Clementine Classics: Sister Carrie by Theodore Dreiser. Theodore Dreiser

surprisingly, I found myself astounded by Victorian culture and couldn’t help but compare it to the hedgehog world. As a species, we may defecate in public and be prone to mites, but goddamn, are we more socially advanced. Sister Carrie is a clusterfuck of repressed desires, bougie decadence, casual racism, and patriarchal tyranny. That shit just wouldn’t fly within the hedgehog community. We’ve simply evolved past that, and you humans are practically barbaric in comparison.

      And the writing. I consider myself an educated rodent—hell, I can quote Foster Wallace in my sleep—so when I come across paragraphs clogged with sentences that are so fucking flowery they give me dander allergies, of course I’m going to lose my shit. Theodore Dreiser wasn’t exactly respected among his peers for his writing prowess. In fact, a renowned British publisher once claimed his prose had a “slovenly, turgid style.” And that’s being generous. Some of his paragraphs could put a tweaking meth head to sleep. A fun drinking game: down a shot every time Dreiser uses the word “halcyon.”

      Sister Carrie came out around the same time as acclaimed English novels like Middlemarch, Great Expectations, and Heart of Darkness. Dreiser wanted to write the next great American novel, and his desperation pervades the book like an unsavory pit stain. The novel may center on a simple girl from the Midwest, but he tries to infuse every fiber of the story with seemingly deep, transcending wisdom. That shit doesn’t work when your heroine is the Victorian equivalent of a Kardashian.

      You’re probably wondering why I even bothered finishing the damn thing. True, the writing made my quills itch, but the story itself was fucking compelling. Who doesn’t love a good underdog? The pacing could’ve used some speeding up, but I couldn’t deny that I was rooting for Sister Carrie to channel her inner bitch and take charge. I definitely suffered from a couple of rage blackouts while reading, but what can I say? I get emotionally invested in books, and I’ll throw Dreiser a bone for getting me sucked into this trainwreck.

Chapter 1

       THE MAGNET ATTRACTING—A WAIF AMID FORCES

      When Caroline Meeber boarded the afternoon train for Chicago, her total outfit consisted of a small trunk, a cheap imitation alligator-skin satchel, a small lunch in a paper box, and a yellow leather snap purse, containing her ticket, a scrap of paper with her sister’s address in Van Buren Street, and four dollars in money. It was in August, 1889. She was eighteen years of age, bright, timid, and full of the illusions of ignorance and youth. Whatever touch of regret at parting characterized her thoughts, it was certainly not for advantages now being given up. A gush of tears at her mother’s farewell kiss, a touch in her throat when the cars clacked by the flour mill where her father worked by the day, a pathetic sigh as the familiar green environs of the village passed in review, and the threads which bound her so lightly to girlhood and home were irretrievably broken.

      To be sure there was always the next station, where one might descend and return. There was the great city, bound more closely by these very trains which came up daily. Columbia City was not so very far away, even once she was in Chicago. What, pray, is a few hours—a few hundred miles? She looked at the little slip bearing her sister’s address and wondered. She gazed at the green landscape, now passing in swift review, until her swifter thoughts replaced its impression with vague conjectures of what Chicago might be. Everything I know about Chicago is based on the musical/movie, Chicago. So I’m guessing this book will feature a bunch of flat-chested broads, murder, and Queen Latifah.

      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. Give me the “cosmopolitan standard of virtue” over “saving hands” any fucking day. I’m assuming by “cosmopolitan,” Dreiser is referring to the woman’s magazine, so in that case: multiple orgasms for all! Of an intermediate balance, under the circumstances, there is no possibility. 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. Without a counsellor at hand to whisper cautious interpretations, what falsehoods may not these things breathe into the unguarded ear! Unrecognized for what they are, their beauty, like music, too often relaxes, then weakens, then perverts the simpler human perceptions.

      Caroline, or Sister Carrie, as she had been half affectionately termed by the family, was possessed of a mind rudimentary in its power of observation and analysis. Any family that “half affectionately” gives you a spinster nickname is busting your balls. And I thought I had it bad being named after a pygmy mandarin orange. Self-interest with her was high, but not strong. It was, nevertheless, her guiding characteristic. Warm with the fancies of youth, pretty with the insipid prettiness of the formative period, possessed of a figure promising eventual shapeliness and an eye alight with certain native intelligence, she was a fair example of the middle American class—two generations removed from the emigrant. You heard it here first: Theodore Dreiser thinks young, pretty, middle-class gals are too stupid to read. Books were beyond her interest—knowledge a sealed book. In the intuitive graces she was still crude. She could scarcely toss her head gracefully. Her hands were almost ineffectual. The feet, though small, were set flatly. Unrelated fact: Dreiser had a serious Lolita fetish. Especially if they were his cousins. And yet she was interested in her charms, quick to understand the keener pleasures of life, ambitious to gain in material things. A half-equipped little knight she was, venturing to reconnoiter the mysterious city and dreaming wild dreams of some vague, far-off supremacy, which should make it prey and subject—the proper penitent, grovelling at a woman’s slipper.

      “That,” said a voice in her ear, “is one of the prettiest little resorts in Wisconsin.” “Is it?” she answered nervously.

      The train was just pulling out of Waukesha. For some time she had been conscious of a man behind. She felt him observing her mass of hair. Human courtship is pathetically similar to hedgehog breeding. First sign of attraction? Male responding to female’s quills. He had been fidgeting, and with natural intuition she felt a certain interest growing in that quarter. Her maidenly reserve, and a certain sense of what was conventional under the circumstances, called her to forestall and deny this familiarity, but the daring and magnetism of the individual, born of past experiences and triumphs, prevailed. She answered.

      He leaned forward to put his elbows upon the back of her seat and proceeded to make himself volubly agreeable. Second sign? Male lowering his quills in a casual manner.

      “Yes, that is a great resort for Chicago people. The hotels are swell. You are not familiar with this part of the country, are you?”

      “Oh, yes, I am,” answered Carrie. “That is, I live at Columbia City. I have never been through here, though.”

      “And so this is your first visit to Chicago,” he observed.

      All the time she was conscious of certain features out of the side of her eye. Flush, colorful cheeks, a light mustache, a gray fedora hat. She now turned and looked upon him in full, the instincts of self-protection and coquetry mingling confusedly in her brain. Final sign? Female starts to freak the fuck out and tries to get the hell out of there.

      “I didn’t say that,” she said.

      “Oh,” he answered, in a very pleasing way and with an assumed air of mistake, “I thought you did.”

      Here was a type of the travelling canvasser for a manufacturing house—a class which at that time was first being dubbed by the slang of the day “drummers.” He came within the meaning of a still newer term, which had sprung into general use among Americans in 1880, and which concisely expressed the thought of one whose dress or