On Some Naturalistic Features in Sister Carrie

Abstract. Naturalism is a special creative current of thought which emerged in 1890s and came to a dominant position in 1900s in Europe and America. Its characteristics can be listed as follow: its great emphasis on fidelity and truthfulness in the writing process, the starkest advocating of environment and heredity as those important deterministic forces shaping the fates of individuals, the amoral attitude towards the materials, as well as its stress on pessimistic determinism. The American writer Theodore Dreiser’s Sister Carrie is well known as the works in which Naturalism attained maturity in America. 1n 1900 Dreiser published his first novel Sister Carrie. From then on, the critics have been studying Sister Carrie from various perspectives. This paper will take Sister Carrie as an example, and attempt to study it from naturalistic point of view and explain how environmental factors influence characters’ fate.

Key words: Sister Carrie, naturalistic feature, environmental factor

1.Brief Introduction to Theodore Dreiser and the Novel Sister Carrie

Theodore Dreiser, an outstanding American naturalistic writer, was born into a large and poor family on August 27, 1871 in Indiana. His education was irregular, but with help from a high school teacher, he spent one year at the University of Indiana. After working as a journalist on several mid-western newspapers, in 1894 he went to New York City, where he began a career in publishing, eventually rising to the presidency of Butterick Publications. His first novel, Sister Carrie (1900), the story of a country girl’s rise to material success first as the mistress of wealthy men and then as an actress, horrified its publisher, who gave it only limited circulation. Dreiser distributed it himself, but it was consistently attacked as immoral. Jennie Gerhardt (1911), again about a “fallen woman”，met with a better response; its success allowed Dreiser to work as a writer full time. With these two works, Dreiser started his long battle for the right of the novelist to portray life as he sees it. His other works also includes The Financier (1912), The Titan (1914), The Stoic (1947), The Genius (1915), The Bulwark (1946), and An American Tragedy and so on. In his later life Dreiser became interested in socialism, visiting the Soviet Union as a guest of the government. He died in 1945 at the age of seventy-four.

The heroin of the novel Sister Carrie is Carrie Meeber, who leaves her rural home to try her fortune in Chicago. She meets Charles Drouet, a travelling salesman on the train. After arriving in Chicago, she finds a job in a shoe factory, but the poor income and hard work oppress her imagination. She quits the job, lonely and distressed, she becomes Drouet’s mistress. When Drouet is away on a business trip, Carrie falls in love with George Hurstwood, a married manager; Hurstwood and Carrie elope to New York, and lived together for more than 3 years. In these 3years, Carrie becomes more and more popular while Hurstwood declines. However, in her massive success, she still feels lonely and empty. Sister Carrie represents Dreiser’s belief in representing life honestly in fiction. Dreiser accomplished this through accurate details, especially in his descriptions of the urban settings in which many of his stories take places. In his naturalism portrayals, Dreiser sees his characters as victims of social and economic forces and of date.

In the following part, the author will analyze the naturalistic environmental factors in the novel and stresses on the living environmental factors, social environmental factors as well as mysterious chances.

2.Naturalistic Environmental Factors

Naturalism is characterized by its great emphasis on fidelity and truthfulness in the writing process, the starkest advocating of environment and heredity as those important deterministic forces shaping the fates of individuals, the amoral attitude towards the materials, as well as its stress on pessimistic determinism. One outstanding feature of naturalism is its stress on the influence of environment upon people’s fate. According to naturalism, man is a helpless pawn, at the mercy of the surrounding. in Sister Carrie, the environment does not the one that cause the heroin Carrie fall down but even have much contribution to her rise. This part focuses on discussing how environmental factors, such as the living environmental factors cause the inevitable rise of Carrie.

Naturalism attaches great emphasis on one’s living environment, believing that one’s living environment influences one’s fate enormously. (Ma Lan, 2004) This paper starts with discussing the crucial role played by metropolis in Carrie’s rising journey. Metropolises are indeed the natural and idealized habitats for Carrie, for only in those amusing and magnetizing cities can she satisfy at least temporarily her insatiable desire for pleasure and display her special theatrical talent. (Lv Yi, 2003) Generally speaking, big cities such as Chicago and New York, offer the living environment for Carrie’s rise in Sister Carrie.

2.1 Chicago

Chicago is the first city that forms a suitable living environment that is necessary for Carrie’s rise. Carrie is a bright and beautiful girl. She is eager to enjoy various pleasures in the life, especially ambitious to gain in material well being. She looks forward to Chicago with mixed feeling of ignorance and youthful expectancy. Dreiser depicts her as “a half-equipped little knight”, who ventures to reconnoiter the mysterious city and dreams “wild dreams of some vague, far-off supremacy, which should make it prey and subject---the proper penitent, groveling at a woman's slipper” (Dreiser, 1992: 3). At the very beginning, Carrie dreams wildly that she can gain fame and fortune and take the big city in her control. But the reality turns out to be quite the contrary. Instead of playing the role of the conqueror of the city, man has been moving about in the jungle-like city like driftwood caught in the ocean’s tide. The imagery of the overwhelming sea, another important symbol, serves as an indispensable part of the jungle picture, and like the symbol of the prairie, reminds people of the cruel jungle struggle for existence. Here the imagery of sea stands for the overwhelming urban social force. Living in the metropolis, Carrie always senses that she is much alone, a lonely figure in a tossing, merciless sea, and always following the instruction of the luring city, which is repeatedly described as a magnet, a permanent and compelling attraction, constantly drawing people to it with captivating energy. The omnipresent, seductive voice of the city, the desire its material prosperity produced upon man is always at man’s earshot. Consequently, human beings are incessantly lured to the city by its embodiment of objects of desire that they cannot resist. (Liu Xiaoyan, 2001: 14)

Facing the compelling allures in the mysterious city, and with no one to guide and counsel her, Carrie is ignorant of traps and disasters that lie in wait for her in the big city, thus it’s certain that she will be seduced by the superhuman tempter and have her desire for material goods greatly stirred up. Dreiser has endowed Carrie with the wonder and excitement of an impressionable temperament as it encounters for the first time the material prosperity and splendor of urban life. (Mou Ying, 2003:22) At the very beginning, her limited experience in the city focuses her desire on fine clothes, rich foods and comfortable residences. Her obsessive interests about those items sufficiently illustrate the city’s hypnotic effect on her. Since those are not available at the moment, she unconsciously seeks a way to make them available and her every action is motivated by her unquenchable desire for those items. By the way, the city’s hypnotic power not only stirs up her desires for material goods, but also contributes to her moral fall. Her short but poignant shop-girl working experience in Chicago makes her realize that it is impossible to be a success by working hard and honestly. A poor innocent countryside girl, like Carrie, either works to death under great pressure of overwork and exploitation, or sells herself flesh and soul to be successful but later suffers the fatal accusation of moral degradation. Entrapped in the dilemma, Carrie is doomed to choose the latter and becomes one of so many victims of the city’s hypnotic influence. The conspicuous result is that having met with the hardship of finding a job and tempted by the dazzling material world in Chicago, she becomes the mistress of Drouet, a dandy salesman. The comfortable existence as a fallen woman kept by men is preferable to the hard life of a poor but honest working girl, although she is under severe moral accusation. Many women are experiencing in reality the dilemma Carrie experiences in the novel. Living in conditions of extreme poverty and hardship, some are forced to move into prostitution---degrading and dangerous as it is, produces a livelihood for desperate people.

According to principles in naturalism, man is subject to the environment he lives in. Under the pervasive influence of the city’s hypnotic power, it’s natural for one to fall as an easy prey to the captivating night in the city. It’s in the metropolis, with its unbounded material commodities and numerous entertaining ways that the desire for material goods, for immediate pleasure provides man with the strongest impulse to act, as Carrie does in the novel.

2.2 New York

New York is another important living environment which is instrumental in Carries material rise. As an imperial metropolis, it is the origin of wealth, power and fame, where the mysteries and possibilities of mystification are infinite.

Carrie comes to New York in the evening when the city is at its most fascinating and hypnotic moment. Carrie is immediately captivated by the novel atmosphere of the Northern city. To her, it is an interesting world, one whirl of delight. She feels her life has just begun and she is not defeated at all. Although she does not feel wrapped in hope, she finds the great city hold much, hoping that she can come out of bondage into freedom. With an optimistic state of mind Carrie first arrives in Chicago; with the same but a little bit vague expectation for a new life she comes to New York, where as the incarnation of youth and energy itself, she quickly adapts to the new circumstances and rises to fame and fortune. Generally speaking, described as “a kingdom of greatness” in the novel, New York’s mighty atmosphere sets up for Carrie a wilder dream for a more glamorous material life beyond. What’s more, the great metropolis---her ideal habitat, with its gilded theatres, offers her a wonderful arena to display her performing talent. Therefore, she is bounded to achieve material success in New York. At the very point one can easily identify the working of one’s living environment in shaping Carries rise in the big city.

No matter in Chicago or in New York, the theater plays a decisive role in Carries success. (Pan Xinhua, 2003:23) As a microcosm of the glamorous city with its entire artificial splendor, it embodies the most irresistible attraction from the metropolis. What’s more important, it’s in the glittering theater that offers Carrie with an ideal place to display her performing talent and provides the most favorable environment for her rise.

In the New York half of the novel, although Carrie lives a monotonous and lukewarm life as a common housewife, the theater still holds a great attraction for Carrie. She has never forgotten her one histrionic achievement in Chicagoperformance. The indelible memory of her successful debut dwells in her mind and occupies her consciousness during her many long and lonely afternoons in New York, and even has become the only contribution to her pleasure. Later, her walking on the Broadway fashion parade greatly awakens her old desire for a wonderful theatrical life. The refinement, the merriment, the beauty she has seen on the parade seems to set singing in her heart a low song of longing for the Elf-Land. Since the theater serves as the merely narrow passage to her dreamland, she tries to live as much in these theatrical scenes as in the realities which make up her daily life. Meanwhile, Bob Ames’ conception of acting as a fine art awakes Carrie to her old desire to display her acting talent on the stage. She speaks in her mind, if she someday could be a fine actress, such wise men as Ames would approve of her and she would win their favor. Thus Ames’ encouragement unlocks the door to a new desire for Carrie. It propels her to achieve the kind of artistry which he admires, and further strengthens Carries desire to be on the stage.

Apart from that, the unemployment of Hurstwood and the haunted threat of starvation make Carrie treat the theater as her last resource in distress. As a matter of fact, the theater indeed provides a livelihood for Carrie and leads her to a source of material well-being. (Yao Xiaoming, 2003:18) What’s more important, as a person of emotional greatness---instead of intellectual greatness, Carrie incessantly considers the stage as a door through which she can enter that spectacular world for which she has been so much craving. She wonders if she is only once in a popular performance, earning a decent salary, wearing the fashionable clothes she likes, having enough money to go everywhere as she pleases, how delightful her life will be. In Carries mind, as Dreiser puts it, the theater is “above the common mass, above idleness, above want, above insignificance” and is “ever a center of light and mirth”. (Dreiser, 1992: 462) To put it in another way, to Carrie, the theater is a wonderful combination of everything great and mighty, and a permanent source of happiness.

In short, the glittering theater works as the greatest attraction from the big cities. Besides that, representing the gilded world to which Carrie has been dreaming of entering, the theater provides an ideal stage for her to display her acting gift and helps her to rise from a poor country girl to the position of a prestigious actress.

3.Conclusions

This paper takes two great metropolises as examples, and discusses the effect of Chicago’s hypnotic power and New York’s mighty atmosphere upon Carries fate: they incessantly lure her and awake her unquenchable desire to pursue a fashionable and comfortable urban life. What’s more, the showy theater, as the most irresistible attraction for her in the city, not only symbolizes her dreamland and serves as a source of her happiness, but also provides her with an excellent place to display her talent and makes her rise to material well being. In a word, the luring metropolis provides Carrie with a suitable living environment, for only in metropolis can she satisfy at least temporarily her unquenchable desire for material goods and entertainment, as well as display her performing talent. All these environmental factors comprise a suitable environment that is needed in her success. Therefore, based on naturalism’s principle on environment, she is destined to rise. It proves the fact that environment has played an indispensable and crucial part in one’s fate: such an environment, which is advantageous for one’s development and offers necessary factors for their success, will definitely help one to rise.

Bibliography

[1] Dreiser, Theodore. Sister Carrie [M]. Bantam, 1992: 2, 462, 517, 538.

[2] xiaoyan Liu, Generation of American literary naturalism and its manifestation in Sister Carrie [J]. Chengdu College of Education, 2001 (12): 14.

[3] yi Lv. Reread the natural and Dreiser's Sister Carrie [J]. Liaoning University, 2003 (3): 52-65.