imical legislative proposals and to circumvent such laws as were enacted,
indirection based upon the distribution of masses of money was depended
upon.”17 What could be better, from the perspective of the greatly wealthy,
than to gain by association or by patronage the prestige of the artwork, with
its inherent moral and aesthetic virtues, and its promise of immortality?
In giving us an understanding of his titanic Cowperwood, Dreiser lets
us see the full scope of this quintessentially American story: the acquisition
of wealth and power; the acquisition of the grandeur of European art as a
proof of this wealth; and the bestowal of this wealth, as an aspect of self-
aggrandizement, to the public. The Cowperwood trilogy is more complicated
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than this schema, of course, but that is the framework on which it is built.
If The “Genius” had given us an understanding of the artist’s struggle to achieve the fulfillment of genius in a society governed by business values,
the Cowperwood trilogy lets us see the businessman’s struggle to redeem
the wolfish struggle for wealth and wash the blood from his hands by
wrapping his arms, and his name, around the work of art. So long as it’s
European.
N O T E S
My thanks to Clare Eby and Thomas P. Riggio for many helpful suggestions in
the early stages of this essay. M. O.
1 See T. D. Nostwich, ed., Theodore Dreiser’s “Heard in the Corridors” Articles and Related Writings (Ames, Iowa: Iowa State University Press, 1988); Yoshinobu Hakutani, ed., Selected Magazine Articles of Theodore Dreiser, Life and Art in the American 1890s, Volume 2 (Cranberry, NJ: Associated University Press, 1987); and Theodore Dreiser, Art, Music, and Literature: 1897–1902, edited by Yoshinobu Hakutani (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2001), “Appendix:
Dreiser’s Magazine Articles, 1897–1902.”
2 Dreiser, Art, Music, p. 226.
3 Dreiser’s publisher, John Lane, withdrew the book from the market in 1916, after receiving a threat from the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice that
they would prosecute the publisher on grounds of obscenity. Boni and Liveright
published it again in 1923, by which time it had become a test case for the maturity of American letters.
4 Theodore Dreiser, The “Genius” (New York: Boni and Liveright, 1923), p. 103.
Future references incorporated into text.
5 Dreiser himself greatly appreciated the European painters, especially Franz Hals and Rembrandt, to whom he responded with excitement when visiting the
Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam. My thanks to Thomas P. Riggio for sharing with
me a previously unpublished section of Dreiser’s A Traveler at Forty (being edited for publication), which deals with Dreiser’s museum visits.
6 The Ashcan painters also included George Luks and William Glackens, all of
whom exhibited most notably in 1908 in a New York gallery.
7 Dreiser, “The Color of To-Day: William Louis Sonntag,” in Art, Music, p. 109.
Originally appeared in Harper’s Weekly 45 (14 December 1901): 1272–1273.
Reprinted as “W. L. S.” in Dreiser, Twelve Men (New York: Boni and Liveright, 1919), pp. 344–360.
8 Dreiser, “The Camera Club of New York,” in Art, Music, p. 85.
9 Dreiser, “A Remarkable Art: Alfred Stieglitz,” in Art, Music, p. 120.
10 Sarah Burns, “The Price of Beauty: Art, Commerce, and the Late Nineteenth-
Century American Studio Interior,” in David C. Miller, ed., American Iconology: New Approaches to Nineteenth Century Art and Literature (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993), p. 209.
11 William Dean Howells, “The Man of Letters as a Man of Business,” Literature and Life (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1902).
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m i l e s o rv e l l
12 Theodore Dreiser, The Financier [1912], in Trilogy of Desire: Three Novels by Theodore Dreiser (New York: World Publishing, 1972), p. 59. Future references incorporated into the text.
13 Interestingly, it is Cowperwood who is the cultural expert, not his wife, confirming Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz’s point that men, as well as women, took responsibility for culture at this time, and thus challenging “the usual judgment that culture was a feminine preserve in nineteenth-century America.” See Horowitz, Culture and the City: Cultural Philanthropy in Chicago from the 1880s to 1917 (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky), p. 55.
14 H. Barbara Weinberg, Introduction, American Art and American Art Collections, ed. Walter Montgomery (New York: Garland, 1978), p. 4. One example: in the
Frick collection in New York City, the sole American works are: one Gilbert Stuart (George Washington) and several paintings by James McNeill Whistler. To gain
support, American artists had to emulate European models.
15 Dreiser, The Titan [1914], and The Stoic [1947], pp. 212–213, both in Trilogy of Desire: Three Novels by Theodore Dreiser (New York: World Publishing, 1972) pp. 108, 212–213. Future references incorporated into text. The inspiration for Frank Cowperwood, Samuel T. Yerkes, had collected works by Rembrandt, Hals,
Corot, Watteau, Van Dyck, Holbein, Turner, Rubens, Rodin, Bouguereau, Burne-
Jones, Alma-Tadema, and many others. See Philip Gerber’s study of the Yerkes
story and its relation to Dreiser: “Jolly Mrs. Yerkes is Home from Abroad: Dreiser and the Celebrity Culture,” in Yoshinobu Hakutani, ed., Theodore Dreiser and American Culture: New Readings (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2000), pp. 79–103, esp. p. 96.
16 Dreiser, The Financier, 173. Dreiser could give with one hand what he took away with the other. On the same page he observes: “The average woman, controlled
by her affections and deeply in love, is no more capable than a child of anything save sacrificial thought – the desire to give.”
17 Gustavus Myers, History of the Great American Fortunes (1909, 1936; New York: Modern Library, 1936), p. 701.
G U I D E T O F U RT H E R R E A D I N G
Arnavon, Cyrille. “Theodore Dreiser and Painting.” American Literature 17:2 (May 1945): 113–26.
Burns, Sarah. “The Price of Beauty: Art, Commerce, and the Late Nineteenth-Century American Studio Interior.” In American Iconology: New Approaches to Nineteenth Century Art and Literature, edited by David C. Miller, pp. 209–238. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993.
Dreiser, Theodore. Art, Music, and Literature: 1897–1902, ed. Yoshinobu Hakutani.
Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2001.
The Financier [1912]. In Trilogy of Desire: Three Novels by Theodore Dreiser.
New York: World Publishing, 1972.
The “Genius” . New York: Boni and Liveright, 1923.
The Stoic [1947]. In Trilogy of Desire: Three Novels by Theodore Dreiser. New York: World Publishing, 1972.
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Dreiser, art, and the museum
The Titan [1914]. In Trilogy of Desire: Three Novels by Theodore Dreiser. New York: World Publishing, 1972.
Twelve Men. New York: Boni and Liveright, 1919.
Eby, Clare Virginia. “Cowperwood and Witla, Artists in the Marketplace.” Dreiser Studies 22:1 (Spring 1991): 1–22.
Gerber, Philip L. “The Financier Himself: Dreiser and C. T. Yerkes.” PMLA 88:1
(January 1973): 112–131.
“Frank Cowperwood: Boy Financier.” Studies in American Fiction 2:2 (Autumn 1974): 165–174.
“Jolly Mrs. Yerkes is Home from Abroad: Dreiser and the Celebrity Culture.” In
Theodore Dreiser and American Culture: New Readings, edited by Yoshinobu Hakutani, 79–103. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2000.
Hakutani, Yoshinobu, ed. Selected Magazine Articles of Theodore Dreiser, Life and Art in the American 1890s, Volume 2. Cranberry, NJ: Associated University Presses, 1987.
Horowitz, Helen Lefkowitz. Culture and the City: Cultural Philanthropy in Chicago from the 1880s to 1917. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1976.
Howells, William Dean. “The Man of Letters as a Man of Business.” Literature and Life. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1902.
Kwiat, Joseph J. “Dreiser’s The ‘ Genius ’ and Everett Shinn, the ‘Ash-Can’ Painter.”
PMLA 67:2 (March 1952): 15–31.
Myers, Gustavus. History of the Great American Fortunes. New York: Modern Library, 1909, 1936.
Nostwich, T. D. ed. Theodore Dreiser’s “Heard in the Corridors” Articles and Related Writings. Ames: Iowa State University Press, 1988.
Weinberg, H. Barbara. “Introduction.” American Art and American Art Collections, edited by Walter Montgomery. New York: Garland, 1978.
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9
C L A R E V I R G I N I A E B Y
Dreiser and women
In November 1913, Dreiser wrote his friend and literary champion, H. L.
Mencken, “After I am dead please take up the mss of The Financier, Titan
and Travel book and restore some of the woman stuff.”1 It may come as a
surprise that considerable “woman stuff” was eliminated from The Financier
(1912) and The Titan (1914), from A Traveler at Forty (1913), and indeed from many of Dreiser’s other works, for women do not exactly flicker in the
sidelights of his writing. As heroines, lovers, and antagonists, they frequently share center stage, often even crowding out their male counterparts. Notably,
two of his novels, Sister Carrie (1900) and Jennie Gerhardt (1911), take their titles from the names of female characters, while none display the proper
names of men.
Now that a century’s discussion has passed, a trajectory has started to
become evident in readers’ reactions to Dreiser’s portrayal of women. Until
recently, two responses predominated. Those who disliked his writing fre-
quently saw Dreiser’s non-judgmental treatment of “fallen women” as proof