A Study On The Thirdspace In Sister Carrie

At the end of the 19 th century and the beginning of 20 th,the United States was undergoing a process of transition from an agricultural society to an industrial one,bringing about the rapid growth of wealth,the acceleration of urbanization,the emergence of metropolises,as well as the prosperity and development of public consumption spaces.Nonetheless,increasingly severe immigration and racial problems are intensifying gender conflicts along with sharpened gap between the rich and the poor.Heading towards the consumer era,such situation has led to conflicts between Puritanism and hedonism,which finally advocates profligate consumption.A large number of excellent writers have described the turbulent and contradictory changes in the United States;among them,Theodore Dreiser,one of the pioneers of modern American fiction and the distinguished realists,takes the lead in describing the American urban life in the new era truthfully;thus,Sister Carrie,as a classic work,comes into being.Provided that Dreiser has been to Chicago and New York in the early days,the architectural space and consumption in the two cities are depicted,and the process of people pursuing their American Dream is expounded.Many scholars have analyzed the works from various angles,but very few scholars conduct research from the perspective of Edward Soja’s Thirdspace.Soja points out that the Thirdspace is both a real space and an imagined space,presenting the characteristics of vagueness,contradiction,and fluidity.The feature of the times in the novel is ambiguous;the characters are mostly immigrants,and their identity is uncertain;the structure of the novel is always fluid,starting from the journey space.Thus,it conforms to the characteristics of Thirdspace and is researchable.This paper applies Thirdspace to the study of Sister Carrie and points out that Chicago and New York are the two Thirdspace.Through the four reified dimensions of Thirdspace,namely living space,public space,social space and consumer space,the paper analyzes the connection between Thirdspace and American Dream.In the industrialized city of Chicago,the richness and diversity of living space are swallowed up by the modernization and turn into oppressive spaces;public space has become a breeding ground for the growth of urban subjects’ desires as well as the main place to smooth out individual identity differences.In the developed city of New York,living space transforms into social space full of knowledge and ideology;the successful transformation of the consumer society combines the urban space with the discourse of consumption and present as consumer space full of power.Through the perspective of Thirdspace,firstly,it shows the rich cultural features of American metropolis at the turn of the century as shown in the vigor and ruggedness of the western industrialized Chicago and the economic prosperity and consumption-oriented New York in the east;secondly,the fluidity and uncertainty of the city is intuitively displayed,meanwhile the process of characters’ confusion about their social identity to identify with themselves is deduced;finally,through the application of Thirdspace,it reveals the social,cultural and economic problems in the process of American urbanization.Moreover,the study illuminates Dreiser’s unique insight for city as well as the inevitability of the distortion and disillusionment of American Dream.The fluidity,contradiction and ambiguity of Thirdspace have led to the instability and uncertainty of characters’ identity,revealing the distortion and disillusionment of their American Dream.The significance of the research is that the application of Thirdspace ushers a new perspective to interdisciplinary and textual reading study,broadens the breadth of Dreiser’s work interpretation,and more important,from the perspective of Thirdspace,it presents the great social changes of transformational America more intuitively and comprehensively.