for sexually, Roberta is both active and passive, “weak” yet “courting.” She
is a complex and divided character, at once sexual subject and sexual object.
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Clyde’s stalking away the night she refuses him entrance to her room
is contemptible, but we must recognize that Roberta, as she stays awake
throughout the night, deliberately chooses to have sex with the man she
loves. Roberta’s vigil during this sleepless night, like Isabel Archer’s at the climax of The Portrait of a Lady, centers on whether and how to be loyal to a difficult man. Her decision will bring
The wonder and delight of a new and more intimate form of contact . . . Days,
when both, having struggled in vain against the greater intimacy with each
knew that the other was desirous of yielding to and eventually so yielding,
looked forward to the approaching night with an eagerness which was as a
fever embodying a fear . . . Yet the thing once done, a wild convulsive pleasure motivating both.
(309)
It simply is not true that, as one recent commentator claims, “most of
Dreiser’s women are described as sexually passive creatures,” nor that his
treatment of Roberta “accept[s] . . . the culture’s stereotypes” about women
as “passive, reactive, and weak.”21 Deciding to pursue sexual pleasure,
Roberta asserts her agency – but because she does not use sex to control
Clyde (as the prostitute, Hortense, and Sondra do), and in fact lets Clyde
control her, Roberta unwittingly lays the groundwork for her death. Never-
theless, Dreiser invests Roberta’s sexuality with an integrity, a decency, that is lost on Clyde but remains vivid to readers. An American Tragedy insists on the dignity of a woman’s passion.
Clyde, of course, feels that Roberta’s pregnancy gives her a devastating
power over him. He plots to drown Roberta because he feels she is drowning
him. In desperation, Clyde feels first that she is ruining him and then that
he is killing himself: “why should [Roberta] seek to destroy him . . .? Force
him to . . . social, artistic, passional or emotional assassination?” (442). But Clyde just cannot free himself, as seen after the botched attempt to induce
miscarriage: “despite the keen allurement of Sondra, he could not keep his
mind off Roberta’s state, which rose before him as a specter” (395). The
emotional crux for Clyde occurs when he stumbles upon Roberta’s family in
Biltz. Her dilapidated house and decrepit father evoke Clyde’s own scarcely
repressed past: “unless he could speedily and easily disengage himself from
her, . . . this other world from which he sprang might extend its gloomy,
poverty-stricken arms to him and envelop him once more, just as the poverty
of his family had enveloped and almost strangled him from the first” (445).
Strangling, enveloping: again Clyde expresses his sense of Roberta’s power
over him in the language of a suffocating death. And again he sees “the
specter of Roberta” rise (446). Her ghostlike dominance over Clyde’s psyche,
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both before and after her death, suggests the real power she wields over
him – as his conscience.
Roberta’s influence over Clyde can be clarified by teasing out the implica-
tions of a revealing comment that Dreiser makes in one of the biographical
sketches in A Gallery of Women (1929). Although maintaining he only heard the story of “Albertine” at second hand, Dreiser claims her “portrait . . .
holds me quite as much as some of the more personal pictures that relate to
myself.”22 This is to say that women do not always represent a secondary
“other” for Dreiser or his male characters; they can also represent, in fairly
direct ways, the male self. That is why, in An American Tragedy, Clyde reacts so strongly to Roberta’s power, and in particular why he responds to his
own limited agency by terminating hers. During the pivotal moment when
she comes forward in the boat, Clyde grasps “the profoundness of his own
failure, his own cowardice or inadequateness, . . . instantly yielding to a tide of submerged hate, not only for himself, but Roberta – her power – or that
of life to restrain him in this way” (513, emphasis added). But the power of life to restrain him, which Clyde projects onto Roberta, cannot be destroyed.
Moreover, her power of moral suasion becomes even greater after her death.
Roberta’s testimony cannot be drowned; her letters, which make the prose-
cuting attorney cry as he reads them in court, seal popular opinion and the
jury’s verdict against Clyde.
When times get tough, Clyde turns to his mother. Immediately after that
sense of strangulation brought on by seeing the Alden family home, he felt
“compelled to write his mother” (446). And right after the verdict, Clyde
thinks – first of the electric chair, and then of his mother: “But now . . .
now . . . oh, he needed her so much!” (778). While Clyde looks to her
because only a mother seems capable of loving the accused murderer, he
does so also because, along with Roberta, she represents his conscience.
Only intermittently does Clyde feel “a trace of his mother’s courage” (133).
More typically, she embodies a powerful force that he reveres and fears, and
so, after the car accident that kills a young girl at the end of Book 1, Clyde
flees Kansas City “owing to his fear of the police, as well as of his mother”
(163). Yet once in jail he “express[es] how sorry he was on his mother’s
account . . . [no one] could doubt the quality of the blood and emotional tie
that held him and his mother together . . . his present attitude toward her
was a mixture of fear and shame” (650).
Dreiser’s works feature many strong women figures, many whose power
emphasizes the vulnerability and even weakness of men. He also repeatedly
employs women figures to advance beliefs central to his worldview. Particu-
larly throughout A Gallery of Women, Dreiser uses female figures to frame 156
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his choice philosophical positions. Characteristically, in “Ida Hauchawout,”
Dreiser is led to ponder, “Mesdames and Messieurs, are we all mad? Or am
I? Or is Life?” He goes on, “The crude and defeated Ida. And this fum-
bling, seeking, and rather to be pitied dub with his rhymes. Myself, writing
and wondering about it all” ( Gallery, 374). Dreiser extensively wrote about women and wondered about them, and speculated about cosmic processes
through women figures. At times they cannot carry the philosophical weight
he places upon them, yet he succeeds in endowing many with philosophical
meaning. His most conventionally feminine character, Jennie Gerhardt, rep-
resents, in her wonder, one of the key elements of Dreiser’s own perspective:
“brooding, mystified, nonplussed[,] [l]ife was a strange muddled picture to
her, beautiful but inexplicable” ( Jennie, 307).
The admiration in such passages is evident, and H. L. Mencken provides an
interesting way of accounting for it. Dreiser is, says Mencken, “perhaps the
only American novelist who shows any sign of being able to feel profoundly,”
and consequently Dreiser’s “talent is essentially feminine.” Mencken is not
the only male critic to reach this conclusion. For Leslie Fiedler, Dreiser was a
“feminine” writer in the worst way – mushy, sentimental, and over-invested
in the social dimensions of life. For Michael Davitt Bell, however, Dreiser re-
freshingly lacks the “compensatory ideas” about masculinity typical of con-
temporary naturalist authors like Frank Norris, Jack London, and Stephen
Crane.23 As Dreiser himself seems to these critics to manifest “feminine”
qualities, so do many of his women characters demonstrate various
strengths – powers that derive from their femininity but often allow them
to transcend the expected social limits. His works provide us with a truly
memorable gallery of women.
N O T E S
1 Thomas P. Riggio (ed.), Dreiser–Mencken Letters: The Correspondence of
Theodore Dreiser and H. L. Mencken 1907–1945, vol. 1 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1986), p. 127.
2 Two of the most famous instances involve Doubleday and Page’s supposed
“suppression” of Sister Carrie and the actual suppression of The “Genius” by the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice on the grounds of the novel’s
“lewdness” and “obscenity.”
3 Dreiser’s attack on “puritanism” runs throughout his work; a relevant example is
“Neurotic America and the Sex Impulse,” in Hey Rub-a-Dub-Dub: A Book of the Mystery and Terror and Wonder of Life (New York: Boni and Liveright, 1920), pp. 126–141.
4 The Novels of Theodore Dreiser (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1970), p. 89.
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5 Susan Wolstenholme, “Brother Theodore, Hell on Women,” in Fritz Fleischmann,
ed., American Novelists Revisited: Essays in Feminist Criticism (Boston: G. K.
Hall, 1982), pp. 243–264.
6 As Thomas P. Riggio establishes in the Introduction to American Diaries