3. I am grateful to Thomas P. Riggio for recounting to me this incident, at which he was present. Thomas P. Riggio, personal correspondence.
4. Elaine Showalter, Speaking of Gender (New York: Routledge, 1989) pp. 6, 9–10; Nancy K. Miller, ed., The Poetics of Gender (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), p. xiii.
5. These include Harry Brod, The Making of Masculinities (Newbury, Calif.: Sage, 1987); Michael Kimmel, Changing Men: New Directions in Research on Men and Masculinity (Cambridge: Unwin Hyman, 1987); and Joseph Boone and Michael Cadden, Engendering Men: The Question of Male Feminist Criticism (New York: Routledge, 1990).
6. This essay does not claim that the female character Dreiser created in this novel is representative of all of Dreiser’s fictional females. Dreiser is wildly inconsistent. There are elements of Roberta Alden (her sexual passivity, for example), however, that Irene Gammel finds echoed in other of Dreiser’s female characters, including Carrie Meeber and Jennie Gerhardt. See Irene Gammel, ‘‘Sexualizing the Female Body: Dreiser: Feminism, and Foucault,” in Miriam Gogol, ed., Theodore Dreiser: Beyond Naturalism (New York: New York University Press, 1995), pp. 31-54.
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7. Grace Brown was the woman’s formal name. Her nickname, and the name she was called most often, was “Billy.” Throughout this paper she will be referred to as Billy Brown.
8. Both Ellen Moers and Donald Pizer acknowledge the difficulty of determining precisely which factual material Dreiser drew on for the novel. Pizer makes a fairly convincing case, however, for the idea that despite Dreiser’s own reference to “testimony introduced at the trial,” Dreiser in fact relied exclusively on stories that appeared in the New York World “for his verbatim material and for almost all other explicit detail.” Donald Pizer, “An American Tragedy’’ in Harold Bloom, ed., Theodore Dreiser’s “An American Tragedy” (New York: Chelsea House, 1988), pp. 45–67. (Quotation, p. 57.) See also Ellen Moers, Two Dreisers (New York: Viking, 1969), p. 44. If Dreiser did, by some chance, actually examine the trial transcript and read testimony introduced at the trial, that would only strengthen the significance of his adherence to the journalists’ omission of material that did not fit the paradigms of the melodramas they were narrating in their daily stories.
9. For a complex reading of this myth, see “The Myth of Womanhood: Victims,” in Nina Auerbach, Woman and the Demon: The Life of a Victorian Myth (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982), pp. 7–34.
10. Theodore Dreiser, Newspaper Days (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1991), pp. 261–62. For more on Dreiser’s background in journalism, see Shelley Fisher Fishkin, From Fact to Fiction: Journalism and Imaginative Writing in America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985; New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), pp. 86–134.
11. Dreiser, Newspaper Days, p. 263.
12. R. F. Bunner, “In the Old Pit Shaft” (Cartoon). Life 29 (no. 733) (January 7, 1897): 32.
13. New York World, November 14, 1906; November 18, 1906; and November 29, 1906. For a photograph of Billy Brown, see Joseph W. Brownell and Patricia A. Wawrzaszek, Adirondack Tragedy: The Gillette Murder Case of 1906 (Interlaken, N.Y.: Heart of the Lakes Publishing, 1986), p. 36.
14. Hannah Webster Foster, The Coquette (1797), Introduction by Cathy Davidson (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986); Susannah Rowson, Charlotte Temple (1791), Introduction by Cathy Davidson (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986).
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15. Quoted by lawyers. The People of the State of New York vs. Chester Gillette. State of New York Court of Appeals. Appeal Book, vols. I, II and III (Ilion, Herkimer and Frankfort, N.Y.: Citizen Print), pp. 70–4. Cited hereafter as “Trial Transcript.” Exhibits 5, 6, 7. Original trial transcript pp. 1007–9.
16. Dreiser to Harris, June 12, 1944 and June 19, 1944. I am grateful to Lawrence Hussman for making me aware of sixty uncatalogued letters from Dreiser to Marguerite Tjader Harris in the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas at Austin, which proved invaluable in my research. All citations in this essay from letters between Dreiser and Harris refer to letters at the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center.
17. Craig Brandon, Murder in the Adirondacks: An American Tragedy Revisited (Utica: North Country Books, 1986), p. 56
18. See Theresa Harnishfager’s testimony in the trial transcript. While Billy Brown’s job as an inspector was still likely to be a fairly low-level factory job, it won her a freedom of movement that assignment to a single workstation would have denied her. Presumably her ability to learn new tasks quickly played some role in her being called on frequently as a substitute.
19. Brandon, Murder in the Adirondacks, p. 60.
20. Brandon, Murder in the Adirondacks, p. 60.
21. Brandon, Murder in the Adirondacks, p. 60.
22. Brandon, Murder in the Adirondacks, p. 67.
23. Trial transcript, pp. 78–9.
24. The newspaper reporters and Dreiser may have erased the pride Billy Brown took in her work, her love of reading and stimulating conversation, and her potential sense of her sexual autonomy, but it is worth noting that these traits are often absent from Dreiser’s characters in general (particularly in An American Tragedy). This does not, however, change the fact that the real-life model for his character may have had them, while the fictional creation did not. It merely makes the point that Dreiser was rarely willing to grant any of his characters more than a limited sense of autonomy or initiative (with key exceptions — Frank Cowperwood, for example). Rather, personal identity, for many of Dreiser’s characters, tends to be a mirror box of reflected images, imagined associations, longings, gazes, desires, auras, mirages, clothes, objects, performances, and anticipations. See, for example, Philip Fisher, Hard Facts: Setting and Form in the American Novel (New York: Oxford University Press,
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1985); Amy Kaplan, The Social Construction of American Realism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988); Walter Benn Michaels, The Gold Standard and the Logic of Naturalism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987); Rachel Bowlby, Just Looking: Consumer Culture in Dreiser, Gissing, and Zola (New York: Methuen, 1985).
25. Counterexamples to this general trend can be found as well. Thomas P. Riggio has pointed, for instance, to Hill’s Manual, an immensely popular book with which Dreiser was familiar. First published in 1873 (and remaining in print until 1960), it asserted, “The sphere of woman’s action and work is so widening that she can to-day, if she desires, handsomely and independently support herself. She need not, therefore, marry for a home” (personal correspondence). Nonetheless, many women writers of the period bemoaned the fact that views like these were more the ideal than the reality. As Elaine Showalter notes, “by the fin de siècle a post-Darwinian ‘sexual science’ offered expert testimony on the evolutionary differences between men and women. While women’s ‘nurturant domestic capabilities fitted them for home and hearth,’ … men had evolved aggressive, competitive abilities ‘that fitted them for public life’” (Elaine Showalter, Sexual Anarchy: Gender and Culture at the Fin de Siècle [New York: Viking Penguin, 1990], p. 8.)
26. Charlotte Perkins Gilman, “Masculine Literature” [Part V. Our Androcentric Culture; or The Man-Made World], The Forerunner 1 (March 1910): 21.
27. William Dean Howells, ‘‘Criticism and Fiction” and Other Essays, ed. by Clara Marburg Kirk and Rudolf Kirk (New York: New York University Press, 1959), p. 71.
28. Dorothy Richardson, The Long Day: The Story of a New York Working Girl Told by Herself (New York: Century Co., 1905).
29. Mary McDowell, “Our Proxies in Industry,” 11. Quoted in Leslie Woodcock Tentler, Wage-Earning Women: Industrial Work and Family Life in the United States, 1900–1930 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979), p. 214, n. 31.
30. Quoted in Alice Kessler-Harris, “Organizing the Unorganizable: Three Jewish Women and Their Union,” 7. Cited in Tentler, Wage-Earning Women, 210, note 97.
31. New York World, December 5, 1906.
32. There were, of course, notable exceptions to this rule. Most importantly Charlotte Perkins Gilman endeavored to create a body of fiction that directly challenged the “love plot” as the only plot available to women. See Shelley Fisher Fishkin, “‘Making a Change’:
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Strategies of Subversion in Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Journalism and Fiction,” in Joanne Karpinski, ed., Critical Essays on Charlotte Perkins Gilman (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1992).
33. This characterization of a wide range of arguments is Nina Auerbach’s in Woman and the Demon, p. 12. See also Elizabeth Janeway, Man’s World, Woman’s Place: A Study in Social Mythology (New York: Morrow, 1971) and Janeway, Between Myth and Morning: Women Awakening (New York: Morrow, 1975).
34. Charles W. Eliot quoted in Theodore Penny Martin, The Sound of Our Own Voices: Women’s Study Clubs 1860–1910 (Boston: Beacon Press, 1987), p. 26. Martin cites such sources as Sally Schwager, “‘Harvard Women’: A History of the Rounding of Radcliffe College” (Ed.D. thesis, Harvard Graduate School of Education, 1982), p. 18.
35. Jean E. Friedman and William G. Shade, Our American Sisters: Women in American Life and Thought, 3d ed. (Lexington, Mass.: D.C. Heath and Co., 1982), p. 323.
36. For a description of Victorian ideology of “passionlessness,” see Nancy Cott, “Passionlessness: A Reinterpretation of Victorian Sexual Ideology, 1790–1850,’’ Signs 4 (1978): 219–36. According to Barbara Hobson, it was not until the 1920s that the widespread belief that women were passionless began to disappear. Barbara Meal Hobson, Uneasy Virtue: The Politics of Prostitution and the American Reform Tradition (New York: Basic Books, 1987), p. 185.