Contents
Introduction ........................................................................................................................... 1
Ⅰ.An Overview of American Naturalism.................................................................. 1 1.1 The Origins of Literary Naturalism ............................................................................. 2 1.2 American Naturalism ..................................................................................................... 3
1.2.1 The Origins of American Naturalism...................................................................................3
1.2.2 The General Review of American Naturalism in the 20th Century........................4
Ⅱ. The typical characteristics of naturalism in Sister Carrie............................4 2.1 Naturalistic Environmental Factors in Sister Carrie.................................................5 2.1.1 The Living Environmental Factors........................................................................5 2.1.2 The Social Environmental Factors .......................................................................7. 2.2 Naturalistic Hereditary Factors for Carrie .................................................................... 8 3.2.1 Inborn Beauty Helps Her Success on the Stage.....................................................9 2.2.2 Desire for Pleasure Decides Her Destiny............................................................10
Conclusion............................................................................................................................11 Bibliography ........................................................................................................................ 12
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黄冈师范学院本科毕业论文
Introduction
Theodore Dreiser is one of the most influential American writer with critical realism. His novels depict real-life subjects in a harsh light. Many of his works give the description of naturalism and weakened his critical spirit. Sister Carrie, which is his first novel, published in 1990 revealed the financial disparity and the moral decline of American society and thus regarded as a forbidden work. But now it has become the best-seller because of the naturalism in it. And thus Dreiser has become the representative writer and pioneer of American Naturalism. The themes of Darwinism and Determinism are the common features of Dreiser?s story which also characterize Sister Carrie.
Instead of only dealing with the smiling and beautiful aspects of life like most of the other novels, Dreiser insist on the truthful reflection of life in his fiction.
Sister Carrie is the first novel of Theodore Dreiser, and also is his most famous and important one. It is the representative work of American naturalism. The novel tells the story of Carrie Meeber，a poor girl alone in Chicago. She lives with a traveling salesman and then runs off to New York City with Georg Hurstwood，a prosperous married man．But Hurstwood?s fortunes decline after that，and eventually he becomes a bum and commits suicide．Carrie finally finds success ，but not happiness，as all actress．
The novel sold poorly and was not widely promoted largely because of moral objections to the depiction of a country girl who pursues her dreams of fame and fortune through relationships to men．However, now the book has acquired a considerable reputation．It has been regarded as one of the greatest of all American urban novels.
From 1900 to now, critics around the world have never stopped their study on Dreiser. Their researches have provided us with lots of meaningful information about the writer. Since 1980s, scholars have employed new devices of Determinism, heredity, social environment in their researches. These new methods help us know Dreiser and his work from different and new angles. In China, some Chinese critics have also show their deep interest in Sister Carrie. This paper attempts to analyze the character of Carrie, and Naturalism in this novel.
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黄冈师范学院本科毕业论文
Ⅰ. An Overview of American Naturalism
1.1 The Origins of Literary Naturalism
It seems hard to give a precise definition of naturalism that all can accept. Oxford Concise Dictionary defines naturalism as “a more deliberate kind of realism in novels, stories, and plays, usually involving a view of human beings as passive victims of natural forces and social environment” (Baldick, 2000:146). And in The New Encyclopedia Britannica, there is a more comparatively detailed definition: Naturalism, late 19th and early 20th century aesthetic movement, inspired by adaptation of the principles and methods of natural science, especially the Darwinian view of nature, to literature and art. In literature it extended the tradition of realism, aiming at an even more faithful, unselective representation of reality, a veritable “slice of life”, presented without moral judgment. Naturalism differed from Realism in its assumption of scientific determinism, which led naturalistic authors to emphasize man?s accidental, physiological nature rather than his moral or rational qualities. Individual characters were seen as helpless products of heredity and environment, motivated by strong instinctual drives from within, and harassed by social and economic pressures from without. As such, they had little will or responsibility for their fates, and the prognosis for their “cases” was pessimistic at the outset. (Ottawa, 1993： 559)
In the 19th century, the industrial revolution spread over the entire Western Europe and North America, which brought about dramatically social and economic changes. Furthermore, in 1859, Charles Darwin?s On the origin of Species was published and his theory of evolution became prevailing. Darwin?s evolutionary theory provides naturalism the theoretical basis, as Donald Pizer points out, “Darwin also creates a context that makes naturalism— with its stress upon theories of heredity and environment, a convincing way to explain the nature of reality for the late 19th century” (Pizer, 2000: 47). Thus, literary naturalism is the result of the combination of the dramatically social, economic changes and such innovations in scientific theory. As a literary movement, it originates in France. Emile Zola, a French writer and theorist, is universally labeled as the founder of naturalism. Zola argued, “the best novelist was an empirical observer rather than an imaginative creator” (Lehan, 1984:529). Zola?s preoccupation with scientific theory led him to believe, controlled by heredity and
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黄冈师范学院本科毕业论文
environment, man was theproduct of his temperament in a social context. Thus, naturalistic writers apply to a scientific method to create their writings by studying human beings governed by their instincts and passions as well as the ways in which the characters? lives are controlled by forces of heredity and environment. The concept of pessimistic determinism has commonly been assumed as the dominant characteristics of American naturalism, so naturalists depict characters who are determined not by their personal will or moral principles but by their nerves, blood and natural forces which they can not fully comprehend or control. Naturalism also holds the philosophy that life is unpredictable and contains misadventures. “People in naturalistic works do not act by their reason and thought, instead they act by outer forces or inner impulses and instincts” (Jiang Chengyong, 2002: 193). 1.2 American Naturalism
1.2.1 The Origins of American Naturalism
In the latter part of the 19th century in America, great historical changes took place. This period witnessed the rapid growth of industrial cities, the rise of corporate business, the influx of immigrant labor, and the practice of wretched working conditions. In such a historical context, under the influence of Darwin?s evolutional theory and the rise of European naturalism, American naturalism, as a convincing means to explain the nature of reality for the late 19th century, also rose at the end of the 19th century. With regard to literary theory and writing skills, Zola is the most influential figure on American naturalism. He provides a narrative methodology, a way of seeing reality for American naturalists. And, like those of Zola, Frank Norris?s and Theodore Dreiser?s novels take their being from a naturalistic biology. Characters like McTeague, Carrie are very much the product of an animality that leads to decline and degeneration.
With a French origin and a deterministic ideology, American naturalism of late 19th century rests on a biological model, depending heavily on the theory of evolution and new scientific ideas, viewing man as the victim of natural forces and his social environment, with the lack of free will and reason. It essentially assumes mechanistic in its view of matter and deterministic in its attitude toward human will. Although it is greatly influenced by European naturalism, American naturalism has its own features. According to Furst, American naturalism grows in direct response to the native social and economic problems, the struggle of the poor with the
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黄冈师范学院本科毕业论文
capitalists are always the theme of naturalist writings. “In this way American naturalism owes much to local factors than to outside influences, and it is worth recalling the so-called ?local color? tendencies of the 1870s and 1880s which carried on into naturalism, though with certain shifts of emphasis” (Furst, 1971:34). Another distinction from European naturalism is, “American naturalism, extending from the mid-1880s well into the twentieth century, has a far longer life-span than its European counterparts” (ibid: 36).
1.2.2 The General Review of American Naturalism in the 20th Century
American Naturalism of the turn of 20th century is acknowledged as a significant movement in American literature history, as an appropriate expression to reflect the closed and destructive mechanistic and Darwinian world of struggle against the forces of economic and social oppression.
Despite the hostile conventional criticism, as an expression means of the new reality of America to dramatize “a panoramic world and chaotic inner life”, naturalism indeed seems to appeal to American writers of each generation. As Donald Pizer points out that “naturalism thus truly ?refuses to die? in America” (Pizer, 2000: 14)). Naturalism, in its various interests and strategies, has continued to flourish, and the most striking characteristic of this literary expression in the 20th century is its adaptability to fresh currents of value and experiences in each age while maintaining a core of naturalistic preoccupation. With its ongoing vitality, in the 1930s the theme is worked out in narratives of “group defeat or of personal emptiness and collapse” (ibid: 13) in the works of John Steinbeck and John Dos Passos, and James T. Farrell. It continues into the generation of the 1940s and 1950s in the early works of William Styron, and Norman Mailer, with the theme that is often “combined with the existential theme of the need for a quest for meaning in the face of the inadequacy of social life and belief” (ibid: 13). “And it persists in the partial recovery of the naturalistic themes of political constraint and urban blight” (ibid: 13) in the works of such contemporary novelists as Robert Stone, Joyce Carol Oates (in her early novels), and John Barth, Thomas Pynchon. Besides the writers mentioned above, we can also find the powerful naturalistic tendency in the fiction of such literary giants as Faulkner and Hemingway. “Faulkner?s major theme of the burden of the past as expressed through regional and family destiny strikes a firm naturalistic note, as does Hemingway?s preoccupation with the behavioristic interplay between temperament and
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