5 As Smith-Rosenberg points out, New Women made a variety of choices about
their sexuality. Some married; some were sexually active with men whom they
did not marry, and others with women. Some remained celibate. But regardless of those choices, New Women (as individuals and as a type) were frequently charged with prostitution or lesbianism to discredit them. Their sexuality becomes the
basis for their condemnation, although it is their perceived resistance to gender and sexual norms that is really at issue.
6 Students of the period have indeed noted working-class counterparts of the New Woman. Notably, Kathy Peiss uses the term in Cheap Amusements: Working
Women and Leisure in Turn-of-the-Century New York (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1986), a book I have found very useful for this study. But while there are, as I have noted, correspondences between the unattached woman and
the New Woman, again I stress the important distinctions that have tended to
be overlooked. My interest in this essay is in identifying the prevalence of this particular type that Thomas labels “the unattached woman”: the working-class
woman who is able to disappear and reappear without consequences. Attending
to her prevalence in discussions of women during this period contributes, I believe, to an understanding of the anxieties associated in particular with this invisibility, which has much in common with similar concerns involving class mobility and
immigration.
7 Dreiser’s sister Emma similarly ran off to New York with a married man.
8 On the traits that particularly fit Carrie for the stage, see Glenn, Female Spectacle, p. 81.
9 Bayard Holmes, “The Physical and Evolutionary Basis of Marriage,” JAMA 47.23
(1906): 1886–1887, p. 1886.
10 Albert H. Burr, “The Guarantee of Safety in the Marriage Contract,” JAMA 47.23 (1906): 1887–1889, p. 1887. Subsequent references in the text are to this essay.
11 Ross’s essays were published in the American Journal of Sociology and, subsequently, collected as a book entitled Social Control that appeared in 1901.
12 Ludwig Weiss, “The Prostitution Problem in its Relation to Law and Medicine,”
JAMA 47.25 (Dec. 1906): 2071–2075, p. 2073. Subsequent references in the text are to this essay.
13 In the last decade of the twentieth century, Italian criminologist Cesare Lombroso’s study of female criminality, La Donna Delinquente, circulated widely throughout Europe and the United States. With co-author Gugliemo Ferrero,
Lombroso sought to describe and catalogue biological traits that identify some-
one as a born criminal. In the process, of course, he had to identify “normal”
female traits as well. Prostitution was one of his chief areas of investigation. The success of his work attests to the period’s mania for classification of this sort.
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p r i s c i l l a wa l d
14 Susan Mizruchi, “Fiction and Science of Society,” The Columbia History of the American Novel, gen. ed. Emory Elliott (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), pp. 189–215, p. 191.
15 Edward Alsworth Ross, “Social Control,” American Journal of Sociology 1.5
(March 1896): pp. 513–535, 518–519, 520–521.
16 “Reflections on Communication and Culture,” American Journal of Sociology 44.2 (September 1938): 187–205, p. 205.
17 Alan Trachtenberg, “Who Narrates? Dreiser’s Presence in Sister Carrie,” New Essays on Sister Carrie, ed. Donald Pizer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991): 87–122, p. 88. Subsequent references in the text are to this essay.
18 While Trachtenberg is not specifically concerned with Dreiser’s interest in sociology in this essay (a topic that has been widely treated in critical work on Dreiser), he picks up on the link that Mizruchi underscores as well, Dreiser’s interest in “successful representatives of new social types appearing in a new phase of urban industrial capitalism” (104). Among the many discussions of Dreiser
and sociology that I have found especially useful are David E. E. Sloane, Sister Carrie: Theodore Dreiser’s Sociological Tragedy (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1992); Carla Cappetti, Writing Chicago: Modernism, Ethnography, and the Novel (Columbia University Press, 1993); and Clare Eby, Dreiser and Veblen, Saboteurs of the Status Quo (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1998).
19 In the original edition of Sister Carrie, Dreiser actually plagiarized another writer, George Ade, in his description of Drouet. See Sloane, Sister Carrie, p. 13.
20 Imitation was actually a popular theme of the period, especially in sociology. Following the French sociologist M. Gabriel Tarde, many United States sociologists viewed imitation as the principle of social unity. For a discussion of imitation and the theater, see Glenn, Female Spectacle, especially, pp. 81–95.
21 Robert E. Park, “Sociology and the Social Sciences: The Social Organism and the Collective Mind,” American Journal of Sociology 27: 1 (July 1921): 1–21, pp.
14–15.
G U I D E T O F U RT H E R R E A D I N G
Ammons, Elizabeth. “The New Woman as Cultural Symbol and Social Reality: Six
Women Writers’ Perspectives,” Heller and Rudnick, eds., pp. 82–97.
Banta, Martha. Imaging American Women: Idea and Ideals in Cultural History. New York: Columbia University Press, 1987.
Gardner, Viv and Susan Rutherford, eds., The New Woman and her Sisters: Feminism and Theatre, 1850–1914. Hemel Hempstead, 1992.
Gelfant, Blanche H. “What More Can Carrie Want? Naturalistic Ways of Consuming
Women,” The Cambridge Companion to American Realism and Naturalism, ed.
Donald Pizer. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995, pp. 178–210.
Glenn, Susan A. Female Spectacle: The Theatrical Roots of Modern Feminism. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000.
Kunzel, Regina G. Fallen Women, Problem Girls: Unmarried Mothers and the Professionalization of Social Work, 1890–1945. New Haven: Yale University, 1993.
Mizruchi, Susan. “Fiction and the Science of Society,” in The Columbia History of the American Novel, ed. Emory Elliott. New York: Columbia University Press, 1991, pp. 189–215.
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Dreiser’s sociological vision
Odem, Mary E. Delinquent Daughters: Protecting and Policing Adolescent Female Sexuality in the United States, 1885–1920. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995.
Peiss, Kathy. Cheap Amusements: Working Women and Leisure in Turn-of-the-
Century New York. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1986.
Rosen, Ruth. The Lost Sisterhood: Prostitution in America, 1900–1918. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Press, 1982.
Rudnick, Lois. “The New Woman,” 1915: The Cultural Moment: The New Politics, the New Woman, the New Psychology, the New Art, and the New Theatre
in America, ed. Adele Heller and Lois Rudnick New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1991, pp. 69–81.
Sloane, David E. E. Sister Carrie: Theodore Dreiser’s Sociological Tragedy. New York: Twayne Publishers, 1992.
Smith-Rosenberg, Carroll. Disorderly Conduct: Visions of Gender in Victorian America. New York: Knopf Press, 1985.
Stange, Margit. Personal Property: Wives, White Slaves, and the Market in Woman Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998.
Trachtenberg, Alan. “Who Narrates? Dreiser’s Presence in Sister Carrie,” New Essays on Sister Carrie, ed. Donald Pizer. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991, pp. 87–122.
Trimberger, Ellen Kay. “The New Woman and the New Sexuality: Conflict and Con-
tradiction in the Writings and Lives of Mabel Dodge and Neith Boyce,” Heller
and Rudnick, eds., pp. 98–115.
Walkowitz, Judith R. Prostitution and Victorian Society: Women, Class, and the State. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980.
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12
L E O N A R D C A S S U T O
Dreiser and crime
When Theodore Dreiser was finishing An American Tragedy in 1925, he
found himself unsatisfied with the scene of Clyde’s execution at the end of
the novel. In search of the specificity that fuels all of his writing, he sought to observe an actual death row at Ossining (“Sing-Sing”) State Prison in New
York. The visit, brokered by his friend and supporter H. L. Mencken, was
arranged by none other than James M. Cain, then a writer at the New York
World.1 A few years later, Cain would turn from journalism to fiction, just as Dreiser had done a quarter of a century earlier. Cain’s first two novels, The Postman Always Rings Twice (1934) and Double Indemnity (1936), were stories of planned murder for love and money, and they shocked the literary
community with their frank portrayals of greed, lust, and depravity. Like
Dreiser – whose earlier novels had been attacked by such organizations as
the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice – Cain found himself the
object of a moralistic crusade to have his writing banned. And like Dreiser’s
writing, instead of being suppressed, Cain’s work became influential. His
novels continue to be read; today Cain is recognized as one of the founders of
the hard-boiled school of crime fiction, a genre which features self-interested, emotionally hardened loners who navigate a morally degraded world.
Dreiser’s connection to Cain owes something to coincidence, but it high-
lights Dreiser’s position at the end of one era and the beginning of another.
Dreiser’s monumental crime novel shows him, as Ellen Moers puts it, strad-
dling “two worlds of time.”2 His portrait of a murderer in An American
Tragedy encompasses and traces the transformation of American faith-based sentimentalism in an urban era, even as it presages the hard-boiled attitude
that writers like Cain and Dashiell Hammett would refine in the age of
the New Deal. I want to show how the literary and social contexts for An