摘要

《嘉莉妹妹》是美国自然主义小说家西奥多•德莱赛的第一部小说，讲述了农村姑娘嘉莉到芝加哥谋生，并一步步进入上流社会的故事。文章通过生活的坎坷、爱情的失败和灵魂的孤独三个方面对嘉莉妹妹的悲剧性命运做了深入分析，并在社会、家庭及个性等方面对其悲剧性命运的成因做了进一步探讨，发现嘉莉妹妹的悲剧性命运是由宏观环境（时代与社会），微观环境（家庭）和个性特征之间的相互作用形成的。在经济高速发展的今天，追求梦想的时候要避免在社会上迷失自己，重蹈嘉莉妹妹的覆辙。

关键词：嘉莉妹妹；悲剧命运；社会；家庭；个性

Abstract

Sister Carrie is the first novel of Theodore Dreiser, an American naturalist novelist. It is a story about Carrie, a country girl, goes to Chicago to fight for a life and gradually enters the high society. This paper talks about Carrie’s tragic fate from three aspects: roughness of life, failure of love and loneliness of soul; the following is profound analysis of causes of Carrie’s tragic fate, which refers to aspects of society, family and personality. Finally it draws a conclusion: Carrie’s tragic fate is the result of the interaction of the macro environment (the era and the society), the micro environment (the family) and her personal character. Nowadays, with the rapid economic development, when pursue dream, we should avoid losing ourselves in the society and repeat Carrie’s tragedy.

Key words: Sister Carrie; tragic fate; society; family; personality

1. Introduction
Sister Carrie is a master work of Theodore Dreiser, an American writer whose novels describe real-life subjects in a harsh light. This novel was held to be amoral when it was first published, and Dreiser battled throughout his career against censorship and popular taste. Sister Carrie, Dreiser’s first novel, was first published in 1900, however, because of the novel’s subject matter (the moral corruption of the heroine, Carrie Meeber), it was not promoted and sold badly at that time. With the support of the literary critic named Floyd Dell who considers Dreisera major writer, Sister Carrie was republished in 1912. Arnold Bennett, one of the many critics, praises the book and describes it as the “best novel that has ever come out of America”. With the passage of time, this novel achieves increasing popularity as it always has certain significance to life of later time and it can also touch people’s heart after more than one hundred years.