Life, Death, and the Pursuit of Happiness:
Theodore Dreiser’s Sister Carrie vs. Kate Chopin’s The Awakening
By: Katrina Buckley

The pursuit of happiness—it began as part of a fiery declaration of rebellious ideals by an eloquent insurgent and has since firmly entrenched itself into the collective American psyche. To exist, to survive, to continue to physiologically function—this, according to the prevailing American ethos, is simply not good enough. One must enjoy, thrive, and, most importantly, find and live in eternal happiness. Indeed, the pursuit and eventual discovery of happiness has become an inextricable companion to and universal expectation of the American experience. Expectations, particularly of wholly abstract, frequently elusive entities, can easily transform into burdens, and it is this mutation of the American dream that both complicates life and manifests itself so compellingly in literature. In Theodore Dreiser’s Sister Carrie and Kate Chopin’s The Awakening, the female protagonists, both plagued by discontent, desperately seek enduring happiness; however, while Carrie, blinded by immaturity and ignorance, futilely looks for fulfillment in social prestige and material finery, Edna embarks on an intense, probing search for self that culminates in her suicide. Although Carrie’s pursuit of superficial rewards allows her physical survival, this survival remains tragically predicated on her existence from within a perpetual state of longing. Meanwhile, Edna’s existential quest ultimately leads to her physical demise, but this demise, as portrayed by Chopin, is not tragic, but instead, reflects Edna’s grasp of a transcendent Truth and serves as the necessary agent of an emotional and spiritual triumph. Thus, in a startling irony, while Carrie lives, her story ends on a note of hopeless despair, and while Edna dies, her last moments emanate joyful revelation and lyrical beauty.

In Dreiser's Sister Carrie and Chopin's The Awakening, Carrie and Edna, faced with the same problem—persistent discontent—journey toward the same goal—persistent happiness. Carrie's path leads her to a world of acquisitive greed and materialism, a world where happiness looms seductively, yet unattainably, on the horizon of the future. She lives on in a bland, predictable, unremarkable existence. Edna's path takes her into the crevices of her mind and the faraway reaches of her soul, igniting her passions, arousing her senses, and ending in an ecstasy of revelation that happens to coincide with her willful death. The works, individually and comparatively, thus leave the audience with a grotesque and ambiguous irony.

Carrie retains hope, and it saves her life; Edna loses it, and it dooms her. At the same time, Edna's resignation liberates her spirit while Carrie's perpetually forward and outward-looking eye devastates hers. Edna is literally killed but figuratively saved by her search for profound meaning and Truth; Carrie's unwavering focus on externalities allows for her physical survival but takes a heavy toll on her emotional prospects. Neither one, then, wholly succeeds or fails in her pursuits, and so their plights represent, more than anything, the myth of pristine happiness, embedded within the larger myth of the American dream.

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