Theodore Dreiser is regarded as an influential American novelist in the early 20th century. His novel, Sister Carrie, not only makes him well-known all over the world, but also settles his literary status in America. Sister Carrie mainly tells Carrie’s process of actualization from a penniless girl to an elegant woman. When climbing up the ladder of the upper strata, she does not win her dreaming happiness, but the endless hopelessness and mental torture. From the depictions in Dreiser’s works, people can see a miniature of American society in the early of twentieth century.

1.1 Overseas Researches

Sister Carrie has been studied by many American scholars and critics. There are various works concerning this novel. In the early period, criticism was mainly about historical and biographical criticism. It laid emphasis on the author’s own life, such as Theodore Dreiser written by F. O. Matthiessen in 1951. It mainly told the life of Dreiser and his novels, pointing out the isolation of Carrie in the big city.

With the time passing by, some researches about Dreiser used literary criticisms to study his works. From the 1970s to 1990s, scholars and critics tended to study Sister Carrie from Naturalism and social-Darwinism, which laid emphasis on the relationship between characters’ tragic destiny and society. In 1986, “Theodore Dreiser: At the Gates of the City”, written by Richard Lingeman, studied Sister Carrie mainly from the perspective of Naturalism, and demonstrated that only the strongest could survive in the universe. That is to say, Carrie won her success and Hurstwood committed suicide eventually. In 1988, Bernadett Veres published her work “The Fall of the American Dream: In Theodore Dreiser’s Sister Carrie and An American Tragedy”, which paid attention to the failure of pursuit of American Dream in Sister Carrie, emphasizing the material success of Carrie and failure of Hurstwood. David E.E. Sloane’s “Sister Carrie, Theodore Dreiser’s Sociological Tragedy” in 1992 discussed the social problem, the disparity between the rich and the poor, and protagonists’ tragedy in this novel. As time goes on, researchers tended to study this work from other perspectives, which not only focused on the literature theories, but paid attention to artistic features in the novel. In 2002, Emily Rosenbaum focused on “performance” and “theatre” and discussed what theatre indicates in Sister Carrie. In his work “Performance Anxiety in Sister Carrie: Theodore Dreiser, the Ashcan School, and Theatre Audience”, he analyzed that the theatre encapsulated men’s increasing anxiety about their own masculinity and the “feminized” theatre was a threat to the supremacy of manhood.

1.2 Domestic Researches

In China, many scholars study Dreiser’s work positively. Sister Carrie has attracted a large number of scholars, and they make some progress. Some scholars tended to use feminism approaches to analyze this novel, focusing on Carrie’s self-realization. Wang Ganghua’s “Sister Carrie’s Desires and Motivations” in 2002, demonstrated how Carrie, a girl lacking in self-independence initially, transformed from a traditional woman to a new woman gradually. In 2003, Jiang Daochao published his work Theodore Dreiser. In this book, he introduced the life of Dreiser and discussed the impact of Naturalism and Consumerism on himself and his works, pointing out the relationship between Carrie’s endless desire and environment. Wang Rong’s “Image of New Woman Shaped by Theodore Dreiser— Sister Carrie” in 2009 advocated Carrie’s transformation from a housewife to a modern woman under the influence of materialized society. Huang Kaihong’s “On ‘American Dream’ in the Transitional Society: Sister Carrie’s Moral Tendency” in 2006, focused on the relationship between the collapse of Carrie’s morality and the mainstream of society, pointing out the collapse of social morality resulted in that of inpidual morality. Wang Dan’s “The Practical Significance of Naturalism and Consumerism Represented in the Novel Sister Carrie” in 2006 focused on the impact of consumerism on protagonist and the influence of Naturalism in the novel. Later on, many scholars turned to the study of the images which appear frequently in the novel. In 2004, Li Qishan wrote “On the Contrast and Symbolism in Sister Carrie”, which analyzed the symbolic meanings of newspaper, clothing, windows, mirror, theatre, mine and the park. In her essay, theatre was regarded as the desire of Carrie.