A Study of the Reflection of Naturalism in the Heroine in Sister Carrie

Sister Carrie is one of the greatest works composed by Theodore Dreiser, one of the representatives of naturalists in American literature at the beginning of the 20th century. Among numerous works of Theodore Dreiser, Sister Carrie enjoys a quite high literary status, and also meets with different comments after its publication. The novel mainly tells the personal experiences of a rural beautiful girl Carrie in the big city Chicago. Driven by natural desires and urban environment, she changes her social status and original values in the end. Naturalism is a scientific and literary approach employed here to depict the characters in the novel where a person's fate is decided or predetermined by impersonal forces of nature and environment beyond human control. The novel is an experiment where the author could discover and analyze the natural forces and survival laws that influence personal behaviors, emotion and fate. This paper introduces the origin, development and characteristics of naturalism in American literature, studies the effect of human weakness on their life, and makes clear the influences of environment on people’s way of thinking and way of life.