摘要

西奥多•德莱塞的小说《嘉莉妹妹》和夏洛蒂•勃郎特的小说《简爱》在他们各自的国度里都得到了读者的认可与热情赞誉，他们的创作都从女性主义的视角关注了女性生存境遇与命运。虽然两部作品来自不同年代，国家和性别的作者，通过对比分析，我们可以发现两部作品女主人公的相似与不同之处。本文将立足于“新女性”的特点，结合中西方评论界学者们的观点，对比分析两部作品中的女性形象，个性特征以及他们各自遭遇的异同，挖掘这两位女性在当时特定的社会文化背景下表现出的女性意识以及他们在追求自我，掌握命运的方式以及结果的不同之处。
本文以女权主义及新女性特点作为理论依据，以内容分析以及对比论证作为研究方法来展开本论文。文章首先介绍了前人对两位作者的作品的研究及评论，以及本文的写作目的。然后介绍了两位作者的生平及其写作背景。其次，介绍了女性主义的发展及其和女性文学的关系。最后着重对比分析了嘉莉妹妹与简爱的女性形象，包括她们女性意识的觉醒、在女性意识基础上对待爱情的态度的不同及她们最后命运的不同。
本文不仅是对《嘉莉妹妹》与《简爱》研究的必要补充，同时有助于解读那个时代人们的性别观。

关键词：女性主义，新女性，嘉莉妹妹，简爱，对比分析

Abstract

Theodore Dreiser's Sister Carrie and Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre have received the readers’ recognition and great praise in their respective countries. Both works show the authors’ concern for women’s fate and their living circumstances from their own perspective of feminism. Although the two authors have different historical backgrounds, genders and they live in different countries, we can discover similarities and differences between the two women characters by comparative analysis. So based on the characteristics of new woman, the author intends to make comparisons of the individualities and experiences of the women characters in these two novels, and to delve into their female consciousness in two different social and cultural backgrounds to reveal their images. Besides, it also analyzes their different methods in self-shaping, fate-controlling and their different endings.
This thesis employs feminist theory and characteristic of new woman as theoretical foundation and adopts content analysis and comparison and contrast as the research methods. It first gives a short review of the research on the two writers and their works. Then it makes a general survey of the two authors and their writing backgrounds. Next, this thesis introduces the development of feminism and its relation to women’s writing. At last, it emphasizes the contrastive analysis of the two female images including their awakening of female consciousness, different attitudes to love on the basis of female consciousness and their different endings.
The result of this thesis will be a supplement to the research on Sister Carrie and Jane Eyre and will also help us to gain insight into the gender views of their era..

Key words: feminism, new woman, Sister Carrie, Jane Eyre, contrastive analysis