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 a result of instinctual decisions that might be considered morally questionable. For Dreiser, instinct is neither morally good nor bad—it simply exists and wields considerable influence over human life. And because Carrie manages to climb the ranks by following her own instincts and desires rather that adhering to society’s rigid moral code, Dreiser also subverts the Victorian idea that life rewards people for morally upstanding behavior.
According to the society that she lives in, Carrie’s behavior is thoroughly immoral. Although she starts out with pure intentions, traveling to the city in hopes of finding honest work, she quickly feels unsatisfied with the low pay and slow grind of hard labor and instead chooses to become a kept woman. By the standards of turn-of-the-century America, such a decision stamps Carrie as a moral failure. Minnie’s reaction to Carrie’s departure reveals as much: suspecting that Carrie has become dependent on a man for financial support, Minnie remarks to her husband Hanson that Carrie “doesn’t know what she has done […] poor Sister Carrie!” Minnie then has a nightmare in which Carrie is drifting out of her reach and feels “more inexpressibly sad than she had ever been in life.” From Minnie’s reaction, readers can gather that Carrie’s becoming a kept woman morally reprehensible by society’s standards. Later, Drouet, out of a sense of propriety, introduces Carrie to Hurstwood as his wife, further suggesting that having a mistress is not kindly looked upon by proper society. And when Carrie decides to leave Drouet for Hurstwood, she insists that Hurstwood marry her, demonstrating her understanding that being a mistress is an undesirable and shameful thing, and that respectable society does not consider extramarital relations morally acceptable.
However, Dreiser does not frame Carrie’s actions as either morally acceptable or morally inacceptable; rather, he frames them as the consequence of Carrie following her own instincts and desires. According to Dreiser, people are always torn between reason and instinct: “[Humans are] becoming too wise to hearken always to instincts and desires; he is still too weak to always prevail against them.” Carrie is generally a follower of instinct: “In Carrie—as in how many of our worldlings do they not?—instinct and reason, desire and understanding, were at war for the mastery. She followed whither her craving led. She was as yet more drawn than she drew.” Though initially torn by Drouet’s offer, Carrie finds the promise of financial stability and modest material wealth is too compelling to abandon. Similarly, though unwilling to be ungrateful to Drouet, Carrie finds Hurstwood’s passion and suave demeanor irresistible, and her instinct prevails.
Dreiser is careful to sidestep the dichotomy of good and evil that Victorian authors often subscribe to. He never declares Carrie’s actions to be evil: though society may find her behavior morally reprehensible, Dreiser never claims that this judgment is warranted. In fact, Dreiser appears understanding of the urge to follow one’s instincts. At one point, he likens humans to “a wisp in the wind, moved by every breath of passion, acting now by his will and now by his instincts,” suggesting that though reason is present in humans’ lives, instinct renders people defenseless “wisp[s].” Considering this lack of defense, it is difficult to attribute genuine evildoing to Carrie. It is not that good and evil do not exist, but that it is irrelevant to Carrie if she can only succumb to her instinct.
Even though Carrie’s behavior is morally reprehensible by societal standards, Dreiser allows her to go unpunished. Indeed, in a certain sense, she is even rewarded for her moral missteps. Where the typical Victorian author might throw Carrie on the streets and leave her to die in the gutter, Dreiser allows her to climb to the height of high society, accruing wealth, fame, and hordes of adoring suitors. Carrie lives in utter luxury: “[…] she enjoyed the luxuries which money could buy. For her the doors of fine places seemed to open quite without asking […] Men sent flowers, love notes, offers of fortune. And still her dreams ran riot.” In the socioeconomic sense, Carrie is rewarded. Through Carrie’s socioeconomic success, Dreiser demonstrates that there is no correlation between moral failure and socioeconomic failure. Following instinct may lead people to moral failure; however, moral failure does not always lead to reward or punishment, save for perhaps the fleeting experience of a guilty conscience. To Dreiser, life is much more indiscriminate than Victorian moralists would like to admit. Through Sister Carrie, he seems to suggest that authors should write narratives that neither reward nor punish characters based on moral rectitude. Instead, writers should depict life as it is: a struggle between reason and instinct that generates an unpredictable array of outcomes.
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Morality and Instinct Quotes in Sister Carrie
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. Of an intermediate balance, under the circumstances, there is no possibility.
As Carrie listened to this and much more of similar familiar badinage among the men and girls, she instinctively withdrew into herself. She was not used to this type, and felt that there was something hard and low about it all. She feared that the young boys about would address such remarks to her—boys who, beside Drouet, seemed uncouth and ridiculous.
To [Carrie], and indeed to all the world, [Drouet] was a nice, good-hearted man. There was nothing evil in the fellow. He gave her the money out of a good heart—out of a realisation of her want. He would not have given the same amount to a poor young man, but we must not forget that a poor young man could not, in the nature of things, have appealed to him like a poor young girl. Femininity affected his feelings. He was the creature of an inborn desire.
“Where do you suppose she’s gone to?” said Minnie, thoroughly aroused.
“I don't know,” a touch of cynicism lighting his eye. “Now she has gone and done it.”
Minnie moved her head in a puzzled way.
“Oh, oh,” she said, “she doesn't know what she has done.”
“Well,” said Hanson, after a while, sticking his hands out before him, “what can you do?”
Minnie’s womanly nature was higher than this. She figured the possibilities in such cases.
“Oh,” she said at last, “poor Sister Carrie!”
Here, then, was Carrie, established in a pleasant fashion, free of certain difficulties which most ominously confronted her, laden with many new ones which were of a mental order, and altogether so turned about in all of her earthly relationships that she might well have been a new and different individual. She looked into her glass and saw a prettier Carrie than she had seen before; she looked into her mind, a mirror prepared of her own and the world’s opinions, and saw a worse. Between these two images she wavered, hesitating which to believe.
[Drouet] was simply letting things drift because he preferred the free round of his present state to any legal trammellings. In contrast, Hurstwood appeared strong and sincere. He had no easy manner of putting her off. He sympathised with her and showed her what her true value was. He needed her, while Drouet did not care.
The manager was no fool to be led blindly away by such an errant proposition as this, but his situation was peculiar. Wine was in his veins. It had crept up into his head and given him a warm view of the situation. It also coloured the possibilities of ten thousand for him. He could see great opportunities with that. He could get Carrie.
The progress of the train was having a great deal to do with the solution of this difficult situation. The speeding wheels and disappearing country put Chicago farther and farther behind. Carrie could feel that she was being borne a long distance off—that the engine was making an almost through run to some distant city. She felt at times as if she could cry out and make such a row that some one would come to her aid; at other times it seemed an almost useless thing—so far was she from any aid, no matter what she did. All the while Hurstwood was endeavouring to formulate his plea in such a way that it would strike home and bring her into sympathy with him.
This man, to whose bosom she was being pressed, was strong; he was passionate, he loved her, and she was alone. If she did not turn to him—accept of his love—where else might she go? Her resistance half dissolved in the flood of his strong feeling.
[Carrie] felt as if she would like to be agreeable to [Ames], and also there came with it, or perhaps preceded it, the slightest shade of a feeling that he was better educated than she was—that his mind was better. He seemed to look it, and the saving grace in Carrie was that she could understand that people could be wiser.
That night he felt a cold coming on and took quinine. He was feverish until morning, and sat about the next day while Carrie waited on him. He was a helpless creature in sickness, not very handsome in a dull-coloured bath gown and his hair uncombed. He looked haggard about the eyes and quite old. Carrie noticed this, and it did not appeal to her. She wanted to be good-natured and sympathetic, but something about the man held her aloof.
Her need of clothes—to say nothing of her desire for ornaments— grew rapidly as the fact developed that for all her work she was not to have them. The sympathy she felt for Hurstwood, at the time he asked her to tide him over, vanished with these newer urgings of decency. He was not always renewing his request, but this love of good appearance was. It insisted, and Carrie wished to satisfy it, wished more and more that Hurstwood was not in the way.
Carrie’s little soldier friend. Miss Osborne, seeing her succeeding, had become a sort of satellite. Little Osborne could never of herself amount to anything. She seemed to realise it in a sort of pussy-like way and instinctively concluded to cling with her soft little claws to Carrie.
[Carrie] had learned that men could change and fail. Flattery in its most palpable form had lost its force with her. It required superiority—kindly superiority—to move her—the superiority of a genius like Ames.
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 longings arise. 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.
