The Last Titan. A Life of Theodore Dreiser

mediate emancipation” of the people from the old bonds of religion and

government.21

Indeed, the mindset of Dreiser as he returned to his tale of an impover-

ished maiden seduced by two princes of capitalism was one of polar op-

posites in his pity for the poor and his fascination of the rich. The plot of

Jennie Gerhardt involves two powerful men who philander from their po-

sitions of political influence or wealth, a United States senator and the sec-

ond son of a prosperous carriage manufacturer in Ohio. Dreiser had done

the same more or less, or tried to, as the powerful chief editor at Butterick

with Thelma, and now he was ready to take that experience back into his

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book. One might suspect that the youth of Thelma Cudlipp contributed

somehow to the songs of innocence in Jennie’s character. The scholarly con-

sensus is that Jennie’s original character in the novel’s earliest known draft

(1901) was that of a coarse, self-centered woman, much like her predeces-

sor in Sister Carrie. Her character was then softened into the sentimental

hero she becomes in the 1911 publication of the novel, supposedly because

Dreiser feared that his second novel would otherwise suªer the fate of his

first, and so did his editor at Harper’s.

Recently, however, Thomas P. Riggio has argued, using the 1901 manu-

script, that Jennie’s original character lacked the crudeness and egoism of

Carrie. Moreover, the males in her life were never as lascivious and as rak-

ish in their original rendering as had been assumed. The theory of the char-

acters’ original decadence is based almost solely on a letter Dreiser wrote to

George P. Brett of April 16, 1901, saying that he had made “an error in char-

acter analysis.” Riggio suggests that—in the wake of the disastrous fate of

Sister Carrie—Dreiser’s act of self-censorship had already been achieved in

the 1901 manuscript.22 His comment to Brett, then, may have been a ruse

to ensure the nervous editors at Macmillan (who eventually opted not to

publish the novel) that Jennie Gerhardt would pass muster with the fading

but nevertheless still flickering moral “standard of the evening lamp.”

The primary model for Jennie Gerhardt is Mame, who in her adult years

became a loyal and loving “wife” to the dissolute Austin Brennan and a

“saint” to her own family members, including Dreiser, who had by now

forgotten their quarrel of 1890 following their mother’s death. It was she

who finally took in their father after his other children had largely aban-

doned him in Chicago. When John Paul Dreiser died in her home in

Rochester in 1900, she was also caring for Sylvia’s son, Carl, who was four-

teen at the time. In the novel, Old Gerhardt becomes softened in his dog-

matic ways and emotionally attached to his granddaughter Vesta much as

old man Dreiser apparently related to his bastard grandson.23 Mame’s own

illegitimate child was stillborn; the father was the “Colonel Silsby” of Dawn,

who becomes Senator George Sylvester Brander in Jennie Gerhardt.

If fiction can in any way be trusted as biography, we probably have the

most faithful picture of the Dreiser clan in Jennie Gerhardt. Its author re-

draws here the close immigrant family circle in which the patriarch speaks

to his children in German, and they reply in English. Like John Paul, Old

Gerhardt, we are told in the novel, “insisted that the parochial schools were

essential, and there, outside of the prayers and precepts of the Evangelical

faith, they learned little.” “Mrs. Gerhardt was no weakling” even though

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she wears the same “thin, worn slippers” Dreiser would remember on the

feet of his mother in Dawn. And like Marcus Romanus, nicknamed

“Rome,” who often stood in front of the Terre Haute House with a tooth-

pick in his mouth to give the impression he had just eaten in the hotel’s

restaurant, Jennie’s brother Sebastian, nicknamed “Bass,” loved to hang

about the Columbus House in the neighboring state of Ohio: “He would

go downtown evenings . . . and stand around the hotel entrance with his

friends, kicking his heels, smoking a two-for-five-cent cigar, preening him-

self on his stylish appearance and looking after the girls.”24

Though Dreiser was forty, he was still drawing heavily on his family back-

ground. Even his Maumee stories, while based on the city and his reporter’s

experiences, were mostly rooted in family memories. Dreiser would nearly

exhaust this autobiographical source in The “Genius” before tapping into

more worldly experiences in The Financier and The Titan, but he would

also come back to it in later sketches and novels. Essentially, Jennie Ger-

hardt draws from both his family and his experience in the wider world and

consists of two stories. The first concerns the seduction of eighteen-year-

old Jennie by the fifty-two-year-old Brander. He dies not long after im-

pregnating her, and her father banishes her from their home as hardly bet-

ter now than a streetwalker and thus a bad influence on his five other

children. With the help of her brother Bass, she moves to another part of

town in Columbus and eventually on to Cleveland after giving birth to her

daughter, Vesta, who remains with Mrs. Gerhardt in Columbus. This is es-

sentially the story Dreiser had written back in 1901 and returned to briefly

in 1904.

The other story brings in with Lester Kane the worldliness Dreiser had

absorbed over the last decade, especially as head of the Butterick publica-

tions. It is yet another tale of seduction in which Jennie now develops into

the altruistic heroine so praised by some of Dreiser’s reviewers—who nev-

ertheless complained that the author ought to have found a more dignified

subject than that of a kept woman. Kane meets Jennie in Cleveland, where

she is a maid in a house in which he is a guest. Eventually, they live to-

gether without marrying because Kane cannot or will not marry below his

social station. His wealthy father discovers his alliance and stipulates in his

will that Lester must either marry the girl or leave her. If he marries her,

he will receive $10,000 a year for the rest of his life. If he doesn’t but con-

tinues to live with her, he will be cut oª from his inheritance entirely in

three years. There is one other option, which Lester finally chooses, and

that is to leave Jennie altogether and claim his full inheritance. He marries

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an old flame from his station in life, leaving Jennie alone with her daugh-

ter. Vesta dies of typhoid at age fourteen (the age Carl was when John Paul

Dreiser died in 1900), and Jennie adopts first a girl and then a boy and set-

tles into the role of nurturing, much like Hester Prynne at the conclusion

of The Scarlet Letter. Like Hawthorne’s fallen woman, Jennie is there in the

end to comfort her man, the same one who had seduced her and ultimately

scorned her.

Unlike Sister Carrie, in which the Carrie and Hurstwood stories almost

break that novel into two discernible story lines, the dual plots in Jennie

Gerhardt dovetail into one. In fact, they serve in tandem to retell Haw-

thorne’s classic tale of “human frailty and sorrow.” As the mother of Vesta,

Jennie is first “married” to the Senator, a much older man, like Hester’s Roger

Chillingworth, who is dead to her in the sense of any true emotional ties.

She then finds a younger man in Lester. Although Jennie already possesses

a child, when the reader first meets Dimmesdale at the beginning of The

Scarlet Letter, Hester is pregnant with his child. Like Hester with Dimmes-

dale, Jennie ultimately comes to realize that she can never have her lover

and so dedicates herself to relieving the misery of others. And there are other,

stricter parallels. Both Hester and Jennie live in isolation from society with

daughters who become a symbol of both their fall and their rise. They are

both despoiled by upstanding citizens: Dimmesdale is the minister his Pu-

ritan congregation looks up to for moral leadership, and Brander is a fed-

eral legislator entrusted with the people’s vote. Both mothers live ultimately

for their daughters in order that their oªspring not suªer for their sexual

sins. And Pearl and Vesta are also subtle but constant reminders of the sins

of passion that brought them into existence. One critic who has observed

many of these parallels also insists that the similarity of the two novels ends

here, but so does the essence of Jennie Gerhardt. 25 What Dreiser seems to