The Lifestyle Of Leisure Class In Sister Carrie:a Cultural Analysis

As Theodore Dreiser’s first novel, Sister Carrie is an important landmark in American literature. Though rejected by publishers for its "immoral" content when it was first finished, the novel enjoys great fame for its realistic depictions of the industrial and urban America. By telling the story of a young countryside girl’s rise to a famous actress in big cities, Theodore Dreiser successfully drew out a vivid picture of the late nineteenth-century America.Drawing upon Thorstein Veblen’s concept of "conspicuous consumption" and Pierre Bourdieu’s analysis of "cultural capital", and combining textual analysis with the novel’s specific social context, the thesis presents a cultural analysis of the lifestyle of leisure class and its problems reflected in Sister Carrie. The post-Civil War America is characterized by its rapid industrial development. However, the gap between the leisure class and the lower class represented by Sister Carrie widens on an unprecedented scale. Economically, Sister Carrie’s pursuit for material prosperity can be interpreted, from Veblen’s perspective, as an attempt to emulate the lifestyle of the leisure class through conspicuous consumption. However, Sister Carrie’s vulgar materialism, inferiority in tastes and low education level reveal her lack of cultural capital, which determines that she cannot get rid of her working class origin and cross the invisible class barrier established by the leisure class.The thesis takes the method of close reading, and focuses on the economic and cultural aspects of the lifestyle of leisure class the author portrays in Sister Carrie. The thesis reaches the conclusion that, the experiences of Sister Carrie present to us how the leisure class in the late nineteenth-century America distinguish themselves with both economic and cultural advantages, and the distinction explains well the novel’s last scene in which the unhappy Sister Carrie sitting on a chair rocking herself to a delirium. The analysis serves to help us better understand the behaviors and motivations of the protagonists based on historical background, thus improving our appreciation of the profound significance of this novel.