Women’s Crisis And Its Causes In Theodore Dreiser’s An American Tragedy

An American Tragedy,first published in 1925,is a novel by Theodore Dreiser(1871-1945),a representative naturalist.In his life,he wrote more than 20 works,including Sister Carrie(1900),Jennie Gerhardt(1911)and so on.An American Tragedy,Dreiser’s most accomplished work,was selected by Time as one of the top 100 novels of English language in 2005.An American Tragedy was based on the real case of Chester Gillette,who was sentenced to death for the murder of his lover Grace Brown in 1906.It tells a tragic story of Clyde Griffiths,who wanted to get into the upper class by marrying a wealthy girl called Sondra Finchley,murdered his pregnant lover named Roberta Alden,and finally was sent to the electric chair.Dreiser elevates this real case into “an indictment of the American social system” through a high degree of artistic generalization.The novel has profound social and political significance,and vividly reveals the hypocrisy and darkness of American society in religion,politics,morality and judicial system.In An American Tragedy,the tragic fate of the female characters unfolds slowly along with the development of Clyde’s life.Critics argue that Dreiser is prejudiced against women,so this thesis will use the feminist theory of the French existentialist writer Simone de Beauvoir(1908-1986)to deeply explore the female crises faced by the female characters in An American Tragedy,to connect these crises with their tragic fates,and to explore the main causes of these crises,so as to reveal the concrete manifestation of Dreiser’s misogyny.The thesis is divided into three parts.The first chapter mainly analyzes the gender crisis of the female characters in An American Tragedy from the perspective of society.Beauvoir believes that the gender crisis of women mainly includes the biological gender crisis and the social gender crisis,and that the political,economic,cultural and other factors have caused the gender crisis of women in different degrees.Based on this,this chapter will deeply reveal the gender crisis faced by the female characters in An American Tragedy from three aspects: the invasion of urbanization,the prevalence of consumerism and the confinement of religion and morality.The second chapter mainly analyzes the identity crisis of the female characters in An American Tragedy from the perspective of individuals.In her magnum opus The Second Sex,Beauvoir deeply explores the difficult situation faced by women at different ages and of various identities.And the female characters in different classes in the novel are also faced with different identity crises.Therefore,this chapter will explore the reasons why the female characters in An American Tragedy are in the dilemma of identity construction from two aspects of lack of the sense of belongingness to family and community and lack of the sense of identity as lover.The third chapter mainly analyzes the subjectivity crisis of the female characters in An American Tragedy from the perspective of self-alienation.In The Second Sex,Beauvoir explores the problems women face in overcoming immanence and seeking transcendence,and believes that women are limited by subjective self-design,which leads to their failure to realize their transcendence and to complete the construction of female subjectivity.Based on this,this chapter will deeply reveal the crisis of subjectivity faced by the female characters in An American Tragedy from two aspects of alienation of self-consciousness and alienation of spiritual intelligence,and explore the path of female to complete the construction of subjectivity.Dreiser created a series of distinct female characters in An American Tragedy with superb writing techniques.Reinterpreting the female crises and tragic fates faced by the female characters in the novel based on the feminist theory of Beauvoir is advantageous to more objectively and deeply expose the influence of American society in politics,economy and culture on women’s development.At the same time,it also provides direction and guidance for contemporary women to explore themselves in the family and society.