AcknowledgmentsFirst and foremost, I would like to express my heartfelt gratitude to Li Yahong, my supervisor, for his continuous support and helpful instruction, for his valuable and constructive advice through the development of my thesis. Without his generous instruction and painstaking revision, the thesis would have never been finished.I wish to express my sincere gratitude to all the professors and teachers in the College of Foreign Languages. They have given me generous instruction and kind encouragement during my study. And their inspiring guidance will continue to have a profound impact on my study and my work.Special thanks should be given to my family for their support for me during all these years. Deep love, continuous support and expectation are always my strongest backbone whenever I am confronted with the challenges in my study and life.AbstractTheodore Dreiser is one of the outstanding American realistic writers, who published his first successful novel Sister Carrie in 1900. Theodore Dreiser relates a story of Carrie s rise from a poor country girl to a famous actress in his masterpiece Sister Carrie. The novel sets the American metropolis at the turn of the 19th century and the 20th century as background. At this time, the United States was undergoing tremendous changes, the process of industrialization had changed people s way of life and had changed people s ideas and moral concepts. At that time, people s ideals and moral values had been seriously distorted, and people s success was not through hard work to get, and they blindly sought money. Especially for women, their bodies were the best means to gain success. The heroine Carrie of the novel, as the weakest ...
