A Study Of Reification In Sister Carrie

Sister Carrie was written at the turn of the twentieth century when the US witnessed industry’ s flourishing development,including scientific and technological innovations and mass production growth.As a realist writer,Theodore Dreiser keenly observes working girls’ survival dilemma and their fetishism to objects in the industrialized age.Lukacs likewise pays attention to human’ s living conditions under mechanical production and puts forward the theory of reification in History and Class Consciousness.He points out that,in the reified world,man’ s labor and activity become something objective that controls him and human relations take on the character of things.Meanwhile,Lukacs proposes that the deeper cause for reification lies in the reified structure of consciousness of capitalism,which can be broken by the construction of totality.From the perspective of reification,this paper tries to analyze the reason for Carrie’ s survival dilemma,her choice of depending on men for life,as well as her spiritual crisis and its solution under the capitalist society.To be more specific,Carrie’ s reified behaviors are interpreted in three aspects,namely the reified self,the reified relations,and the reified structure of consciousness.The above analyses conclude that the reified structure of consciousness of capitalism arouses Carrie’ s endless material desires and decides her life choices,causing her survival dilemma and spiritual crisis.This crisis is universal and represents the doomed fate of individuals under reification.With the enlightenment of Lukacs’ totality,this thesis believes that it implicates a solution to the spiritual crisis at the end of the novel,namely: constructing totality to resist reification by awakening individual’ s true self and recovering individual’ s dialectic and dynamic relations with the world through realist literature.