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Section Four Important Naturalism Writers and Their
Works: Stephen Crane and The Red Badge of Courage;
Theodore Dreiser and Sister Carrie
I.Stephen Crane
1.The life of Stephen Crane
Stephen Crane was born on November 1, 1871 in a New Jersey
Methodist clergyman's family. He was the fourteenth and last child
of Mary Peck Crane and Reverend Jonathan Crane. By the time his
father died in 1880, Crane had lived in several places in New York
and New Jersey and had been thoroughly educated in the faith he was
soon to reject. Also around this time, he wrote his poem,"I'd Rather
Have." His first short story was Uncle in Pennington
Seminary, where he stayed until 1887. He attended Claverack
College, Hudson River Institute, Lafayette College, and Syracuse
University between 1888 and 1891. He never graduated from any of
these. Then Crane moved into New York. He earned his living as a
free-lance journalist. In 1892, the New York Tribune
published many of his New York city sketches and some Sullivan
county tales. He gave a sympathetic report of a worker's strike that
criticized middle-class values. That same year, the mechanics union
took exception to Crane's article on their annual fete. This
resulted in Crane's brother, Townley being fired from
theTribune. After that, Crane lived the down-and-out life of
a penniless writer in the slums. During this period, he developed
his power as an observer of psychological and social reality. Then
he met Hamlin Garland and William Dean Howells who helped him in his
work, and also the painters whose impressionism influenced him in
his writing.
In 1893, Crane published at his own expense an early version of
Maggie: A Girl of the Street. The book was taken as the first
important naturalist novel in America. In 1894, the Philadelphia
Press published an abbreviated version of The Red Badge of
Courage. During the first half of 1895, Crane traveled in the
West. He met Willa Cather there. His first book of poems, The
Black Riders and Other Lines was published in May. The Red
Badge of Courage appeared in October. In the novel, Crane talked
about war in alarming honesty against the romantic view of war as a
symbol of courage and heroism. The book won the praise of writers
such as W. D. Howells, Henry James and Joseph Conrad. By December,
he was famous when he just had turned twenty-four. In 1896, He
published George's Mother, The Little Regiment and Other
Stories, and fell in love with Cora Stewart. They never got
married but Crane lived with her for the rest of his life.
In January, 1897, on the way to report the insurgency in Cuba,
Crane was shipwrecked off the Florida Coast. After the ship sunk, he
struggled 50 hours with the waves before he was saved. This
experience became the theme of his best-known short story, "The Open
Boat". Four months later, he was in Greece, reporting on the
Greco-Turkish War. Moving back to England, he became friends with
Conrad, Henry James, Harold Frederic, H. G. Wells, and others.
During that year, he wrote most of his great short stories: "The
Open Boat," and "The Blue Hotel."
Crane was never healthy. He began to weaken in 1898 as a result
of malaria contracted in Cuba while he was reporting on the Spanish
American War. By 1899, Crane was back in England and living well
above his income. Although he publishedWar Is Kind,Active
Service and The Monster and Other Stories, he continued
to fall more deeply in debt. By 1900, he suffered from illness and
heavy debts. He went to Germany in the hope of recovery, but he died
of tuberculosis in Badenweiler, Germany on June 5, 1900. His body
was brought back to America and buried at Elizabeth, New Jersey.
Crane died at the age of twenty-eight, leaving works that fill ten
sizable volumes.
2. Crane's major works and his influence
Crane was a pioneer writing in the naturalistic tradition.Some
critics noted that Crane's writings gave the whole esthetic movement
of the ninties "a sudden direction and a fresh impulse." Crane's
writing has been called realistic, naturalistic and impressionistic.
He presented incomplete characters and a broken world. It is Crane's
power with words and his ability to live with paradox that makes him
interesting.
In Maggie: A Girl of the Streets, Crane describes the slum
life vividly and nakedly. It tells the story of a good woman's
downfall and destruction in a slum environment. Maggie is a factory
girl. She is seduced by a bartender, a friend of her truck-driver
brother. When she becomes pregnant, she is thrown out of her home by
her mother. She is rejected by her lover and forced into
prostitution. She soon drowns herself. In all her short life Maggie
has been struggling to escape from the hopeless slum. But she
failed. As Crane says, environment is a "tremendous" thing for an
insignificant human being to fight against.
The basic theme of the animal man in a cold world run through his
novel The Red Badge of Courage. Crane looked into man's
primitive emotions and trying to tell the basic truth about human
life. In this war novel, there is nothing like heroism on the
battlefield. There is only fear of death, cowardice,the natural
instinct of man to run from danger.
Crane's best short stories include "Open Boat", "The Blue Hotel",
and "An Experiment in Misery". They all stress the basic Crane motif
of environment and heredity overwhelming man.
In his novels, Crane started the modern tradition of telling the
truth at all costs about the elemental human
situation, and writing about war as a real human
experience. This was a revolutionary event both in theme and
technique. It produced a far-reaching influence on later writers:
Hemingway, Dos Passos, and in recent history, Kurt Vonnegut and
other writers. It is no exaggeration to say that Crane anticipated
the chief phenomena of American literature in the first few decades
of the twentieth century. He was a also a pioneer in the field of
modern poetry. His early poems were brief, quotable, and had
unrhymed, unorthodox conciseness and impressionistic imagery. These
put a significant influence on modern poetry. He and Emily Dickinson
are now recognized as the two precursors of Imagist poetry.
II.The Red Badge
of Courage(电影片段)
1. Plot Overview
Stephen Crane's war novel, the Red Badge of Courage, is
not an ordinary Civil War novel. It is about a young farm
boy Henry Fleming's experience in the war.
Henry dreams of becoming a hero in the battlefield. He joins the
army, regardless of his mother's warning. But his dreams disappear
when he comes to the real battlefield. In the first attack, Henry is
boxed in by his fellow soldiers, realizes that he could not run even
if he wanted to. He fires mechanically, feeling like a cog in a
machine.
A second attack causes his sudden panic and flight. He is driven
by shame and wanders on the fringe of the battle field. He seems to
be helplessly wandering in a nightmarish atmosphere. He meets a
"tattered soldier" whose wounds seems "a red badge of courage" to
Henry. He repeatedly asks Henry where he is wounded. This
embarrassing question increases Henry's sense of guilt. The two men
are caught up in the procession of wounded soldiers who make their
way to the rear. Among them they seen Henry's friend, Jim Conklin.
This severely wounded "tall soldier" dies under their frightened
gaze after horrible sufferings. After his shocking experience Henry
abandons the "tattered man" whose very presence seems to him an
accusation. Retreating Union soldiers run past him and one of them
knocks him down with the butt of his rifle, ironically giving him
the "red badge of courage" he had been longing for.
After regaining consciousness Henry meets a man with "a cheery
voice" who takes him back to the regiment. His friend Wilson,
believing that Henry has been shot, cares for him tenderly. From
then on, Henry's attitude is altogether changed. He feels full of
aggressive but specious self-confidence and, because he does not
tell others the real cause of his wound, he gets
much respect from his fellow soldiers for his brave
conduct.
The last chapter shows him fighting like a lion at the head of
his unit during a victorious charge.As he and the others march back
to their position, Henry reflects on his experiences in the war.
Though he revels in his recent success in battle, he feels deeply
ashamed of his behavior the previous day, especially his abandonment
of the tattered man. But after a moment, he puts his guilt behind
him and realizes that he has come through "the red sickness" of
battle. He is now able to look forward to peace, feeling a quiet,
steady manhood within himself. But at the end of the story, Henry's
regiment finds itself crossing the same river that it crossed a few
days ago and thus going back to its previous position as if nothing
happened. Henry's first impression is right after all: "It was all a
trap."
2.Character Analysis
Throughout the novel, Crane refers to Henry Fleming as "the young
soldier" and "the youth." He believes in traditional
models of courage and honor, and romanticizes the image of dying in
battle by invoking the Greek tradition of a dead soldier being laid
upon his shield. On the other hand, because he is young, Henry has
to experience enough to test these ideas. So his most passionate
beliefs are based on fantasies. This makes him seem vain and
self-centered.
Henry desires a reputation. He hopes that an impressive deed on
the battlefield will make him remembered as a hero among men.
Ironically, after fleeing from battle, Henry feels little guilt. He
condemns the soldiers who stayed to fight as fools who were not
"wise enough to save themselves from the flurry of death." This is
how he restores his fragile self-pride. When Henry returns to camp
and lies about the nature of his wound, he doubts neither his
manhood nor his right to behave as pompously as an experienced
soldier. Henry's lack of a true moral sense shows the emptiness of
the honor and glory that he seeks. He feels no responsibility to
earn these praises. If others call him a hero, he believes he is
one.
When Henry finally faces battle, however, he feels a "temporary
but sublime absence of selfishness." A great change occurs within
him: as he fights, he loses his sense of self. He is no
longer interested in winning the praise and attention of other men.
He allows himself to disappear into the action and become one
component of a great fighting machine. As Henry finds himself deeply
involved in battle, the importance of winning a name for himself
disappears with the gun smoke. "it was difficult to think of
reputation when others were thinking of skins." It is ironic, then,
that Henry establishes his reputation at these very moments.
Officers who witness his fierce fighting regard him as one of the
regiment's best. Henry does not cheat his way to the honor that he
so desperately wants when the novel opens; instead, he earns it.
This marks a tremendous growth in Henry's character. He learns to
reflect on his mistakes, such as his earlier retreat, without
defensiveness. He abandons the hope of false heroism and understands
more of what it means to be a man.
3.Themes
The novel has several themes. Here we will discuss
courage, manhood, the universe's disregard for human life and the
dehumanizing effect of war.
(1)Courage：
Henry Fleming defines it, desires it, and finally
achieves it. As the novel opens,Henry's understanding of courage is
traditional and romantic. At the end of the novel, as the mature
Henry marches victoriously from battle, he has a more subtle and
complex understanding of courage : it is not simply a function of
other people's opinions, but it does include self concerns such as a
soldier's regard for his reputation.
(2)Manhood：
Throughout the novel, Henry struggles to preserve
his manhood. As he is in the battlefield, he believes he will be a
hero. These early conceptions of manhood are simplistic, romantic,
adolescent fantasies. By the novel's end, Henry learns that the
measure of one's manhood doesn't lie in one's conduct on the
battlefield, but in the complex ways in which one settles one's
mistakes and responsibilities.
(3)The universe's disregard for human life：
Crane stresses the
universe's disregard for human life in the novel. Henry realizes
that the natural world goes on regardless of the manner in which men
live and die. In the woods, Henry saw a dead soldier, whose rotting
body is a powerful reminder of the universe's indifference to human
life. Death is nothing more than a necessary and unremarkable part
of nature. As he reflects at the end of the novel: "He had been to
touch the great death, and found that, after all, it was but the
great death." Here Crane establishes the hard opposing forces in
Henry's mind: the belief that human life deserves such distinctions
as courage and honor is fruitless, and all human life meets the same
end.
(4)The dehumanizing effect of war:
War is seen as a force
moving men ruthlessly and blindly as if they were pawns on a chess-
board. The young soldier is moved about as if in a box with no free
will, serving as an instrument of blind fate. And men fighting are
like helpless animals. Crane uses animal images to show this theme.
Henry runs away from the battlefield "like a rabbit". Later he
fights like "a mad horse". The soldiers in the war "showed their
teeth; their eyes shone all white." The battle is "an encounter of
strange beaks and claws, as of eagles."
4.Selected Reading
CHAPTER 24
The roarings that had stretched in a long line of sound across
the face of the forest began to grow intermittent and weaker. The
stentorian speeches of the artillery continued in some distant
encounter, but the crashes of the musketry had almost ceased. The
youth and his
friend of a sudden looked up, feeling a deadened form of
distress at the waning of these noises, which had become a part of
life. They could see changes going on among the troops. There were
marchings this way and that way. A battery
wheeled leisurely. On the crest of a small hill was the thick gleam
of many departing muskets.
The youth arose. "Well, what now, I wonder?" he said. By his tone
he seemed to be preparing to resent some new monstrosity in the way
of dins and smashes. He shaded his eyes with his grimy hand and
gazed over the field.
His friend also arose and stared. "I
bet we're goin' t' git along out of this an' back over th'
river," said he.
"Well, I swan!" said the youth.
They waited, watching. Within a little while the regiment
received orders to retrace its way. The men got up grunting from the
grass, regretting the soft repose. They jerked their stiffened legs,
and stretched their arms over their heads. One man swore as he
rubbed his eyes. They all groaned "O Lord!" They had as many
objections to this change as they would have had to a proposal for a
new battle.
They trampled slowly back over the field across which they had
run in a mad scamper.
The regiment marched until it had joined its fellows. The
reformed brigade, in column, aimed through a wood at the road.
Directly they were in a mass of dust-covered troops, and were
trudging along in a way parallel to the enemy's lines as these had
been defined by the previous turmoil.
They passed within view of a stolid white house, and saw in front
of it groups of their comrades lying in wait behind a neat
breastwork. A row of guns were booming at a distant enemy. Shells
thrown in reply were raising clouds of dust and splinters. Horsemen
dashed along the line of intrenchments.
At this point of its march the division curved away from the
field and went winding off in the direction of the river. When the
significance of this movement had impressed itself upon the youth he
turned his head and looked over his shoulder toward the trampled and
debris-strewed
ground. He breathed a breath of new satisfaction. He finally nudged
his friend. "Well, it's all over," he said to him.
His friend gazed backward. "B'Gawd,
it is," he assented. They mused.
For a time the youth was obliged to reflect in a puzzled and
uncertain way. His mind was undergoing a subtle change. It took
moments for it to cast off its battleful ways and resume its
accustomed course of thought. Gradually his brain emerged from the
clogged clouds, and at last he was enabled to more closely
comprehend himself and circumstance.
He understood then that the existence of shot and countershot was
in the past. He had dwelt in a land of strange, squalling upheavals
and had come forth. He had been where there was red of blood and
black of passion, and he was escaped. His first thoughts were given
to rejoicings at this fact.
Later he began to study his deeds, his failures, and his
achievements. Thus, fresh from scenes where many of his usual
machines of reflection had been idle, from where he had proceeded
sheeplike, he struggled to marshal all his acts.
At last they marched before him clearly. From this present view
point he was enabled to look upon them in spectator fashion and
criticise them with some correctness, for his new condition had
already defeated certain sympathies.
Regarding his procession of memory he felt gleeful and
unregretting, for in it his public deeds were paraded in great and
shining prominence. Those performances which had been witnessed by
his fellows marched now in wide purple and gold, having various
deflections. They went gayly with music. It was pleasure to watch
these things. He spent delightful minutes viewing the gilded images
of memory.
He saw that he was good. He recalled with a thrill of joy the
respectful comments of his fellows upon his conduct.
Nevertheless, the ghost of his flight from the first engagement
appeared to him and danced. There were small shoutings in his brain
about these matters. For a moment he blushed, and the light of his
soul flickered with shame.
A specter of reproach
came to him. There loomed the dogging memory of the tattered
soldier--he who, gored by bullets and faint of blood, had fretted
concerning an imagined wound in another; he who had loaned his last
of strength and intellect for the tall soldier; he who, blind with
weariness and pain, had been deserted in the field.
For an instant a wretched chill of sweat was upon him at the
thought that he might be detected in the thing. As he stood
persistently before his vision, he gave vent to a cry of sharp
irritation and agony.
His friend turned. "What's the matter, Henry?" he demanded. The
youth's reply was an outburst of crimson oaths.
As he marched along the little branch-hung roadway among his
prattling companions this vision of cruelty brooded over him. It
clung near him always and darkened his view of these deeds in purple
and gold. Whichever way his thoughts turned they were followed by
the somber phantom of the desertion in the fields. He looked
stealthily at his companions, feeling sure that they must discern
in his face evidences of this pursuit. But they were plodding in
ragged array, discussing with quick tongues the accomplishments of
the late battle.
"Oh, if a man should come up an' ask me, I'd say we gota
dum good lickin'."
"Lickin'--in yer
eye! We ain't licked, sonny. We're goin' down here aways, swing
aroun', an' come in behint'em."
"Oh, hush, with your comin' in behint 'em. I've seen all 'a that
I wanta.
Don't tell me about comin' in behint--"
"Bill Smithers, heses
he'd rather been in ten hundred battles than been in that heluva
hospital. He ses they got shootin' in th' nighttime, an' shells
dropped plum
among 'em in th' hospital. He ses sech hollerin'
he never see."
"Hasbrouck? He's th' best off'cer in this here reg'ment. He's a
whale."
"Didn't I tell yeh
we'd come aroun' in behint 'em? Didn't I tell yeh so? We--"
"Oh, shet
yeh mouth!"
For a time this pursuing recollection of the tattered man took
all elation from the youth's veins. He saw his vivid error, and he
was afraid that it would stand before him all his life. He took no
share in the chatter of his comrades, nor did he look at them or
know them, save when he felt sudden suspicion that they were seeing
his thoughts and scrutinizing each detail of the scene with the
tattered soldier.
Yet gradually he mustered force to put the sin at a distance. And
at last his eyes seemed to open to some new ways. He found that he
could look back upon the brass and bombast
of his earlier gospels and see them truly. He was gleeful when he
discovered that he now despised them.
With this conviction came a store of assurance. He felt a quiet
manhood, nonassertive but of sturdy and strong blood. He knew that
he would no more quail before his guides wherever they should point.
He had been to touch the great death, and found that, after all, it
was but the great death. He was a man.
So it came to pass that as he trudged from the place of blood and
wrath his soul changed. He came from hot plowshares to prospects of
clover tranquilly, and it was as if hot plowshares were not. Scars
faded as flowers.
It rained. The procession of weary soldiers became a bedraggled
train, despondent and muttering, marching with churning effort in a
trough of liquid brown mud under a low, wretched sky. Yet the youth
smiled, for he saw that the world was a world for him, though many
discovered it to be made of oaths and walking
sticks. He had rid himself of the red sickness of battle. The
sultry nightmare was in the past. He had been an animal blistered
and sweating in the heat and pain of war. He turned now with a
lover's thirst to images of tranquil skies, fresh meadows, cool
brooks--an existence of soft and eternal peace.
Over the river a golden ray of sun came through the hosts of
leaden rain clouds.
Questions for Discussion
1.In
this novel, the images of animals and their features are frequently
used, which add up to 80 times in the plot, in the dialogues or in
the illusions of Henry. Does it show that man is a beast with
illusions?
2.What
are the distinctive features of Crane's writing style that is
regarded as one of the achievements of the novel?
III. Theodore Dreiser(1871-1945)
1.The Life of Theodore Dreiser
Theodore Dreiser is generally known as one of American
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.
Theodore Herman Albert Dreiser was born in Terre Hante, Indiana,
on August 27,1871, into a German immigrant family. Living in a poor
and intensely religious family, Dreiser had a very unhappy
childhood. He was the ninth of ten children. His father,
John Paul, had previously been a cotton mill manager, but a series
of unfortunate accidents caused his fortunes to dwindle. In 1864 the
cotton mill burned down, and during the reconstruction John Paul was
hit in the head with a beam. He never fully recovered and as a
result become deeply religious. He further was soon cheated by his
business partners. The family was forced to move from one Indiana
town to another in order to survive. Theodore Dreiser later blamed
his father for the family's poverty.
At the age of fifteen Dreiser moved to Chicago and held jobs
washing dishes, clerking a hardware store, and tracing freight cars.
Dreiser had some education at a Catholic school in Terre Hante, and
later went to a public school of Warsaw, Indiana. He met a teacher
there who appreciated his school work and made it possible for him
to spend a year at Indiana University. Apart from school education,
Dreiser read widely by himself. He immersed himself in Dickens and
Thackeray, read widely Shakespeare, and tasted Bunyan, Fielding,
Pope, Thoreau, Emerson, and Twain, but his true literary influences
were from Balzac, Charles Darwin and Herbert Spencer. Dreiser had
longed to become a writer, so he went up to Chicago afterwards and
made a beginning by placing himself with one of Chicago's
newspapers, where he learned by experience. Later on, he slowly
groped his way to authorship.
Dreiser first entered the newspaper world by dispensing toys for
the needy at Christmas for the Chicago Herald. He
subsequently got hired as a cub reporter with the Chicago Globe
and later went to St. Louis as a feature writer for the
Globe-Democrat. He left St. Louis and moved to Pittsburgh,
working with the Dispatch. With a secure job again, Dreiser
married Sara Jug White after meeting her at the Chicago World's
Fair. The couple moved to New York where he received a job as a
magazine editor. At the suggestion of his editor friend Arthur
Henry, Dreiser began writing his first novel, the result of which
was Sister Carrie.
Dreiser is a prolific writer and many of his works are familiar
to us Chinese readers. Among them, Sister Carrie(1900) is the
best known. In his early period some of his best short fictions were
written, among which are Nigger Jeff and Old Rogaun and
His Theresa. In 1911, Jennie Gerhardt came out, followed
by two volumes of his "Trilogy of Desire," The
Financier(1912) and The Titan(1914), the third, The
Stoic, being published in 1947. The Genius(1915), a
classic story of a "misunderstood artist," was once condemned for
"obscenity and blasphemy." Although a score of American men of
letters lent their support, the novel remained unpublished until
1923. In 1925 Dreiser's greatest work An American Tragedy
appeared. But it was banned in Boston in 1927. During the last
twenty years of his life, Dreiser turned away from fiction and
involved himself in political activities and debating writing. In
1927 he accepted an invitation to visit Russia and wrote Dreiser
Looks at Russia the following year. He joined the Communist
Party shortly before his death in 1945.Unable to write well towards
the end of his life, he moved to Hollywood in 1939 and supported
himself by the sale of film rights of his earlier works. He died
there in 1945 at the age of seventy-four.
2.Dreiser's Works and Themes
With the publication of Sister Carrie, Dreiser was
launching himself upon a long career that would make him one of the
most important American writers of the school of literary
naturalism. Naturalism emphasized heredity and environment as
important deterministic forces which shaped individualized
characters who were presented in special and detailed circumstances.
At bottom, life was shown to be ironic, even tragic. When Dreiser
was asked about what he thought earthly existence was during his
middle years, he described it 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.
The effect of Darwinist idea of "survival of the fittest" was
shattering. It is not surprising to find in Dreiser's fiction a
world of jungle, where "kill or to be killed" was the law. Dreiser's
naturalism found expression in almost every book he wrote. In
Sister Carrie Dreiser expressed his naturalistic pursuit by
presenting the purposelessness of life and attacking the
conventional moral standards. After a series of incidents and
coincidents, Carrie obtains fame and comfort while Hurstwood loses
his wealth, social position, pride and eventually his life. In his
"Trilogy of Desire," Dreiser's focus shifted from sympathising the
helpless characters at the bottom of the society to the power of the
American financial giants in the late 19th century. An American
Tragedy proves to be his greatest work. In a book with such a
name, Dreiser intended to tell us that it is the social pressure
that makes Clyde's downfall inevitable. Clyde's tragedy is a tragedy
that depends upon the American social system which encouraged people
to pursue the "dream of success" at all costs.
From the first novel Sister Carrie on, Dreiser set himself
to project the American values for what he had found them to be --
materialistc 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 motivation purpose of life in the
United States in the late 19th 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
3.Dreiser's Style and Influence
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 straightforward, 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. Language is a means of
communication rather than an art form for Dreiser.
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. Dreiser's stories are always solid and
intensely interesting with their simple but highly moving
characters. Dreiser is good at employing the journalistic method of
reiteration to burn a central impression into the reader's mind. His
interest in painting is reflected in his taste for word-pictures,
sharp contrast, truth in color, and movement in outline. Here lies
the power and permanence that have made Dreiser one of America's
foremost novelists.
IV. Sister Carrie
1. Plot Overview.
Caroline Meeber, known as Carrie, leaves her home at age eighteen
and takes the train to Chicago. The man sitting behind her on the
train, named Drouet, starts talking to her. Carrie soon becomes
interested in him due to his fine clothing and manners.
Carrie begins to live with her sister Minnie Hanson. Carrie soon
realizes that the Hansons expect her to find a job and pay them
rent. After several days of searching she finds
employment in a shoe factory.
Carrie works hard at her job, but the salary is too low for her
to pay rent and purchase clothes for the winter. Winter is coming
and she is seriously ill. She losts her job. Carrie accidentally
meets Drouet on the street. He kindly offers her a meal and takes
her to a fine restaurant. He convinces her to meet him again the
next day and presses twenty dollars into her hand. The next day and
he takes her out shopping, buying her an entire wardrobe.
Carrie is so delighted by the way he treats her that she agrees
to allow him to rent an apartment for her. Drouet then introduces
Carrie to his friend Hurstwood, the manager of one of the top bars
in the city. Hurstwood is far more refined and elegant than Drouet.
He falls madly in love with Carrie and starts to think of getting
her to run away with him.
Hurstwood's family life falls apart rapidly as he has been
neglecting his wife in order to see Carrie. Meanwhile,
Drouet has also discovered that Carrie has been spending far more
time with Hurstwood then he ever thought. Drouet is angry with
Carrie. Hurstwood foolishly fights with his wife, not realizing that
his wife has the entire property in her name. She then files for
divorce, locks him out of the house.
Hurstwood goes to his workplace and spends his nights at a local
hotel. One evening he pulls out over ten thousand dollars in cash
from his workplace and rushes to Carrie's apartment. He tells her
that Drouet has had an accident and that they need to go to the
hospital. With that lie he gets her onto a train heading to Detroit
and from there to Montreal. Carrie is upset and furious with him,
but passively does nothing to resist.
From Montreal they go to New York City where Hurstwood rents an
apartment for them. He has sent back most of the money he stole
while in Montreal in order to avoid being put into the prison.
Hurstwood keeps only thirteen hundred in order to set up his own
business. He and Carrie are soon forced to move into a smaller
apartment. Failing to find work, Hurstwood slowly gets used to
idleness. He takes up some gambling and loses over a hundred dollars
in one night. Carrie loses interest in him.
When Hurstwood is almost out of money, Carrie decides that she
will have to get a job to support them. After a few days she is
given a spot in the chorus line of a Broadway show. Her salary is
barely enough for them to live on. She is soon promoted to lead the
chorus line and later to an even better paying dancing position.
Carrie refuses to tell Hurstwood about her success because she needs
the extra money to purchase clothes for herself.
Hurstwood takes one last job as a cab driver when the trolley car
workers go on strike. An angry mob soon manages to stop his car and
beats Hurstwood. Hurstwood decides to give up and head home. Carrie
luckily is given a speaking part one day and at that point decides
to leave Hurstwood in order to live with an actress friend of hers.
She moves out while he is taking a walk.
The rest of the novel traces Carrie's rise and Hurstwood's
fall. Carrie becomes an overnight star and signs a
contract paying her a hundred and fifty dollars a week. Drouet moves
to New York and tries to reestablish his relationship with Carrie,
but she refuses him. Hurstwood loses his apartment and becomes a
homeless beggar. In despair, he commits suicide by gassing himself
in his hotel room one night. Hurstwood's wife and daughter take a
voyage to Rome with a wealthy young man that his daughter has
married while Hurstwood's dead body is carried away on a ship.
Carrie meanwhile has become unhappy with her state in the world,
wishing that she could perform drama rather than comedy.
2.Major Characters and the Theme.
2.1.Major Characters
(1)Carrie is a poor county girl who
comes to the city to seek whatever she can find. Carrie does rise,
but she does so by using men as ladder. She is not a simple gold
digger; she is much more complex than that. Her goals are colthes,
money, and fame, and the means by which she achieves them are
relatively unimportant. More importatn, however, is that Carrie is a
seeker and a lover. She cannot be satisfied. There must always be a
new world to conquer, new goals to achieve. Carrie uses everything
to reach her consuming amibition. She comes to understand the
usefulness of sex, but she also understands the emotional commitment
necessary to love, and she refuses to do that. In the pursuit of the
fullest expression and fulfillment of life she can achieve,human
attachments are only temporary, and Drouet and Hurstwood are only
means to an end for Carrie. Drouet is an escape for Carrie. She does
not love him, but his means are a source of amazement. She
recognizes that the relative good things in his chambers and in the
apartment he rents for her are the signs of that for which she
wants. She knows early that Droute is only a bridge
in her movement from poverty to riches. Carrie's
desertion of Hurstwood can be seen as cold and cruel, but she stays
with him until it is clear that no one can save him. In New York,
when she has finally gotten all that she has sought, Ames shows her
that there is a world beyond the material, a world of literature and
philosophy; it is an aesthetic world of which Carrie has not dreamed
and which she takes as a new level to achieve.The promise of an
aesthetic world beyond material affluence offers hope for Carrie,
and that hope seems illusory. The rocking chair is the perfect
symbol of Carrie. It is an instrument that forever moves but never
goes anywhere and never truly achieve anything. Carrie's every
success is at last unsatisfying and every new horizon offers only
hollow promise.
(2)Hurstwood is the bar manager of a famous Chicago bar. As he
watches Carrie perform in a cheap theatrical, he is shocked by her
youth and her energy. As a middle-aged married man whose wife is a
bad-tempered woman, he is naturally attracted to Carrie. Carrie in
turn recognizes the quality of Hurstwood's clothes, his style, and
his bearing as distict improvements on Drouet and makes it clear
that she will accept his love. When Hurstwood and Carrie come to New
York, he fails to open his own business or find a good job. The more
he fails the further he withdraws from life and from Carrie, until
he becomes completely dependent on her. When Carrie leaves him, he
drifts deeper into New York's lower class world until he kills
himself. Hurstwood is a weak man trapped by circumstance. He is
unwilling or unable to cope with situations. His love with Carrie is
based on mutual attraction, but he also enjoys his daily life and
the prestige that accompanies it. Only when his wife threatens him,
he is forced to run away with Carrie and loses everything. Hurstwood
dies because he is tired of the struggle.
2.2.Dreiser's real theme in Sister Carrie is the
purposelessness of life. While looking at individuals with warm,
human sympathy, he also sees the disorder and cruelty of life in
general. While Carrie gains fame and comfort, Hurstwood loses his
wealth, social position and pride. His tragedy is just as accidental
as Carrie's success. Dreiser does not try to explain why these
things happen. In this form of naturalism, the working of fate can
never be explained. As a character in Jennie
Gerhardt, his next novel, says: "The individual doesn't count
much in the situation...We are moved about like chessman...we have
no control." It is a "most terrible truth" that "the purpose of
nature have no relation to the purpose of men."
3.The selected
reading from the last chapter of Sister
Carrie.
...
Hurstwood put his hands, red from cold, down in his pockets.
Tears came into his eyes.
"That's right," he said; "I'm no good now. I was all
right. I had money. I'm going to quit this,"
and, with death in his heart, he started down toward the
Bowery. People had turned on the gas before and died;
why shouldn't he?He remembered a lodginghouse where there were
little, close rooms, with gas-jets in them, almost pre-arranged, he
thought, for what he wanted to do, which rented for fifteen
cents. Then he remembered that he had no fifteen
cents.
On the way he met a comfortable-looking gentleman, coming, clean-
shaven, out of a fine barber shop.
"Would you mind giving me a little something?" he asked this man
boldly.
The gentleman looked him over and fished for a
dime. Nothing but quarters were in his pocket.
"Here," he said, handing him one, to be rid of
him. "Be off, now."
Hurstwood moved on, wondering. The sight of the large,
bright coin pleased him a little. He remembered that he
was hungry and that he could get a bed for ten
cents. With this, the idea of death passed, for the time
being, out of his mind. It was only when he could get
nothing but insults that death seemed worth while.
One day, in the middle of the winter, the sharpest spell of the
season set in. It broke grey and cold in the first day,
and on the second snowed. Poor luck pursuing him, he had
secured but ten cents by nightfall, and this he had spent for food.
At evening he found himself at the Boulevard and Sixty-seventh
Street, where he finally turned his face Bowery-ward. Especially
fatigued because of the wandering propensity which had seized him in
the morning, he now half dragged his wet feet, shuffling the soles
upon the sidewalk. An old, thin coat was turned up about
his red ears--his cracked derby hat was pulled down until it turned
them outward. His hands were in his
pockets.
"I'll just go down Broadway," he said to himself.
When he reached Forty-second Street, the fire signs were already
blazing brightly. owds were hastening to
dine. Through bright windows, at every corner, might be
seen gay companies in luxuriant restaurants. There were
coaches and crowded cable cars.
In his weary and hungry state, he should never have come here.
The contrast was too sharp. Even he was recalled keenly
to better things. "What's the use?" he thought. "It's all
up with me. I'll quit this."
People turned to look after him,so uncouth was his shambling
figure.Several officers followed him with their eyes, to see that he
did not beg of anybody.
Once he paused in an aimless, incoherent sort of way and looked
through the windows of an imposing restaurant, before which blazed a
fire sign, and through the large, plate windows of which could be
seen the red and gold decorations, the palms, the white napery, and
shining glassware, and, above all, the comfortable
crowd. Weak as his mind had become, his hunger was sharp
enough to show the importance of this. He stopped stock
still, his frayed trousers soaking in the slush, and peered
foolishly in.
"Eat," he mumbled. "That's right,
eat. Nobody else wants any."
Then his voice dropped even lower, and his mind half lost the
fancy it had.
"It's mighty cold," he said. "Awful
cold."
At Broadway and Thirty-ninth Street was blazing, in incandescent
fire, Carrie's name. "Carrie Madenda," it read, "and the
Casino Company." All the wet, snowy sidewalk was bright with this
radiated fire. It was so bright that it attracted
Hurstwood's gaze. He looked up, and then at a large,
gilt-framed posterboard, on which was a fine lithograph of Carrie,
lifesize.
Hurstwood gazed at it a moment, snuffling and hunching one
shoulder, as if something were scratching him. He was so
run down, however, that his mind was not exactly
clear.
He approached that entrance and went in.
"Well?" said the attendant, staring at him. Seeing him
pause, he went over and shoved him. "Get out of here," he
said.
"I want to see Miss Madenda," he said.
"You do, eh?" the other said, almost tickled at the spectacle.
"Get out of here," and he shoved him again. Hurstwood had
no strength to resist.
"I want to see Miss Madenda," he tried to explain, even as he was
being hustled away. "I'm all
right. I----"
The man gave him a last push and closed the door. As
he did so, Hurstwood slipped and fell in the snow. It
hurt him, and some vague sense of shame returned. He
began to cry and swear foolishly.
"God damned dog!" he said. "Damned old cur," wiping
the slush from his worthless coat. "I--I hired such
people as you once."
Now a fierce feeling against Carrie welled up--just one fierce,
angry thought before the whole thing slipped out of his
mind.
"She owes me something to eat," he said. "She owes it
to me."
Hopelessly he turned back into Broadway again and slopped onward
and away, begging, crying, losing track of his thoughts, one after
another, as a mind decayed and disjointed is wont to
do.
It was truly a wintry evening, a few days later, when his one
distinct mental decision was reached. Already, at four
o'clock, the sombre hue of night was thickening the
air. A heavy snow was falling--a fine picking, whipping
snow, borne forward by a swift wind in long, thin
lines. The streets were bedded with it--six inches of
cold, soft carpet, churned to a dirty brown by the crush of teams
and the feet of men. Along Broadway men picked their way
in ulsters and umbrellas. Along the Bowery, men slouched
through it with collars and hats pulled over their ears. In the
former thoroughfare businessmen and travellers were making for
comfortable hotels. In the latter, crowds
on cold errands shifted past dingy stores, in the deep recesses
of which lights were already gleaming. There were early
lights in the cable cars, whose usual clatter was reduced by themantle
about the wheels. The whole city was muffled by this
fast-thickening mantle.
In her comfortable chambers at the
Waldorf, Carrie was reading at this time "Pere
Goriot," which Ames had recommended to her. It was so
strong, and Ames's mere recommendation had so aroused her interest,
that she caught nearly the full sympathetic significance of
it. For the first time, it was being borne in upon her
how silly and worthless had been her earlier reading, as a
whole. Becoming wearied, however, she yawned and came to
the window, looking out upon the old winding procession of carriages
rolling up Fifth Avenue.
"Isn't it bad?" she observed to Lola.
"Terrible!" said that little lady, joining her. "I
hope it snows enough to go sleigh riding."
"Oh, dear," said Carrie, with whom the sufferings of Father
Goriot were still keen. "That's all you think
of. Aren't you sorry for the people who haven't anything
to-night?"
"Of course I am," said Lola; "but what can I do? I haven't
anything."
Carrie smiled.
"You wouldn't care, if you had," she returned.
"I would, too," said Lola. "But people never gave me
anything when I was hard up."
"Isn't it just awful?" said Carrie, studying the winter's
storm.
"Look at that man over there," laughed Lola, who had caught sight
of some one falling down. "How sheepish men look when
they fall, don't they?"
"We'll have to take a coach to-night," answered Carrie
absently.
In the lobby of the
Imperial, Mr. Charles Drouet was just arriving, shaking the snow
from a very handsome ulster. Bad weather had driven him
home early and stirred his desire for those pleasures which shut out
the snow and gloom of life. A good dinner, the company of
a young woman, and an evening at the theatre were the chief things
for him.
"Why, hello, Harry!" he said, addressing a lounger in one of the
comfortable lobby chairs. "How are you?"
"Oh, about
six and six," said the other. "Rotten weather, isn't
it?"
"Well, I should say," said the other. "I've been just
sitting here thinking where I'd go to-night."
"Come along with me," said Drouet. "I can introduce
you to something
dead swell."
"Who is it?" said the other.
"Oh, a couple of girls over here in Fortieth
Street. We could have a dandy
time. I was just looking for you."
"Supposing you get 'em and take 'em out to
dinner?"
"Sure," said Drouet. "Wait'll I go upstairs and change
my clothes."
"Well, I'll be in the barber shop," said the other. "I
want to get a shave."
"All right," said Drouet, creaking off in his good shoes toward
the elevator. The
old butterfly was as light on the wing as ever.
On an incoming vestibuled
Pullman, speeding at forty miles an hour through the snow of the
evening, were three others, all
related.
"First call for dinner in the dining-car," a Pullman servitor was
announcing, as he hastened through the aisle in snow-white apron and
jacket.
"I don't believe I want to play any more," said the youngest, a
black-haired beauty, turned supercilious by fortune, as she pushed
a
euchre hand away from her.
"Shall we go into dinner?" inquired her husband, who was all that
fine raiment can make.
"Oh, not yet," she answered. "I don't want to play any
more, though."
"Jessica," said her mother, who was also a study in what good
clothing can do for age, "push that pin down in your tie--it's
coming up."
Jessica obeyed, incidentally touching at her lovely hair and
looking at a little jewel-faced watch. Her husband
studied her, for beauty, even cold, is fascinating from one point of
view.
"Well, we won't have much more of this weather," he
said. "It only takes two weeks to get to
Rome."
Mrs. Hurstwood nestled comfortably in her corner and
smiled. It was so nice to be the mother-in-law of a rich
young man --one
whose financial state had borne her personal
inspection.
"Do you suppose the boat will sail promptly?" asked Jessica, "if
it keeps up like this?"
"Oh, yes," answered her husband. "This won't make any
difference."
Passing down the aisle came a very fair-haired banker's son, also
of Chicago, who had long eyed this supercilious
beauty. Even now he did not hesitate to glance at her,
and she was conscious of it. With a specially conjured
show of indifference, she turned her pretty face wholly
away. It was not wifely modesty at all. By so much was
her pride satisfied.
At this moment Hurstwood stood before a dirty four story building
in a side street quite near the Bowery, whose one-time coat of buff
had been changed by soot and rain. He mingled with a
crowd of men--a crowd which had been, and was still, gathering by
degrees.
It began with the approach of two or three, who hung about the
closed wooden doors and beat their feet to keep them
warm. They had on faded derby hats with dents in
them. Their misfit coats were heavy with melted snow and
turned up at the collars. Their trousers were mere bags,
frayed at the bottom and wobbling over big, soppy shoes, torn at the
sides and worn almost to shreds. They made no effort to go in, but
shifted ruefully about, digging their hands deep in their pockets
and leering at the crowd and the increasing lamps. With
the minutes, increased the number. There were old men with grizzled
beards and sunken eyes, men who were comparatively young but
shrunken by diseases, men who were middle-aged. None were
fat. There was a face in the thick of the collection
which was as white as drained veal. There was another red
as brick. Some came with thin, rounded shoulders, others with wooden
legs, still others with frames so lean that clothes only flapped
about them. There were great ears, swollen noses, thick
lips, and, above all, red, blood-shot eyes. Not a normal,
healthy face in the whole mass; not a straight figure; not a
straightforward, steady glance.
In the drive of the wind and sleet they pushed in on one another.
There were wrists, unprotected by coat or pocket, which were red
with cold. There were ears, half covered by every
conceivable semblance of a hat, which still looked stiff and
bitten. In the snow they shifted, now one foot, now
another, almost rocking in unison.
With the growth of the crowd about the door came a
murmur. It was not conversation, but a running comment
directed at any one in general. It contained oaths and
slang phrases.
"By damn, I wish they'd hurry up."
"Look at the copper
watchin'."
"Maybe it ain't winter, nuther!"
"I
wisht I was in Sing
Sing."
Now a sharper lash of wind cut down and they huddled
closer. It was an edging, shifting, pushing
throng. There was no anger, no pleading, no threatening
words. It was all sullen endurance, unlightened by either
wit or good fellowship.
A carriage went jingling by with some reclining figure in it. One
of the men nearest the door saw it.
"Look at the bloke ridin'."
"He ain't so cold."
"Eh, eh, eh!" yelled another, the carriage having long since
passed out of hearing.
Little by little the night crept on. Along the walk a
crowd turned out on its way home. Men and shop-girls went
by with quick steps. The cross-town cars began to be
crowded. The gas lamps were blazing, and every window
bloomed ruddy with a steady flame. Still the crowd hung
about the door, unwavering.
"Ain't they ever goin' to open up?" queried a hoarse voice,
suggestively.
This seemed to renew the general interest in the closed door, and
many gazed in that direction.They
looked at it as dumb brutes look, as dogs paw and whine and study
the knob. They shifted and blinked and muttered, now a curse,
now a comment. Still they waited and still the snow whirled and cut
them with biting flakes. On the old hats and peaked
shoulders it was piling. It gathered in little heaps and
curves and no one brushed it off. In the centre of the crowd the
warmth and steam melted it, and water trickled off hat rims and down
noses, which the owners could not reach to scratch. On
the outer rim the piles remained unmelted. Hurstwood, who
could not get in the centre, stood with head lowered to the weather
and bent his form.
A light appeared through the transom overhead. It sent
a thrill of possibility through the watchers. There was a
murmur of recognition. At last the bars grated inside and
the crowd pricked up its ears. Footsteps shuffled within
and it murmured again. Some one called: "Slow up there,
now," and then the door opened. It was push and jam for a
minute, with grim, beast silence to prove its quality, and then it
melted inward, like logs floating, and disappeared. There
were wet hats and wet shoulders, a cold, shrunken, disgruntled mass,
pouring in between bleak walls. It was just six o'clock
and there was supper in every hurrying pedestrian's
face. And yet no supper was provided here--nothing but
beds.
Hurstwood laid down his fifteen cents and crept off with weary
steps to his allotted room. It was a dingy
affair--wooden, dusty, hard. A small gas-jet furnished
sufficient light for so rueful a corner.
"Hm!" he said, clearing his throat and locking the
door.
Now he began leisurely to take off his clothes, but stopped first
with his coat, and tucked it along the crack under the
door. His vest he arranged in the same
place. His old wet, cracked hat he laid softly upon the
table. Then he pulled off his shoes and lay
down.
It seemed as if he thought a while, for now he arose and turned
the gas out, standing calmly in the blackness, hidden from view.
After a few moments, in which he reviewed nothing, but merely
hesitated, he turned the gas on again, but applied no match. Even
then he stood there, hidden wholly in that kindness which is night,
while the uprising fumes filled the room. When the odour
reached his nostrils, he quit his attitude and fumbled for the
bed.
"What's the use?" he said, weakly, as he stretched himself to
rest.
And now Carrie had attained that which in the beginning seemed
life's object, or, at least, such fraction of it as human beings
ever attain of their original desires. She could look
about on her gowns and carriage, her furniture and bank
account. Friends there were, as the world takes it--those
who would bow and smile in acknowledgment of her
success. For these she had once craved. Applause there
was, and publicity--once far off, essential things, but now grown
trivial and indifferent. Beauty also--her type of
loveliness--and yet she was lonely. In
her rocking-chair she sat, when not otherwise engaged--singing and
dreaming.
Thus in life there is ever the intellectual and the emotional
nature--the mind that reasons, and the mind that
feels. Of one come the men of action--generals and
statesmen; of the other, the poets and dreamers--artists all.
As harps in the wind, the latter respond to every breath of
fancy, voicing in their moods all the ebb and flow of the ideal.
Man has not yet comprehended the dreamer any more than he has the
ideal. For him the laws and morals of the world are
unduly severe. Ever hearkening
to the sound of beauty, straining for the flash of its distant
wings, he watches to follow, wearying his feet in
travelling. So watched Carrie, so followed, rocking and
singing.
And it must be remembered that reason had little part in this.
Chicago dawning, she saw the city offering more of loveliness than
she had ever known, and instinctively, by force of her moods alone,
clung to it. In fine raiment and elegant surroundings,
men seemed to be contented. Hence, she drew near these
things. Chicago, New York; Drouet, Hurstwood; the world of fashion
and the world of stage--these were but incidents. Not
them, but that which they represented, she longed
for. Time proved the representation
false.
Oh, the tangle of human life! How dimly as yet we
see. Here was Carrie, in the beginning poor,
unsophisticated. emotional; responding with desire to
everything most lovely in life, yet finding herself turned as by a
wall. Laws to say: "Be allured, if you will, by
everything lovely, but draw not nigh
unless by righteousness." Convention to say: "You shall not better
your situation save by honest labour." If honest labour be
unremunerative and difficult to endure; if it be the long, long road
which never reaches beauty, but wearies the feet and the heart; if
the drag to follow beauty be such that one abandons the admired way,
taking rather the despised path leading to her dreams quickly, who
shall cast the first stone? Not evil, but longing for that which
is better, more often directs the steps of the
erring. Not evil, but goodness more often allures the
feeling mind unused to reason.
Amid the tinsel and shine of her state walked Carrie, unhappy. As
when Drouet took her, she had thought: "Now I am lifted into that
which is best"; as when Hurstwood seemingly offered her the better
way: "Now am I happy."
But since the world goes its way past all who will not partake of
its folly, she now found herself alone. Her purse was
open to him whose need was greatest. In her walks on
Broadway, she no longer thought of the elegance of the creatures who
passed her. Had they more of that peace and beauty which
glimmered afar off, then were they to be envied.
Drouet abandoned his claim and was seen no more. Of
Hurstwood's death she was not even aware. A slow, black
boat setting out from the pier at Twenty-seventh Street upon its
weekly errand bore, with many others, his nameless body to the Potter's
Field.
Thus passed all that was of interest concerning these twain in
their relation to her. Their influence upon her life is
explicable alone by the nature of her longings. Time was
when both represented for her all that was most potent in earthly
success. They were the personal representatives of a
state most blessed to attain--the titled ambassadors of comfort and
peace, aglow with their credentials. It is but natural
that when the world which they represented no longer allured her,
its ambassadors should be discredited. Even had Hurstwood
returned in his original beauty and glory, he could not now have
allured her. She had learned that in his world, as in her
own present state, was not happiness.
Sitting alone, she was now an illustration of the devious ways by
which one who feels, rather than reasons, may be led in the pursuit
of beauty. Though often disillusioned, she was still
waiting for that halcyon day when she would be led forth among
dreams become real. Ames had pointed out a farther step,
but on and on beyond that, if accomplished, would lie others for
her. It was forever to be the pursuit of that radiance of delight
which tints the distant hilltops of the world.
Oh, Carrie, Carrie! Oh, blind strivings of the human heart!
Onward onward, it
saith, and where beauty leads, there it
follows. Whether it be the tinkle of a lone sheep bell
o'er some quiet landscape, or the glimmer of beauty in sylvan
places, or the show of soul in some passing eye, the heart knows and
makes answer, following. It is when the feet weary and
hope seems vain that the heartaches and the longings
arise. Know, then, that for you is neither surfeit nor
content. In your rocking-chair, by your window dreaming,
shall you long, alone. In your rocking- chair, by your window, shall
you dream such happiness as you may never feel.
Questions for Discussion:
1.What
does Carrie's loneliness stand for?
2.Do
you think Dreiser's prose style is awkward or appropriate?
Explain.
参考书目：
1.The Red Badge Of Courage 选自《美国文学教程》，胡荫桐
刘树森主编，天津：南开大学出版社， 1995年，第292页--第298页。
2.Sister
Carrie选自《英美文学选读》，张伯香主编，
北京：外语教学与研究出版社，1998年， 第546页--第561页。
3.《美国文学选读》，
常耀信主编， 天津：南开大学出版社，1991年。
4.《美国文学简史》， 常耀信著，
天津：南开大学出版社，1990年。
5.《美国文学作品选读》，王松年总主编，上海：上海交通大学出版社，2003年。
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