Abstract and Key Words

Abstract: Naturalism refers to the creative current of thought which emerged in 1890s and came to a dominant position in 1900s in Europe and America. It is characterized by its great emphasis on the fidelity and truthfulness in the writing process; the starkest advocating key to the environment and heredity which shapes the fates of individuals. Dreiser’s Sister Carrie is well known as the works in which Naturalism attained maturity in America. This paper taking Sister Carrie as an example, attempts to make a careful study of it from naturalistic point of view and explain how environmental factors and hereditary factors influence Carrie's fate.

Key words: environment; heredity; naturalism

摘要：自然主义特指源于十九世纪九十年代，二十世纪盛行于欧洲和美国的一种思潮。它有以下几个显著特征：写作中力图准确性，真实性；强调环境和遗传对人的命运所起的决定性作用。德莱塞的《嘉莉妹妹》被认为是自然主义在美国臻于成熟的代表作。因此本文以这部小说为例，试图从自然主义角度来解读《嘉莉妹妹》，讨论环境因素和遗传因素是怎样影响嘉莉的命运的。

关键词：环境；遗传；自然主义

1．Introduction
1.1 Theodore Dreiser
Theodore Dreiser（1871-1945）is greatest naturalist writer. He is regarded as a pioneer of American naturalism and Dreiser expresses the characteristics of naturalism in most of his works. He replaced the observance of Victorian notions of propriety with the unflinching presentation of real-life subject matter. Among other themes, his novels explore the new social problems that had arisen in a rapidly industrializing America. He and his characters did not attack the nation's puritanical moral code: they simply ignored it; this attitude shocked the reading public when his first novel, Sister Carrie, came out in 1900. With the publication of Sister Carrie, Dreiser committed his literary force to opening the new ground of American naturalism. His heroes and heroines, his settings, his frank discussion, and humanization of sex, his clear dissection of the mechanistic brutality of American society are vividly presented in his works. All were new and shocking to a reading public reared on genteel romances and adventure narratives.
His works Sister Carrie, Financier and American Tragedy were leading the American writers and readers to know about the naturalism. His sprawling imagination and cumbersome style kept him from performing well in the smaller literary forms, and his nonfiction writing, especially his essays, are marked by intellectual inconsistency, a lack of objectivity, and even bitterness. But these latter traits are much less obtrusive in his novels, where his compassion and empathy for human striving make his best works moving and memorable.