Essays on literary works - 2024

Carrie's Quest for Happiness (From Theodore Dreiser's “Sister Carrie”)

“When a girl leaves her home at eighteen, she does one of two things.”
Yeah. She either becomes a Tumblr icon of girlhood disillusionment or disappears into the sepia filter of American naturalism. Or — if she’s Carrie Meeber — both.

Let’s talk about Sister Carrie like it’s not a corpse in the high school curriculum morgue. Let’s talk about her like she just ghosted your group chat because she met a man with a better apartment. Because Dreiser’s Carrie? She’s not some dead-eyed morality puppet. She’s an accidental influencer. A soft girl before soft girls knew how to edit their Instagram grids. A hustler wrapped in chiffon daydreams and bad decisions.

She’s also the prototype of that painfully modern, slightly nauseating question: Can a woman be happy without knowing what the hell she wants?

Midwest Girl Moves to the Big City — And It’s Not a Netflix Rom-Com

Carrie Meeber hops a train to Chicago with cardboard luggage and delusions of adequacy. She’s got $4, no job, and not even the self-loathing necessary to survive the city yet. The city is cruel, cold, industrial, and not at all giving manic pixie vibes.

And then she meets Drouet.
He’s got confidence. A mustache. Disposable income. He’s basically the human version of an early TikTok “boyfriend haul.” She lets him buy her things, because capitalism runs on the adrenaline of attention. But — plot twist — she doesn’t love him. Not really. She likes the feeling of being loved. Or…being noticed? Or maybe just having gloves?

This is the thing about Carrie: she’s a mood ring of desire. She absorbs whatever’s around her and turns it into craving. Validation. Warmth. Something shiny. She doesn’t know what happiness is — she just knows it must be close to new clothes and people clapping.

Dreiser isn’t judging her, by the way. He’s just quietly watching her spin around in late-stage capitalist confusion 100 years before we gave it a name.

Carrie Is Not “Strong Female Character” Material — And That’s the Point

No, Carrie doesn’t “find herself.” No, she doesn’t “grow stronger.” She doesn’t burn it all down like a proto-feminist girlboss. (Sorry, 2020s brain. She’s not here for the glow-up arc.)

What she does is more real — and way more chaotic. She keeps chasing the next thing. A man. A part in a play. A better apartment. Better boots. And every time she gets what she wants, it glows for like five seconds before going stale in her hands.

Relatable? Painfully.

She’s not in control. She’s not even pretending to be. She wants to be wanted. That’s the operating system. She doesn’t know how to want things without measuring how they’ll make her look to someone else.

Which, let’s be honest, is how like half the internet functions. Every post, every outfit, every “just vibing” selfie: a cry for a little reflected light. Carrie Meeber was doing lifestyle curation in 1900. She didn’t even have an iPhone, and she still understood that being seen can feel like being alive.

But Wait — Is Carrie Actually a Monster?

It’s tempting to call Carrie shallow. Selfish. Maybe even manipulative.

She bounces from Drouet to Hurstwood (ugh, more on him soon) with a kind of airy indifference. She doesn’t cry over them. She doesn’t seem torn up. She just drifts into whatever space feels warmer, richer, more full of promise.

But that’s not malice — that’s survival.

Carrie is a woman in a world where power is distributed through proximity to men, money, and beauty. She didn’t make those rules. She just learns how to play by them faster than most. And yeah, she makes messy choices. She ghostwrites her own morality as she goes. But does she ever really win?

Let’s talk about her final form: the lonely famous actress. She gets everything the early chapters told her to want. Wealth. Fame. Autonomy (sort of). But she sits in her velvet chair and listens to the silence and…feels nothing. Classic nihilism core.

That, dear reader, is the real twist of Sister Carrie. You can climb the mountain of ambition and find there’s no view. Just fog and the echo of your own applause.

Hurstwood Is the Man Who Thought He Was the Plot

Now let’s drag the man-shaped bag of regrets named Hurstwood.

When Carrie meets him, he’s peak masculine self-satisfaction. Married. Manager of a bar. Has that condescending aura of “I’ve seen things.” He becomes obsessed with Carrie in the way older men sometimes do — confusing youth with purity, with salvation, with control.

And then he implodes.

He steals money. Spirals. Loses everything. And you think — okay, we’re about to get a redemption arc, right? Right??

Nope.

Instead, we get the bleakest depiction of male ego collapse in American lit. Hurstwood in New York is a slow-motion car crash of pride and poverty. Too proud to beg. Too broken to work. Too male to adapt. And when Carrie finally leaves him (which she should, good for her, get that bag), he doesn’t recover. He just…drifts downward. He dissolves.

It’s so bleak you almost feel bad. Almost.

But Dreiser is doing something here — he’s showing us how fragile “success” really is, especially when it’s built on gender roles, illusions, and unchecked confidence. Hurstwood thought he was the protagonist. Turns out, he was just a subplot. A mid-season villain. A cautionary tale in faded suspenders.

Fame, But Make It Existential

So Carrie becomes an actress. Not just an actress — a star. Audiences love her. Men adore her. Her face is printed and praised. And yet…

She’s sad.
She’s restless.
She looks out the window of her luxury apartment and thinks, Is this it?

This is what makes Sister Carrie feel like it was ghostwritten by an emotionally literate Tumblr user from 2014: the idea that achieving everything still leaves a weird, humming emptiness inside.

Carrie is not punished for her ambition. Nor is she rewarded. She just…lives with it. Which is somehow more brutal than either.

Fame doesn’t give her meaning. It gives her distractions. Attention is not affection. Success is not love. Being admired is not the same as being known.

And I swear, if that’s not the thesis statement of our entire social media era, I don’t know what is.

Carrie Would 100% Be On Instagram — And That’s the Horror

Imagine Carrie with a ring light.

She’d be an influencer with haunting eyes and captioned selfies that read, “just thinking abt life 💭✨” while silently waiting for 400 people to like it. She’d be sponsored by some boot company. She’d be caught in a situationship with a Hurstwood-esque podcaster who thinks her sadness is sexy.

And she still wouldn’t know what she wants.

Because Carrie isn’t just a character. She’s a mood. A symptom. An open tab on the browser of modern existence.

She’s what happens when we confuse performance for purpose. When we chase things because everyone else is chasing them. When we mistake being wanted for being happy.

She’s not a warning. She’s a mirror.

No Moral, Just Mood

If you came here looking for narrative closure, you’re in the wrong century. Dreiser doesn’t wrap things up. He doesn’t moralize. He just…lets it hang.

Carrie ends the novel more successful but more adrift than ever. Hurstwood ends dead. Drouet fades like an embarrassing ex in your story archive.

And the reader? We’re left in the weird, grey space between empathy and discomfort. We see ourselves — our hungers, our petty dreams, our empty scrolls through Amazon wishlists at 2AM — in the folds of Carrie’s perfectly tailored dress.

Carrie Meeber didn’t find happiness. She found options. And that might be worse.

Because at least when you have no choices, you can blame the system. But when you have too many, and none of them fill the void — that’s when the existential dread starts humming like an old fridge in your soul.

So yeah. Sister Carrie isn’t a love story. It’s not a cautionary tale. It’s a vibe. A glitch. A perfectly ironic subtweet of the American Dream.

Carrie didn’t fall.
She floated.
And maybe that’s scarier.