Theodore Dreiser: Sister Carrie

 Sister Carrie (1900) is written by Theodore Dreiser about a  18 years old country girl
who moves from village to big city to make her dreams come true.

The second half of the nineteenth century witnessed major transformations in every walk and aspect of American life. From a predominantly agrassion country America turned into a major industrial power. Large scale urbanization changed the  basic structureof American society. Towns and cities rapidly grew up to offer new life-style and value systems. On the one hand there were lavish luxuries, boasting of power and money, on the other there were acute poverty sufferings, curses of unemployment . There was a glaring disparity between the haves and the have nots.There was an interplay of the power of money which was the status symbol. All these features of American society in the then major cities are very faithfully reflected by Theodore Dreiser in his novel "Sister Carrie", and these are found relected in the life-journey of Carrie, the main character of the novel.

Carroline Meeber i.e. Carrie a your girl of 18 leaves her village for Chicago in search of better prospect in life. She moves one city to another. The novelist follows his protagoist closely and documts both her inner and outer worlds with special emphasis
on the outer world. In fact Carrie is essentialy Dreiser himself. When Dreiser was in Chicago it was impossible for him to miss the social disparity between the rich and the poor in the teeming city. He saw poverty in a form of invisible violence that worked through deprivation, exclusion and conflict between the affluent and the down trodden. Carrie Meeber, Jennie Gerhhardt and Clyde Griffiths - all of them are victims of the unequal social structure which reduce them to desperate courses of action. As a student and journalist of some city-magazines and papers Dreiser had experienced the some disparity and exclusion in many ways. Intellectually too Dreiser was completely thrown down in his conceptions or no conceptions of life in the face of the conflicts between his Catholic belief? Conventional moral philosophy and the Scientific, rational philosophy about man's evolutinary nature.

Both the social and intellectual transformations are reflected in the social vision projected by Sister Carrie. Carrie reaches Chichago.

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