Jennifer Jones as Sister Carrie
Kiki Ostrenga
Last Thursday I commended David Brooks of The New York Times as one of the few Republican conservatives willing to call out the insanity occurring in parts of the G.O.P. One reason Brooks is able to keep his feet on the ground may be because he reads great literature. In a column a couple of weeks ago, he unexpectedly turned to Theodore Dreiser’s 1900 novel Sister Carrie in an attempt to make sense of the strange and disturbing case of a 13-year-old internet celebrity.
Kiki Ostrenga, whose case was profiled by Rolling Stone, apparently became an internet sensation for the multiple identities, often sexually suggestive, that she projected on her website. I won’t go into all the twists and turns of what happened other than to say that there were death threats and violence, her family had to move and went bankrupt, and Kiki had her innocence and her adolescence destroyed.
Here’s Brooks applying Dreiser’s novel to Kiki:
In 1900, Theodore Dreiser wrote “Sister Carrie,” about a young woman who left the farm and got mauled by the crushing forces of industrial America: the loneliness of urban life, the squalid conditions of the factory, the easy allure of the theater, the materialism of the new consumer culture.
If Dreiser were around today, he might write about Kiki Ostrenga, . . . a young teenager who got mauled by the some of the worst forces of the information age.
While I applaud Brooks’ use of Sister Carrie, however, the novel’s protagonist doesn’t entirely get mauled. In fact, Chicago helps her escape from a stunted rural existence, and, while she gets used by others, she benefits as well. Ultimately she is able to discover and exercise her gift for acting. Without the brave new world of industrial America, she would have been one of those flowers that is (in Thomas Gray’s memorable image) “born to blush unseen/And waste its fragrance on the desert air.”
As I recall the novel, Carrie is wrestling with American materialism at the end of the book but has not yet been destroyed by it. In fact, she has a choice: to act for fame and money or to act for art. (My old actor friend Maurine Holbert Hogaboom used to say that the first track was being a “cathedral actor,” the second a “career actor.”) Kiki might benefit from the wise counsel that Carrie gets. Carrie is told that she has a gift but that
“now that you have it, you must do something with it.”
“What?” asked Carrie.
“I should say, turn to the dramatic field. You have so much sympathy and such a melodious voice. Make them valuable to others. It will make your powers endure.”
Carrie did not understand this last. All the rest showed her that her comedy success was little or nothing.
“What do you mean?” she asked.
“Why, just this. You have this quality in your eyes and mouth and in your nature. You can lose it, you know. If you turn away from it and live to satisfy yourself alone, it will go fast enough. The look will leave your eyes. Your mouth will change. Your power to act will disappear. You may think they won’t, but they will. Nature takes care of that.”
As I recall, it’s not clear by the end of the book whether materialism or a meaningful life will triumph. Kiki’s ending is still unwritten as well.
By the way, two other books that Brooks could have mentioned were Nabokov’s Lolita (obviously) and Defoe’s Moll Flanders. Lolita, of course, is about an obsession with nymphets while Defoe’s narrator protagonist is the consummate shape shifter, assuming whatever identity a situation calls for.
I suspect that neither Kiki nor her parents are readers, but any of these three novels could have given them perspective on what was going on. Instead they were overwhelmed by the forces that she had unleashed and had no way to see clear.