The Last Titan. A Life of Theodore Dreiser

study had been and where he kept the manuscript of his novel. He ven-

tured in his piece to say that “Hawthorne evidently had this story in mind

sometime before he began to write it.” Later Dreiser would tell Mencken

that in beginning Sister Carrie he wrote down his title “at random” and im-

mediately began, but he too seems to have had his story in mind, or at least

the outline of one that drew clearly on his family history.51 Could Dreiser

have been thinking of himself as he wrote about Hawthorne—about his

possibilities as a writer of something more enduring than a magazine arti-

cle? Perhaps. Arthur Henry, we will remember, saw short stories in him.

Why not a novel?

t h e w r i t e r

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s e v e n

Sister Carrie

–

Sister Carrie is a work of genius and Doubleday

belongs to that species of long-eared animals which are not hares.

G E O R G E H O R T O N T O A R T H U R H E N R Y , F E B R U A R Y 9 , 1 9 0 1

fresh from a summer on the banks of the maumee, Dreiser took

out a piece of yellow paper and changed the course of American letters. As

a result, he is called the “Father of American Realism,” but that academic

saw ignores, of course, the pioneering work of Walt Whitman, whose fifth

edition of his indefatigable book was privately published in the year of

Dreiser’s birth. The next edition of Leaves of Grass, and essentially the last,

came under fire by Anthony Comstock and his New England Society for

the Suppression of Vice, which even attempted to have Whitman’s book

banned from the U.S. mail. Dreiser, as we shall see, caught the wrath of

the second generation of that infamous censorship movement with the pub-

lication of The “Genius, ” but Sister Carrie was the first heir to Whitman’s

fight to tell the truth in literature. Indeed, Dreiser’s title may actually come

from Whitman’s era in the form of a Civil War song of the same name, in

which “Sister Carrie” (South Carolina) is chastised for leaving home (or the

Union).1 Whitman is the true precursor of American literature in the twen-

tieth century, but he wrote poetry instead of prose—many denied it even

the claim to poetry—which kept it out of general circulation among pop-

ular readers during his lifetime. But Sister Carrie was a novel, a genre more

accessible to the average reader, especially women, who made up the great

majority of American readers at the end of the nineteenth century. One of

them was allegedly Mrs. Frank Doubleday.

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Dreiser probably began Sister Carrie in late September of 1899, shortly

after returning to New York City. Henry returned, too, again leaving

Maude and Dottie behind, to resume for the next month or so his resi-

dence with the Dreisers, and he either continued or began to write A

Princess of Arcady. While Henry imagined a conventional romance in which

the heroine is sent to a convent school to preserve her innocence until the

proper time for marriage, Dreiser began his own fable about an American

princess, “two generations removed from the emigrant,” who rules only in

her dreams and loses her innocence at almost the first opportunity. Henry

wrote an idyll about a “nun” whose youthful sexuality is never violated,

while Dreiser wrote a novel about a sister who commits adultery. It is gen-

erally thought that Dreiser was thinking exclusively of his sister Emma and

not even remotely— or ironically—about a nun when he gave his Carrie

the title of “Sister” at the top of his page, but Henry’s use of nuns and a

convent in his book may have had an associative influence. Dreiser’s ro-

mantic chapter titles, which were added between the first draft and the re-

vision published by Doubleday, suggest the moral contrast and underscore

the departure of this gritty tale of two cities from the Victorian fiction of

its day.

It is instructive to take a closer look at A Princess of Arcady. The story

concerns two children, Hilda and Pierre, whom we first meet on Pilliod’s

Island, a paradise of vineyards and richly colored flowers on the Maumee

River. They meet Minot Alexander, who visits the island with its owner

(the boy’s grandfather, Jean Pilliod), and who feels a strange attachment to

the girl in spite of the fact that he is old enough to be her grandfather. The

feeling is mutual, and the girl escorts Alexander back to her humble cot-

tage, where her sick mother is slowly dying and her fisherman father drinks

too much. The ambiguity of Alexander’s feeling for the girl is vaguely as-

sociated with a love aªair he had had long ago with a woman now lost to

the convent, a woman named Betty, whom he still remembers as passion-

ate and beautiful. Alexander returns to the village of Maumee, here ele-

vated to the status of city, where he befriends Christopher Mott and his

daughter Primrose, an eccentric and homely woman of thirty, who occupy

gardens and greenhouses in the middle of town, one of the last holdouts

against urban sprawl. Mott is an impractical man who refuses to give up

his precious plants, which he considers more noble than humans. When

the bank threatens to foreclose, Alexander quietly pays oª the mortgage

and tears up the note. In the meantime, Hilda’s mother dies, and the child

is put into an orphanage. By the time Alexander learns of it, Hilda has es-

s i s t e r c a r r i e

1 4 1

caped and returned to the island. He adopts her on the condition that she

will attend a convent school in order to grow into the ideal woman whose

charm inspires not merely sexual passion but “achievements which have

made epochs and kingdoms famous when the patronage of the throne alone

would have failed.”2

He writes to his old flame, now Mother Superior Pelagia at the Convent

of Our Lady of Peace, to get permission to send Hilda to the convent, which

is in New York City, across from the Palisades. Before Hilda leaves, how-

ever, she visits the island one last time. There she finds young Pierre carry-

ing stones from the water’s edge and fantasizing that he is building a palace

for the two of them. Hilda goes away to the convent school, returning every

summer to the Motts’ cottage, which she now considers her permanent

home. Interestingly, on her first train ride to the school, she befriends a fel-

low enrollee named Edna, whose beautiful mother attracts the attention of

a “drummer, who wishing to look at her now and then, took a place on a

vacant seat behind where she would not notice.” Dreiser’s Sister Carrie, of

course, begins on a train with the same kind of “masher” or “drummer,”

the traveling salesman Charles Drouet, who befriends Carrie. Alexander

also accompanies Hilda to the school upon her enrollment and sees for the

first time in forty years his Betty, now a “black-robed figure” and a “little

old lady.”

Many years later, following Hilda’s graduation from the convent school,

she learns what has happened to Pierre. Apparently, after losing her he had

become a disgruntled and disappointed young man who got into minor

scrapes with the law. Hilda returns home to Maumee, where Pierre, now

twenty, reformed, and the owner of Pilliod’s Island following his grandfa-

ther’s death, secretly watches over her at the Mott gardens—which thanks

to Alexander’s financial support have become a sanctuary not unlike the

beautiful garden in Hawthorne’s “Rappaccini’s Daughter.” Hilda is not

cursed by paternal love in this romance, however, and so she and Pierre are

soon reunited and marry to live happily ever after. The novel closes with

Mott’s saying to Alexander that Hilda had “come to fine flower” under his

influence. When Alexander denies any direct influence, Mott agrees but

says that he had “done all the best gardeners could do. You provided the

good soil and shelter from the storm.”3

While Henry was writing his novel about true love and eternal romance,

he carried on an extramarital aªair with Anna T. Mallon, leaving Maude

to worry about the upbringing of their daughter and the mortgage on the

House of the Four Pillars. Anna, who was several years older than Henry,

s i s t e r c a r r i e

1 4 2

ran a typing service at 308 Broadway. Dreiser had patronized it for his mag-

azine articles, and Henry apparently went down to the typing pool one day

on an errand for either Dreiser or himself and promptly fell in love. His

dedication of his book to Anna, whom he would eventually marry, sug-

gests that she influenced the plot of A Princess of Arcady: to Anna “on whose