A Thematic Analysis Of Dreiser's Novels From The Perspective Of Marxist's Alienation Theory

Theodore Dreiser (1871-1945), was an important America realistic novelist at the turn of the 19th and 20th century. The founder of realistic writing style and the soul of the 19th century American literature, he developed a new way for American realism literature. In his lifetime, Dreiser wrote eight novels, four short novels, two plays, three politic books, many biographies and essays. His works embody the feature of complete, typical, deeply realistic description of the 20th century American society, boldly revealing the spiritual crises and social viciousness of the capitalist society as well as the influence of the American money-worship life mode upon men's universal and criminal corrosion. Dreiser established the foundation of American new era literary creation thoughts and creation principles in 20th century.From the 1930s to nowadays, one of the hottest topics on western new Marxist thoughts has been alienation. In recent years, increasing academic attentions have been paid to the studies on the Marxist's Alienation Theory in Chinese philosophy circles and many remarkable achievements on these issues have also been obtained. Inspired by the findings of contemporary studies, the author of this thesis adopts the perspective of the Marxist's Alienation Theory in the study the Dreiser's novels and attempts to find an effective way for interpreting the thematic significance of his novels.Based on the close reading of Theodore Dreiser's English versions of Sister Carrie, Jennie Gerhard and An American Tragedy, this thesis adopts the Marxist's Alienation Theory, and applies the theory in the new culture background with the focuses on four theoretical aspects, namely, the alienation between labor force and product, the alienation between labor force and labor activity, the alienation of human relations, and human self-alienation, to the analyses of the themes of Dreiser's three novels, so as to reveal the human spiritual crisis and social viciousness in the money-oriented capitalist society. In the Marxist view, because of the outer corrupt lifestyle and the distortion of man's inner world, all kinds of social relationship between men in these novels finally collapse, men losing his own value, material dominating men's destiny, the relationship between men becoming more and more indifferent, man losing his own personal consciousness and being alienated from the society. Then everything becomes strange and the men feel lonely in an isolated place. This will have great enlightenment and significance for us to face nowadays'society.