have otherwise added were merely the social frills from the world of the
Delineator (the sketch of Jennie in the frontispiece of the first edition re-
sembles in dress and demeanor the Delineator’s model of the all-around
wholesome but also vulnerable female) and the cynical view of high soci-
ety from one of its own that Dreiser may have taken from Edith Wharton’s
The House of Mirth (1905). He credited this book in his “Literary Appren-
ticeship” as an influence on him as he composed Jennie Gerhardt. Two years
later he pronounced Wharton’s masterpiece “the greatest novel I ever read
by an American woman.”26
Dreiser essentially wrote three novels in 1911. He revised and finished Jen-
nie Gerhardt. He wrote a complete draft of The “Genius” (the original title
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was without the quotation marks). And he wrote more than half of The
Financier that fall before making his first European sojourn in November
1911. Jennie contained the seeds of the other two novels as surely as Sister
Carrie had launched the main idea in its successor. For we have in Dreiser’s
first two novels the dramas of “The Flesh & the Spirit” (the title for Sister
Carrie that the Doubleday editors preferred). Carrie is ready to give herself
almost without thinking, whereas Jennie sacrifices her body, in the words
of Richard Lehan, “for those she loves—for something beyond her—in a
way that would seem foolish to Carrie.” Dreiser continued the autobio-
graphical impulse in The “Genius” and moved in The Financier beyond his
family saga and his own young manhood and first marriage to the world
of money. Dreiser’s first financier is not Frank Cowperwood, however, but
Robert Kane of Jennie Gerhardt, Lester’s older brother, who favors mo-
nopolies. With Lester out of the company, Robert makes himself president
and proceeds with Cowperwood-like e‹ciency and ruthlessness: “Armed
with the voting power of the entire stock of the company, and therefore
with the privilege of hypothecating its securities, he laid before several of
his intimate friends in the financial world his scheme of uniting the prin-
cipal carriage companies and controlling the trade.”27 This, of course, is
not the business novel of William Dean Howells, whose Silas Lapham ul-
timately conspires against himself to save his self-dignity. Dreiser’s busi-
nessman here is cold-hearted, scheming, and unrepentant.
–
Even before he finished Jennie, he searched for a publisher, first at Macmil-
lan and then at Harper’s, where Ripley Hitchcock—famous in the trade
for editing such well-known authors as Woodrow Wilson, Joel Chandler
Harris, and Rudyard Kipling—eventually persuaded that firm to publish
Jennie as long as Dreiser agreed to a thorough in-house editing of the man-
uscript. Hitchcock had also handled Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage and
Maggie, where he had been responsible for expurgations that may have al-
tered or softened the author’s naturalistic views. Dreiser didn’t know this
at the time, or ever, but he probably had no choice but to agree to this form
of self-censorship. Even though his Carrie had been revived, the reputation
it gave him was still largely limited to the literary world of fellow writers
and editors. He could boast of no box o‹ce success and no doubt felt for-
tunate indeed to have a house such as Harper’s willing to publish him. Hitch-
r e t u r n o f t h e n o v e l i s t
2 0 4
cock and his staª reduced the manuscript by approximately sixteen thou-
sand words.
One critic argues that the editing transformed it from “a blunt, carefully
documented piece of social analysis to a love story merely set against a so-
cial background.” This may be more than a slight overstatement, but the
book was certainly sanitized of its oªensive parts along with its typical Dreis-
erian redundancies. Dreiser was always too blunt for his era, even as a re-
alist, and he always needed an editor. When Lester, for example, debates
whether to remain with Jennie once he finds out about Vesta, Dreiser wrote
and Hitchcock and company struck: “He took his customary way [with]
her there at the apartment the same evening that he thought these things
out.” In other cases, of course, only verbosity was sacrificed.28 When
Mencken saw the cuts, he told Dreiser that they irritated him at first but
on second thought was inclined to the idea that not much damage had
been done to the story. More candidly, he thought Dreiser probably re-
quired the larger canvas. “The chief virtue of Dreiser” he told Harry Leon
Wilson, “is his skill at piling up detail. The story he tells, reduced to a
mere story, is nothing.” Actually, Mencken read the manuscript twice, both
before and after the editing at Harper’s, and suggested no substantive
changes, but the novel had also been read by others before going to
Harper’s. Both Fremont Rider, who had worked with Dreiser at B. W.
Dodge Company as well as at Butterick, and Lillian Rosenthal, who had
already become Dreiser’s occasional lover, recommended that he change
the original happy ending, in which Jennie and Lester marry. He even
showed the completed manuscript to Jug, who as she had done with Sister
Carrie, tried to clean up the diction and joined the other editors in recom-
mending the excision of suggestive passages.29
The book appeared that fall to generally favorable reviews. The climate
for realistic literature had improved since the appearance of Sister Carrie.
Reviewers had not forgotten that novel, of course, but now they expected
Dreiser to tell the unalloyed truth and thought it probably ought to be told.
What saved it from the old denunciation was that in spite of her sins, Jen-
nie is—unlike Carrie—wholly unselfish. Indeed, some critics thought she
was “really too unselfish to be virtuous.”30 Edward Markham wrote in the
New York American of October 25, 1911, that Jennie “never becomes wholly
degraded in spirit” but rather “develops into a forgiving and ministering
woman.” Yet the reviewer could not let pass the obligation Jennie owed to
her own sense of womanhood. “Is a woman ever justified in smirching her
womanhood, in staining her virtue, in order to help her relatives—even to
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2 0 5
save them from starvation?” he asked. The answer was a resounding and
ironclad “No.” It was the old “love the sinner, hate the sin” insistence that
before Freud prevailed in even the most liberal of the post-Victorian crit-
ics. For the Detroit Free Press of November 4, the story probably should not
have been told because it tells a tale “repugnant to all our ideals and stan-
dards.” But even this reviewer could not condemn Jennie as “unmoral” for
acting as she does in the face of so much adversity. The New York Times of
November 19 generally agreed that Dreiser’s novel presented a “naked pic-
ture” of life, “but no one can for a moment question the real life about us
is more naked than the story.”
Dreiser made an important concession in this story that would in one
way reappear in An American Tragedy. He punishes his protagonist for suc-
cumbing to the forces of heredity and environment. Carrie may be con-
fused, but she is not left so abandoned by the world as Jennie. Eugene Witla
in The “Genius” will also survive by making a few concessions in the end,
and Frank Cowperwood will not be soundly defeated until The Stoic, which
Dreiser never completely finished himself. For this reason, the New York
Daily Tribune of October 21 thought in its review of Jennie that Sister Car-
rie “remains to this day one of the most powerful productions of uncom-
promising realism in American literature.” Hurstwood, of course, is pun-
ished in the novel, but it is mere chance that he goes downward while Carrie
rises. This is the point: life to Dreiser was mostly if not exclusively (and it
is this lingering doubt that makes him so profound) a matter of blind
chance—with morality or unselfishness ultimately having nothing to do
with it. Therefore, the Tribune reviewer felt Jennie was not as compelling
as Sister Carrie.
None of the contemporary reviewers of Jennie saw the parallel with The
Scarlet Letter, but they found literary sources in Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urber-
villes, Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, Zola’s Nana, George Moore’s Esther Waters, and Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina. Actually, Mencken mentioned Hawthorne’s
novel in his review for The Smart Set, but only for its similarly high achieve-
ment, not for any similarity of plot. He hailed Jennie Gerhardt as “the best
American novel I have ever read, with the lonesome but Himalayan ex-
ception of ‘Huckleberry Finn.’” He placed the book ahead of not only
Hawthorne’s novel but Howells’s The Rise of Silas Lapham, James’s What