Yet, despite this penchant for the gender stereotypical seduction theme, Dreiser has gained the stature of a literary French Marianne, who, by waving the flag of sexual liberation in his battle against the bulwarks of American literary “puritanism,” has
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firmly established sex as a discursive fact. In his works, Dreiser celebrates sexuality as the major driving force in life, holding it up as a force of progress endlessly engaged in battles against sexually repressive social conventions and institutions. As Charles Glicksberg has put it in his Sexual Revolution in American Literature (1971), sex, according to Dreiser, is the “primal source of beauty, the mother of the arts, it provides the vital incentive that makes for progress and achievement.”3 Alfred Kazin uses a very similar language in the introduction to the unexpurgated edition of Sister Carrie (1981): “To the always alienated and radical Dreiser, Carrie represents the necessity of transformation, sex as revolution.”4
Elevated to the level of a canonized critical “fact,’’ Dreiser’s discourse of sexual frankness and liberation, is, nonetheless, problematic — not only because it may reinscribe old stereotypes in a new language, as Fiedler’s critique implies, but also because it innocently assumes the existence of sexuality as an innate, bodily fact, a fact that is presumed to be recoverable — like a Ding an sich — underneath layers of psychological repressions and literary censorship. Dreiser’s discursive scientificity is underlined by his characteristic use of materialistic imagery, such as “magnetism” and “chemism.” Especially in his evocation of sexuality, he strengthens the impression of the body as an easily graspable, physical or natural entity, whose existence is presumed to have been hidden behind veils of conventions. The tacit implication behind such language is that “lifting the veil” and transcending conventions with a discourse of “frankness” will make the “real thing” automatically appear “is it is” and grant it a place in literature in its own right.
Since Dreiser has come to epitomize the discursive explosion on sexuality in early twentieth-century American literature, a post-modern perspective on sexuality, as it is expressed for example in The History of Sexuality (1980) by French philosopher Michel Foucault, presents a springboard for reexamining the accepted views on Dreiser’s eulogy of sex and desire. Foucault rejects, debunks, and caricatures discourses of sexual liberation. He argues that what is nowadays subsumed under the term “sexuality” is by no means “innate” or “natural,” but rather a complex historical construct created over the last two centuries in our discursive practices. Since the eighteenth century, Foucault argues, people have not really shaken off sexual “repressions” and become more active sexually, but they have become obsessed with the pleasure of talking and writing and theorizing about sexuality, with putting sexuality in linguistic and scientific categories: “[S]ex was taken charge of, tracked down as it were, by a discourse that aimed
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to allow it no obscurity, no respite.”5 Even more importantly, in this process of transforming sex into discourse, sexuality has been policed, because talking about sexuality in regulated, “authorized” discourses helps control it.
It is here that Foucault’s theory intersects with important concerns of (post) modern feminism, and these points of intersection will be useful in drawing attention to the power effects inherent in Dreiser’s inscription of the female body in his texts.6
Turning to Dreiser’s A Gallery of Women (1929), a collection of nonfictional and semifictionalized sketches on the author’s female friends and acquaintances — here, especially, to the sketch of “Emanuela” — we find not only an excellent starting point, but also a true touchstone to evaluate Dreiser’s inscription of female sexuality as well as the underlying gender-based ideologies in his fiction. ‘‘Emanuela” presents an account of a beautiful and gifted woman artist, whom the thirty-year-old narrator–author meets in New York’s artistic circles. According to Dreiser’s first-person account, she repeatedly initiates contact with him only to retreat with an almost physical repulsion from his sexual advances. “I don’t like you that way!,” she tells him, also confessing candidly that the “muddy depths” of sex are not for her, that she in fact does, not want any sexual relationship.7 The narrator, irritated at being led by the nose, excels at exposing Emanuela’s duplicity, namely, the fact that she “pursues” him for years, never tires of “luring” him into accepting tantalizing tête à têtes, but each time almost ritually thwarts what he longs for most — the sexual contact.
But as Emanuela oscillates between her attraction for the narrator and her physical repulsion, so the narrator himself oscillates between irresistible attraction and angry, frustrated retreat — an interplay that is paralleled by the oscillating discourses he adopts to describe and evaluate Emanuela. Describing his role as a briskly advancing Don Juan, the narrator lovingly weaves the threads of his idealizing love–romance tapestry, evoking Emanuela in terms of Minerva, Diana, and Venus, and mythologizing her “white,” “seraph”-like, virginal body, only to intersperse in his romance a cooler, scientific–analytical thread when it comes to dealing with her “freezing recessions.” This discursive oscillation, better than anything else, illustrates the narrator’s duplicity in his relationship with the young woman whose body strikes him as “beautiful and voluptuously formed,” but who refuses to fulfill what he sees as the “natural” functions of such a “perfect” body, namely, to have intercourse with a man.
“Was she not a clear illustration of some of Freud’s prime contentions?” (693), the narrator asks, taking recourse in a psycho-
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analytic authority — sanctioned as truthful by himself and the intellectual forerunners of his contemporary society. It matters little that Emanuela rejects this discourse for herself. “Oh, yes, she had read Freud, and had been impressed in part, but could not accept him fully. No. His analysis was too coarse and too domineering, left no place for anything but itself. And there was nothing that was the whole truth about anything” (695). Despite her protests — sex cannot possibly be “the base of all dreams” — Dreiser imposes the Freudian discourse as truthfully revealing the secrets about her character, namely, her sexual repression, her ‘‘sex inhibition,” and “the obvious pathologic fact in her case, that she was frigid” (687). After establishing the “fact” of Emanuela’s “frigidity,” he does not, however, abandon the chase as useless; on the contrary, despite his better judgment he continues it sporadically for more than a decade, as if his realization of the woman’s “frigidity” made the chase all the more intense, the sexual object all the more desirable.
Dreiser’s Freudian discourse implies that frigidity is partly rooted in the organic and partly in childhood repressions.8 Simone de Beauvoir, in contrast, gives a very persuasive definition of frigidity that refrains from making any biological assumptions and from speculating about a far-away childhood. At the same time, it locates the roots of frigidity in gender relationships of power. De Beauvoir writes that “resentment is the most common source of feminine frigidity; in bed the woman punishes the male for all the wrongs she feels she has endured, by offering him an insulting coldness.”9 Dreiser’s excursion into amateur psychoanalysis reveals more about his own motivations than Emanuela’s. One is reminded here of de Beauvoir’s recognition that “antifeminists” have used “science — especially biology and experimental psychology” — to prove women’s inferiority.
Here, Foucault’s theory, and with it poststructuralist feminism, intersects with de Beauvoir’s critique to demonstrate how much the body is in fact “constructed” through scientific, especially (socio) biological and psychoanalytic, discourses. Drawing on Foucaultian theory, Chris Weedon has pointed out that “biological theories of sexual difference” have been used to create social gender definitions, with the result that social roles have become fixed on the basis of the argument that these roles are deeply rooted in an “unchanging natural order.”10 From a poststructuralist perspective, to be sure, there is no such thing as a purely biological, “natural” body that exists prior to culture. The body, always already submerged in and imbued with culture, is in fact “constructed” through discourses, social practices, and norms that the individual inscribes on his/her body. The notion of the existence
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of a “natural” body is, however, ideologically supported by what we have come to accept as empirical “truths” (or as “common sense”), which Weedon quickly disqualifies as ‘‘tautological,” as illustrated in the following example. In most societies, she argues, “women have primary responsibility for childcare,” an empirical fact that is often used to back up the (socio) biological (and patriarchal) claim that women are “naturally suited to these roles,” a claim which in turn helps to perpetuate the social status quo.11
If anything, “Emanuela” emphasizes the narrator’s painful efforts to prove the truth value of his analysis: “For what was the real truth about her?” (702), he asks not once but repeatedly, subjecting — even though rarely — his own conclusions to a skeptical requestioning: “Or am I misreading you, and are you really moved by something which I cannot feel?” (703). But the text also turns against its author–narrator–analyst by exposing that it is indeed his discourse of truth — his use of sanctified Freudian theory — that not only aids but makes possible the narrator’s dominant position in this relationship. It culminates in several problematic scenes in which he indulges in the fantasy of taking his victim by force. But as he slips into the role of an imaginary rapist, his theory helps him to shift the desire for enforced intercourse from himself to his victim: “Unquestionably, in some errant, repressed and nervous way, she was thinking that I would assail and overcome her, cave-man fashion, and so free her once and for all of her long and possibly, — how should I know — torturing self-restraint” (698).