Urban Life and Decay
At its core, Sister Carrie details a young girl’s transition from provincial to city life. Caroline “Carrie” Meeber moves from rural Columbia City, Wisconsin, to Chicago and then to New York. Each move shows Carrie the complexities of living in a larger, more urban sphere. With each of these transitions, Carrie is eager to adapt and conform to her new environment, and, consequently, grows increasingly sophisticated as she moves from one cosmopolitan city to another…
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Morality and Instinct
In Sister Carrie, Dreiser objectively relates the narrative without pronouncing judgment on his characters. Carrie often internally wars over whether to follow conventional moral standards or her instinctual desires, and she almost always succumbs to the latter. Where a typical Victorian novel might render Carrie’s narrative as that of a woman falling from grace and being shunned by society, Dreiser portrays Carrie as a woman who rises to the upper echelons of society as…
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Wealth and Class
Over the course of Sister Carrie, Carrie comes to learn the complexities of wealth and class. Towards the beginning of the novel, Carrie only perceives that she, a jobless young woman, is poor, while Drouet, a businessman, is rich. After meeting an assortment of characters from different social backgrounds—including Hurstwood, Mrs. Hale, and Mrs. Vance—Carrie learns that the spectrum of wealth is exceedingly wide. At the same time, Ames shows…
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