Analysis Of The Self-conflict Of Two Mistresses Between Sister Carrie And Guo Haizao

Theodore Dreiser began to write before 1900, but his first novel Sister Carrie was not extensive accepted but criticized severely from both critics and ordinary readers. This novel could not be acknowledged ethically then because the protagonist in the novel Carrie did not gain her happiness with appropriate methods. But as time went by, the novel drew much attention and came to be more and more popular. What’s more, some other novels, such as The Financier (1912), The Titan (1914) and An American Tragedy (1925), written by Dreiser brought him much popularity, which gradually established his position in the American literary world firmly.Based on the similarity of the novels in plots and protagonists, the paper shows how the protagonists survive in the social consumption environment, under the guidance of the self perception theory of James Brown and George Mead by means of close reading combined with the concept of symbolic consumption. By analyzing the relationships between the "material me", "social me" and "spiritual me", the author of the paper discusses the consequent results of Carrie and Guo Haizao who were trapped into self-conflict. The author thinks that the first "me" is the basis and also the direct motive force of the second and third "me". The paper emphasizes that it is the imbalance of the relationship among relations between the three "me" mentioned above that leads to the conflict.The paper tries to analyze the causes that Carrie and Guo Haizao fall into self-conflict from the perspective of material me, social me and spiritual me based on the theory of cognitive psychology. The paper focuses on Guo Haizao, the modern intellectual female, with the analysis of Carrie as the basis of the research. The author of the paper hopes that the research may give much food for thought to females, modern females in particular, that is, we have to recognize ourselves clearly in the changing social environment. What’s more, we should deal with the relationship properly, especially that between males, in order to keep the independence economically and spiritually.Anyway, in the face of inevitable tendency of symbolic consumption and influence of traditional male authority, the modern females should shape a clarified identification and never get adrift in the flood of consumption. It is of the realistic significance for the paper to make a research of the two novels from the perspective of the theory.