37. Facsimile page of advice book reproduced in June Sochen, Herstory: A Record of the Women’s Past, 2d ed. (Palo Alto: Mayfield Publishing Co., 1982), p. 198.
38. Kathryn Tovo makes this point in her study of the Berachah Home, a turn-of-the-century residence for unwed mothers and “fallen” women in Arlington, Texas. Kathryn Tovo, “Rescue Homes at the Turn of the Century: The Berachah Home Experience,” unpublished paper, University of Texas, Austin.
39. Dreiser tells us that Roberta strikes Clyde as “more intelligent” than the other factory girls, but there is no further comment on the nature of her intelligence or on her intellectual interests. Dreiser, An American Tragedy (New York: New American Library, 1981), p. 241.
40. One might note that many of these qualities apply to Clyde, as well. But what is at issue here is not the oft-noted twinning Dreiser evokes in his characterization of Clyde and Roberta, but rather the ways in which the press and Dreiser fit Billy Brown into a certain very gender-specific, narrow mold. (When Dreiser “lowers” Chester Gillette’s
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educational and social status in the novel, making Clyde Griffiths less sophisticated and well traveled, he is making Clyde conform to another gender-specific stereotype dominant in the culture, that of the Horatio Alger hero [see Fishkin, From Fact to Fiction, pp. 122–5].)
41. The fact that Dreiser portrayed Roberta Alden’s sexuality in this way does not mean that he was incapable of depicting women with strong sexual drives. (Note, for example, his character Angela Blue in The “Genius.”)
42. For an analysis of Dreiser’s elimination of active verbs to add ambiguity to the drowning, see Fishkin, From Fact to Fiction, pp. 130–4.
43. In A Gallery of Women, vol. I (New York: Horace Liveright, 1929), for example, Dreiser addresses the issue of work on pp. 113, 138, and 156–71, of books and reading on pp. 81, 82, 87, and 96, and of sexual autonomy on pp. 77–8.
44. Philip Gerber, “‘A Beautiful Legal Problem’: Albert Levitt on An American Tragedy.” Papers on Language and Literature 27 (Spring 1991): 214–42. (Quotation, p. 216.)
45. To be fair, this difference may well be the result, in large part, of Dreiser’s greater success as a novelist in An American Tragedy. Older, more accomplished, and more confident in his art, Dreiser may simply have written a better book in 1925 than he had written earlier.
46. As Donald Pizer commented, for example, “Dreiser relied on the Gillette case but was not bound by it. His intent was not to retell a story but to recast Gillette’s experience into … a story which would render the tragic reality at the center of the American dream. He therefore made a large number of changes in his sources, all of which are related to two basic impulses: to shift the unavoidable impression of the documentary evidence that Gillette was a shallow-minded murderer to the impression that Clyde might be any one of us caught in the insoluble conflict between our deepest needs and the unyielding nature of experience; and to transform the shapeless, repetitious, and superficial manifestation of life in an actual trial into the compelling revelation of human nature and experience present in fiction at its best’’ (Pizer, “An American Tragedy,” p. 58). See also Fishkin, From Fact to Fiction, pp. 121…34.
47. Fishkin, From Fact to Fiction, p. 125.
48. Interestingly, Plank found that Dreiser “alters” the facts of the other murder cases he describes as well:
In order to add a sense of historical verifiability to the social and economic forces that he offers as the motivation for the crime
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in An American Tragedy, Dreiser creates a tradition of similar crimes. Although this tradition is not factually accurate, it is a valuable extension of the novel. The errors in “I Find the Real American Tragedy” are not evidence of a careless researcher, but of an imaginative writer who borrows from history to support his fiction. It reveals that Dreiser depended less on historical events and factual details than many people have argued. …
See Kathryn M. Plank, “Dreiser’s Real American Tragedy,” Papers on Language and Literature 27 (Spring 1991), 268–87.
49. Pizer, “An American Tragedy,’’ p. 58.
50. Indeed, they had existed earlier, as well, as the work of Charlotte Perkins Gilman amply demonstrates. See Fishkin, “‘Making a Change.’”
51. June Sochen, Herstory, p. 35.
52. A case in point is Emily Budick, Engendering Romance: Women Writing in the Hawthorne Tradition (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994).
53. See for example Gregg Camfield, Sentimental Twain: Samuel Clemens in the Maze of Moral Philosophy (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1994).
54. Lawrence Hussman is editing Marguerite Tjader Harris’s memoir for publication. Thomas P. Riggio has been working with Yvette Eastman on her memoirs and with the 230 unpublished letters she has from Dreiser; he is also editing a book of Dreiser’s letters to women.
55. Clara Jaeger, Philadelphia Rebel: The Education of a Bourgeoise (Richmond: Grosvenor, 1988), p. 68.
56. Jaeger, Philadelphia Rebel, pp. 74–6.
57. Marguerite Tjader Harris, Theodore Dreiser. A New Dimension (Norwalk: Silvermine, 1965), p. 4.
58. Swanberg, Dreiser (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons), p. 233.
59. Harris, Theodore Dreiser, p. 1.
60. Lawrence Hussman, Comments, panel on “Theodore Dreiser in the Nineties: Lacan, Foucault and Feminist Readings.” American Literature Association Conference. Sunday, May 26, 1991. Washington, D.C.
61. Jaeger, Philadelphia Rebel, p. 88.
62. One woman who sought help from Dreiser in marketing her writing was Louise Ann-Miller. See Swanberg, Dreiser, p. 141.
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63. He wanted Mencken to help find Anna Tatum an editorial job (Swanberg, Dreiser, 211).
64. Dreiser to Harris, April 13, 1931.
65. Jaeger, Philadelphia Rebel, p. 79.
66. Jaeger, Philadelphia Rebel, pp. 78–9.
67. Jaeger, Philadelphia Rebel, p. 105.
68. Thomas P. Riggio, ed., Theodore Dreiser. The American Diaries, 1902–1926 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1982), Introduction, p. 25.
69. Often the relationship was more informal — such as when he took Lillian Rosenthal’s advice about changing the plot of Jennie Gerhardt (Swanberg, Dreiser, p. 143). Although Swanberg calls Anna Tatum Dreiser’s “unpaid secretary” (171), Thomas P. Riggio affirms that no proof exists one way or the other that Tatum was not paid (personal communication). The correspondence with Marguerite Tjader Harris reveals that she often worked in an unpaid capacity.
70. Jaeger, Philadelphia Rebel, p. 77.
71. This is not meant to imply that all such interactions involving Dreiser were coercive; some, presumably, were not.
72. Jaeger, Philadelphia Rebel, p. 96.
73. Swanberg, Dreiser, p. 169, n. 25.
74. Swanberg, Dreiser, 150, n. 42; 117, 161.
75. Thomas P. Riggio has criticized Swanberg’s account of Dreiser’s plagiarism as simplistic. He notes that Dreiser “had an unbelievable memory: he could recite whole chapters verbatim, years after he had written them. Kussell wouldn’t have gotten the piece back to edit if he had been a cheap plagiarist” (Personal communication). While Dreiser’s habit of plagiarizing may not have been “cheap” or conscious, it was, nonetheless, a potential hazard for the aspiring young women writers who shared their work with him. One might add that Dreiser plagiarized from men as well — the roster includes George Ade, Poe, and Sherwood Anderson. It is the asymmetry of power that fell along gender lines, however, that makes his plagiarizing from women perhaps more troubling.
76. Dreiser to Harris, July 5, 1944.
77. Swanberg, Dreiser, p. 237.
78. Thomas P. Riggio, personal communication.
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79. Swanberg, Dreiser, p. 137.
80. Swanberg, Dreiser, p. 375, n.7.
81. Swanberg, Dreiser, p. 197.
82. Dreiser to Harris, n.d., 1 p. ms. “Dear Marguerite … ”
83. Dreiser to Harris, March 8, 1944.
84. Dreiser to Harris, April 9, 1941 (emphasis added).
85. Harris, Theodore Dreiser, p. 2.
86. Harris, Theodore Dreiser, p. 2.
87. Dreiser to Harris, July 5, 1944.
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Sexualizing the Female Body:
Dreiser, Feminism, and Foucault
Irene Gammel
Surrounded by an aura of what Dreiser often calls a “pagan’’ sensuality, many of his female characters paradoxically also exude a strange sense of sexual abstinence, almost chastity. Philip Fisher has commented on Carrie Meeber’s absence of sexual desires and eroticism in her love relationships at the same time that she enacts desires and eros very successfully on the theater stage.1 In An American Tragedy (1925), Roberta Alden briefly electrifies the protagonist Clyde Griffiths with her “poetic sensuality,” only to haunt him and the reader for the rest of the novel in the image of the corpse recovered from the depths of Big Bittern Lake, whose sexuality and desires are re-created in strangely intimate detail by pathologists and prosecutors in a spectacular murder trial.
Aileen Butler in the Trilogy of Desire (1912, 1914, 1947) is presented in the first volume as the incarnation of sensual vitality indulging in a short-lived, clandestine carnival of sex with her partner, only to turn into a neglected wife in the next two volumes. There, her mature, untapped sexuality is reduced to occasional pleasureless adulteries with men who turn out to be lesser doubles of her husband, leaving a sense of waste, ruin, and sterility in her life. This impression is further emphasized by the slow decay of her body. Leslie Fiedler, commenting on the chastity of the “unchurched nun,” Sister Carrie, and on Jennie Gerhardt’s almost asexual mothering of her two lovers, irreverently draws the conclusion that Dreiser “could never portray, for all his own later hectic career as a lover, any woman except the traditional seduced working girl of sentimental melodrama.”2