IBIS wrote:
Intro to CARRIE
We know little about Carrie when we first meet her. My first impression of her is formed by her material possessions: a yellow leather snap wallet, a cheap imitation alligator-skin suitcase, and four dollars.
This tells me that Carrie is poor, she can’t afford the luxury of real alligator skin, but she wants the status of it, and so she owns a cheap imitation.
Telling us the exact amount of money she has… four dollars… focuses on the importance of cold hard cash in her new world.
There already is a strong emphasis on the theme of money.
And four dollars is also the rent she is to pay to her brother-in-law, out of the $4.50 that she earns, leaving her with less than adequate carfare. What I found interesting is that, when Carrie turned over her four dollars to her sister, Hanson turned over four dollars less towards the household expenses than he usually did, intending to save those four dollars towards buying some property. Apparently, they expect Carrie to turn over virtually her whole salary, and at the same time, cost them nothing in living expenses, since Hanson expects to live on the same amount as before she came to live with them.
On the first Saturday night Carrie paid her board, four dollars. Minnie had a quaver of conscience as she took it, but did not know how to explain to Hanson if she took less. That worthy gave up just four dollars less toward the household expenses with a smile of satisfaction. He contemplated increasing his Building and Loan payments. As for Carrie, she studied over the problem of finding clothes and amusement on fifty cents a week. She brooded over this until she was in a state of mental rebellion.
Of course, the ironic outcome of taking almost all of her wages for board is that she has to walk in the bad weather, gets sick, and loses her job. At which time she is of no more use to the Hansons and they want to send her back home. I believe that Carrie's sister does have some slight feelings for her sister (usually successfully repressed, but expressing themselves in her dream), but it certainly has nothing to do with family affection that Carrie was allowed to come to them; they only wanted another wage-earner to contribute to the household.
At the beginning of Chapter 7, Dreiser waxes a little philosophical about money and lets us know Carrie's position on the subject:
The true meaning of money yet remains to be popularly explained and comprehended. When each individual realises for himself that this thing primarily stands for and should only be accepted as a moral due--that it should be paid out as honestly stored energy, and not as a usurped privilege--many of our social, religious, and political troubles will have permanently passed. As for Carrie, her understanding of the moral significance of money was the popular understanding, nothing more. The old definition: "Money: something everybody else has and I must get," would have expressed her understanding of it thoroughly. Some of it she now held in her hand--two soft, green ten-dollar bills--and she felt that she was immensely better off for the having of them. It was something that was power in itself. One of her order of mind would have been content to be cast away upon a desert island with a bundle of money, and only the long strain of starvation would have taught her that in some cases it could have no value. Even then she would have had no conception of the relative value of the thing; her one thought would, undoubtedly, have concerned the pity of having so much power and the inability to use it.
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Grand Dame of the Land of Oz, Duchess of Fantasia, in the Kingdom of Wordsmithonia; also, Poet Laureate of the Kingdom of Wordsmithonia
