Weakness of power: Masculinity at odds in Theodore Dreiser’s Sister Carrie

Age, gender, and race (among many), are often used as sources of power in human societies to lord it over the weaker ones. Two decades before women got the right to vote in the U.S., Theodore Dreiser published Sister Carrie, portraying an 18-year-old girl dissatisfied with county life, who travels to the city for better life. The journey and the stay met with masculinity showcased by a sex-hungry Drouet and a fragmented Hurstwood. Lack of responsibility as a male quickly plunges this figure into a journey that gradually weakens him deprives him of belongings, and finally offers him suicide. Informed by psychoanalytical theory, this paper describes Sister Carrie in terms of weakness of power (male over female) which turns the powerful into weak and the weak into powerful.