Garden Sphere

Heads up! Spoiling the novel Sister Carrie by Theodore Dreiser (1900).

FOLFIRI is so isolating. Unlike FOLFOX's 2-day recovery period, FOLFIRI has me dragging for over a week with an awful mix of fatigue, pain, and moodiness. Without being able to go anywhere or handle anything too taxing, my world's contracted into a tight, inward world orbiting the chemo spa and mild pleasures. This really isn't like me. I kind of hate it. I don't want to be on FOLFIRI anymore...

Alone Together

In 2017, ガンガンONLINE published a cute little manga series called Garden Sphere. (And, oh, how I'd love to cosplay Princess Shukuru and Prince Rou with my husband.♥) The title refers to the secluded castle they retreat into to negotiate a political marriage and end the national conflict between their people. War cannot reach them there, and no one intrudes on them but a skeleton crew of family servants. They are too young to understand politics, so they mostly have playdates and do fittings for their cute wedding clothes. It's Konno-san's first manga, so even though it's shallow, it's really sweet and has adorable illustrations.

This idea of a “garden sphere” resonates with me, where everything collapses into a small, comforting world curtained off from serious issues. Not just now because I'm really struggling with cancer lately, but always. Even as a kid.

Every work of fiction has--or should have--a narrowed focus, edited under the governance of theme and character. Even grand epics with sprawling settings will carve out little intimate spaces: the sanctuary of home, a confidant's embrace, or a moment of introspection that shuts out the storm. These spaces are grounding and break the tension.

Some favorites come to mind: the Velvet Room in Persona, the towers in Code Lyoko, the Room of Requirement in Hogwarts Legacy (sorry Harry Potter people, I only know the game lol), and Ryan Gosling's relationship with his AI girlfriend in Blade Runner 2049. Spaces like guild halls in Guild Wars and runecrafting altars in RuneScape give that sense of being whisked away to a private space only you and your friends can enter. It's more fun when that secret world is tied to a physical artifact, like the Modron Cube in Planescape: Torment.

These secluded worlds always draw me in, especially those with restricted access. They are like sanctuaries of personal nurturing. Growing up, I cultivated my own garden sphere, my inner world of contemplation and imagination. I was a very private person. I don't really have any lifelong friends or family who have always hung in there, besides a very few. And I'm awkward about expressing it outwardly, but I really love them and find them very special.

There are a few physical spaces from my childhood, too.

I ran away from home a lot (lol) and haunted the few spaces that felt safe and empty. There was a strangely unused house in my neighborhood that I spent a lot of time at. If I needed to make any private phone calls, I took them in the garage there, like the time I ordered a corsage for prom. They were so quiet and dark. My parents couldn't bother me there. Whenever my husband-then-boyfriend-at-the-time moved here, I tried to find it to show him, but I couldn't recognize it. So much was the same, but the strangely abandoned house is no longer mine. There were other places, too. I knew all the unused rooms at church and school that no one ever checked. But that house was my favorite.

My childhood writing is dominated by spaces like this, periodically taking a character or two out of the scene and setting them in some isolated pocket world to play out their solitude.

I probably have some disassociative misanthropic disorder, but whatever. I just crave hiding places.

Cancer's Small World

I prefer a simple kind of life with fewer people and things. It's not like I'm not impulsive - I never grew out of lust for opportunities for urban exploration and day trips by myself when I can get away with it, but I trend towards depth in my interests rather than a pursuit of whatever flashes in front of me.

Further, cancer's bred a superstition in me, that excitement, any stress, sabotages my body and wastes precious recovery energy. Eustress is still stress, no? And with chemo fog, my head churns like a slow computer. I always preserved my garden sphere, but now it's such a small, almost childishly shallow. Lounging and enjoying simple pleasures is not the life I've ever felt comfortable with. It's just not what I've ever allowed for myself. But what else can I do when my body and mind are so fragile?

Straight out of the hospital, I marathoned Kitchen Nightmares to an extreme. Apparently, that's super common. The Youtube comments are full of hospital patients and people watching with dying relatives.

Gordon Ramsay has perfected braindead TV. Any random episode is a safe bet--only a handful of employees to remember, a villain of the week, and more or less the same plot. Nothing's so bad it can't be resolved with a coat of white paint, tiny pretentious burgers, and a quick heart-to-heart confrontation. This is truly the epitome of garden sphere reality cable.

Pictured above: the brain activity of the average Kitchen Nightmares fan.

(I'm not kidding when I say braindead lol. Look at my old PET scans. Dark areas indicate areas with good glucose intake. So obviously, that would be your brain, digestive tract, and any tumors. Out of the hospital, my tumors were eating so much of my glucose, my brain was barely showing up in the scan. Crazy. You can see the healthy dark color after a year of chemo, though, so I got less thrall-like.)

As I've recovered, my tolerance for media's marginally improved. I graduated to doll webisodes, MMO private servers, but no real literature. It's all just shallow garden sphere media. It's a sharp drop from Etidorpha, the Bhagavata Purana, and the church fathers I was reading right before. I really like reading, but chemo fog is thick as roux to cut through. It's awful. I just can't read for more than a few minutes without feeling the equivalent mental fatigue of studying Japanese for hours. That said, at the end of November, I finally managed to finish a book for the first time in over a year: Sister Carrie. Felt so good.

Reading the 500-page Sister Carrie in a few days flooded me with optimism, but following with Père Goriot evaporated every little bit again. Balzac is too much for now.

Not to undermine Dreiser's latent skill in governing plot and character arcs under his theme, but Sister Carrie's characters and world are as claustophobically narrow as my own. She practically only interacts with 1 to 2 characters per arc and spends most of the novel in her apartment, admiring clothes or men. What a coincidence that the only book I can read is in the garden sphere genre. I read the original heavily censored version, too, no less.

Gilded Cage

The dark mirror aspect of Dreiser's writing - taking a relatable character who makes every bad decision possible - is a staple of my gross interest in his writing, and Carrie is no exception. I don't compromise myself, yet Carrie can take $20 and turn it into a gilded cage. She was letting Drouet stake his claim in the most primal way possible, too, ensuring her messy attachment forever. Maybe her $20 then is more like $600 now, but girl, it's not worth it!

Carrie only cares about shopping for pretty clothes and having her ear tickled. Freshly 18 and moving to the city without any plans, she's quickly snagged by Drouet, a smooth and well-dressed salesman with enough money to shower her in whatever baubles she desires. He's dirty, probably a man in his late 20s or early 30s, targeting pretty but clueless young women like it's a game. He undoubtedly has a pet girl in each city for pleasure during his business trips, and a harem of hollaback girls besides. During Carrie's second interaction with Drouet, he gives her the equivalent of something like $20, enough to secure a tasteful and lasting outfit while squirreling away the rest for rent and food. Yet she blows it all on an overly trendy coat that won't outlast the season. During their third interaction, she takes his advice about ghosting her family and moves in with him. She gives up everything for nothing.

Young, single girls in unfamiliar towns can live off of the kindness of strangers, at least from my experience. With her natural charm, Carrie could secure a rogue's gallery of harmless, overeager boys; accept simple gifts; and walk away with her independence. Accept a leg up, sure, but it's not safe to trust anyone entirely or ever let a man buy you.

Drouet is charming and kind, but his brand of help comes with too many binds. Even if I'm starving, I'm not easy nor a beggar. I don't let guys buy me food unless it's an earnest offer on some level. An extravagant gift is a hard no. Even when I was only getting money through excessively inconsistent freelance writing and hanging out with rich brats, I concealed my situation and split bills. Call it pride or stubbornness, but I carve out my own life. I had bad experiences growing up anyway, so the lesson of trust came very slowly.

Of course, none of these guys stuck around, no matter how kind they were or how great our chemistry was. They were shallow, not looking for a deep relationship. They just want to make a girl smile, show her off to a few friends, then disappear, never entering my garden sphere. I wasn't looking for a boyfriend anyway, so it suited me. No boy deserves to be tied up in my messy life, you know? I was content to play surrogate girlfriend in exchange for charity and good advice, then break without ties, going through life.

Carrie wasn't looking for a proper relationship, either. She never knows love at any point in the novel, only ever longing for a higher standard of dress, dining, and entertainment. She views men the same way, easily becoming infatuated with the more clever and moneyed Hurstwood, despite his age. He and Drouet fight over her like a doll, catching her between Drouet's condescension and Hurstwood's manipulation. In the aftermath, she ends up playing wife for Hurstwood, trapped in an apartment in a new city without any friends. He's a monster, concealing his other marriage, kidnapping her under false pretense, and expecting gratitude for it all.

Even when she splits from Hurstwood and goes to Ames, an apparently emotionally deeper and more supportive boyfriend, their relationship has the same issues. Only, instead of the level of luxuries they share, it's built on the level of art and literature they share. Even if his impulse guides her into self-improvement, pushing her into a field of work where she makes enough money for independence, he's just another passing step in her longing for happiness she may never feel. The shallow infatuation remains, him admiring her more as a muse than a partner. The manipulation remains, him pushing her into acting then specifically comedy-drama. It's never a proper relationship. There's never any love in it, just shallow pleasantries and infatuations.

My Own Gilded Cage

Despite the monotonous Carrie cycle of fruitlessly walking the streets in search of work ↷ letting men use her ↷ and refining her blossoming charm↻, I couldn't put the book down. Even if the first half was spent in Drouet's apartment with a boy who stopped taking Carrie out after the honeymoon period, and the second half was spent in Hurstwood's, where he never took her out at all.

Somewhere in the middle, I realized that's exactly why I was locked into the book. Wanting to leave the house but barely being able to leave the bed is the same cage. It's even gilded a bit, with snacks and craft projects and all the gifts people have given me, but it's an aggressively small, boring place to be.

Sister Carrie's characters are shallow and easy to critique, much like any Kitchen Nightmares cast. Carrie's boyfriends are few and never entirely leave her life, either, lingering like ghosts until time to pop up again. And although the narrative has plenty of high stakes drama, the dangers are easily identified and long periods of inactivity subdue the monsters into something manageable and familiar. It's a really boring book.

Carrie's Garden Sphere

In a magical part near the end, Drouet appears out of nowhere, hoping to wheedle his control back over the newly rich and famous Carrie, prettier than ever. He finagles Carrie into going on a dinner date with him, and for a moment, she falls for his old charms. Really, Dreiser brings him in to reveal all Hurstwood's secrets before an unexpected confrontation with him, but this is an archetypal scene to me and dreamy to read.

To be at the end of a long dreary novel, after such painful betrayals, left at the end with no one in your camp except a villain you can't really be afraid of anymore... After all, what was Drouet's crime? Being shallow? He's done wrong, but others have done worse. Carrie could even credit him for having coining the stage name that started her career in a way. It's all a wash in the end, isn't it?

Honestly, I have this feeling like I'm very, very old, like an immortal at the end of a lifetime. Like I've been on so many adventures, probably more than most people who grew up with stable households and curfews and less impulsive behavior than me, but that chapter's long closed. I have a very good husband and a very good community now. I hope I keep them forever. I finally lost the urge to run off and hide.

Honestly, kinda, even if they were terrible to me, I grow attached to anyone who has stuck around in my life for a while. If I lost everyone, after so much time has passed, I'd rather be strange bedfellows with a villain like Drouet. He's shown me every part of his villainy, and I've already developed every defense against it. Rather him than a seemingly kind stranger like Ames whose depths are a total unknown. Besides, I would think even a very antagonistic sort of villain, after so long, would surely have developed some sort of mutual respect or common ground after a while.

I've mostly had bad people in my life, but I'd like to think they should become more like a bittersweet comfort, an old thorn dulled by time.

Of course, not every weed in my garden is worth letting bloom. Hurstwood has an undercurrent of violence to him, and unlike Drouet who had a touch of magnanimity and care for Carrie's well-being, Hurstwood is an entitlement elemental. He's a danger against which there is no defense, even at the height of Carrie's fame and fortune. True villains like that should be fenced out. And he never really did enter Carrie's shallow inner world, either, not like Drouet had.

Overall Review of Sister Carrie

I went in blind but trusting, since An American Tragedy is one of my favorite books. I didn't know this was Dreiser's first novel, nor that it was brutally censored. It feels like I missed crucial scenes, like the censored version of Culpa Innata. (That game definitely just goes to black, skips, then leaves you with random new quest items in your inventory.)

Dreiser surely wouldn't miss Drouet luring Carrie into his bed and her growing awareness of her power, given his gritty depictions of the destructive nature of lust and ambition in his later works. I've heard the unexpurgated edition includes all the risque details you would expect from his unvarnished realism. Of course, Dreiser is never lurid, just unflinching, so it isn't like his books get gross or anything of course.

With its teeth clipped, I'm definitely missing out on Drouet's scoundrel. Worse, Margaret Sanger's birth control was yet to catch on in the 1900s, so the novel's also missing just how close Carrie was to unraveling her whole world. Dreiser lays pregnancy scares and abortion open bare in Roberta's case in An American Tragedy. Left is Dreiser's crude early writing, circling the drain of isolation and dissatisfaction with dull company.

Yet boring and watered-down as it is, I adore this book. The ending is absolutely magical, the way Dreiser binds off his character arcs, looping each through each other, in a sequence of deliberate moves. He's so good at plotting. Honestly, it forgives any sins along the way.

Anyway...

An American Tragedy is so dear to me because I read slowly and at the same life stages as Clyde. I left home with him, made my first friends with him, started dating with him, looked for work with him, got into a serious relationship with him. Even our holidays lined up. Clyde was like that dark mirror to look into when I had time to read. I suppose when I look back, Sister Carrie will hold the same weight with me, accompanying the same cage I was in 2024. Dreiser novels are so intimate. Maybe whenever I become a cold-blooded Wall Street investor and railroad tycoon, I'll read his Trilogy Desire to chase that feeling again.

But whatever.