SOURCE: “Sisters in a Quest—Sister Carrie and A Thousand Acres: The Search for Identity in Gendered Territory,” in Midwestern Miscellany, Vol. 22, 1994, pp. 18–29.

In the following essay, Rozga compares and contrasts Smiley's A Thousand Acres and Theodore Dreiser's Sister Carrie.

Theodore Dreiser's Sister Carrie and Jane Smiley's A Thousand Acres each have as their main character a woman in search of a place for herself. Aside from this basic quest motif, however, what is most apparent are the differences: Theodore Dreiser's Sister Carrie, a turn of the century work, is narrated by a third-person voice whose pronouncements figure in the novel almost as prominently as do the voices of the main characters; A Thousand Acres, Jane Smiley's late twentieth century novel, is narrated by the main character, Ginny Cook Smith. The main and title character in Sister Carrie is a young Wisconsin woman who leaves home to seek...