The Men And Women Striving In An Indifferent World

Theodore Dreiser, an outstanding American novelist of the 20th century, a pioneer of naturalism in American literature, played an important role in introducing a new realism into American fiction. Sister Carrie is Dreiser's first novel and also an important one in which he led the way for a generation of writers seeking to present a detailed and realistic portrait of American cultural history and American life.This thesis attempts to analyze the characters and some techniques used to create and develop characters on the basis of realism, naturalism and feminist criticism theories. The thesis is divided into five parts.Part One is a brief introduction to the author and his works and literature review. This part centers on the previous research and comments on the author and his novel Sister Carrie based on which I put forward the purpose and significance of choosing this topic.Part Two provides the theoretical bases for character analysis, mainly realism, naturalism and feminist criticism theories. Dreiser's characterization is a blend of them.Part Three analyzes three major characters in Sister Carrie, including two male characters---Drouet and Hurstwood, and one female character---Carrie.Dreiser's characters are the truthful reflection of his life and have realistic features. The figure of Carrie is a complex compound of Emma (the original model of Carrie), Theodore Dreiser and Dreiser's mother. And Hurstwood's decline minors Dreiser's fear for failure.Dreiser's characters also bear naturalistic and feminist colors.The nineteenth century America was an industrial society as well as a patriarchal society. Under the dual social-cultural condition, men were desperate in seeking wealth and power; in addition, they abused their sexual advantages and instinct to hunt women, and they neglected their responsibility. Thus, they fell victims to the pessimistic determinism of social and sexual forces in which they were born. As Drouet and Hurstwood, they are featured by desire, shallowness and neglecting responsibility and ground under by a detached and indifferent deterministic environment.Meanwhile the first surge of Feminism from 1880 to 1920 put "new women" onto the stage of history. In Carrie, however, Dreiser forges a woman who manifests a singular freedom of mobility that propels herbeyond the confines of gender and social determinism. Carrie's visionary hope, her revolt and her spiritual rise exhibit a self that sets her apart from the gender dictates of her time: her nature is distinguished by resiliency. Through Carrie, Dreiser expands the boundaries of the deterministic novel; he places Carrie at the center of her world and is clearly suspicious of social dogma or philosophical doctrine that might obscure her essential individuality.Part Four mentions some techniques used to create and develop characters: symbols, details and contrasts. The application of these seemingly common techniques to characterization is where Dreiser's uncommonness lies.Dreiser uses a number of symbols or devices around which he organizes his material, such as rocking chair, train, door and other symbols. They link the various episodes together and reveal the emotion and fate of characters. The details include environmental descriptions, which enhance the reader's sense of reality, develop a sociological context for the characters and build the threatening impact on the characters; and animal details, which are the typical features of naturalism portraying man's competition for survival on the biological and natural level, as opposed to the moral level. The recurrent descriptions and contrast of human dwellings represent also the rise and fall of the characters. The contrast between Carrie and other women around her marks the distinct difference of her personality and offers several portraits of varied female behavior against which he urges readers to evaluate Carrie.Part Five is a conclusion. By his unique and fascinating characterization Dreiser reveals the destructiveness of industrial society and patriarchal society and expands the boundaries of social determinism by force of his personal identification with the feminine world he explored. His mind progresses beyond his time's mainstream ideology and his novel remains a classic work of complex naturalist expressionism, and superior to all the conventional naturalism of the day in his truthful reflection of social dynamics and cultural tension in the 19th century American society.