His underestimation of Carrie blinds him again: “Strangely, he had not con-
ceived well of her mental ability. That was because he did not understand
the nature of emotional greatness. He had never learned that a person might
be emotionally – instead of intellectually – great” (271–272). In a novel as
deeply concerned about agency as Sister Carrie is, it seems doubly significant that Hurstwood’s oversight causes him to discount Carrie’s agency, even as
he loses his own.
Carrie’s social ascent does not bring unqualified happiness but it does bring
gradual disengagement from male proprietorship and some independence.
At the novel’s end Carrie lives luxuriously with a woman co-worker. Her
celebrity causes her to become the fantasy of random men who know nothing
about her except that she seems “a delicious little morsel. [Her stage grimace]
was the kind of frown they would have loved to force away with kisses.
All the gentlemen yearned toward her” (326). Dreiser gives Carrie the last
145
c l a r e v i r g i n i a e b y
word on this collective fantasy; as she remarks to roommate Lola Osborne,
“‘Aren’t men silly?’” (333). After spending the entire novel attached to one
man or another, she proves that she does not need a man to complete her.
As we see in Dreiser’s treatment of Carrie’s acting career, when he asso-
ciates women with emotion, it can have unexpected results, often strengthen-
ing rather than weakening their characters. Dreiser thus significantly rewrites the familiar binary which aligns women with emotion and weakness, and
men with intellect and strength. We catch further glimpses of emotional
power in Roberta Alden in An American Tragedy (1925) and Angela Blue
in The “Genius” (1915), but the quality is best developed in Aileen Butler, mistress and eventual second wife of Frank Cowperwood in The Trilogy of
Desire. When introduced in The Financier, Aileen is the vital and energetic teenaged daughter of Cowperwood’s mentor and business partner, Edward
Malia Butler. Despite the age gap between Aileen and Cowperwood, she lacks
the tedious formlessness of Dreiser’s Lolita figures, particularly Suzanne Dale of The “Genius”. While Suzanne is among the least appealing of Dreiser’s female characters, Aileen – especially as the defiant, passionate, self-directed heroine of The Financier – is among the most compelling.
Aileen exhibits considerable influence over her lover throughout The
Financier. She activates in Cowperwood “a sense of the distinguished and a need for it which had never existed in him before to the same degree”: his
signature art collecting thus reflects her influence.8 Throughout the Trilogy, Dreiser lauds artistic sensitivity as well as defiance of convention, and the
latter quality defines Aileen in The Financier. After her angry father discovers their liaison, Cowperwood reflects that Aileen’s “love was unjust, illegal, outlawed; but it was love, just the same, and had much of the fiery daring
of the outcast for justice” (211). This is no self-deluded sacrificial girl but a woman brave enough to do as she wishes. Aileen’s insubordination is both
source of her power and proof of it; she was “not dutiful . . . She was not
obeying the instructions” of church or family (122). As her lover succinctly
puts it, Aileen has “a will of her own” (342). Her father views the affair
through the lens of convention, misreading Cowperwood as stereotypical
seducer, Aileen as poor misled maiden. But the financier, who knows better,
affirms, “‘if you know anything about love you know that it doesn’t always
mean control . . . she has had as much influence on me as I have had on
her’” (342). He loves Aileen precisely because “in spite of all his intellec-
tual strength, he really could not rule her” (365). The narrator elaborates:
“sometimes [Cowperwood] felt as though she would really overcome him
mentally, make him subservient to her, she was so individual, so sure of her
importance as a woman” (365).
146
Dreiser and women
While the force of Aileen’s love delights Cowperwood, it also threatens
him: “he was a little afraid now of this deep-seated passion . . . It was
dangerous” (258). His fear bears strange fruit during the scene of his impris-
onment. When Aileen visits the Philadelphia penitentiary, “It was her ardent
sympathy that he was afraid of ” (411). Aileen’s love infantilizes the mighty
Cowperwood, as she coos, “‘My poor boy – my darling,’” while stroking
his head. This gesture unhinges him: he “winced and trembled” because her
love “was so soothing at the same time that it was unmanning.” Indeed,
she makes him “a child again.” As Aileen becomes powerful mother figure,
Cowperwood, “for the first time in his life, . . . lost control.” He bursts into tears, “completely unmanned” (412–413). The strongest, the most virile, of
Dreiser’s male characters crumbles in the hands of an even stronger woman.
The promiscuous Cowperwood tires of Aileen by The Titan, in which he
takes so many lovers that one reviewer carped that the novel is a “club sand-
wich” of alternating layers of financial and erotic episodes.9 A particularly
interesting girlfriend, Stephanie Platow, appears only in a few chapters but
still manages to magnetize and then injure Cowperwood. He is drawn to
Stephanie both as an art object and as an artist. As Gilbert Osmond views
Isabel Archer in The Portrait of a Lady (1880–1881), albeit more passionately, Cowperwood sees Stephanie as suitable for his collection. He com-
ments on how fine jade earrings would look with her black hair and how
perfectly framed she appears, sitting in front of a window.10 But Cowper-
wood also recognizes Stephanie as an artist and watches her “bent over a
small wood block, cutting a bookplate with a thin steel graving tool” (188).
She draws well and, in contrast to Carrie, considers herself “destined for the
stage” (189). Little wonder that in Stephanie, the intrigued financier “rec-
ognized the artist at last, full and clear” (194). And because “[t]he man’s
greatest love was for art,” he feels “a strange, uncertain feeling of real affection creeping over him” (195). The suggestion that Cowperwood has rogue
emotions provides, after the episode in the Philadelphia prison, the second
glimpse into the chink on the armor on the titan.
Besides being artistic, Stephanie’s other leading characteristic is being a
“rank voluptuary” (188). After she discovers the “world . . . of sex satisfac-
tion” (191), Stephanie actively pursues sexual pleasure. This combination
of artistic acumen and erotic openness is irresistible to Cowperwood, who
begins “as serious a sex affair as any that had yet held him” (197). This
“passionate girl . . . met him with a fire which . . . quite rivaled his own”
(199). But he soon learns that while Stephanie “had art – lots of it . . . it was dangerous to trifle with a type of this kind, particularly once awakened to
the significance of promiscuity” (198).
147
c l a r e v i r g i n i a e b y
The “danger” for Cowperwood is that he cannot “easily absorb[]”
Stephanie, who retains her sexual autonomy. The first sign of trouble comes
when Cowperwood is “shock[ed]” to discover she is not a virgin (197). (She
is wise enough to understate the number of partners who have preceded
him.) More difficult for Cowperwood to accept, she continues dalliances
with other men. Stephanie “had the strange feeling that affection was not
necessarily identified with physical loyalty, and that she could be fond of
Cowperwood and still deceive him” (206). The situation imperils him emo-
tionally while giving her the upper hand. As the narrator explains,
The constant atmosphere of suspicion and doubt . . . came by degrees to
distress and anger [Cowperwood]. While she was with him she was clinging
enough, but when she was away she was ardently cheerful and happy. Unlike
the station he had occupied in so many previous affairs, he found himself, . . .
asking her whether she loved him instead of submitting to the same question
from her.
(208)
Stephanie, in short, acts exactly as Cowperwood always has: as a person
entitled to sexual subjectivity, not one reduced to a sex object.11 As with the decline of the Carrie–Hurstwood ménage, Dreiser inverts gender stereotypes
to illustrate men’s vulnerability to women’s power.
While it is unclear whether Dreiser fully grasps the irony of Cowperwood’s
attitudes (especially since the author’s letters reveal his intolerance of similar behavior in Kirah Markham, the lover from whom he modeled Stephanie),
he seems to recognize a double standard is at work. Dreiser’s handling of the
end of their affair provides one of the rare occasions when he distances
himself from Cowperwood. Rightly suspecting Stephanie’s infidelity, the
financier begins asking questions. Cowperwood’s assumption of a pater-
nal role is doubly ironic: while drawing attention to their age difference, it
also recalls the contrasting role he played when Aileen’s father discovered
their affair. The financier further assumes the role of wronged father when