The Two Endings of Sister Carrie
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Stephen C. Brennen teaches in the Department of English at Tulane University. He has published one book, Irving Babbitt, as well as several articles on Theodore Dreiser, and he is currently working on a study of Dreiser's mythic imagination.
Notes
1. Donald Pizer, The Novels of Theodore Dreiser: A Critical Study (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota P0ress, 1976), p. 90.
2. Julian Markels, "Dreiser and the Plotting of Inarticulate Experience," MR, 2 (1961), 443, 446.
3. John C. Berkey, Alice M. Winters, and James L. W. West III, ed., Sister Carrie, by Theodore Dreiser (Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 1981), pp. 585, 532. For convenience, only this edition will be cited in comparing the two endings; its apparatus contains all relevant passages from the 1900 Doubleday, Page edition. Subsequent references will be parenthetical. Jug's role in writing and revising the novel is discussed on pp. 515-19, 583-85. For a discussion of the textual issues, see reviews by Donald Pizer in AL, 53 (1982), 731-37, and Richard Brodhead in YR, 7 (1982), 597-600.
4. Barbara Herrnstein Smith, Poetic Closure: A Study of How Poems End (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1968), p. 10. Smith deals explicitly with poetry but many of her general conclusions apply equally to novels.
5. Robert H. Elias, in Theodore Dreiser: Apostle of Nature, emended ed. (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1970), writes that "Carrie represents the boyhood Dreiser." She is "what Dreiser had been and now saw as sentimentally blind" (p. 109). See also Pizer, Novels, p. 66, and Ellen Moers, Two Dreisers (New York: Viking, 1969), pp. 118-23.
6. The fullest treatment of Dreiser and Spencer is by Christopher G. Katope, "Sister Carrie and Spencer's First Principles," AL, 41 (1969), 64-75.
7. See, for example, Sandy Petrey, "The Language of Realism, The Language of False Consciousness: A Reading of Sister Carrie," Novel, 10 (Winter, 1977), 101-13.
8. Ellen Moers, "The Finesse of Dreiser," ASch, 33 (Winter 1963-64), 109-14. See also Two Dreisers, pp. 145-52.
9. Theodore Dreiser, "Reflections," Ev'ry Month, 3 (March, 1897), 6.
10. Moers, Two Dreisers, pp. 106-07.
11. For a discussion of the climactic declaration of love that constitutes the "generative core" of nineteenth-century women's fiction, see Alfred Habegger, Gender, Fantasy, and Realism in American Literature (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1982), pp. 17-18. In its original form, Sister Carrie follows the pattern Habegger finds in this kind of fiction, for it tells the story "of girlhood probation under specially trying circumstances, the prize at the end being . . . the perfect man." In fact, one of the notes for Dreiser's epilogue says that Ames must not be a "matrimonial possibility" for Carrie, verifying that he originally was such a possibility (see the Pennsylvania edition, p. 516).
12. Lawrence E. Hussman, Jr., Dreiser and His Fiction: A Twentieth-Century Quest (Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 1983), pp. 26-27; Smith, p. 36. Hussman locates Ames's inconsistencies in his urging Carrie to serve others by pursuing an acting career that will continue to enrich her. A more serious question is whether Dreiser has fully prepared readers to accept a "perfect" Carrie or needed to lay a firmer basis for her emergence of consciousness in the chapters leading up to her last meeting with Ames.
13. Hussman, pp. 11-12, 30-32; Stephen C. Brennan, "Sister Carrie and the Tolstoyan Artist," RS, 47 (March, 1979), 1-16.
14. Theodore Dreiser, The "Genius" (New York: Horace Liveright, 1923), p. 65. Hereafter cited parenthetically.
15. W. A. Swanberg, Dreiser (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1965), p. 48.
16. Quoted from Vera Dreiser, My Uncle Theodore (New York: Nash Publishing, 1976), p. 113.
17. Swanberg, p. 79.
18. Asserting that "there was nothing responsive" between Carrie and Ames (p. 647), Dreiser in his revised penultimate chapter relied only on the water imagery he had previously employed to suggest his characters' drifting among forces: "The effect of this [Ames's advice] was like roiling helpless waters" (p. 651). Carrie and Ames still respond to music, but only to...
