he has Stephanie trailed – exactly as Butler had confirmed his suspicions in
The Financier. Unable to “forgive [Stephanie] for not loving him perfectly,”
Cowperwood learns from a twenty year old “what it was to love and lose”
( Titan, 218, 221).
Stephanie Platow fuses artistry, defiance, and “varietism” – a combination
often noted in male characters that Dreiser admires, such as Cowperwood
and Eugene Witla of The “Genius” . But Dreiser’s works also illustrate a long line of female “geniuses,” extending from Carrie and Stephanie through
the singer Christina Channing in The “Genius” and “Olive Brand,” among others, in A Gallery of Women (1929). These women use their creativity to 148
Dreiser and women
establish themselves as independent agents through their creativity, many of
them also by asserting their sexual subjectivity.
The Trilogy’s final love interest, who appears as a seventeen-year-old student irresistible to the middle-aged financier toward the end of The Titan
and continues to captivate the aging man throughout The Stoic (1947), is less independent than Stephanie but still exerts a strong influence over Cowperwood. When he declares his love to Berenice Fleming, he expects “to
magnetize her and control her judgment,” but finds “it was almost the other
way about. She was almost dominating him” ( Titan, 422). As he did earlier with Aileen and Stephanie, Cowperwood finds Berenice irresistible because
of her power over him. It is the mighty financier, not the teenager, who “fall[s]
into a hopeless infatuation.” Cowperwood knows “he had fallen in tow of
an amazing individual . . . who was not to be bent to his will” ( Titan, 426).
Her strong will makes Berenice the financier’s equal, a fact he acknowledges
after their first sexual encounter. Far from pluming himself on his latest con-
quest, Cowperwood “sit[s] beside her, talking to her as though she were one
of his fellow-investors or financial equals.”12 Indeed, in what must be one
of the most curious descriptions of lovemaking in Dreiser’s fiction, we later
learn that “it was not Berenice but himself [Cowperwood] who was most
ravished mentally and sexually, indeed all but submerged in her” ( Stoic, 64).
This young woman who is a “person in her own right” ( Stoic, 193) overturns another gender stereotype by ravishing her lover and submerging his identity in hers. While the relationship is less compelling to most readers than it seems to have been to Dreiser, he unmistakably attributes power and agency
to Berenice. Perhaps more significantly, she controls the end of the trilogy:
her eastern-inspired mysticism provides the thread that allows Dreiser finally
to bring his long saga to a close.
As Dreiser’s depiction of female subjectivity exists along a continuum,
so is there considerable range in his treatment of pregnancy. He registers
amazement at what he calls “the real psychological as well as sociological
and biological import” of pregnancy, which he depicts as inspiring awe and
fear in the same way, and almost to the same degree, that God does in the Old
Testament.13 An American Tragedy provides Dreiser’s best known treatment of pregnancy, but The “Genius” and Jennie Gerhardt establish its critical position in his work.
Jennie Gerhardt is perhaps of all Dreiser’s women characters the most diffi-
cult for modern readers to understand. She asserts little agency; she embodies
power without controlling it. What Dreiser attempts is rather old-fashioned,
for he aligns Jennie’s power with motherhood and the home. “The right hand
of her mother,” Jennie also “inherited her disposition from her mother.”14
Dreiser proclaims her an “ideal mother,” personifying a power that he calls,
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in passages that sound picturesquely archaic, the “All-Mother” (97, 92).
Consequently, the selfless Jennie sacrifices her virginity to well-connected
Senator Brander in exchange for financial help for her impoverished family.
At the moment when Brander propositions that Jennie move in with him,
“Her mother came into her mind. Maybe she could help the family” (49).
Helping the family means providing them with a home. The conjunction
of Jennie’s maternal nature with her desire to house her family comfort-
ably is not surprising. As in the familiar iconography, “the average home
depends upon the mother” (180). Due to the Gerhardts’ poverty, Jennie’s
mother has never realized her “keen desire for a nice home. Solid furniture,
upholstered and trimmed, a thick, soft carpet of some warm, pleasing color,
plenty of chairs, settees, pictures, a lounge and a piano” (106). Although
Mrs. Gerhardt’s ideal home is defined largely by objects appropriate to the
social class to which she aspires, Jennie’s home is spiritualized: “For her, life was made up of those mystic chords of sympathy and memory which bind up
the transient elements of nature into a harmonious and enduring scene. This
home was one such chord, united and made beautiful by her affection and
consideration, extended to each person and to every object” (364). Emotional
connections place each object, including the home, in proper relation.
Jennie succeeds in housing her family by unconsciously projecting a force
that men find irresistible because it seems so acquiescent. “Men were nat-
urally attracted to her” (119), the narrator explains. “[T]he non-defensive
disposition . . . is like a honey-pot to flies,” and thus men draw near it:
“A girl like Jennie is like a comfortable fire to the average masculine mind; it is like warmth after the freezing attitude of harder dispositions. They grav-itate to it, seek its sympathy. Yearn to possess it” (120). Dreiser’s image of
cozy fire fuses Jennie’s maternal power with her home-like appeal. When
wealthy Lester Kane falls for Jennie, his instincts are proprietary and preda-
tory: “‘You belong to me,’” he says, and she finds herself “like a bird in the
grasp of a cat” (123). Lester seduces Jennie by appealing to her loyalty to
home and family: “‘You can take a nice home for them and furnish it in
any style you please’” (157). Jennie understands that “He would help them,
and her mother would not be troubled any more” (157) – that by becoming
Lester’s mistress, she can become the perfect homemaker for her family.
The stereotypical component of all this is obvious – “a woman’s work
is in the home.” Yet Dreiser uses the traditional linking of motherhood and
home to elevate Jennie, over Lester and over the society which condemns her.
Jennie’s emotional depth exceeds Carrie’s, and her social transgressiveness
surpasses Aileen’s. Jennie contravenes social codes in pursuit of relationships more fundamental than social ones, and Dreiser rebukes those who ostracize
her. “Certain processes of the All-Mother,” the narrator remarks, “when
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Dreiser and women
viewed in the light of the established opinion of some of the little individuals created by it, are considered very vile” (92). And so Jennie is expected to look upon “the budding of essential love” that she feels for her coming child as
“evil” (93). Dreiser labels the social injunction against “the creation of life”
as “marvelously warped” and “radically wrong” (92, 93). He casts Jennie
as a figure who embodies a quiet yet transgressive power, a force that may
be temporarily suppressed but never defeated, an authority more enduring
than that exercised by either her father’s God or Lester’s family’s millions.
Even more decisively than in Sister Carrie, Dreiser sides with his woman character.
Dreiser further explores the ambiguous powers that accompany female
sexuality, particularly when pregnancy results, through Angela Blue of The
“Genius” , a character modeled on the author’s first wife, Sara White. In many respects, Angela’s power over Eugene Witla foreshadows that which
An American Tragedy’s Roberta Alden will possess over Clyde Griffiths:
Angela’s commanding influence, like Roberta’s, is inextricable from her sex-
uality, and Dreiser invests both of them with a rich sensuality stifled by social taboos. Angela’s sexual awakening while Eugene visits her family home in
rural Wisconsin is a memorable scene, lushly sensuous even while overlaid
with somewhat stale conventions according to which the aroused woman
“yielded saying she would not yield.”15 Dreiser’s own puritanical views
about male sexual indulgence, views that he tried hard to submerge in The
“Genius” , surface in his depiction of conjugal sexuality; like Upton Sinclair’s Love’s Pilgrimage (1911), Dreiser’s k ünstlerroman depicts the marriage bed as disastrous to the hero’s artistic career. It is as if sex with his wife (though not, apparently, with other women) drains Witla of his artistic prowess, one
form of power eviscerating another.16 Noticeably, once she is married, sexual
subjectivity presents no such problem for Angela.
But in this novel that celebrates “the beauty of girlhood” as “the one
great thing in the world” (279), an aging wife clearly presents a problem for
the philandering protagonist. Consequently, Dreiser casts Angela’s power in
largely negative and restrictive terms; Witla spends much of the novel “afraid
of Angela” (280) and trying to subvert her control. Sensing her husband’s
emotional defection, she decides that a child may bind him to her. In a
sequence that again anticipates An American Tragedy, Angela announces