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Chapter 2
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Sister Carrie, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Urban Life and Decay
Morality and Instinct
Wealth and Class
Summary
Analysis
Carrie walks around in the wholesale district looking for places to apply. She feels very self-conscious of being a “wage-seeker” and, “to avoid a certain indefinable shame […] at being caught spying about for a position,” spends some time walking too fast to look at the manufacturing and wholesale houses properly. Realizing this won’t work, she slows down and notices a great door with a brass sign. However, seeing through the window “a young man with a grey checked suit,” she hurries away, “too overcome by shame to enter.” She repeats this process of approach and retreat with Storm and King, a wholesale dry goods concern that employs women.
Carrie’s innate moral standard equates wealth with goodness: she feels ashamed of seeking work, as if poverty is something disgraceful. The city continues to overwhelm Carrie. Coupled with her sense of shame, she is too embarrassed to enter any of the establishments in the wholesale district. Nevertheless, Carrie also demonstrates a certain amount of gumption, and finally enters the dry goods concern after retreating from several other establishments—despite her shame, Carrie is not meek.
Themes
Carrie’s cowardice begins to dishearten her as she continues to walk, so she decides to return to Storm and King. On the way, she enters a wholesale shoe company, where an old gentleman gently declines her request for work. Encouraged by his kindness, she ventures into a clothing company and asks for work again, but this time she receives an abrupt “no.” This rejection is “a severe setback to her recently pleased mental state.” However, after a bowl of soup for lunch, she feels moderately restored and continues her search.
The city appears to be a booming place, full of opportunities for those who are looking for work. Nevertheless, here readers can see wage seekers often need more than just a will to work—they need experience or connections. In this way, the city is a harsher place than Carrie had imagined. Carrie’s surroundings easily affect her resolve: kindness encourages her, and harshness easily breaks her down. She is a very impressionable young woman.
Themes
Carrie encounters Storm and King again and enters the building. She waits while the men conferring nearby ignore her, until a man at a desk directs her to Mr. McManus. McManus asks Carrie if she has experience in the wholesale dry goods business, stenography, or typing. Carrie replies no to each of these inquiries. McManus rejects her request for work, citing they only need “experienced help,” but attracted by Carrie’s “plaintive face,” points her to the department stores that often need young women as clerks.
The industrial world is dominated by men—everyone in charge appears to male, and woman are only lower-tier workers. It is seemingly more difficult for women to find work than men, and all the more so if the woman, like Carrie, has no skills in sales, stenography, or typing. Regardless of how sweet and likeable Carrie is, her lack of skills and experience is damning in her job search.
Themes
McManus’s words give Carrie courage, and after wandering for some time, she gets directions from a police officer to go to “The Fair,” which is two blocks away. At the store, Carrie is drawn to all merchandise: “There [is] nothing there which she could not have used—nothing which she d[oes] not long to own.” However, she also realizes that everything is beyond her reach, since she’s unemployed. Carrie once again feels the shabbiness of her material state, especially next to the fine ladies shopping and even the female clerks “with whom she now [compares] poorly.” She is envious and “[longs] for dress and beauty with a whole heart.”
Carrie is drawn to the luxuries of the city and desires all the material goods in the department stores. These items form a stark contrast with Minnie’s austere and frugal lifestyle. Carrie realizes that if she is to obtain these goods, then she must find a source of income. Carrie longs to be able to hold her head high next to all the finely dressed women around her, for even the female clerks are better dressed than she. In this way, readers can see that Carrie is instinctively drawn to wealth and luxury.
Themes
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Carrie waits for 45 minutes before she is called in for an interview. After learning that she has no experience with working in stores, the interviewer rejects her and promptly asks her to leave. As an afterthought, he asks for her name and address, in case a position opens. After getting to the street, Carrie is on the brink of tears and, “feeling a certain safety and relief in mingling with the crowd,” wanders along.
Many people are seeking jobs alongside Carrie, as evidenced by the 45 -minute wait before her interview. In this way, it seems that the wage-seekers outnumber the number of positions available. The city is not the booming place of opportunity that Carrie had imagined; indeed, it seems she does not know how to integrate into this urban system.
Themes
Walking along the street, Carrie sees an advertisement for female wrappers and stitchers for Speigelheim & Co., which produces boys’ caps. She enters the building and observes the workspace to be dingy and the female workers to be “drabby-looking creatures.” Carrie is sure she does not want to work in this place but waits until the foreman approaches her. Despite her lack of related work experience, the foreman offers her a job that pays $3.50 per week. Carrie leaves gratified at the offer but disappointed with the shop’s dinginess and the low pay.
Despite her desperation, Carrie has a strong sense of pride. The wrapping and stitching establishment reeks of dinginess and poverty, no doubt forming a stark contrast to the department stores she saw before. Although she has received no offers thus far and has no experience, Carrie is still unwilling to work in a grimy place with low pay. In this way, Carrie has great expectations for herself and has double standards about menial work—she looks down on it, even though she herself isn’t qualified to do anything else.
Themes
Carrie continues her search but is rejected with “chilling formality” from the more desirable, respectable places. She receives an especially cold rejection from a manufacturing cloak house, and so “with the wane of the afternoon went her hopes, her courage, and her strength.” She begins to head back to her sister Minnie’s house but feels “one of those forlorn impulses which often grow out of a fixed sense of defeat” and decides to make one more effort at a wholesale shoe house with a plate-glass window.
Carrie does not seem in touch with reality—she does not realize that her lack of experience forbids her from working in more desirable and respectable places. She feels only disappointment, rather than a resolve to start at a less than perfect establishment and work her way up to better places. Carrie’s inexperience renders her far too idealistic and easy to disappoint.
Themes
The man behind the door at the shoe house tells Carrie they only employ book-keepers and typewriters, but tells her to ask for Mr. Brown upstairs. In “a portion of a stock room which gave no idea of the general character of the place,” Mr. Brown offers Carrie a position that pays $4.50 per week. Though disappointed by the pay, Carrie accepts the offer and begins to feel more relaxed and hopeful. As she walks to Minnie’s flat, she sees workers returning home with smiles and reassures herself that “she w[ill] have a better time than she ever had before—she w[ill] be happy.”
Carrie is a disappointed at the low pay offered to her, despite knowing that she has no experience or redeemable work qualities. Nevertheless, she is hopeful and thinks that with the money, she can now be happy. At this point in the novel, Carrie equates wealth with happiness—she believes that money will lift her out of Minnie’s sad, barren apartment and into a more luxurious and happier place. Carrie’s idealistic views set her up for disappointment.
Themes
