Social Darwinism As Seen In Sister Carrie

Theodore Dreiser(1871-1945), the most important representative of American Naturalism, wrote an incredible quantities of words during a fifty-year-long career in letters. He wrote many famous novels in his life time, among which Sister Carrie, the Trilogy of Desire, An American Tragedy and the Bulwark were regarded as his most important and influential works. Although many critics and scholars categorized him into the naturalistic line, Theodore Dreiser preached various ideas in different periods of his career as a writer. He deserved the title of "a great literary master" chiefly due to the fact that he created stories of the spectacle of grandeur and misery, of success and failure, which were saturated with the growing and changing America of the days and years that he knew. In time, he came to write and express his feelings of curiosity and wonder, as well as those of pity and compassion. His novels were reflecting the current social phenomenon like a mirror.Dreiser's career as a writer could be divided into three phases rather than one sole naturalistic tendency as some conventional and arbitrary scholars held. The first period witnessed the influence from Herbert Spencer and other Social Darwinists. In it, he preached all the Social Darwinian doctrines he obtained either from the second hand books by its advocators or directly from Social Darwinists' works. Then Social Darwinism retreated from the influential frontline with Consumer Culture emerging as the second influence on his works. In this phase, Dreiser created many characters who were loyal adherents to consumer culture. Their life goal of consuming blazed a way for them and determined their final fate. As he grew old, Theodore Dreiser returned to Christianity that he abhored and even revolted against in his childhood and young adulthood. He endeavored to preach the Christian ideas in his novels of the last period, with The Bulwark as their representative.This thesis is to examine the first phase of his career as a writer—the...