By the standards of turn-of-the-century America, such a decision stamps Carrie as a moral failure. Although she starts out with pure intentions, traveling to the city in hopes of finding honest work, she quickly feels unsatisfied with the low pay and slow grind of hard labor and instead chooses to become a kept woman.

And because Carrie manages to climb the ranks by following her own instincts and desires rather that adhering to society’s rigid moral code, Dreiser also subverts the Victorian idea that life rewards people for morally upstanding behavior.Īccording to the society that she lives in, Carrie’s behavior is thoroughly immoral.

For Dreiser, instinct is neither morally good nor bad-it simply exists and wields considerable influence over human life. Where a typical Victorian novel might render Carrie’s narrative as that of a woman falling from grace and being shunned by society, Dreiser portrays Carrie as a woman who rises to the upper echelons of society as a result of instinctual decisions that might be considered morally questionable. Carrie often internally wars over whether to follow conventional moral standards or her instinctual desires, and she almost always succumbs to the latter. In Sister Carrie, Dreiser objectively relates the narrative without pronouncing judgment on his characters.

Sister carrie pages