Clementine Classics: Sister Carrie by Theodore Dreiser. Theodore Dreiser
much him kissing your ass. Drouet looked at her and his thoughts reached home. She felt his admiration. It was powerfully backed by his liberality and good-humor. She felt that she liked him—that she could continue to like him ever so much. There was something even richer than that, running as a hidden strain, in her mind. Every little while her eyes would meet his, and by that means the interchanging current of feeling would be fully connected.
“Why don’t you stay downtown and go to the theatre with me?” he said, hitching his chair closer. The table was not very wide.
“Oh, I can’t,” she said.
“What are you going to do tonight?”
“Nothing,” she answered, a little drearily.
“You don’t like out there where you are, do you?”
“Oh, I don’t know.”
“What are you going to do if you don’t get work?”
“Go back home, I guess.”
There was the least quaver in her voice as she said this. Somehow, the influence he was exerting was powerful. They came to an understanding of each other without words—he of her situation, she of the fact that he realized it. “No,” he said, “you can’t make it!” genuine sympathy filling his mind for the time. “Let me help you. You take some of my money.”
“Oh, no!” she said, leaning back. It’s nice to see her have at least an iota of sense. Though I give her five lines before she breaks down.
“What are you going to do?” he said. 5 . . .
She sat meditating, merely shaking her head. 4 . . .
He looked at her quite tenderly for his kind. There were some loose bills in his vest pocket—greenbacks. Goddammit, Sister Carrie. How am I supposed to root for you? Where the fuck is that lumberjack Swede when you need him? They were soft and noiseless, and he got his fingers about them and crumpled them up in his hand.
“Come on,” he said, “I’ll see you through all right. Get yourself some clothes.”
It was the first reference he had made to that subject, and now she realized how bad off she was. In his crude way he had struck the key-note. Her lips trembled a little.
She had her hand out on the table before her. They were quite alone in their corner, and he put his larger, warmer hand over it.
“Aw, come, Carrie,” he said, “what can you do alone? Let me help you.”
He pressed her hand gently and she tried to withdraw it. At this he held it fast, and she no longer protested. Then he slipped the greenbacks he had into her palm, and when she began to protest, he whispered:
“I’ll loan it to you—that’s all right. I’ll loan it to you.” Well, folks, buckle up. The fall from grace officially just happened. Let’s hope some fucked up shit starts to go down or I’m going to have to break out the Boone’s Farm.
He made her take it. She felt bound to him by a strange tie of affection now. They went out, and he walked with her far out south toward Polk Street, talking. Fun fact: President James K. Polk expanded the United States from coast to coast. He was also sterile.
“You don’t want to live with those people?” he said in one place, abstractedly. Carrie heard it, but it made only a slight impression.
“Come down and meet me tomorrow,” he said, “and we’ll go to the matinee. Will you?”
Carrie protested a while, but acquiesced.
“You’re not doing anything. Get yourself a nice pair of shoes and a jacket.”
She scarcely gave a thought to the complication which would trouble her when he was gone. In his presence, she was of his own hopeful, easy-way-out mood.
“Don’t you bother about those people out there,” he said at parting. “I’ll help you.”
Carrie left him, feeling as though a great arm had slipped out before her to draw off trouble. The money she had accepted was two soft, green, handsome ten-dollar bills. That’s five months rent right there. Sister Carrie chose her pimp well. As a woman, I’m worried for her. (Hey, I may be a bitch, but I’m not a monster.) But as a reader, I can’t wait to see how this will all implode in her face.
THE LURE OF THE MATERIAL—BEAUTY SPEAKS FOR ITSELF
The true meaning of money yet remains to be popularly explained and comprehended. When each individual realizes for himself that this thing primarily stands for and should only be accepted as a moral due—that it should be paid out as honestly stored energy, and not as a usurped privilege—many of our social, religious, and political troubles will have permanently passed. As for Carrie, her understanding of the moral significance of money was the popular understanding, nothing more. The old definition: “Money: something everybody else has and I must get,” would have expressed her understanding of it thoroughly. Another line straight out of any rap song. When you think about it, Sister Carrie would be a good b-girl moniker. I’m surprised no one has turned this novel into a rap-opera yet. Nicki Minaj, I’m talking to you. Some of it she now held in her hand—two soft, green ten-dollar bills—and she felt that she was immensely better off for the having of them. It was something that was power in itself. One of her order of mind would have been content to be cast away upon a desert island with a bundle of money, and only the long strain of starvation would have taught her that in some cases it could have no value. Even then she would have had no conception of the relative value of the thing; her one thought would, undoubtedly, have concerned the pity of having so much power and the inability to use it.
The poor girl thrilled as she walked away from Drouet. She felt ashamed in part because she had been weak enough to take it, but her need was so dire, she was still glad. Now she would have a nice new jacket! Fuck you, dignity! Now she would buy a nice pair of pretty button shoes. She would get stockings, too, and a skirt, and, and—until already, as in the matter of her prospective salary, she had got beyond, in her desires, twice the purchasing power of her bills. Whoa there. It’s one thing to let you buy a jacket, but a whole wardrobe is a whole other level of shameless. . . .and I wholeheartedly support this hot-mess-in-the-happening.
She conceived a true estimate of Drouet. To her, and indeed to all the world, he was a nice, good-hearted man. There was nothing evil in the fellow. He gave her the money out of a good heart—out of a realization of her want. He would not have given the same amount to a poor young man, but we must not forget that a poor young man could not, in the nature of things, have appealed to him like a poor young girl. Stellar reasoning, Sister Carrie. But who gives a fuck? You took the money, now go buy the Hope fucking Diamond. Femininity affected his feelings. He was the creature of an inborn desire. Yet no beggar could have caught his eye and said, “My God, mister, I’m starving,” but he would gladly have handed out what was considered the proper portion to give beggars and thought no more about it. There would have been no speculation, no philosophizing. He had no mental process in him worthy the dignity of either of those terms. In his good clothes and fine health, he was a merry, unthinking moth of the lamp. Deprived of his position, and struck by a few of the involved and baffling forces which sometimes play upon man, he would have been as helpless as Carrie—as helpless, as non-understanding, as pitiable, if you will, as she.
Now, in regard to his pursuit of women, he meant them no harm, because he did not conceive of the relation which he hoped to hold with them as being harmful. He loved to make advances to women, to have them succumb to his charms, not because he was a cold-blooded, dark, scheming villain, but because his inborn desire urged him to that as a chief delight. And what if women have this “inborn desire”? Man your pitchforks, lads. We’ve got a dirty whore on our hands. He was vain, he was boastful, he was as deluded by fine