Sister Carrie employs many techniques to show the shifting attitude of the characters towards their stations in life. Because money is a sensitive subject for people in general, the use of it as a literary device is wise and heartbreaking.
The Morals of Money
The first page of Sister Carrie sets up the connection between money and morality that is to run throughout the book. The first sentence of the text begins, “When Caroline Meeber boarded the afternoon train for Chicago, her total outfit consisted of a small trunk….and four dollars in money.”
Then two paragraphs below that, “When a girl leaves home at eighteen, she does one of two things. Either she falls into saving hands and becomes better, or she rapidly assumes the cosmopolitan standards of virtue and becomes worse.”
Cost of Living in Dreiser
When Carrie arrives at her sister’s apartment in Chicago, she is at once struck by the shabby economy of her sister’s life. The four dollars she had in her possession mean nothing to Carrie before she gets off the train, because she has little sense of how much her cost of living will be in the big city.
Her sister expects her to find a job for a least five dollars a week to help cover her room and board, but after one long, hard day searching for work and being coolly rejected, Carrie receives an offer of work for four-fifty a week. This shows Carrie’s disillusionment—on this salary, she will not be going to restaurants or theaters, or out for any kind of fun. Four-fifty a week meant painstaking toil with little reward.
A Full Wallet, A New Outlook
Carrie’s situation is gloomy until she runs into Drouet and he offers to take her under his wing. The first thing he does is give her twenty dollars to buy a new hat—this represents a change in Carrie’s attitude and a hint of a soon to come change in her circumstances.
Sister Carrie lives With Drouet
Soon Carrie moves in with Drouet, leaving the discomfort of her sister’s life behind. Her circumstances become pleasant, if not lavish, and for a while she sails along wanting for little. The next change in her life comes when Hurstwood, who is wealthier and more impressive than Drouet, seduces her. (195).
Betrayal in Sister Carrie
Once Carrie discovers that Hurstwood is married, she is ashamed and considers leaving Drouet out of anger masking her shame at being caught flirting with the other man. Drouet calms Carrie’s anger by appealing to her pragmatic sensibility. “Don’t go and try to knock around now without any money. Let me help you” (221).
Declining Status in Sister Carrie
The beginning of the end of Sister Carrie comes when Hurstwood, desperate to escape his wife and to have Carrie, steals $10,000 and tricks Carrie into believing Drouet is in the hospital in order to get her on a train the Canada. One of Hurstwood’s most defining characteristics up to this stage was his pride and personal dignity. Stealing the money is his first major lapse in ethical behavior, and represents a downward shift away from dignity and toward desperation. Hurstwood and Carrie move to New York. He is forced to work in a cheap saloon, and he and Carrie have to rent a small flat and limit their expenses.
Material Envy
The rest of the book is a downhill slope for Hurstwood, and for Carrie until the very end when she leaves him and becomes an actor. From the time they arrive in New York, every mention of money is a clue of their declining situation. After a while Hurstwood realizes that he is going to lose his job, and for the first time is forced to admit to Carrie that they don’t have enough money. “I’ve been thinking that if we take a smaller flat and live economically for a year…then we could arrange to live as you want to”(320). This sentence from Hurstwood’s mouth sounds to Carrie, and to the reader, like a scary soundtrack coming in to warm of danger.
“It would suit me all right,” said Carrie, who nevertheless, felt badly to think it had come to this. Talk of a smaller flat sounded like poverty”(320).
A Morality Tale
Time passes; Hurstwood loses his job and fails to find another one, and eventually fails to try. He asks Carrie, “Do you think we live as cheaply as we might?” on page 341, and then starts volunteering to handle all the household chores himself to better save money. At this point the writing is on the wall, and the book becomes more and more disturbing—the last hundred and fifty pages are read with a feeling of impending doom for Hurstwood.
Carrie’s eventual turn to wealth as a Broadway actor comes too late to mark a change in the novel’s tone, and the final image of Carrie sitting alone depressed in a hotel room comes as no surprise, nor does the final narrative overture about how happiness cannot be bought. The theme of people misunderstanding the power of money begins on the first page and carries through to the last.
Dreiser, Theodore. Sister Carrie. New York: Penguin Putnam, 1961.
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