Carrier Sister

1. Introduction

Theodore Dreiser is one of America's greatest writers, and its greatest naturalistic writer. With the publication of Sister Carrie in 1900, Dreiser delivered all his power of influence on literary to open a new chapter of American naturalism.

1.1 Background information

This novel was written hundreds of years ago and has been called the typical and essential modern American novel. Through its characters and story, it cites the effects of the changing economic structure on American culture. Though many researchers have already made comments on it, even today, it still has its value about our life, we can still find out the characters around us.

1.2 Scope of research

The novel is a biography of Dreiser himself. It tells us about his life and how he considers the world around him. As is mentioned above, Dreiser is a naturalist because of his works, which are filled with naturalistic style namely Naturalism.

His roles, his arrangement, his straight discussion, his description of sex relationship, his clear analysis of the mechanistic ruthlessness of American society—all this was new and shocking to a reading public reared on cultured romances and adventure descriptions.

However, little research has made valuable contributions to Dreiser's naturalistic style mirrored in the protagonist Carrie Meeber in Sister Carrie and her duality of desire.

The purpose of this paper is to analyze the naturalistic style and characters in Dreiser’s novel.

1.3 The organization of the thesis

This thesis is divided into five parts. Chapter One introduces the background information and its scope of research. Chapter Two expounds the background and production of realism and naturalism and influence of naturalism on American literature. Chapter Three introduces other writings’ analyses from Dreiser’s life experience and points out the peculiarity of Dreiser’s novels, especially Sister Carrie, which pays close attention to commonality, women’s life and always tragic endings. Chapter Four focus on the influence of the characters on Sister Carrie. The last chapter expounds the topic of the duality of desire.

2. Realism & naturalism in Sister Carrie

Realism is commonly defined as a concern for fact or reality and rejection of the impractical and visionary (Pizer 47). However, the term realism is widely used in the large-minded arts, particularly in painting, literature, and philosophy. Sometimes, it is also used in international relations.

Naturalism is defined as a theory which applied scientific concepts and methods to such problems as plot development and characterization (Pizer 143). It is a manner and method of composition by which the author portrays 'life as it is' in accordance with the philosophic theory of determinism (Poirier 82).

2.1 Development of realism and naturalism

The period ranging from 1865 to l914 has been referred to as the Age of Realism in the 1iterary history of the United States, which is actually a movement or tendency that dominated the spirit of American literature, especia1ly American fiction, from the 1850s onwards (Bassoff 24). Realism was a reaction against Romanticism or a move away from the bias towards romance and self-creating fictions, and it paved the way to Modernism.

In art and literature, Realism refers to an attempt to describe human behavior and surroundings or to represent figures exactly as they act or appear in life (Pizer 48). Realism emerged as a literary movement in Europe in the 1850s. In reaction to Romanticism, realistic writers should set down their observations impartially and objectively. They insisted on accurate documentation, sociological insight, and avoidance of poetic diction and idealization. The subjects were to be taken from everyday life, preferably from lower-class life. Realism entered American literature after the Civil War.

American naturalism is a more advanced stage of realism toward the close of the 19th century. The American naturalists accepted the more negative implications of Darwin’s theory and used it to account for the behavior of those characters in literary works who were conceived as more or less complex combinations of inherited attributes, their habits conditioned by social and economic forces. And consciously or unconsciously the American naturalists followed the French novelist and theorist Emile Zola's call that the 1iterary artist must operate with characters, passions, human and social data as the chemist and the physicist work on inert bodies, as the physiologist works on living bodies (Zola 53). They chose their subjects