Sister Carrie: Chapter 44 Summary & Analysis

After achieving fame, Carrie finds her circumstances to be vastly different: she has a better dressing room and “she [is] no longer ordered, but requested, and that politely.” Carrie enjoys the audience’s applause but feels “mildly guilty of something—perhaps unworthiness.” The narrator relates that “it never once crossed her mind to be reserved or haughty.”

Carrie begins to get letters and cards. A certain Mr. Withers offers Carrie an apartment at a hotel, costing usually three to fifty dollars a day, at any rate that she “could afford to pay.” Carrie is now a “patron,” one whose “name is worth something.” Carrie asks about bringing Lola and Mr. Withers agrees. The two visit the apartment, “a suite on the parlour floor” with “accommodations [that] would ordinarily cost a hundred dollars a week,” and decide to move in. The apartment is “such a place as [Carrie] had often dreamed of occupying.”

One day, after a matinee, Mrs. Vance visits Carrie. Carrie warms up to her “in spite of her first troubled feelings.” Mrs. Vance “tactfully [avoids] the subject of Hurstwood […] No doubt Carrie had left him.” The two make plans to visit each other. Carrie realizes that “she [is] as good as this woman now—perhaps better,” and “something in the other’s solicitude and interest [makes] her feel as if she [is] the one to condescend.”

Many gentlemen send letters to Carrie, hoping for “an engagement.” One man with “a million in [his] own right” begs her for “one half-hour […] to plead [his] cause.” Carrie “[smiles] to think that men should suddenly find her so much more attractive.” It only “[incites] her to coolness and indifference.” Carrie refuses to meet any of these men. She spends her time enjoying all “the luxuries which money could buy.”

Carrie receives her first $150 paycheck. The cashier treats Carrie with much more friendliness than before. She perceives the world to be “so rosy and bright.” However, Carrie soon realizes the “impotence of money”: “If she wanted to do anything better or move higher she must have more—a great deal more.”

Carrie begins to see that “life’s perfect enjoyment [is] not open.” A critic claims that Carrie is “merely pretty, good-natured, and lucky.” This “[cuts]” Carrie “like a knife” An author brings Carrie a play to produce, but “alas, she could not judge.” Carrie blames these things on the slowness of summer. She tells Lola about her loneliness, but Lola, “thinking of her own lightsome tourneys with the gay youths,” does not understand. Carrie doesn’t yet realize it, but “her idle hands were beginning to weary.”