Street, where Hopkins and Emma had lived. The money count, beginning
with $1,300 following Hurstwood’s forced restitution of most of the stolen
money, is then at $700, then to $340 after a gambling loss, then tumbling
through another card game to $190 on down to $100, $50, $13, and $10.
All the while, Carrie’s success as a chorus girl nets a salary beginning with
$12 a week, rising steadily with the decline of Hurstwood’s savings. On her
way up to $150 a week, she deserts him to brood by himself.16
In chapter 45, which reuses the title “Curious Shifts of the Poor,” Hurst-
wood begins again with $70 after selling their furniture and deserting their
flat for “a third-rate Bleecker Street hotel” on the edge of the Bowery. He
comes down to his last fifty cents and finds a job sweeping up and doing
odd jobs, perhaps as Hopkins did, at the Broadway Hotel near Washing-
ton Square. “Porters, cooks, firemen, clerks”—all were higher than the now
almost wholly defeated Hurstwood, who gets the lowly position by telling
the manager, “I came here because I’ve been a manager myself in my day.”
When he falls sick with pneumonia in February of 1896 and loses even this
job, he is sent to Bellevue, where Dreiser had one of his last assignments as
a reporter on the World. It is here that the “Captain” of the Demorest’s es-
say enters the story. The fact that Dreiser drew on this article, written be-
fore he wrote the novel, confirms his own sense of gloom and doom as he
constructed his tale. He not only spliced in parts of the “Curious Shifts”
essay, but he restored parts that the editors at Demorest’s had taken out.17
s i s t e r c a r r i e
1 4 9
The diªerence between the versions in Demorest’s and Sister Carrie is that one of the figures of “Curious Shifts of the Poor” emerges out of the shadows as George Hurstwood, once utterly oblivious of those whose ranks he
has now joined. Although he sees Carrie once more very briefly and gets
nine dollars from her, she forgets about him as quickly as she had the beg-
gar to whom Drouet allowed a dime. He tries to see her again by going to
the stage door of her theater, where he is pushed into the icy slush by the
doorman. The scene shifts to Carrie in her Waldorf Astoria suite, Drouet’s
unsuccessful attempt to renew relations, and Hurstwood’s family comfort-
ably riding in a Pullman car on their way to a ship bound for Rome. At the
same moment, Hurstwood is described as standing in a side street waiting
to pay fifteen cents for his final night’s rest—this scene, too, adapted from
one of the vignettes in “Curious Shifts of the Poor.” Dreiser originally ended
the novel with Hurstwood’s suicide, dating the conclusion of his penciled
manuscript, “Thursday, March 29, 1900 —2:53 p.m.”18
–
Just how Dreiser came to extend this final chapter so that it ends with Car-
rie in her rocking chair alone dreaming of such happiness as she will never
feel is not known, and may never be. Once the original manuscript was
typed at Anna Mallon’s agency, he, Arthur, and Jug edited it. He told
Mencken that they reduced it by almost forty thousand words, and the
scholarly editors of the original typescript estimate approximately thirty-
six thousand words.19 Dreiser was from the beginning a prolix writer, and
after Dreiser Henry made most of the substantive cuts, while Jug looked
after her husband’s grammar, spelling, and punctuation. Henry’s books show
him to have been a better and more economical stylist than Dreiser, though
falling well behind his friend in originality and literary substance. Dreiser
may have also agreed to the cuts because they both feared it was too long
for commercial publication. Henry’s A Princess is just over three hundred
pages in print; even as revised, Sister Carrie would run almost twice that.
Since the book’s title was Sister Carrie, it no doubt seemed reasonable to
end with Carrie somehow, and the basis of what were to be the final words
already appeared in the penultimate chapter. Robert Ames (an Edison-like
figure who is also a stand-in for the author), urges Carrie to consider apply-
ing her talents to serious drama, but she continues blindly as a showgirl,
trapped in both the sentimental culture of her class and a lack of educa-
s i s t e r c a r r i e
1 5 0
tion. It is clear that no serious relationship between them will ever work
out, because Carrie is simply too intellectually shallow for this electrical en-
gineer. They part, and Carrie is left almost as emotionally needy as she had
been in the beginning of the novel. Dreiser originally wrote, perhaps with
some help, the following coda in the penultimate chapter:
Oh, blind strivings of the human heart. Onward, onward it saith, and where
beauty leads, there it follows. Whether it be the tinkle of a lone sheep bell
o’er some quiet landscape, or the glimmer of beauty in sylvan places, or the
show of soul in some passing eye, the heart knows and makes answer, fol-
lowing. It is when the feet weary in pursuit and hope seems vain that the
heartaches and the longings arise.
This kind of “nature” writing and florid style could easily have been a
part of A Princess of Arcady, so much so as to suggest that Henry influenced
its composition. We know from internal evidence that Henry helped with
the romantic chapter titles, which were penciled into the typescript in both
men’s hands as they were getting it ready to go to press at Doubleday.20 The
sentimental romantic convention to which the titles subscribe suggests
Henry’s idealism more than Dreiser’s realism, from the first chapter (“The
Magnet Attracting: A Waif Amid Forces”) to the last (“The Way of the
Beaten: A Harp in the Wind”). Other Henryesque titles are “The Machine
and the Maiden: A Knight of To-Day” (6), “The Lure of the Beautiful:
Beauty Speaks for Itself ” (7), “A Witless Aladdin: The Gate to the World”
(16), and “An Hour in Elfland: A Clamour Half Heard” (19). The prod-
ucts of what F. O. Matthiessen calls “magazine verse”—and most likely the
joint project of two writers who had worked for magazines— the titles serve
as a counterpart to the book’s harsh naturalism, but they also cloak it to
some extent.21
But to return to the final chapter of the Doubleday version, in which
Carrie is featured following the suicide of Hurstwood. It, too, is written in
the florid style of the penultimate chapter and the chapter titles. In fact, the
last paragraph of the final chapter is taken almost verbatim from the coda
of the penultimate chapter. Dreiser merely shifted it to the end of the Dou-
bleday version of the book, placing “O Carrie! O Carrie” at its beginning,
before “blind striving of the human heart.” And then he added three more
sentences that brought the passage in line with one of the leitmotifs in the
novel, the rocking chair into whose arms both Carrie and Hurstwood fall
whenever confused or defeated: “Know then, that for you is neither surfeit
s i s t e r c a r r i e
1 5 1
nor content. In your rocking chair, by your window dreaming, shall you
long, alone. In your rocking chair, by your window shall you dream such
happiness as you may never feel.”22
It may be conjectured, therefore, that Henry helped to write the last para-
graph in the last chapter of Sister Carrie. The paragraph appears to be in
Jug’s hand; she evidently made a fair copy of the paragraph taken from the
original penultimate chapter, in which, as the editors of the original type-
script note, she made slight changes. Of course, all these alterations, like
any suggestions Henry may have made for the final paragraph, could have
been agreed upon orally by Dreiser.23 But ironically, although Dreiser, as
noted earlier, claimed to have written the last chapter of Henry’s novel,
the opposite may have been true. Whatever the case, the extent of Henry’s
collaboration may be greater than has been thought. They knew each other’s
plots intimately, the two books were conceived together on the Maumee,
and they both had female protagonists who were in one sense or another
“nuns.”24
Aside from the logic of Dreiser’s title, ending the book with Carrie may
also have been an eªort to placate the Victorian critics by “punishing” her
for her adultery in leaving her basically unhappy, if also materially enriched.
But that wasn’t enough for the censors in 1900. Nor had it been in 1899
when Kate Chopin in The Awakening felt obliged to have her adulterous
female commit suicide. Only Hester of The Scarlet Letter, published a half
century earlier, passed America’s puritanical code of literature because she