One pities the jurisconsult who is
condemned, by Comstockian clamour, to plough through such a novel. In it
there is a sort of humourless _reductio ad absurdum_, not only of the
Dreiser manner, but even of certain salient tenets of the Dreiser
philosophy. At its best it has a moral flavour. At its worst it is
almost maudlin....
The most successful of the Dreiser novels, judged by sales, is "Sister
Carrie," and the causes thereof are not far to seek. On the one hand,
its suppression in 1900 gave it a whispered fame that was converted into
a public celebrity when it was republished in 1907, and on the other
hand it shares with "Jennie Gerhardt" the capital advantage of having a
young and appealing woman for its chief figure. The sentimentalists thus
have a heroine to cry over, and to put into a familiar pigeon-hole;
Carrie becomes a sort of Pollyanna. More, it is, at bottom, a tale of
love--the one theme of permanent interest to the average American
novel-reader, the chief stuffing of all our best-selling romances. True
enough, it is vastly more than this--there is in it, for example, the
astounding portrait of Hurstwood--, but it seems to me plain that its
relative popularity is by no means a test of its relative merit, and
that the causes of that popularity must be sought in other directions.
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