it is neither surfeit nor content. In your rocking-chair, by your window dreaming, shall you long, alone. In your rocking chair, by your window, shall you dream such happiness as you may never feel.
To me this books speaks deeply:
I must always warn myself against such blind strivings of the human heart. Focus on what is important. Our longings will tell us we want something that we do not have, but the truth is there if we realize it...if we do not want, we will have everything. Happiness is a state of mind, not a circumstance . Anyway I could go on and on, but I'll spare you my soap box. :) Theodore Dreiser I listened to the Blackstone Audiobook which came out Nov 18, 2005. It is not registered here at GR. There are two versions of Theodore Dreiser's book. The original Doubleday Edition was published in 1900. This, the original, was in fact edited by his wife. It has 47 chapters. It was considered more easily accessible to the public; the harsh message of new American Naturalism softened. The Blackstone audiobook uses this version.
80 years later, the Pennsylvania Edition of the book came out. It restored what had been cut or altered in the original version. It has 50 chapters. It is considered harsher in tone.
Having not read the Pennsylvania Edition, I am unable to comment on that. What I can say is that the “Doubleday Edition” used by Blackstone is dark too. It takes a good hard look at human behavior. It is fully realistic. I think it magnificently portrays both human behavior and the reality of life in the 1890s of America as the nation moved from an agrarian existence toward urbanization.
The book focuses on three people: Carrie Meeber(actress), Charles Drouet(salesman) and George Hurstwood(familyman?,manager?). Three very different people. Each of these three is explored in depth. Their lives are intertwined, yet each chooses a different course to follow. Do we choose, or are we just unable to be other than ourselves? Life is hard for all three. This is a book that portrays reality. This book lies at the forefront of American Naturalism. Here is the gritty truth. For me each character was himself through and through, from start to finish. Wonderful character portrayal.
There is no humor. You don't need it in this book.
Magnificent dialog.
Do you like the works of Edward Hopper? You know you often look through a large window out into another world, be it a bar or a landscape or whatever. There is clarity to what you see. Sharp and clear and you watch. That is exactly how Dreiser's book affects me .....but through words.
The audiobook narration by C.M. Hebert was totally magnificent. Perfect in all ways - speed, tone, intonations. Feelings are expressed. A voice quavers, another is jolly. One has confidence. Each voice fit the character, the dialog, the words.
This book is not just about one woman and her determination to make her own life. It is also about what that demands. What are the consequences? How do we go after a goal with dignity? And Carrie is no more sure of herself than you or I. We are also given two others - Drouet and Hurstwood. I found them equally interesting! I really, really liked this book. Theodore Dreiser
A landmark in American literature, presented in its complete and unexpurgated version. Dreiser's unsparing story of a country girl's rise to riches as the mistress of a wealthy man marked the beginning of the naturalist movement in America. Both its subject matter and Dreiser's objective, nonmoralizing approach made it highly controversial, and only a heavily edited version could be published in 1900. In this restored version, the truly revolutionary nature of Sister Carrie is made fully evident. Sister Carrie
Free read Sister Carrie
Book Review
3 out of 5 stars to Sister Carrie, one of the greatest American novels of true realistic cum naturalistic tone, published in its final form in 1900 by Theodore Dreiser. Some of my favorite literature comes from this time period in American history. Writers took extreme liberties with creating the most realistic point of view and portrayal of characters who were living the American dream, or at least attempting to. All details were painfully described when it came to what was going on in their lives. It wasn't about how you brush your teeth from left to right, but it certainly came close. Feelings were clear. Words were prolific. It was less about the plot and drama, the shock and the surprise, but more about how people felt and interpreted all the actions around them. People wanted to know what was going on all over the city, the country and the world. Authors delivered. In this book, Carrie and her family, loved ones and friends, face all the experiences thrown at you when you become an adult. How you make decision. How you spend your day. It shows thru comparison and contrast what happened versus what could have happened. While I normally love this approach, this one was a tad bit dry for me. I enjoyed it thoroughly, but it was just a good book. I didn't feel connected to it as much as everyone else at the time. But if you want to know how things were during the 1870s - 1890s in American life, this book will show you.
About Me
For those new to me or my reviews... here's the scoop: I read A LOT. I write A LOT. And now I blog A LOT. First the book review goes on Goodreads, and then I send it on over to my WordPress blog at https://thisismytruthnow.com, where you'll also find TV & Film reviews, the revealing and introspective 365 Daily Challenge and lots of blogging about places I've visited all over the world. And you can find all my social media profiles to get the details on the who/what/when/where and my pictures. Leave a comment and let me know what you think. Vote in the poll and ratings. Thanks for stopping by. Theodore Dreiser Theodore Dreiser's Sister Carrie was the first real book I've ever read in English. I was 11, my mother just bought me a brand-spanking-new English dictionary, and my school librarians finally let me roam the section of the library where normally kids were not allowed to wreak havoc in on their own. Awed by the idea of a big book in a language I just started to somewhat understand, I reached for it, just missing the much more age-appropriate Treasure Island - but then why'd you think I'd ever want to follow rules?
Needless to say, the combination of Dreiser being way over my head, my limited English skills and only so much patience an 11-year-old would have with a dictionary, I soon enough started getting distracted by the afternoon episodes of Duck Tales, and therefore my memory of this book has long been just a bit fuzzy.
And so I read it again with a set of grown-up eyeballs, sans dictionary this time, armed with a few more gray hairs (all twenty of them) and a hint of a wrinkle.
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This book was quite scandalous for its times - vulgar, immoral, risqué. It was ready to shake up the moral standards of its time with the unacceptable storyline: a young poor provincial woman Carrie Meeber comes to Chicago, gets disillusioned with honest overworked poverty, and before you know it, shacks up with first one man, then another (a married one, at that), and far from being suitably punished for such an immoral approach to life becomes a successful celebrated actress rolling in riches. Sordid, indeed!
“When a girl leaves her home at eighteen, she does one of two things. Either she falls into saving hands and becomes better, or she rapidly assumes the cosmopolitan standard of virtue and becomes worse.”
It's the American Dream shown in all its dirty unattractiveness, nothing covered up by the gilded pretentiousness of class-correctness and faux piety, with the scathing understanding of the evils of desolate hopeless poverty. Dreiser does not hold back, casually telling it how it is, without any preachiness or squeamishness. Sordid, indeed!
“She knew that out in Chicago this very day the same factory chamber was full of poor homely-clad girls working in long lines at clattering machines; that at noon they would eat a miserable lunch in a half-hour; that Saturday they would gather, as they had when she was one of them, and accept the small pay for work a hundred times harder than she was now doing. Oh, it was so easy now! The world was so rosy and bright.”Dreiser does not cut his heroine any slack. There are no illusions about the personality of Carrie Meeber. She has no redeeming qualities of excessive piety, unearthly compassion, admirable selflessness, exceptional kindness, awe-inspiring talent. She instead is a moderately-talented, practical and a bit selfish young woman longing for the beauty of life which to her quite circumscribed middle-class mind consists of comfortable life in pretty clothes and beautiful apartment, surrounded by everything that glitters but is not necessarily gold. Dreiser's descriptions of her mind and ambitions are frequently quite scathing:
“Self-interest with her was high, but not strong. It was, nevertheless, her guiding characteristic.”And yet Carrie does not need idealization or overwrought characterization to feel so real and alive through the pages of Dreiser's novel. And, unlike her almost-contemporaries Anna Karenina, Edna Pontellier and Emma Bovary, Carrie does not pay the price of death for daring to live the life that does not conform to the pre-defined ideal; instead, she thrives - even if it in Dreiser's wistful vision does not live up to any high standards:
“And yet she was interested in her charms, quick to understand the keener pleasures of life, ambitious to gain in material things.”
“Her imagination trod a very narrow round, always winding up at points which concerned money, looks, clothes, or enjoyment.”
“Know, then, that for you is neither surfeit nor content. In your rocking-chair, by your window dreaming, shall you long, alone. In your rocking-chair, by your window, shall you dream such happiness as you may never feel.”A woman without much agency, drifting on the waves of life that happen to take her into the direction of richness and fame? This was an accusation flung at Carrie from time to time. But consider that Carrie was never expected to have any agency whatsoever, instead expected to fulfill her role in society either as a pretty decoration or a choiceless drudge - and her refusal to accept these choices to me spells out enough agency to cause many a frown on the critics' faces in the early 1900s.
Not an ideal woman? No, of course. But the rebellious, tenacious even if simple personality of Carrie Meeber just highlights the ridiculousness of the ideal itself (meek, docile, forever understanding, endlessly supportive, quietly content). She will paddle out no matter into which depths you throw her to drown, regardless of what means she has to use.
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Besides Carrie, it's not the pathetic figures of her suitors, Drouet and Hurstwood, that are at the center of the novel. No, it's the idea of a big city - Chicago and New York - in the world just shaking off the confines of small towns in the agricultural society, the allure of fast life, of industry, of loud sounds and bright colors and frenzy of crowds of people, all in the several square miles of the vortex of human life, so beckoning and yet so coldly cruel.
The city has its cunning wiles, no less than the infinitely smaller and more human tempter. There are large forces which allure with all the soulfulness of expression possible in the most cultured human. The gleam of a thousand lights is often as effective as the persuasive light in a wooing and fascinating eye. Half the undoing of the unsophisticated and natural mind is accomplished by forces wholly superhuman. A blare of sound, a roar of life, a vast array of human hives, appeal to the astonished senses in equivocal terms.The city beckons and seduces, but refuses to nurture those it attracts. Carrie is left on her own, to fend for herself, to make her way in life - or rather, to drift on the waves of the stubborn stream of life, busy paddling along and trying not to drown.
And so in Dreiser's description you can't help but feel both the alluring call and the warning caution of the fascinating world, still so new in those times, so fresh, so dangerous and so inevitable.
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There was something about this book from over a century ago that continued to speak to me through the years, to fascinate me, to make me think and feel and experience things it needed me to. And I loved it for all of that. 4 stars. Theodore Dreiser High school read. Recall it being extremely well-written albeit quite depressing - need to re-read! Theodore Dreiser
When a girl leaves her home at eighteen, she does one of two things. Either she falls into saving hands and becomes better, or she rapidly assumes the cosmopolitan standard of virtue and becomes worse.
That I prioritized 'Sister Carrie' over at least fifty other books high on the ever-expanding tbr list can be imputed to a matter of false advertising. The blurb hails Carrie as a modern woman in American fiction, a first of her kind (think Kate Chopin's The Awakening released just a year prior to this). A heroine who may have plummeted to the depths of social and moral ignominy and eventually died or killed herself, following the inexorably harsh laws governing 'fallen women' in literature, had she not achieved independent success in the end. And as a woman I am interested in categorizing male authors according to their handling of women characters. Sue me!
Yet contrary to what indicated by the deceptive title, the book features very little of the eponymous heroine's trajectory often deviating to chronicle the narrative arcs of her lovers who, by turns, unwittingly aid and thwart her. In fact this is as much about Carrie Meeber's rise to prominence as a Broadway actress as it is about Hurstwood's downward spiral into eventual vagrancy and death on the streets of New York - a slow and gradual process which makes for a terrifying, bone-chilling spectacle and, for a while, threatens to steal the limelight from Carrie's growth story in entirety.
In the sunshine of the morning, beneath the wide, blue heavens, with a fresh wind astir, what fears, except the most desperate, can find a harbourage? In the night, or the gloomy chambers of the day, fears and misgivings wax strong, but out in the sunlight there is, for a time, cessation even of the terror of death.
That a male author condemned a male character to a fate of complete but uneventful ruination while simultaneously elevating a woman to a position of significance in society is a literary feat worthy of applause. And yet something about this book leaves one unsatisfied, a little deceived, a little cheated, with a distinct feeling of 'isn't there more?'
She wanted pleasure, she wanted position, and yet she was confused as to what these things might be. Every hour the kaleidoscope of human affairs threw a new lustre upon something, and therewith it became for her the desired-the all.
Carrie never acts out of her own conviction in any goals, always, inevitably letting circumstances coerce her into action when all other avenues which allow her to maintain a glamorous, hassle-free existence have been exhausted. She lets desperation be her guide instead of some 'soul hunger' (yes I am still suffering from a Middlemarch hangover) or a conscious desire for personal liberty. She is also never proactive in pursuing love, only ever responding to the advances of those who express romantic interest. Carrie's awakening is shown to be in its initial stages, never attaining maturation. And this is why I can't help but prefer assertive Edna over dilly-dallying, uncertain, easily-swayed-by-another's-opinion Carrie.
The pitfalls of a lack of narrative focus and the structurally awkward, dry, doctor's-prescription-like prose notwithstanding, the novel has its redeeming facets. Dreiser's gift for character analysis is astonishing. With surgical precision he exposes the motivation at work behind every action and thought. As a consequence, the inner lives of all the characters are brilliantly replicated for the reader's benefit. In addition, the novel seems like a mild indictment of the fatal lure of the big city with its frenetically-paced industrial hubs, jam-packed shopping districts and flourishing neighborhoods, the deceptive grandeur with its promise of wealth and social relevance to the starry-eyed, penniless newcomer that remains only ever that - a promise. Not all women are as lucky as Carrie, pretty enough to attract the attentions of rich men, willing to fund her wardrobe and house her, and eventually the stage.
Ah, she was in the walled city now! Its splendid gates had opened, admitting her from a cold, dreary outside. She seemed a creature afar off-like every other celebrity he had known.
That Carrie was created by a male novelist in 1900 remains an impressive fact though. For that, I doff my hat..er...hairband to you, Mr Dreiser!
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P.S.:-From the desultory tone of my review and its utter lacklustreness you can probably infer how underwhelming I found the book. Theodore Dreiser I can't believe I am actually trying to read this again. This is an oft-flung book, which has fair aerodynamics and, the hardcover copy of which makes a satisfying thunk as it hits the wall. Theodore Dreiser