The Analysis of Carrie Meeber’s View on Love 浅析嘉莉•米贝的爱情观

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摘 要

《嘉莉妹妹》是20世纪著名的自然主义小说家赛奥多·德莱赛的第一部小说。它讲述了年轻的乡村女孩嘉莉·米贝如何从社会底层成为百老汇当红女星的故事,生动地描绘了嘉莉·米贝的生存状态。本篇论文从家庭因素、社会环境和自身欲望三个方面简要地对嘉莉·米贝的爱情观进行分析。最后得到的结论是：理想的爱情在纯粹的物质关系中是不可能找到的。对当代追求爱情、婚姻和幸福的中国女性来说，这项研究会给她们带来一些启发。

关键词：嘉莉·米贝；爱情观；当代中国女性

Contents

1. Introduction………………………………………………………………1
2. Literature Review…………………………………………………………2
3. The Analysis of Carrie Meeber’s View on Love in Sister Carrie…………...4

3.1 Family factors……………………………………………………………….5

3.2 The social environment……...………………………………………………7

3.3 Carrie’s own desires for materials...…………………………………………9

4. Conclusion………………………………………………………………..10

Works Cited…………………………………………………………..12

1. Introduction

Theodore Dreiser was born in Terre Haute, Indiana, on August 27, 1871, the twelfth of the thirteen children. His gentle and devoted mother was illiterate; his German immigrant father was severe and distant. From the former he seems to have absorbed a quality of compassionate wonder; from the latter he seems to have inherited moral earnestness and the capacity to persist in the face of failure, disappointment, and despair. Dreiser as a youth was as ungainly, confused, shy, and full of vague yearnings as most of his fictional protagonists, male and female. In this as in many other ways, Dreiser’s novel is direct projections of his inner life as well as careful transcriptions of his experiences.

As an itinerant journalist, Dreiser slowly groped his way to authorship, testing what he knew from direct experience against what he learned from reading Charles Darwin, Thomas Huxley, and Herbert Spencer, those late-nineteenth-century scientists and social scientists who lent support to the view that nature and society had no divine sanction. Dreiser also read heavily in Balzac, Hardy and Tolstoy, whose views complemented his own.

Sister Carrie (1900), which traces the material rise of Carrie Meeber and the tragic decline of G. W. Hurstwood, was Dreiser’s first novel. The heroine of the novel is Carrie Meeber, who leaves her rural home to try her fortune in Chicago. She meets Charles Drouet, a traveling 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, and 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 live together for more than 3 years. In these 3 years, as Hurstwood declines, Carries develops. To earn money, she becomes a star from a chorus girl to a famous musical comedy by her own efforts. Meanwhile, Hurstwood sinks into a beggary and suicide. In spite of her freedom and success, Carrie is still lonely and unhappy.

The background of Sister Carrie is at the end of 19th century in America. Actually, The background is in Chicago and New York, in 1889. Just as the author depicted in the novel: “In 1889 Chicago had the peculiar qualifications of growth which made such adventure some pilgrimages even on the part of young girls plausible. Its many and growing commercial opportunities gave it widespread fame, which made of it a giant magnet, drawing to itself, from all quarters, the hopeful and hopeless—those who had their fortune yet to make and those whose fortunes and affairs had reached a disastrous climax elsewhere. It was a city of over 500, 000, with the ambition. Its streets and houses were already scattered over an area of seventy-five miles. Its population was not so much thriving upon established commerce as upon the industries which prepared for the arrival of others. The sound of the hammer engaged upon the erection of new structures was everywhere heard. Great industries were moving in. The huge railroad corporations which had long before recognized the prospects of the place had seized upon vast tracts of land for transfer and shipping purposes. Street-car lines had been extended far out into the open country in anticipation of rapid growth.”(Dreiser 2).The author employs a typical “arrived metropolis” narrative mode. From the 18th century realism to modernism in the 20th century, many authors often use this model to express the metropolitan luxury landscape, lifestyle, values and its powerful creation on individual reconstruction or rejection, accommodation or subjugation. These novels show the process of individual urbanization and modernization vividly through depicting the success or failure of provincial youth.

Because it depicted social transgressions by characters who felt no remorse and largely escaped punishment, and because it used “strong” language and used names of living persons, it was virtually suppressed by its publisher, who printed but refused to promote the book. Since its reissue in 1907, it has steadily risen in popularity and scholarly accepted as one of the key works in the Dreiser’s canon. Indeed, though turn-of-the century readers found Dreiser’s point of view crude and immoral, his influence on the fiction of the first quarter of the century is perhaps greater than any other writers.

2. Literature Review

Since Sister Carrie’s important status in literary, many different comments on it have been made by scholars. Upon its publication, Sister Carrie experienced double day; Page’s reluctance to publish the book and the subsequent poor sales and sparse reviews: F.R.Leavis remarked that Dreiser wrote as if he had no “native language” (Lehan 43). Among of the opponents, the most notable is Saul Bellow’s flat assertion that Dreiser’s works constitute bad writing. In addition, to Stuart Sherman, Dreiser’s fiction constituted not the pure voice of truth but rather the howl of an atavistic animalism. Men may often be selfish and brutal, Sherman and other New Humanists agreed, but they also held that civilization represented an effort to control these remnants of our animal past through reason and will, and that literature should depict the desirability and possibility of achieving this goal.

Despite full of critical commands on it, Carrie sister has also gained the recognition from some critics in the meantime. Supporters of his work such as Sherwood Anderson, H. L. Mencken and Randolph Bourne were not merely engaged in the praise of novels which had moved them a lot. They were also seeking to cast Dreiser in the symbolic role of the trailblazer whose willingness to challenge the conventional beliefs and genteel codes of American life.

Dreiser criticism is often concerned with the issue of his naturalism. Many early critics treated Dreiser’s works as a literary movement with a Darwinian-based pessimistic determinism in theme and crude massiveness in technique. But since the seminal essay by Elise Vivas, most critics who have written have recognized that many different strains make to the distinctive fictional voice like Dreiser’s, and his prophetic tone are antithetical to the biological and environmental determinism and amoral objectivity of a conventionally conceived naturalist. Although such recent critic as Charles Walcutt, Donald Pizer, June Howard, John Conder and Michael Davitt Bell still engage themselves with the problems of defining American naturalism and explaining Dreiser as a principal naturalist, they now incline to an acceptance of the complexities and ambivalences of both the movement and Dreiser.

Along this issue also appears reevaluation about Sister Carrie. In the Pennsylvania edition of Theodore Dreiser’s first novel, Sister Carrie, James West observes that the characters in the restored edition of the text “assume the original clarity of the author’s design”(Fisher 6). The clarity to what West refers emerges in the new edition through Dreiser’s earliest rendering of his characters as victims or survivors of gender behavior imposed by America’s nineteenth-century cultural milieu. In Theodore Dreiser: Beyond Naturalism (1995), Scott Zaluda argues that Dreiser champions the feminine: in a reference to Drouet in Sister Carrie, Dreiser states that “femininity affected his feelings and as such he was the creature of an inborn desire” (Lehan 65). Dreiser often links inborn desire and feelings to femininity and in so doing he proposes a broad-minded movement away from woman as object whose fulfillment is predicted on desirability of woman as subject, capable of fulfilling her own desire. If Dreiser was not a feminist, then he was at least a fellow traveler, allied with feminists in a struggle particularly.

From comments above we can see that the theme of Sister Carrie is not directly concerned with the love of man and woman. So we cannot call the relationship between Carrie and Drouet or Hurstwood love to some extend. Even if we regard it as some kind of love, they are just “deformed love”(Zhang Fan 193) because too many self-desires is involved in it.

However, it doesn’t mean that there is nothing about view of love reflected in the novel in that love between man and woman is an important part of life. Besides people’s life outlook and social values will be automatically showed in their attitude towards love, which in turn presents their outlook on life and society. Therefore the paper will grope for the view of love in Sister Carrie that revealed from Carrie by analyzing Carrie’s relationships with Drouet and Hurstwood from three aspects—family factors, the social environment and Carrie’s own desires. At last, the paper will looks further into the illumination Carrie’s view of love brings to the modern women in China.

3. The Analysis of Carrie Meeber’s View on Love in Sister Carrie

Chicago, undoubtedly, is a prosperous metropolis with multitudes of temptations. Carrie, a country girl, goes to Chicago in the hope of leading a better life and getting rid of poverty through her efforts. However, life is tough for such a young girl. The slender income working as a worker in the factory can not satisfy her desire of the romantic city life. So she becomes Drouet’s and Hurstwood’s mistress successively. Under this condition, Carrie gradually converts herself from a country girl to a city girl with endless desires. In the end, however, after she rises to fame, Carrie she still feels lonely, sitting in the rocking chair dreaming of her own happiness. Obviously, even if Carrie has already possessed reputation and wealth she has longed to dream of, she still feels hollow. In this novel, influenced by family factors, social environment and Carrie’s own desires, the true love never appears both in Carrie’s two relationships.

3.1 Family factors

First of all, family factors play an important role in the formation of Carrie’s view of love. Carrie was born in a poor family and both of her parents are farmers. So she nearly knows nothing about the outside world. Due to this reason, when Carrie Meeber leaves her home town in Wisconsin, “bright, timid and full of the illusions of ignorance and youth”(Dreiser 1), she wants to get rid of poverty and live a both rich and happy life. From this point, we can see that influenced by her living environment, Carrie is a native girl and her view of love is bound to be more or less traditional.

With nothing but a few dollars and a certain unspoiled beauty and charm, she is going to Chicago to live with her sister and to find a job. While on the train, she meets Charles Drouet, a genial, flashy travelling salesman, who later becomes her first boyfriend in her life. Having few chances to see the colorful outside world, Carrie is immediately attracted by Chicago and has a good expectation for her future life—“She realized that hers was not to be a round of pressure, and yet there was something promising in all the material prospect he set forth.” (Dreiser 5) when on the way to Chicago, Drouet talks with Carrie of sales of clothing, his travel, and all interesting things about Chicago. To Carrie, Drouet is attractive too. Drouet has good clothes—“The whole suit was rather tight-fitting, and was finished off with heavy-soled tan shoes, highly polished, and the gray fedora hat.”(Dreiser 4), which, to a rural girl, is a represent of richness. What’s more, when they exchange their addresses, Carrie notices that Drouet “reached down in his hip pocket and took a fat purse that is filled with slips of papers, some mileage book and a roll of greenbacks”(Dreiser 6), which “impressed her deeply”(Dreiser 6). “The purse, the shiny tan shoes, the smart new suit and the air with which he did things” (Dreiser 6), and to Carrie, all the external materials used to package Drouet “built up for her a dim world of fortune, of which he was the center. It disposed her pleasantly toward all he might do.” (Dreiser 6).

After Carrie arrives in Chicago, her old sister, Minnie introduces Carrie to her taciturn husband, Hanson. Hanson is mostly indifferent to Carrie"s presence, but he remarks that she should find work in Chicago as soon as possible. The next day, Carrie walks to the wholesale district to look for work. Shy and fearful, she cannot bring herself to ask for a job at most of the places she passes. After a while, she works up the courage to inquire at a few stores. The owners are alternately kind and cold, but none of them offer her a job. One man suggests that she try to get a job as a shop girl in one of the department stores, but Carrie discovers that the stores are only looking for people with experience. Eventually, she finds a job in a shoe factory, where she earns four and a half dollars a week.

Hanson and Minnie are pleased that Carrie has found work so quickly. When Carrie is eager to use her earned money to go to the theater, Minnie and Hanson expect her to pay for the food she eats at their apartment, and her notions of spending money on entertainment run counter to their plans to profit from her, which disappoint her and make her feel both dismay and frustrated. In the house, she feels little love from her older sister Minnie who is subordinated to her husband, not to mention Hanson.

Though Carrie gets a job in a shoe factory, pretty soon an illness costs her job. Hence she has no choice but to continue to go out to hunt for work. Just then Carrie encounters Drouet on a downtown street. Taken by her beauty, and moved by her poverty, Drouet encourages her to dine with him and even offer her greenbacks, which makes Carrie feel that Drouet is “like a great arm to draw off trouble for her”(Dreiser 61). When they dine secondly, Drouet persuades Carrie to leave her sister and move in with him. Faced with her sister Minnie and her husband’s increasing dissatisfaction and indifference, Carrie is forced to cohabit with Drouet in the end. However, in Drouet’s heart, Carrie is just one of his numerous preys and he is mainly enchanted by Carrie’s good appearance. What’s more, young, poor, inexperienced, Carrie was in a humble position compared with Drouet. Therefore, Carrie easily becomes his quarry.

Drouet is warm-hearted, but he never takes any of his romantic affairs seriously. He provides Carrie with a place to stay after she has to stop living with her sister; he also promised to marry her, but he never really intends on focusing through, which indicates that he doesn’t genuinely love Carrie. Smart as Carrie, she realizes that Drouet doesn’t intend to marry her, which for a rural girl, tortures her morally and makes her unpeaceful. It finally leads to Carrie having a secret affair with Hurstwood.

From above, it is clear to us that young as Carrie, she has a good expectation of love. Meeting Drouet for the first time, she would not be hooked on Drouet immediately if she was in a rich family and knew a lot about outside world. Meeting Drouet for the second time, she would not live with him immediately if her older sister Minnie and her families cared more about her. Just these family factors push her towards the wrong road further and further, which exerts great negative affects on the formation of her view of love.

3.2 The social environment

The social background of the novel is the late-nineteenth America. During this period, industries grow and economic expands in a rapid speed. As reflected in the novel: “The sound of hammer engaged upon the erection of new structures was everywhere heard. Great industries were moving in”(Dreiser 2). Under the circumstances, Carrie is deeply attracted with Chicago. In her mind, the big city is charming in which she can become rich and get the fortune. Therefore, the prosperous city and the various enjoyments change and build her view of love.

During Carrie’s company with her neighbor Mrs. Hale, she sees much more beautiful buildings, wide private grassland, and luxurious carriages. Her desire is aroused. “She was perfectly certain that here was happiness. If she could but stroll up yon broad walk, cross that rich entrance way, which to her was of the beauty of a jewel, and sweep in grace and luxury to possession and command—oh! How quickly would sadness flee; how, in an instant, would the heartache end.” (Dreiser 114). She wants more material wealth to fill in her anxiety for her future life. In her opinion, only money can bring her safety. However, Drouet cannot satisfy her any longer. Then, another man comes to her and attracts her. That is Hurstwood.

The first time Carrie meets Hurstwood, by instinct, she immediately finds that Hurstwood is “more clever than Drouet in a hundred ways”(Dreiser 94). Good at flattery, Hurstwood appears a gallant man of the world, with a cosmopolitan charm and intelligence, the very characteristics that more fetches Carrie. Also he dresses well and seems to be more graceful and elegant than Drouet. For Hurstwood himself, his career is in a boom period and social relationships go smoothly in all aspects. As regards in his marriage, there is no love lost between he and Julia and there is not great feeling of dissatisfaction too. They just rough it. With the affection between him and his wife evanescing, Hurstwood is passionately in love with Carrie before long.

Hurstwood “had only a thought of pleasure without responsibility” (Dreiser 129) at the beginning. Then as Carrie is gaining in maturity and beauty, he thinks that “Carrie was indeed worth love, if ever youth and grace are to command that token of acknowledgment from life in their bloom”(Dreiser 140) and “what a thing it was to have her love him, even if it be entangling!”(Dreiser 145), especially when she makes a successful debut as Augustin Daly’s Laura. Supposing that Hurstwood is at first merely obsessed by Carrie’s beauty, he is completely bewitched by Carrie both physically and spiritually after her debut. Charmed with Carrie, Hurstwood more and more wants to win her and ultimately declares his love to her. Faced with Hurstwood’s confession of love, Carrie is deeply moved by the sincerity that he shows to her. “Carrie in her rooms that evening was in a fine glow, physically and mentally.”(Dreiser 128) and “she was deeply rejoicing in her affection for Hurstwood and his love. ”(Dreiser 128). Therefore, we can see that there is love really existing between Carrie and Hurstwood.

However, so naive is Carrie that she doesn’t know Hurstwood has been married. It’s not long that Drouet finds that Carrie and Hurstwood have an affair and a scene follows. Carrie is furious when Drouet tells her that Hurstwood is already married. She blames Drouet for her folly, saying that he should have told her that Hurstwood is a married man. At last, Drouet decides to leaves Carrie for some time. During the period, Carrie has to come out of the house to look for work. At that time, she is totally disappointed with Hurstwood and is determined to begin to earn her living honestly. Yet it is hard for a woman like Carrie to lead a cozy and comfortable life by being a ordinary worker because of long work hours and low incomes. Hence, though the love Carrie has for Hurstwood has faded because of his deception on her, she still crave for him in that she is now actually fascinated by the affluent material life hidden under his refined and elegant resemblance, and what’s more, working in a factory is so hard for her. Hurstwood is not only a wonderful lover, but also an object of which she takes advantage to achieve her changing life and ideal. So “Yet she could not keep out the pictures of his looks and manners”(Dreiser 210). She thinks that “this one deed seemed strange and miserable, it contrasted sharply with all she felt and knew”(Dreiser 211).

In the novel, not only does the industrialization bring city boom, but also create a sense of helplessness between people. Under this condition, losing hope on Drouet’s coming back; Carrie doesn’t get off the train though she knows that Hurstwood cheats her again. In her opinion, love is worth a penny but she can use it to live a decent life. So Carrie’s view of love has being altered by the crude social environment. She doesn’t believe love any more.

3.3 Carrie’s own desires for materials
Carrie, a desire catcher, wearing expensive clothes and going to luxurious restaurants and elegant theatres are the dreams she is eager to realize. So in the face of the two men’s enthusiastic pursuit, Carrie doesn’t appear to be fragile and simple any more and she starts to ponder over her relationship with them. Compare with Hurstwood, to Carrie, Drouet is much duller to her but she feels that she is indebted to him. So she becomes Hurstwood’s lover and enjoys more happiness.

But fate teases them. Shortly after, Mrs. Hurstwood learns from acquaintances that Hurstwood has been out driving with another woman and deliberately excluded her from the Elks theatres night. She tells him that she intend to sue for divorce. Faced with both social and financial ruin, Hurstwood is in despair. One night, he discovers that his employer’s safe is open. He steals several hundreds of money and deceives Carrie to run away with him. On the train to New York, after Carrie knows the truth, she still hesitates whether to get off or not. She doesn’t get off for she hasn’t made her decision. Her hesitation just show she wants to get on another step.

Under the name of Wheeler, Carrie and Hurstwood are married in New York. Unfortunately, Hurstwood’s career is no success. Seized by her early terrible venture in Chicago, Carrie realizes that lack of money is a horrible thing so she sets out to find work and is lucky enough to find a job as a chorus girl. Soon she thinks of Hourstwood as encumbrance and wants to get rid of him. Finally, with a friend, she takes an apartment and leaves Hurstwood to himself.

At last, she becomes a famous actress, she has all the money and comforts and luxuries which satisfy all her desires foe material enjoyments, but she is lost in emptiness. To Hurstwood, being so old and weak, he can find no jobs. He becomes a bum, living in a Bower flophouse and begging on the streets. In the end, He committed suicide at last in a small shabby room and is unknown to Carrie.

It seems to Theodore Dreiser that we should not simply judge their behavior on the moral aspect. Maybe “ it is the operating rule of the whole human history, where nobody can escape from temptations.” (Wang Ganghua 87). However, full of deception and various desires, their feelings for one another are doomed not to last long. They are bound to be confronted with a disillusioned ending, which is like beautiful soap bubbles popping in the air. Maybe, to some extend, Carrie has loved Hurstwood. But her love to Hurstwood is mixed too many her own desires for materials. Therefore, once Hurstwood loses his money and social status and becomes a poor man who fails to provide her with the lavish life she wants, he is not attractive in her eyes and as her desires for him weaken, which is accompanied by his decline, he even becomes bothersome. Hence in the love mixed with desires, as soon as desires weaken, love will fade even disappear.

4. Conclusion

Through analysis above, we can see that there is no ideal love in Sister Carrie and her view of love is the product of her family factors, the social environment and her own desires. Both her relationships with Drouet and Hurstwood are driven by all kinds of factors and at last the two men just become passers-by in her life. What’s more, the novel seems to want to tell us that in reality, “ideal love is almost unreachable because it involves lots of self-desires”(Zhang Meilin, and Wu Gefei 71).

Here it is necessary to mention one of the characters in the novel—Ames. Though he just appears in the novel several times, his influence on Carrie is tremendous. In Carrie’s eyes, Ames is like her mental tutor. He is “Wiser than Hurstwood, saner and brighter than Drouet”(Dreiser 312) and seems to be apart from the society full of self-interest that fuels the economic boom and conspicuous consumption. Clearly we can find that the love which is mainly excited by desires cannot compare with the love that mostly depends upon spirituality. In this case, for human searching for real love, abandoning self-desires properly is the first step to take and emphasizing spiritual values is the second important step to take.

Comparing the time of Carrie, everyone knows that China is now on the road of what Occident have experienced in the late 19^th century. Part of people becomes well-off due to the rapid development. Now as people’s requirement is higher, the strings attached to love and marriage are more and more. Besides like the time of Carrie in America, chances are everywhere, but tempt is also everywhere. Nowadays more and more young girls are walking out of their home and streaming into big cities to search for their happiness one after another. So it is a challenge for them to resist tempt. In our lives, we have seen many cases about girls selling their soul and bodies for their so-called “love and happiness”. Even though they are dressed well and become rich, it doesn’t represent their love finally results well.

Love is marriage’s mother but there are always some poor orphans. There are modern Chinese women marrying for different reasons and not only for love. They marry for money, for promotion, for repayment, for parents’ or some others’ orders, and even just for sex, but what is the same to love relationships is that marriage based on true love lasts and cannot be easily split up whereas marriage without love does not endure and may end in divorce. Luckily, some modern Chinese women live a happy life because their marriage is based on true love. On the contrary, some others marry for money only and their marriage is destined to be a failure.

There is no doubt that Sister Carrie is a good textbook to educate Chinese people, especially modern Chinese woman, which alerts them that it is a shame to satisfy own desires through wrongful ways, especially at the cost of love. The true meaning of happiness to obtain love and fortune is through sincere contribution and honest attitude. Love resembles a mirror. Any deception and self-desires will sooner or later be revealed on it and stains will appear over your personality. In a word, honest, sincerity and contribution should be strongly advocated both in love and marriage.

Works Cited

Philip, Fisher. Hard Facts: Setting and Form in the American Novel. New York: Oxford University Press, 1985.

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