Theodore Dreiser was no beautician, yet there's an astounding
energy to his undaunted novel about a nation young lady's American dream.
Robert McCrum presents the arrangement.
Sister Carrie is one of a few books in this arrangement that
address the American dream, and it does as such in a radical soul of naturalism
that rejected the Victorian accentuation on ethical quality. In some ways it's
unrefined and ponderous, blasting with coarse outrage, yet in its day it was,
innovatively, a distinct advantage. Afterward, America's first Nobel laureate,
Sinclair Lewis, said that Dreiser's effective first novel "came to
housebound and airless America like an awesome free Western breeze, and to our
stuffy family life gave us the principal natural air since Mark Twain and
Whitman".
I will be the first to yield that Dreiser does not currently look
anything like their equivalent. He is no beautician, but then the crude energy
of his story trumps the occasionally unbearable thump of his exposition. Saul
Bellow, for example, exhorted perusers to take Sister Carrie at a dash.
Doubtlessly Dreiser paints a seriously nitty gritty, convincing and firmly
watched representation of urban America at the turn of the twentieth century –
a century in which the US would have such a conclusive impact.
The novel opens with Caroline – Sister Carrie – Meeber moving from
the nation to the city, taking the prepare to Chicago to understand her
expectations for a superior, more impressive future. On the way, she meets a
voyaging sales representative, Charles Drouet, who soon discharges her from the
drudgery of machine-work in the unfeeling city by making her his special lady.
This is the first in a progression of Carrie's unprofitable endeavors to
discover joy. From this time forward, she turns into the casualty of
progressively urgent connections which, joined with a captivated interest with
the stage, take her to New York and the life of a Broadway melody young lady.
The novel closures with Carrie changing her name to Carrie Madenda and turning
into a star similarly as her alienated spouse, George Hurstwood, gasses himself
in leased lodgings. The end parts of the book, in which Hurstwood is destroyed
and after that disfavored, are among the most intense pages in a novel of
barbarous force, whose unsentimental delineation of huge city life separates
it. Contemporary perusers were perplexed, nonetheless, and Sister Carrie did
not offer well.
"The commentators have not by any stretch
of the imagination comprehended what I was attempting to do," Dreiser said
later. "Here is a book that is near life. It is planned not as a bit of
artistic craftsmanship, but rather as a photo of conditions done as basically
and successfully as the English dialect will allow … It makes one feel that
American feedback is the joke which English abstract experts keep up it to be.
At the point when [the novel] gets to the general population, they will
comprehend, on the grounds that it is an account of genuine living, of their
lives."
No comments:
Post a Comment