Theodore Dreiser

Theodore Dreiser published SISTER CARRIE in 1900. James Joyce would write most of the short stories in DUBLINERS in 1905, and yet the two works read as if they were written very many more years apart. Dreiser tells far too much about the characters for contemporary tastes. In describing the decline of Hurstwood, one of the main characters, he says:

He was beginning to find, in his wretched clothing and meager state of body, that people took him for a chronic type of bum and begger. Police hustled him along, restaurant and lodginghouse keepers turned him out promptly the moment he had his due; pedestrians waved him off. He found it more and more difficult to get anything from anybody.

Only after he has told us this does Dreiser show us the same.

"Give me a little something, will you mister?" he said to the last one. "For God's sake do; I'm starving."

"Aw, get out," said the man, who happened to be a common type himself. "You're no good. I'll give you nawthin'."

Dreiser has no sense of how to convey information except by telling the reader. He cannot describe the man who rebuffs Hurstwood so that the reader can determine that he's common--
he doesn't show
the reader that the man is a laborer, someone below Hurstwood's earlier station--he just tells it. And so the reader comes away with no mental image of the common type. The scene is flat.

But Dreiser is concerned with realistically portraying Hurstwood's mental and moral decline, and the power of Dreiser's own passion is what makes the book compelling despite the added work it requires of the reader.

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Maureen F. McHugh (mcq@en.com)