Sister Carrie Cultural Analysis

Theodore Dreiser is regarded as an influential American novelist in the early 20th century. His novel, Sister Carrie, not only makes him well-known all over the world, but also settles his literary status in America. Sister Carrie mainly tells Carried process of actualization from a penniless girl to an elegant woman. When climbing up the ladder of the upper strata, she does not win her dreaming happiness, but the endless hopelessness and mental torture. The novel was created in 1900 when the modern consumer culture boomingly rises; people’s value orientations and behavior modes were largely determined by the consumption ideology. The new production-oriented ideologies gradually give way to the consumption-oriented one in American society.

In such a society, consumer culture places more emphasis on material consumption and people gain great satisfaction just through the possession of materials, which gradually weakens the traditional moral standards of hardworking and frugality. In other words, consumer culture is a kind of the materialized lifestyles. It fully applauds consumption and lures people to consume ostentatiously in order to display their purchasing luxurious commodities and consumptive powers. In the process of worshiping materials, American society is gradually becoming the law of the jungle and their main life goal has already simplified a kind of the material satisfaction. Now, the possession of wealth is no longer to satisfy peopled basic needs, but an indicator of social identity and high-quality life. In the novel, Dreiser depicts in detail the characters5 crazy cravings for materials. Living in such a materialistic society, people are full of endless desires for various conspicuous consumptions, such as vogue clothes, magnificent residences, luxurious hotels, saloons and splendid theatres,

He was born in Terre Haute, India, on August 27, 1871, the thirteen children in his family. His mother did not receive enough education, and his father always held a serious attitude towards him. From his parents, though he got little educational knowledge, yet he seemed to have developed a habit of enthusiastic wonder and inherited moral earnestness and the ability to endure in facing of the failure. Living in a poor and religious family, Dreiser had an unhappy childhood. At the age of fifteen, he quitted school and went to Chicago, earning little income through a variety of trivial jobs to meet the ends. With the help of a high school teacher, he learnt at Indiana University during a year, but honestly speaking, his knowledge mostly came from experience and from reading and thinking by himself. During learning at the university, the literary theory of those outstanding American writers, including Charles Darwin, Thornes Huxlay and Herbert Spenser, was exposed to Dreiser, and he began to be interested in the writing of essays in his spare time. However, learning at the Indiana University made it difficult to survive in the hardship, so he returned the Chicago after a year doing some odd job from the bottom of the American society. The longing dream of Dreiser was to be a writer, so he made a beginning by working as a journalist in