g180:<<嘉利妹妹>>的英文简介

In Sister Carrie, Dreiser expressed his naturalistic pursuit by expounding the purposelessness of life and attacking the conventional moral standards. In this novel, Dresiser sets to prove that the American value system is materialistic to the core. Living in a society with such a moral system, human beings are obsessed with a never-ending and meaningless search for satisfaction of their desires. One of the desires is for money, the other being sex. In the end of the novel, Dresiser tends to tell us that men are controlled and conditioned by heredity, instinct and chance, a few extraordinary and unsophisticated human beings refuse to accept their fate worldlessly and instead strive to find meaning and purpose of life.

Plot

Leaving her rural Wisconsin home, 18 year-old Caroline Meeber heads for Chicago, Illinois, where she wants to live with her older sister's family. Soon, however, Carrie finds out that working in a sweatshop and living in a squalid and overcrowded apartment is not what she wants. When she meets a man named Drouet, a travelling salesman whose acquaintance she already made on the train to Chicago, she readily leaves behind her family—they never see "Sister Carrie" again—when he offers to look after her. Drouet installs her in a much larger apartment in return for her favours. Through Drouet, Carrie meets Hurstwood, the manager of a respectable bar. From the moment he sets eyes on her, Hurstwood is infatuated with the young girl, whereas for Carrie, Hurstwood is just a wealthy man past the prime of his life. Before long they start an affair, communicating and meeting secretly in the expanding, anonymous city. Although Hurstwood has a family and Carrie might conclude that he does, the lovers never talk about it and it never seems to occur to Carrie to ask.

One night, at his job, Hurstwood is presented with the opportunity to embezzle a large sum of money. He succumbs to the temptation and decides, on the spur of the moment, to leave everything behind and start a new life with Carrie. Under a pretext, he lures Carrie onto a northbound train and escapes with her to Canada. After a while, his guilty conscience makes him pay back most of the money, but there is no way he could return to his former life so the couple eventually decide to move to the East coast.

The second part of the book is set in New York City. Hurstwood and Carrie rent a flat where they live as man and wife under an assumed name. Gradually, Hurstwood realizes that finding a new job is not easy at all. As his money is slowly running out, the couple have to start economizing, which Carrie does not like at all. She starts looking for a job herself and finds employment at one of the many theatres. Her rise to stardom is sharply contrasted with Hurstwood's downfall: she leaves him, and the rapidly ageing Hurstwood, overwhelmed by apathy, is left all alone, without a job and without any money. At one point, during a strike, he even works as a scab driving a Brooklyn streetcar. He joins the homeless of New York and finally, in a cheap hotel, puts an end to his life.