Sister Carrie

Sister Carrie

by

Theodore Dreiser

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Wealth and Class Theme Analysis

Themes and Colors
Urban Life and Decay Theme Icon
Morality and Instinct Theme Icon
Wealth and Class Theme Icon
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Wealth and Class Theme Icon

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 Carrie that contrary to what she had thought, wealth does not necessarily define one’s class—displays of wealth can, ironically, create the perception that one is of a lower class.

Carrie becomes aware of wealth and class as soon as she boards the train to Chicago. However, she only perceives an oversimplified binary: rich and poor. The first relatively wealthy person Carrie meets is Drouet, on the train to the city. Carrie immediately noticed Drouet’s rich dress: “His suit was of a striped and crossed pattern of brown wool, new at the time […] He was […] attractive, and whatever he had to recommend him, you may be sure was not lost upon Carrie.” As a result, Carrie also becomes “conscious of an inequality” between the way she and Drouet dress: “Her own plain blue dress, with its black cotton trimmings, now seemed to her shabby. She felt the worn state of her shoes.” In this first encounter, Carrie distinguishes only between rich and poor: Drouet is rich while she is poor. Readers can see that Carrie’s rudimentary discernment of wealth continues throughout her first days in Chicago, through her experiences while job searching. While walking in the wholesale district, Carrie notices, “with a touch at the heart, the fine ladies who elbowed and ignored her, brushing past in utter disregard of her presence, themselves eagerly enlisted in the materials which the store contained.” Here, Carrie only perceives that she notices these ladies while they hold her “in utter disregard,” as her plain dress makes her seem poor and obscure, undeserving of notice; she has nothing while these ladies wear the glamorous merchandise of the department stores. In this way, Carrie again sees only in terms of rich and poor.

Carrie begins to notice that there are gradations in wealth when she meets Hurstwood, Mrs. Hale, and Mrs. Vance. Upon meeting Hurstwood, Carrie immediately notices that he is well dressed and notices the difference between Hurstwood’s dress and Drouet’s: “Hurstwood’s shoes were of soft, black calf, polished only to a dull shine. Drouet wore patent leather, but Carrie could not help feeling that there was a distinction in favour of the soft leather, where all else was so rich.” For the first time, Carrie notices a difference among the wealthy. While Drouet is rich compared to, say, Carrie’s sister Minnie, Hurstwood, in his more distinguished-looking shoes, appears wealthier than Drouet. Initially, Carrie is relatively satisfied with the living quarters Drouet rents for her. Indeed, compared to her sister’s apartment, the place is quite nice. However, after going on a drive to an especially rich neighborhood with Mrs. Hale, Carrie perceives the “comparative insignificance” of her rooms next to magnificent houses she saw earlier, with their “richly carved entrance-ways, where the globed and crystalled lamps shone upon panelled doors set with stained and designed panes of glass.” After all, her apartment is “but three small rooms in a moderately well-furnished boarding house.”

Carrie begins to notice that next to the poor, there is the wealthy, but there is also the wealthier. She no longer thinks in terms of the simple distinction between rich and poor: “She was not contrasting [her rooms] now with what she had had, but what she had so recently seen,” understanding that there are distinct levels of wealth among the rich. When Carrie and Hurstwood first move to New York, the two live in a building for relatively wealthy people. Here, Carrie meets Mrs. Vance, a wealthy young woman who lives in the adjacent apartment. With Mrs. Vance, Carrie experiences for herself the wealth disparity among the rich. Carrie, Mrs. Vance, Mr. Vance, and Ames dine at a glamorous restaurant called Sherry’s. Previously, only the newspapers “had given [Carrie] a distinct idea of the gorgeousness and luxury of this wonderful temple of gastronomy.” Experiencing Sherry’s firsthand leads Carrie to remember the time “she sat with Drouet in a good restaurant in Chicago.” The difference between her scant meals at her sister’s home and her meal with Drouet is big, but as is the difference between her nice meal with Drouet and her extravagant meal with Mrs. Vance. This marks Carrie’s full realization of the vastness of the spectrum of wealth.

Carrie’s socioeconomic education continues when she learns from Ames that shows of wealth and class do not share a purely positive correlation. Indeed, excessive shows of wealth can seem garish and, thus, of a lower class. Rather, what seems to elevate a person’s class, at least according to Ames, is a keen appreciation for art. At one point during the dinner at Sherry’s, Ames makes a remark to Carrie that takes her “by the faintest touch of surprise”: “I sometimes think it is a shame for people to spend so much money this way […] they pay so much more than these things are worth. They put on so much show.” Carrie, feeling that Ames’s mind is “better” than hers, takes these words into consideration. She begins to learn that brute wealth is not all that makes a person distinguished, and that spending excessive money is too ostentatious and borders on vulgarity. While attending the theater along with the Vances, Ames “mentioned things in the play which [Carrie] most approved of—things which swayed her deeply.” After Ames mentions that he thinks art and “the theatre a great thing,” Carrie develops a desire to be on stage, not out a desire to be wealthier, but out of a desire to be an artist that “such men as he would approve of her.” While Carrie’s understanding of wealth and class changes as she flits from city to city and one social circle to the next, she ultimately desires not simply to be wealthier, but also of a higher class, so that she can walk in the same circles as intellectuals like Ames.

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Wealth and Class Quotes in Sister Carrie

Below you will find the important quotes in Sister Carrie related to the theme of Wealth and Class.
Chapter 3 Quotes

Not only did Carrie feel the drag of desire for all which was new and pleasing in apparel for women, but she noticed too, with a touch at the heart, the fine ladies who elbowed and ignored her, brushing past in utter disregard of her presence, themselves eagerly enlisted in the materials which the store contained.

Related Characters: Caroline “Carrie” Meeber
Related Symbols: The City
Page Number: 16
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 4 Quotes

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.

Related Characters: Caroline “Carrie” Meeber, Charles H. Drouet
Related Symbols: The City
Page Number: 29
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 6 Quotes

On the first morning it rained [Carrie] found that she had no umbrella. Minnie loaned her one of hers, which was worn and faded. There was the kind of vanity in Carrie that troubled at this. She went to one of the great department stores and bought herself one, using a dollar and a quarter of her small store to pay for it.

“What did you do that for, Carrie?” asked Minnie, when she saw it.

“Oh, I need one,” said Carrie.

“You foolish girl.”

Carrie resented this, though she did not reply. She was not going to be a common shop-girl, she thought; they need not think it, either.

Related Characters: Caroline “Carrie” Meeber (speaker), Minnie Hanson (speaker)
Related Literary Devices:
Page Number: 39
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 8 Quotes

“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!”

Related Characters: Minnie Hanson (speaker), Sven Hanson (speaker), Caroline “Carrie” Meeber
Related Symbols: The City
Page Number: 54
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 10 Quotes

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.

Related Characters: Caroline “Carrie” Meeber
Page Number: 65-66
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 11 Quotes

[…] Carrie was naturally imitative. She began to get the hang of those little things which the pretty woman who has vanity invariably adopts. In short, her knowledge of grace doubled, and with it her appearance changed. She became a girl of considerable taste.

Related Characters: Caroline “Carrie” Meeber
Page Number: 74
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 14 Quotes

[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.

Related Characters: Caroline “Carrie” Meeber, George W. Hurstwood, Charles H. Drouet
Page Number: 95
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 18 Quotes

[Hurstwood] was evidently a light among them, reflecting in his personality the ambitions of those who greeted him. He was acknowledged, fawned upon, in a way lionised. Through it all one could see the standing of the man. It was greatness in a way, small as it was.

Related Characters: George W. Hurstwood
Page Number: 124
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 20 Quotes

[Carrie] felt Hurstwood’s passion as a delightful background to her own achievement, and she wondered what he would have to say […] She was now experiencing the first shades of feeling of that subtle change which removes one out of the ranks of the suppliants into the lines of the dispensers of charity.

Related Characters: Caroline “Carrie” Meeber, George W. Hurstwood
Page Number: 137
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 26 Quotes

Anyhow, there was one change for the better. She knew that she had improved in appearance. Her manner had vastly changed. Her clothes were becoming, and men—well-dressed men, some of the kind who before had gazed at her indifferently from behind their polished railings and imposing office partitions—now gazed into her face with a soft light in their eyes.

Related Characters: Caroline “Carrie” Meeber
Page Number: 171
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 29 Quotes

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.

Related Characters: Caroline “Carrie” Meeber, George W. Hurstwood
Related Literary Devices:
Page Number: 196
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 30 Quotes

Whatever a man like Hurstwood could be in Chicago, it is very evident that he would be but an inconspicuous drop in an ocean like New York. In Chicago, whose population still ranged about 500,000, millionaires were not numerous. The rich had not become so conspicuously rich as to drown all moderate incomes in obscurity. […] In Chicago the two roads to distinction were politics and trade. In New York the roads were any one of a half-hundred, and each had been diligently pursued by hundreds, so that celebrities were numerous. The sea was already full of whales. A common fish must needs disappear wholly from view—remain unseen. In other words, Hurstwood was nothing.

Related Characters: George W. Hurstwood
Related Symbols: The City
Page Number: 204
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 31 Quotes

[Carrie] could not, for the life of her, assume the attitude and smartness of Mrs. Vance, who, in her beauty, was all assurance. She could only imagine that it must be evident to many that she was the less handsomely dressed of the two. It cut her to the quick, and she resolved that she would not come here again until she looked better. At the same time she longed to feel the delight of parading here as an equal. Ah, then she would be happy!

Related Characters: Caroline “Carrie” Meeber, Mrs. Vance
Related Symbols: The City
Page Number: 217
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 32 Quotes

In all Carrie’s experience she had never seen anything like [Sherry’s]. In the whole time she had been in New York Hurstwood’s modified state had not permitted his bringing her to such a place. There was an almost indescribable atmosphere about it which convinced the newcomer that this was the proper thing. Here was the place where the matter of expense limited the patrons to the moneyed or pleasure- loving class.

Related Characters: Caroline “Carrie” Meeber, George W. Hurstwood
Related Symbols: The City
Page Number: 223
Explanation and Analysis:

[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.

Related Characters: Caroline “Carrie” Meeber, Robert Ames
Page Number: 225-226
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 39 Quotes

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.

Related Characters: Caroline “Carrie” Meeber, George W. Hurstwood
Related Symbols: The City
Page Number: 271
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 42 Quotes

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.

Related Characters: Caroline “Carrie” Meeber, Lola Osborne
Related Symbols: The City, The Stage
Related Literary Devices:
Page Number: 300
Explanation and Analysis:

[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.

Related Characters: Caroline “Carrie” Meeber
Page Number: 300-301
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 47 Quotes

It seemed as if he thought a while, for now [Hurstwood] arose and turned the gas out, standing calmly in the blackness, hidden from view. After a few moments, in which he reviewed nothing, but merely hesitated, he turned the gas on again, but applied no match. Even then he stood there, hidden wholly in that kindness which is night, while the uprising fumes filled the room. When the odour reached his nostrils, he quit his attitude and fumbled for the bed.

“What’s the use?” he said, weakly, as he stretched himself to rest.

Related Characters: George W. Hurstwood (speaker)
Page Number: 350
Explanation and Analysis:

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.

Related Characters: Caroline “Carrie” Meeber
Related Symbols: The City
Page Number: 352
Explanation and Analysis: