美国文学史考试之Theodore Dreiser

Theodore Dreiser

1. Dreiser’s life and position:

Theodore Dreiser is generally acknowledged as one of America's literary naturalists. He possessed none of the usual aids to a writer’s career: no money, no friend in power, no formal education worthy of mention, no family tradition in letters. With every disadvantage piled upon him, Dreiser, by his strong will and his dogged persistence, eventually burst out and became one of the important American writers.

2. His major works:

Sister Carrie 嘉丽妹妹--the best-known

Financier 金融家

The Titan 巨头

The Stoic 斯多噶

An American Tragedy 美国的悲剧

3. Dreiser's style:

Dreiser's style has been a controversial aspect of his work from the beginning. For lack of concision, his writings appear more inclusive and less selective, and the readers are sometimes burdened with massive detailed descriptions of characters and events. Though the time sequence is clear and the plot straight forward, he has been always accused of being awkward in sentence structure, inept and occasionally flatly wrong in word selection and meaning, and mixed and disorganized in voice and tone. For him language is a means of communication rather than an art form. However, Dreiser's contribution to the American literary history cannot be ignored. He broke away from the genteel tradition of literature and dramatized the life in a very realistic way. There is no comment, no judgment but facts of life in the stories. His style is not polished but very serious and well calculated to achieve the thematic ends he sought

4. An analysis of Sister Carrie:

Sister Carrie best embodies Dreiser’s naturalistic belief that men are controlled and conditioned by heredity, environment and chance, but a few extraordinary and unsophisticated human beings refuse to accept their fate wordlessly and instead strive, unsuccessfully, to find meaning and purpose for their existence. Carrie, as one of such, senses that she is merely a cipher

in an uncaring world yet seeks to grasp the mysteries of life and thereby satisfies her desires for social status and material comfort. In Sister Carrie, Dreiser expressed his naturalistic pursuit by expounding the purposelessness of life and impotence of men.

5. Dreiser’s literary naturalism (or American naturalism):

As a genre, naturalism emphasized heredity and environment as important deterministic forces shaping individualized characters who were presented in special and detailed circumstances. At bottom, life was shown to be ironic, even tragic. Dreiser described earthly ex istence as “a welter of inscrutable forces,” in which was trapped each individual human being. In his words, Man is a “victim of forces over which he has no control.” To him, life is "so sad, so strange, so mysterious and so inexplicable." No wonder the characters in his books are often subject to the control of the natural forces -- especially those of environment and heredity.

6. Dreiser’s naturalism in his works:

In Sister Carrie Dreiser expressed his naturalistic pursuit by expounding the purposelessness of life and attacking the conventional moral standards.

7. Dreiser’s exploration of human desire and revelation of the dark side of human nature:

From the first novel Sister Carrie on, Dreiser set himself to project the American values for what he had found them to be --materialistic to the core. Living in such a society with such a value system, the human individual is obsessed with a never-ending, yet meaningless search for satisfaction of his desires. One of the desires is for money which was a motivating purpose of life in the United States in the late l9th century. For example, in Sister Carrie, there is not one character whose status is not determined economically. Sex is another human desire that Dreiser explored to considerable lengths in his novels to reveal the dark side of human nature. In Sister Carrie, Carrie climbs up the social ladder by means of her sexual appeal. Also in the “Trilogy of Desire,” the possession of sexual beauty symbolizes the acquisition of some social status of great magnitude. However, Dreiser never forgot to imply that these human desires in life could hardly be defined. They are there like a powerful "magnetism" governing human existence and reducing human beings to nothing. So like all naturalists he was restrained from finding a solution to the social problems that appeared in his novels and accordingly almost all his works have tragic endings.