英美文学选读学习笔记 Theodore Dreiser

Theodore Dreiser (1871-1945) is generally acknowledged as one of America's literary 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. Dreiser had some education at a Catholic school in Terre Hante, and later went to a public school of Warsaw, Indiana, where he met a teacher who apciated his school work and made it possible for him to spend a year at Indiana University. Apart from school education, Dreiser read voraciously 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. From the age of fifteen, Dreiser began to work on his own, earning a meager support by doing some odd jobs. 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 is a prolific writer and many of his works are familiar to us Chinese readers. Among them, Sister Carrie (1900) is the best-known, tracing the material rise of Carrie Meeber and the tragic decline of G. W. Hurstwood.  In his early period some of his best short fictions were written, among which are Nigger Jeff and Old Rogaum 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 posthumously 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  Although a score of American men of letters lent their support, the novel remained unpublished until 1923.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 two decades 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.

With the publication of Sister Carrie, Dreiser was launching himself upon a long career that would ultimately make him one of the most significant American writers of the school later known as literary naturalism. As a genre, naturalism emphasized heredity and environment as important deterministic forces shaping inspanidualized characters who were sented in special and detailed circumstances. At bottom, life was shown to be ironic, even tragic. Asked, during his middle years, about what he thought earthly existence was, Dreiser described it as "a welter of inscrutable forces," in which was trapped each inspanidual 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 exssion ill almost every book he wrote. In Sister Carrie Dreiser exssed his naturalistic pursuit by expounding 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 the pathos of the helpless protagonists at the bottom of the society to the power of the American financial tycoons in the late 19th century. An American Tragedy proves to be his greatest work and by entitling this book with such a name, Dreiser intended to tell us that it is the social ssure 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 --materialistic to the core. Living in such a society with such a value system, the human inspanidual is obsessed with a never-ending, yet meaningless search for satisfaction of his desires. One of the desires is for money which was a motivating 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.

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. For him language is a means of communication rather than an art form. 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.