" Here Dreiser sets himself that
difficult task, and here he carries it off with almost complete success.
Reduce the story to a hundred words, and the same words would also
describe "Sister Carrie." Jennie, like Carrie, is a rose grown from
turnip-seed. Over each, at the start, hangs poverty, ignorance, the dumb
helplessness of the Shudra, and yet in each there is that indescribable
something, that element of essential gentleness, that innate inward
beauty which levels all barriers of caste, and makes Esther a fit queen
for Ahasuerus. Some Frenchman has put it into a phrase: "_Une ame grande
dans un petit destin_"--a great soul in a small destiny. Jennie has some
touch of that greatness; Dreiser is forever calling her "a big woman";
it is a refrain almost as irritating as the "trig" of "The Titan."
Carrie, one feels, is of baser metal; her dignity never rises to
anything approaching nobility. But the history of each is the history of
the other. Jennie, like Carrie, escapes from the physical miseries of
the struggle for existence only to taste the worse miseries of the
struggle for happiness.
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