Sister Carrie

by

Theodore Dreiser

Caroline “Carrie” Meeber Character Analysis

Carrie is the titular protagonist of the novel. She is the sister of Minnie Hanson and mistress of Drouet and, later, Hurstwood. Throughout the novel, Carrie is always chasing after happiness, be it through wealth, fame, or distinction. At the beginning of the novel, Carrie is a young woman from provincial Wisconsin who imagines that leading a cosmopolitan life will bring her happiness. After moving in with her penny-pinching sister and her husband, Sven Hanson, in Chicago, Carrie realizes that life in the city is quite dull without material wealth. After a short-lived attempt at earning her keep, she chooses to become the mistress of a wealthy man named Drouet, whom she met on the train to Chicago. While living with Drouet, Carrie encounters his friend Hurstwood, an even wealthier man, and later moves to New York with Hurstwood to be his mistress instead. In each of these cases, Carrie experiences certain qualms of conscience; nevertheless, her desire for wealth is always too great to overcome. Carrie eventually meets Ames, a well-educated and idealistic young man, and encounters for the first time the idea that wealth isn’t everything and that it’s better to pursue art. Soon after, she leaves Hurstwood to pursue acting, mainly for financial reasons—Hurstwood has run out of money and has no motivation to get a job—but also out of a desire to pursue distinction and self-sufficiency. As Carrie grows rich and famous, her esteem for material wealth deteriorates. By the end of the novel, she is disillusioned and will likely never achieve happiness: Carrie never finds happiness in what she has, but always yearns for something that is just beyond her reach.

Caroline “Carrie” Meeber Quotes in Sister Carrie

The Sister Carrie quotes below are all either spoken by Caroline “Carrie” Meeber or refer to Caroline “Carrie” Meeber. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
Urban Life and Decay Theme Icon
).
Chapter 1 Quotes

When a girl leaves her home at eighteen, she does one of two things. Either she falls into saving hands and becomes better, or she rapidly assumes the cosmopolitan standard of virtue and becomes worse. Of an intermediate balance, under the circumstances, there is no possibility.

Related Characters: Caroline “Carrie” Meeber
Related Symbols: The City
Page Number: 1
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 3 Quotes

Not only did Carrie feel the drag of desire for all which was new and pleasing in apparel for women, but she noticed too, with a touch at the heart, the fine ladies who elbowed and ignored her, brushing past in utter disregard of her presence, themselves eagerly enlisted in the materials which the store contained.

Related Characters: Caroline “Carrie” Meeber
Related Symbols: The City
Page Number: 16
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 4 Quotes

As Carrie listened to this and much more of similar familiar badinage among the men and girls, she instinctively withdrew into herself. She was not used to this type, and felt that there was something hard and low about it all. She feared that the young boys about would address such remarks to her—boys who, beside Drouet, seemed uncouth and ridiculous.

Related Characters: Caroline “Carrie” Meeber, Charles H. Drouet
Related Symbols: The City
Page Number: 29
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 6 Quotes

On the first morning it rained [Carrie] found that she had no umbrella. Minnie loaned her one of hers, which was worn and faded. There was the kind of vanity in Carrie that troubled at this. She went to one of the great department stores and bought herself one, using a dollar and a quarter of her small store to pay for it.

“What did you do that for, Carrie?” asked Minnie, when she saw it.

“Oh, I need one,” said Carrie.

“You foolish girl.”

Carrie resented this, though she did not reply. She was not going to be a common shop-girl, she thought; they need not think it, either.

Related Characters: Caroline “Carrie” Meeber (speaker), Minnie Hanson (speaker)
Related Literary Devices:
Page Number: 39
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 7 Quotes

To [Carrie], and indeed to all the world, [Drouet] 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 realisation 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. Femininity affected his feelings. He was the creature of an inborn desire.

Related Characters: Caroline “Carrie” Meeber, Charles H. Drouet
Page Number: 45
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 8 Quotes

“Where do you suppose she’s gone to?” said Minnie, thoroughly aroused.

“I don't know,” a touch of cynicism lighting his eye. “Now she has gone and done it.”

Minnie moved her head in a puzzled way.

“Oh, oh,” she said, “she doesn't know what she has done.”

“Well,” said Hanson, after a while, sticking his hands out before him, “what can you do?”

Minnie’s womanly nature was higher than this. She figured the possibilities in such cases.

“Oh,” she said at last, “poor Sister Carrie!”

Related Characters: Minnie Hanson (speaker), Sven Hanson (speaker), Caroline “Carrie” Meeber
Related Symbols: The City
Page Number: 54
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 10 Quotes

Here, then, was Carrie, established in a pleasant fashion, free of certain difficulties which most ominously confronted her, laden with many new ones which were of a mental order, and altogether so turned about in all of her earthly relationships that she might well have been a new and different individual. She looked into her glass and saw a prettier Carrie than she had seen before; she looked into her mind, a mirror prepared of her own and the world’s opinions, and saw a worse. Between these two images she wavered, hesitating which to believe.

Related Characters: Caroline “Carrie” Meeber
Page Number: 65-66
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 11 Quotes

[…] Carrie was naturally imitative. She began to get the hang of those little things which the pretty woman who has vanity invariably adopts. In short, her knowledge of grace doubled, and with it her appearance changed. She became a girl of considerable taste.

Related Characters: Caroline “Carrie” Meeber
Page Number: 74
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 14 Quotes

[Drouet] was simply letting things drift because he preferred the free round of his present state to any legal trammellings. In contrast, Hurstwood appeared strong and sincere. He had no easy manner of putting her off. He sympathised with her and showed her what her true value was. He needed her, while Drouet did not care.

Related Characters: Caroline “Carrie” Meeber, George W. Hurstwood, Charles H. Drouet
Page Number: 95
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 20 Quotes

[Carrie] felt Hurstwood’s passion as a delightful background to her own achievement, and she wondered what he would have to say […] She was now experiencing the first shades of feeling of that subtle change which removes one out of the ranks of the suppliants into the lines of the dispensers of charity.

Related Characters: Caroline “Carrie” Meeber, George W. Hurstwood
Page Number: 137
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 26 Quotes

Anyhow, there was one change for the better. She knew that she had improved in appearance. Her manner had vastly changed. Her clothes were becoming, and men—well-dressed men, some of the kind who before had gazed at her indifferently from behind their polished railings and imposing office partitions—now gazed into her face with a soft light in their eyes.

Related Characters: Caroline “Carrie” Meeber
Page Number: 171
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 27 Quotes

The manager was no fool to be led blindly away by such an errant proposition as this, but his situation was peculiar. Wine was in his veins. It had crept up into his head and given him a warm view of the situation. It also coloured the possibilities of ten thousand for him. He could see great opportunities with that. He could get Carrie.

Related Characters: Caroline “Carrie” Meeber, George W. Hurstwood
Related Symbols: The City
Related Literary Devices:
Page Number: 183
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 28 Quotes

The progress of the train was having a great deal to do with the solution of this difficult situation. The speeding wheels and disappearing country put Chicago farther and farther behind. Carrie could feel that she was being borne a long distance off—that the engine was making an almost through run to some distant city. She felt at times as if she could cry out and make such a row that some one would come to her aid; at other times it seemed an almost useless thing—so far was she from any aid, no matter what she did. All the while Hurstwood was endeavouring to formulate his plea in such a way that it would strike home and bring her into sympathy with him.

Related Characters: Caroline “Carrie” Meeber, George W. Hurstwood
Related Symbols: The City
Page Number: 191
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 29 Quotes

This man, to whose bosom she was being pressed, was strong; he was passionate, he loved her, and she was alone. If she did not turn to him—accept of his love—where else might she go? Her resistance half dissolved in the flood of his strong feeling.

Related Characters: Caroline “Carrie” Meeber, George W. Hurstwood
Related Literary Devices:
Page Number: 196
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 31 Quotes

[Carrie] could not, for the life of her, assume the attitude and smartness of Mrs. Vance, who, in her beauty, was all assurance. She could only imagine that it must be evident to many that she was the less handsomely dressed of the two. It cut her to the quick, and she resolved that she would not come here again until she looked better. At the same time she longed to feel the delight of parading here as an equal. Ah, then she would be happy!

Related Characters: Caroline “Carrie” Meeber, Mrs. Vance
Related Symbols: The City
Page Number: 217
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 32 Quotes

In all Carrie’s experience she had never seen anything like [Sherry’s]. In the whole time she had been in New York Hurstwood’s modified state had not permitted his bringing her to such a place. There was an almost indescribable atmosphere about it which convinced the newcomer that this was the proper thing. Here was the place where the matter of expense limited the patrons to the moneyed or pleasure- loving class.

Related Characters: Caroline “Carrie” Meeber, George W. Hurstwood
Related Symbols: The City
Page Number: 223
Explanation and Analysis:

[Carrie] felt as if she would like to be agreeable to [Ames], and also there came with it, or perhaps preceded it, the slightest shade of a feeling that he was better educated than she was—that his mind was better. He seemed to look it, and the saving grace in Carrie was that she could understand that people could be wiser.

Related Characters: Caroline “Carrie” Meeber, Robert Ames
Page Number: 225-226
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 35 Quotes

That night he felt a cold coming on and took quinine. He was feverish until morning, and sat about the next day while Carrie waited on him. He was a helpless creature in sickness, not very handsome in a dull-coloured bath gown and his hair uncombed. He looked haggard about the eyes and quite old. Carrie noticed this, and it did not appeal to her. She wanted to be good-natured and sympathetic, but something about the man held her aloof.

Related Characters: Caroline “Carrie” Meeber, George W. Hurstwood
Related Literary Devices:
Page Number: 246
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 39 Quotes

Her need of clothes—to say nothing of her desire for ornaments— grew rapidly as the fact developed that for all her work she was not to have them. The sympathy she felt for Hurstwood, at the time he asked her to tide him over, vanished with these newer urgings of decency. He was not always renewing his request, but this love of good appearance was. It insisted, and Carrie wished to satisfy it, wished more and more that Hurstwood was not in the way.

Related Characters: Caroline “Carrie” Meeber, George W. Hurstwood
Related Symbols: The City
Page Number: 271
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 42 Quotes

Carrie’s little soldier friend. Miss Osborne, seeing her succeeding, had become a sort of satellite. Little Osborne could never of herself amount to anything. She seemed to realise it in a sort of pussy-like way and instinctively concluded to cling with her soft little claws to Carrie.

Related Characters: Caroline “Carrie” Meeber, Lola Osborne
Related Symbols: The City, The Stage
Related Literary Devices:
Page Number: 300
Explanation and Analysis:

[Carrie] had learned that men could change and fail. Flattery in its most palpable form had lost its force with her. It required superiority—kindly superiority—to move her—the superiority of a genius like Ames.

Related Characters: Caroline “Carrie” Meeber
Page Number: 300-301
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 47 Quotes

Oh, Carrie, Carrie! Oh, blind strivings of the human heart! Onward, onward, it saith, and where beauty leads, there it follows. Whether it be the tinkle of a lone sheep bell o’er some quiet landscape, or the glimmer of beauty in sylvan places, or the show of soul in some passing eye, the heart knows and makes answer, following. It is when the feet weary and hope seems vain that the heartaches and the longings arise. Know, then, that for you is neither surfeit nor content. In your rocking-chair, by your window dreaming, shall you long, alone. In your rocking-chair, by your window, shall you dream such happiness as you may never feel.

Related Characters: Caroline “Carrie” Meeber
Related Symbols: The City
Page Number: 352
Explanation and Analysis:
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Caroline “Carrie” Meeber Quotes in Sister Carrie

The Sister Carrie quotes below are all either spoken by Caroline “Carrie” Meeber or refer to Caroline “Carrie” Meeber. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
Urban Life and Decay Theme Icon
).
Chapter 1 Quotes

When a girl leaves her home at eighteen, she does one of two things. Either she falls into saving hands and becomes better, or she rapidly assumes the cosmopolitan standard of virtue and becomes worse. Of an intermediate balance, under the circumstances, there is no possibility.

Related Characters: Caroline “Carrie” Meeber
Related Symbols: The City
Page Number: 1
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 3 Quotes

Not only did Carrie feel the drag of desire for all which was new and pleasing in apparel for women, but she noticed too, with a touch at the heart, the fine ladies who elbowed and ignored her, brushing past in utter disregard of her presence, themselves eagerly enlisted in the materials which the store contained.

Related Characters: Caroline “Carrie” Meeber
Related Symbols: The City
Page Number: 16
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 4 Quotes

As Carrie listened to this and much more of similar familiar badinage among the men and girls, she instinctively withdrew into herself. She was not used to this type, and felt that there was something hard and low about it all. She feared that the young boys about would address such remarks to her—boys who, beside Drouet, seemed uncouth and ridiculous.

Related Characters: Caroline “Carrie” Meeber, Charles H. Drouet
Related Symbols: The City
Page Number: 29
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 6 Quotes

On the first morning it rained [Carrie] found that she had no umbrella. Minnie loaned her one of hers, which was worn and faded. There was the kind of vanity in Carrie that troubled at this. She went to one of the great department stores and bought herself one, using a dollar and a quarter of her small store to pay for it.

“What did you do that for, Carrie?” asked Minnie, when she saw it.

“Oh, I need one,” said Carrie.

“You foolish girl.”

Carrie resented this, though she did not reply. She was not going to be a common shop-girl, she thought; they need not think it, either.

Related Characters: Caroline “Carrie” Meeber (speaker), Minnie Hanson (speaker)
Related Literary Devices:
Page Number: 39
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 7 Quotes

To [Carrie], and indeed to all the world, [Drouet] 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 realisation 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. Femininity affected his feelings. He was the creature of an inborn desire.

Related Characters: Caroline “Carrie” Meeber, Charles H. Drouet
Page Number: 45
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 8 Quotes

“Where do you suppose she’s gone to?” said Minnie, thoroughly aroused.

“I don't know,” a touch of cynicism lighting his eye. “Now she has gone and done it.”

Minnie moved her head in a puzzled way.

“Oh, oh,” she said, “she doesn't know what she has done.”

“Well,” said Hanson, after a while, sticking his hands out before him, “what can you do?”

Minnie’s womanly nature was higher than this. She figured the possibilities in such cases.

“Oh,” she said at last, “poor Sister Carrie!”

Related Characters: Minnie Hanson (speaker), Sven Hanson (speaker), Caroline “Carrie” Meeber
Related Symbols: The City
Page Number: 54
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 10 Quotes

Here, then, was Carrie, established in a pleasant fashion, free of certain difficulties which most ominously confronted her, laden with many new ones which were of a mental order, and altogether so turned about in all of her earthly relationships that she might well have been a new and different individual. She looked into her glass and saw a prettier Carrie than she had seen before; she looked into her mind, a mirror prepared of her own and the world’s opinions, and saw a worse. Between these two images she wavered, hesitating which to believe.

Related Characters: Caroline “Carrie” Meeber
Page Number: 65-66
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 11 Quotes

[…] Carrie was naturally imitative. She began to get the hang of those little things which the pretty woman who has vanity invariably adopts. In short, her knowledge of grace doubled, and with it her appearance changed. She became a girl of considerable taste.

Related Characters: Caroline “Carrie” Meeber
Page Number: 74
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 14 Quotes

[Drouet] was simply letting things drift because he preferred the free round of his present state to any legal trammellings. In contrast, Hurstwood appeared strong and sincere. He had no easy manner of putting her off. He sympathised with her and showed her what her true value was. He needed her, while Drouet did not care.

Related Characters: Caroline “Carrie” Meeber, George W. Hurstwood, Charles H. Drouet
Page Number: 95
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 20 Quotes

[Carrie] felt Hurstwood’s passion as a delightful background to her own achievement, and she wondered what he would have to say […] She was now experiencing the first shades of feeling of that subtle change which removes one out of the ranks of the suppliants into the lines of the dispensers of charity.

Related Characters: Caroline “Carrie” Meeber, George W. Hurstwood
Page Number: 137
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 26 Quotes

Anyhow, there was one change for the better. She knew that she had improved in appearance. Her manner had vastly changed. Her clothes were becoming, and men—well-dressed men, some of the kind who before had gazed at her indifferently from behind their polished railings and imposing office partitions—now gazed into her face with a soft light in their eyes.

Related Characters: Caroline “Carrie” Meeber
Page Number: 171
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 27 Quotes

The manager was no fool to be led blindly away by such an errant proposition as this, but his situation was peculiar. Wine was in his veins. It had crept up into his head and given him a warm view of the situation. It also coloured the possibilities of ten thousand for him. He could see great opportunities with that. He could get Carrie.

Related Characters: Caroline “Carrie” Meeber, George W. Hurstwood
Related Symbols: The City
Related Literary Devices:
Page Number: 183
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 28 Quotes

The progress of the train was having a great deal to do with the solution of this difficult situation. The speeding wheels and disappearing country put Chicago farther and farther behind. Carrie could feel that she was being borne a long distance off—that the engine was making an almost through run to some distant city. She felt at times as if she could cry out and make such a row that some one would come to her aid; at other times it seemed an almost useless thing—so far was she from any aid, no matter what she did. All the while Hurstwood was endeavouring to formulate his plea in such a way that it would strike home and bring her into sympathy with him.

Related Characters: Caroline “Carrie” Meeber, George W. Hurstwood
Related Symbols: The City
Page Number: 191
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 29 Quotes

This man, to whose bosom she was being pressed, was strong; he was passionate, he loved her, and she was alone. If she did not turn to him—accept of his love—where else might she go? Her resistance half dissolved in the flood of his strong feeling.

Related Characters: Caroline “Carrie” Meeber, George W. Hurstwood
Related Literary Devices:
Page Number: 196
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 31 Quotes

[Carrie] could not, for the life of her, assume the attitude and smartness of Mrs. Vance, who, in her beauty, was all assurance. She could only imagine that it must be evident to many that she was the less handsomely dressed of the two. It cut her to the quick, and she resolved that she would not come here again until she looked better. At the same time she longed to feel the delight of parading here as an equal. Ah, then she would be happy!

Related Characters: Caroline “Carrie” Meeber, Mrs. Vance
Related Symbols: The City
Page Number: 217
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 32 Quotes

In all Carrie’s experience she had never seen anything like [Sherry’s]. In the whole time she had been in New York Hurstwood’s modified state had not permitted his bringing her to such a place. There was an almost indescribable atmosphere about it which convinced the newcomer that this was the proper thing. Here was the place where the matter of expense limited the patrons to the moneyed or pleasure- loving class.

Related Characters: Caroline “Carrie” Meeber, George W. Hurstwood
Related Symbols: The City
Page Number: 223
Explanation and Analysis:

[Carrie] felt as if she would like to be agreeable to [Ames], and also there came with it, or perhaps preceded it, the slightest shade of a feeling that he was better educated than she was—that his mind was better. He seemed to look it, and the saving grace in Carrie was that she could understand that people could be wiser.

Related Characters: Caroline “Carrie” Meeber, Robert Ames
Page Number: 225-226
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 35 Quotes

That night he felt a cold coming on and took quinine. He was feverish until morning, and sat about the next day while Carrie waited on him. He was a helpless creature in sickness, not very handsome in a dull-coloured bath gown and his hair uncombed. He looked haggard about the eyes and quite old. Carrie noticed this, and it did not appeal to her. She wanted to be good-natured and sympathetic, but something about the man held her aloof.

Related Characters: Caroline “Carrie” Meeber, George W. Hurstwood
Related Literary Devices:
Page Number: 246
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 39 Quotes

Her need of clothes—to say nothing of her desire for ornaments— grew rapidly as the fact developed that for all her work she was not to have them. The sympathy she felt for Hurstwood, at the time he asked her to tide him over, vanished with these newer urgings of decency. He was not always renewing his request, but this love of good appearance was. It insisted, and Carrie wished to satisfy it, wished more and more that Hurstwood was not in the way.

Related Characters: Caroline “Carrie” Meeber, George W. Hurstwood
Related Symbols: The City
Page Number: 271
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 42 Quotes

Carrie’s little soldier friend. Miss Osborne, seeing her succeeding, had become a sort of satellite. Little Osborne could never of herself amount to anything. She seemed to realise it in a sort of pussy-like way and instinctively concluded to cling with her soft little claws to Carrie.

Related Characters: Caroline “Carrie” Meeber, Lola Osborne
Related Symbols: The City, The Stage
Related Literary Devices:
Page Number: 300
Explanation and Analysis:

[Carrie] had learned that men could change and fail. Flattery in its most palpable form had lost its force with her. It required superiority—kindly superiority—to move her—the superiority of a genius like Ames.

Related Characters: Caroline “Carrie” Meeber
Page Number: 300-301
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 47 Quotes

Oh, Carrie, Carrie! Oh, blind strivings of the human heart! Onward, onward, it saith, and where beauty leads, there it follows. Whether it be the tinkle of a lone sheep bell o’er some quiet landscape, or the glimmer of beauty in sylvan places, or the show of soul in some passing eye, the heart knows and makes answer, following. It is when the feet weary and hope seems vain that the heartaches and the longings arise. Know, then, that for you is neither surfeit nor content. In your rocking-chair, by your window dreaming, shall you long, alone. In your rocking-chair, by your window, shall you dream such happiness as you may never feel.

Related Characters: Caroline “Carrie” Meeber
Related Symbols: The City
Page Number: 352
Explanation and Analysis: