从《嘉莉姐妹》和《珍妮姑娘》看德莱塞的女性观

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3.0 陈辉 2024-11-19 4 4 458.71KB 48 页 15积分
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Chapter One Introduction
1
Chapter One Introduction
1.1 An Introduction of the Theme of the Thesis
Theodore Dreiser (1871-1945) was recognized as one of the greatest naturalistic
writers in American literary history, and also the trailblazer of American modern novels.
He was the very person who primarily described new American city life as what it was
without any prejudice. Born from a migrated German family in Terre Haute, Indiana as
the ninth one among the thirteen children and lived the life of the underprivileged class,
Dreiser had an unhappy childhood. His father was a German Catholic, and was often
unemployed in Dreiser’s memory. What’s worse, he was narrow-minded, stubborn and
conservative, treated his children with rigid religious beliefs like a tyrant, cared less
about their growth, and gave them very little basic family education. Consequently,
many of his children went astray, and their scandals forced the whole family moved
from one place to another in order to avoid a life of suffering from others’ rebuke. In
contrast, Dreiser’s mother was gentle, hard-working and thrifty. She tried her best to
help the family by doing laundry for others. Even so, the family was still in an
impoverished state, which experience made Dreiser knew quite well the miseries poor
people suffered in the seemingly prosperous American society of his time. Accordingly,
he put pen to paper using materials collected from what happened to and around him.
For example, he was apt to create novels out of the stories happened to his family
members, such as Sister Carrie and Jennie Gerhardt. “Through the lens of naturalism”,
Dreiser showed great sympathy to working class people, bold disposure of the dark side
of American society and strong hatred to social inequality in his novels (Marlow, 2006:
3).
To a great extent, his stinging criticism on the dark side of American social life in
the stage of a rising capitalism was a great challenge to the “genteel tradition”
dominating the literary world during the nineteenth century. One famous representative
figure of this tradition was William Dean Howells (1837-1920), who “accepted the
conventionalized ethics of polite society” and held the idea that “the ends of art must be
consonant with those of the dominant class and beneficial to its stability” (Hovey, 1950:
505). Those who abided by the “genteel tradition” in writing usually presented women
only as symbols of the American ideal. In their works, women were passive and their
fundamental passivity implied three corollary traits: “(1) her dependence on others for
Dreiser’s Attitude toward Feminism Reflected in Sister Carrie and Jennie Gerhardt
2
protection, (2) her reliance on others to entertain her and (3) her tendency to indulge in
idealistic and ‘invalid’ theories” (Sidney, 1976: 602). If they went astray, they would
undoubtedly be punished by social mores and result in wretchedness. Conversely, as a
naturalistic writer, “Dreiser’s female characters may represent the American possibilities,
but these possibilities are not, as nineteenth century fiction asserted, only pastoral and
Edenic, nor, as twentieth century fiction asserts, destructive and immoral. Unlike most
American novelists, Dreiser accepts the aspirations of his heroines.” (Sybil, 1972: 65).
He didn’t have a clear and strong belief that women should be expected to be inherently
moral, disdainful of materialistic motives, and be presented as monsters if they were
ambitious.
Sister Carrie (1900) was his first novel, an acknowledged masterpiece of
naturalism as well. When presented to the readers, it was no doubt like a bomb attacking
the deep-rooted conventional moral values of its time, because it broke up the stereotype
of Victorian novels and brought a fresh atmosphere of depicting society as it was in
reality through the lens of naturalism to American literature. In this novel, Dreiser
apparently portrayed Carrie as a “depraved” woman by way of having been mistress for
two rich men: first the traveling dressy salesman Drouet and then a distinguished
middle-class saloon manager Hurstwood. Nevertheless, she also had the quality of being
a “new woman” who constantly longed for self-improvement and tried to catch
opportunity to climb the ladder of success. In the end of the novel, unlike most other
adulterous fictional heroines, Carrie didn’t become crazy or perish as a result of
punishment by the conventional moral values; on the contrary, she succeeded in acting
and had “everything she wanted: money, clothes, comfort, recognition, rich men
proposing marriage”(Pizer, 2000: 179). Thus, she became an independent woman,
earning bread by her self and owning a high position in the world. Although she was
still desirous for something she could not really understand and felt dissatisfied, yet she
was alive, healthy and prosperous as compared with Hurstwood’s decline and final
result of committing suicide. This kind of novel arrangement irritated those obstinate
apologists who firmly defended conventional moral values. So in a long time Dreiser
was severely criticized and censured by many critics for his exhibition of the society so
veritably, and not having a clear exposure of his own moral sense in the novel so that it
didn’t have an educational function etc.
Regardless of the pouring criticisms Sister Carrie had received, Dreiser’s
Chapter One Introduction
3
sympathy to the heroine Carrie and his defending voice for women were throughout the
novel. In fact, “when Dreiser composed his first novel Sister Carrie, the American
women had begun to be influenced by consumerism. They had started to challenge the
conventional moral values: they didn’t believe any longer that ‘the responsibility of
women was to give birth to babies’, ‘women were born to be mothers’, and credendum
like these. In contrast, they thought they should dress up beautifully, look sexy and
enjoy sexual lives to their heart's content.”(Jiang, 2003: 125). Meanwhile, from 1880s to
1920s, the first feminist movement was in rapid development, which pushed the image
of “new woman” on the stage of history. Under such circumstances, Dreiser showed a
positive attitude toward feminism. To defend the feminist movement, he had ever said to
the reporter, “I thought that generally speaking, the feminist movement had an apparent
tendency of reinforcing and enriching women’s personality” (Long, 1989: 389). His
shape of the image Carrie was a good reflection of his positive feminist attitude.
Jennie Gerhardt was Dreiser’s second novel. It brought the first commercial
success to him. Together with Sister Carrie and An American Tragedy,Jennie Gerhardt
was considered as one of the three best novels of him. Generally speaking, the novel
Jennie Gerhardt was regarded as the companion volume of Sister Carrie. In this novel,
what Dreiser devoted to the readers was an ideal woman with considerable femininity.
Jennie Gerhardt, like Carrie Meeber, was as well a “degenerate” woman judged by the
conventional moral values of her time, because she had two affairs: firstly lost her
chastity to Senator Brander and gave birth to an illegitimate child, later became mistress
of Lester Kane, the son of a wholesale carriage builder in an attempt to help her family
out of grinding poverty, although eventually to avoid doing harm to her lover’s career
she sacrificed her own interests and led a lonely life.
However, Dreiser defended her by giving reasonable excuses when she made a
choice to act against the conventional principle and praised her when she sacrificed her
own interest to make way for her lover’s career. In the eyes of Dreiser, Jennie’s sexual
experiences resulted from her self-sacrificial nature. Moreover, Dreiser didn’t think they
could account for Jennie’s immorality. What Sybil said in his article could better prove
this point, “Dreiser links self-sacrifice, one of the key nineteenth century feminine
virtues, with adulterous sexual submission, reasoning that since the emphasis on
chastity has a financial base, the adulterous woman is more
．．．．
moral than the materialistic
society surrounding her. Dreiser confirms the sentimental assumption that a woman’s
Dreiser’s Attitude toward Feminism Reflected in Sister Carrie and Jennie Gerhardt
4
virginity is her most sacred attribute, and that a woman’s only means to gain status is
the way in which she disposes of her body. Jennie’s adultery confers spiritual status on
her”. (66). In other words, he thought that her degeneration was on the beam a reflection
of her virtue of sacrifice, and it had little to with corrupted morality, which was in like
manner telling us the author’s positive attitude to feminism, although in a mild way.
Anyway, Dreiser’s feminist attitude could be found in both Sister Carrie and
Jennie Gerhardt regardless of the difference that he showed this idea boldly in Sister
Carrie but mildly in Jennie Gerhardt. Because in these two novels, the author’s creation
about the images of Carrie and Jennie, and his blatant defense for both of them was
revolutionary, they were beyond the main social ideology. As Sybil B. Weir pointed out
in his article “The Image of Women in Dreiser’s Fiction, 1900-1925” that “Dreiser is
also one of the first American novelists (perhaps only Kate Chopin precedes him) to
accept the fact that women have erotic desires and to assert that their sexual careers do
not automatically invalidate their moral nature”(65).
Nevertheless, he was not a complete feminist. In the first place, on account of his
own gender limitedness of being a male writer, he was unable to transcend the
patriarchal ideology of his day, so it was unlikely for him to be a complete feminist. As
Gammel observed, “Dreiser’s writing is full of contradictions and tensions between the
male narrator’s omniscient voices on the one hand and the erupting female voices on the
other; between the narrator’s rejection of conventions and their embracing of biological
normality; between the female characters’ claims for independence and their subjection
to male sexual conquests. It is the internal contradictions and tensions of the texts that
inevitably expose the inherent gender bias”. (Gammel, 1995: 50) In the second place, in
view of the pressure of the main social ideology and his novel composition, he was
uneasy about the future of his works (especially after the setbacks of the publication and
feedbacks of Sister Carrie, he used a mild way of disclosing the desires of his heroines
and showing sympathy to them, the composition of Jennie Gerhardt was a good case in
point). So when he created his two heroines Carrie and Jennie, on the one hand, he
showed a positive feminist attitude mainly by way of his naturalistic writing method —
truthfully presented the heroines’ desires, didn’t make any judgment on women’s
corrupted moral issues, and used defending remarks in their favor at every critical
moment; on the other hand, he put them all the way in the shadow of men, and regarded
them always as “the second sex” in the society. To be exact, he didn’t leave either of his
Chapter One Introduction
5
female characters Carrie and Jennie totally independent, but regard them as dependent
of men. Apart from these two aspects, the design of the endings for these two novels
was apparently a proof of his compromise with the main social ideology of his day. In
view of these factors, it can be safely concluded that Theodore Dreiser had a positive
attitude toward feminism, but at the same time, it was being ambiguous and
compromising.
1.2 Purpose and Organization of the Thesis
Based on The Second Sex by French writer Simone de Beauvoir and Dreiser’s
naturalistic writing style, the author made a tentative research in this thesis aiming to
analyze Dreiser’s attitude toward feminism, including how it was reflected in these two
novels and why it had the qualities of being ambiguous and compromising. To achieve
these purposes, this thesis would be developed in the following five chapters: Chapter
Two was The Theoretical Framework, which told briefly the main arguments from The
Second Sex that were to be employed in the body part to support the author’s viewpoint
about Dreiser’s feminist attitude. Chapter Three gave a general review of American
Literary Naturalism, which purpose was to introduce Dreiser’s Naturalistic Writing
Features in chapter three. Chapter Four paved the way for the analysis of Dreiser’s
Attitude toward Feminism in Chapter Five, including his Positive and Compromising
Attitude. The last chapter was the Conclusion part, in which the author explored
Dreiser’s contribution to American modern novels and compared the feminism reflected
from Dreiser’s novels with then developing western feminism and its reflection in the
novels of his contemporaries. In doing so, the author of the thesis tried to give
prominence to her conclusion that Theodore Dreiser had a positive attitude toward
feminism as compared with many of his contemporary writers, although he was not a
complete feminist writer.
1.3 A Brief Introduction of the Plots of Sister Carrie and Jennie
Gerhardt
Sister Carrie began with the scene that Carrie Meeber boarded the afternoon train
for Chicago in a search of a better life there to fulfill her American dream like many
other girls of her time. Dreiser (1982) described her as a half-equipped little knight, who
ventured to reconnoiter the mysterious city and dreaming wild dreams of some vague,
摘要：

ChapterOneIntroduction1ChapterOneIntroduction1.1AnIntroductionoftheThemeoftheThesisTheodoreDreiser(1871-1945)wasrecognizedasoneofthegreatestnaturalisticwritersinAmericanliteraryhistory,andalsothetrailblazerofAmericanmodernnovels.HewastheverypersonwhoprimarilydescribednewAmericancitylifeaswhatitwaswi...

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