Inspired by Sister Carrie

The 1950s are regarded as the golden age of melodrama in American cinema, a time when such legendary directors as Douglas Sirk and Vincente Minnelli produced some of their best work. In 1952 William Wyler released his superb Carrie, an adaptation of Theodore Dreiser’s novel of urban plight, and it resonated strongly with contemporary moviegoers.

Carrie stars Laurence Olivier as Hurstwood, Jennifer Jones as Carrie, and Eddie Albert as Drouet. Even though Dreiser named his novel after its female protagonist, critics have always found the author’s rendering of Hurstwood’s tragic downfall the most masterful portion of the book. The same sentiment has been expressed regarding Olivier’s brilliant, show-stealing performance as the disgraced restaurant owner; he portrays Hurstwood’s deep loneliness with grace and subtlety, his sad eyes and desolate expression reflecting his pain and despair. As Carrie, Jones gives a multifaceted performance that only gets better as the movie progresses. Jones shows vulnerability as well as hardness, revealing the emotional development Carrie undergoes during her difficulties and subsequent swift rise. Albert turns in a brilliant performance as Drouet, conveying the fundamental irresponsibility of the man while keeping him, despite his machinations, charming, friendly, and even likable. Miriam Hopkins is also excellent as the shrewish Julie Hurstwood. Carrie capably recreates the atmosphere of the growing cities of Chicago and New York at the turn of the twentieth century. Wyler’s direction is quiet and fluid, allowing the stories and characters to speak for themselves. The film earned Oscar nominations for art direction and costume design.

For Carrie, Wyler teamed with screenwriters Ruth Goetz and Augustus Goetz. The trio had earlier created an outstanding adaptation of Henry James’s novel Washington Square entitled The Heiress (1949), starring Olivia de Havilland in the title role and Montgomery Clift as her penniless suitor. Carrie was Wyler’s fourth effort at bringing a classic novel to life. In 1936 he had adapted Dodsworth, based on the novel by Dreiser’s fellow naturalist Sinclair Lewis, and in 1939 his famed version of Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights appeared, starring Olivier as the doomed Heathcliff opposite Merle Oberon’s Cathy.

The year before Carrie hit the theaters, George Stevens premiered his successful adaptation of a Dreiser novel with the celebrated A Place in the Sun (1951), based on An American Tragedy (1925); it featured superstars Clift and Elizabeth Taylor. Director Josef von Sternberg had made the first film version of An American Tragedy in 1931.

Comments and Questions

In this section, we aim to provide the reader with an array of perspectives on the text, as well as questions that challenge those perspectives. The commentary has been culled from sources as diverse as reviews contemporaneous with the work, letters written by the author, literary criticism of later generations, and appreciations written throughout the work’s history. Following the commentary, a series of questions seeks to filter Sister Carrie through a variety of points of view and bring about a richer understanding of this enduring work.

Comments

THEODORE DREISER

Well, the critics have not really understood what I was trying to do. Here is a book that is close to life. It is intended not as a piece of literary craftsmanship, but as a picture of conditions done as simply and effectively as the English language will permit. To sit up and criticise me for saying “vest,” instead of “waistcoat”; to talk about my splitting the infinitive and using vulgar commonplaces here and there, when the tragedy of a man’s life is being displayed, is silly. More, it is ridiculous. It makes me feel that American criticism is the joke which English literary authorities maintain it to be. But the circulation is beginning to boom. When it gets to the people they will understand, because it is a story of real life, of their lives.

—from the New York imes (January 15, 1901)

DENVER REPUBLICAN

The chief merit of [Sister Carrie] is its photographic descriptions of character. Scenes and incidents are freely localized. The book is unhealthful in tone, however, and its literary quality is not high enough to cover its faults of theme. -January 20, 1901

—January 20, 1901

SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER

The philosophy of [Sister Carrie] is very clear and very interesting. Its incidents, the squalid plane upon which its development takes place, will naturally prevent it from achieving a marked popularity. Even Mr. Dreiser’s antiseptic style cannot make it anything but a most unpleasant tale, and you would never dream of recommending it to another person to read.

—January 20, 1901

LONDON DAILY MAIL

At last a really strong novel has come from America; a novel almost great because of its relentless purpose, its power to compel emotion, its marvellous simplicity. If Mr. Theodore Dreiser obtains the success he deserves, then “Sister Carrie” should make the book not of one but of many seasons.

—August 13, 1901

MANCHESTER GUARDIAN

Rarely, even in modern work, have we met with characters so little idealised, so patiently presented. There is nothing of the showy development of the worse kind of psychological novel ... Mr. Dreiser impresses us by his truthful sequence of events. He is strictly normal, and no fantastic light is shed on the credible steps of vice and crime. He is a faithful student, but his eyes are not fixed dully on the model. He might be called unimaginative by those who see no imagination in the insight which makes its deductions from experience nor in that illuminating intelligence which controls a design.... The effect of the whole is perhaps a little depressing, and Mr. Dreiser has not much charm of style. He has many happy phrases, but we are occasionally oppressed by such “Americanisms” as “eyes snapping” or “when he went home evenings the house looked nice.” His work is faithful, acute, unprejudiced, and it should belong to the veritable “documents” of American history.

—August 14, 1901

THE ACADEMY

Sister Carrie has opened our eyes. It is a calm, reasoned, realistic study of American life in Chicago and New York, absolutely free from the slightest trace of sentimentality or prettiness, and dominated everywhere by a serious and strenuous desire for truth.

—August 24, 1901

THEODORE WATTS-DUNTON

Throughout [Sister Carrie] the phrasing is of the streets and bars—colloquial, familiar, vivid, slangy, unlovely, but intensely real. Of the manner of the book it is not easy to speak favourably; it is strikingly unworthy of the matter thereof. Whilst large, dignified, and generous, the scheme of the story here told is not pretentious, or complex, or ambitious. It is a very plain tale of a plain though eventful life. Between its covers no single note of unreality is struck. It is untrammelled by any single concession to convention or tradition, literary or social. It is as compact of actuality as a police-court record, and throughout its pages one feels pulsing the sturdy, restless energy of a young people, a cosmopolitan community, a nation busy upon the hither side of maturity. The book is, firstly, the full, exhaustive story of the “half-equipped little knight’s” life and adventures; secondly, it is a broad, vivid picture of men and manners in middle-class New York and Chicago; and, thirdly, it is a thorough and really masterly study of the moral, physical, and social deterioration of one Hurstwood, a lover of the heroine. Upon all these counts it is a creditable piece of work, faithful and real in the interest which pertains to genuinely realistic fiction. It is further of interest by reason that it strikes a key-note and is typical, both in the faults of its manner and in the wealth and diversity of its matter, of the great country which gave it birth.