At the same time, the narrator becomes obsessed with demonstrating “scientifically” that Emanuela’s “mental opposition” and “muscular rejection” are indeed pathological, uncontrollable bodily reactions. Drawing on Freud’s theory, he reads and writes her as a typical case of pathological frigidity, of desiring sex but having built up a “wall of reserve” (707) against it. She has therefore crossed the boundary into “abnormal” sexual behavior — stubborn sexual resistance. “I think you must be mad [crazy]. In fact, I’m sure you are” (709), he closes his “analysis,” stomping off more like the rejected and disappointed lover than the impassioned psychologist.
Throughout the sketch, the narrator is concerned with supporting his analysis with observable, biological facts. He goes so far as to trace what seems to him nature’s inscription of Emanuela’s “abnormal” psychological history on her body: “in her face was a trace of something — could it be a shadow of grossness? — her repressed emotions or desires at last gaining headway?” (718–9). Further-more, it is not so much that the asexual friendship Emanuela offers
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does not count for much, but according to the narrator-author, a “happy camaraderie” with a woman like Emanuela is biologically impossible for a male:
What nonsense! What lunacy! And I told her so. Men were not like that. I was not. She would not like me that way if I were. She was indulging in some unnatural, hopeless, futile dream. In God’s name, what was all her physical beauty for? (687).
Repeatedly, he demonstrates (with himself as the only example) that discussions about art and literary styles in the presence of her physically “perfect” body are at best boring and pointless for a male, at worst a torture. Thus, biology and psychoanalysis not only serve the narrator–author to inscribe female sexuality in terms of a compulsory heterosexuality, but also to pathologize a behavior that is not in tune with “normalized” sexual behavior.
When Dreiser wrote Sister Carrie (1900), he was not yet familiar with Freudian psychoanalysis. As Ellen Moers points out, Freud’s theory probably became known to Dreiser after 1909, after Abraham Brill — a Dreiser friend from 1918 on — had translated some of Freud’s major writings into English. According to Moers, it was mainly Freud’s Theory of Sex that influenced Dreiser. In that work, Dreiser found the basis for the concept of sexual “chemism” that he uses so obsessively in An American Tragedy to describe the sexual drive.12 Nevertheless, the sketch of ‘‘Emanuela” highlights how much Dreiser’s reading of Freudian psychoanalysis converges with his own private experiences and with what he sees as the basis of life, namely, biology and the laws of nature. The later sketch, in fact, functions as a condensed roman à clef that helps unravel Dreiser’s presuppositions about the psychosexual nature of his earlier heroines.
Above all, the sketch of “Emanuela” draws attention to the problematics and power politics of Dreiser’s tacit assumptions about female sexual passivity, which is also a striking feature of Sister Carrie, Jennie Gerhardt (1911), and An American Tragedy. It draws attention to the intense power play of Dreiser’s euphoric celebration of the inner “magnetism” of the beautiful female body, which the author thematizes in the Cowperwood trilogy and The “Genius” (1915). But even more importantly, the sketch shows the power effects inherent in any claim that a specific sexuality is “normal” or “abnormal,” claims that are made in almost all of Dreiser’s major works, either through overt commentary or through clever manipulation of narrative form.
To discuss Dreiser’s inscription of “normalized” sexuality, let us briefly recall Foucault’s History of Sexuality:
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Thus, in the process of hysterization of women, “sex” was defined in three ways: as that which belongs in common to men and women; as that which belongs par excellence, to men, and hence is lacking in women; but at the same time, as that which by itself constitutes woman’s body, ordering it wholly in terms of the functions of reproduction and keeping it in constant agitation through the effects of that very function.13
Dreiser’s fiction inscribes this sexualization of the female body in different forms. Jennie Gerhardt, An American Tragedy, and The “Genius” explore the problem of unwanted pregnancies, whereby women are shown to be deterministically entrapped within the biological logic of a reproductive womb. Although apparently “undersexed,” Emanuela’s body is shown to be filled with sex, albeit with a “repressed” and thus hidden and concealed sexuality. It surfaces, according to Dreiser’s analysis, in her “mothering’’ of the author–narrator — her cooking for him, her tucking him into bed. In other works, this hysterization appears in sublimated forms. Like Emanuela, all of Dreiser’s major female characters are assumed to be endowed with bodies saturated with sex, so that they cannot escape a sexual destiny. But being saturated with sex in Dreiser’s world does not imply sexual activity for the female, but the contrary. The sex-filled female is a rather static target that prompts the male to move, attracting the males like a honeypot does the buzzing flies.
Not only is Carrie’s sexual initiation with her first lover Charles Drouet described in terms of her “yielding” and his “victory,” but so is Roberta Alden’s with Clyde Griffiths in An American Tragedy, and so is almost every other sexual relationship in Dreiser’s works. “She struggled but in vain,” is how the narrator describes Carrie’s seduction by her second lover, Charles Hurstwood: “Instantly there flamed up in his body the all-compelling desire.”14 The language surrounding the sexual act with Hurstwood is submerged in tropes of male power and dominance. At the same time, it is embedded in a discourse that supports the “normalcy” of this sexuality.
Earlier in the novel when Carrie is even more firmly resisting the middle-aged saloon manager’s advances, her lack of passion for Hurstwood is explained by “a lack of power on his part, a lack of that majesty of passion that sweeps the mind from its seat.”15 This discourse implies that in order to be sexually aroused a woman has to be taken possession of completely, has to be usurped completely, has to be overwhelmed both in spirit and in body.16 In Dreiser’s works, beginning with Sister Carrie, but also
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in An American Tragedy and the Trilogy of Desire, sexual relations almost automatically create relationships of power. The male inevitably dominates the female by imposing a form of sexuality that anticipates the conquering sexuality from which Emanuela retreats with so much horror in the later work.
Emanuela’s stubborn sexual resistance is interpreted as an indicator of her “abnormal” psychological makeup, which provokes the narrator’s irritation, puzzlement, and impotent anger. Its “flip side” — Carrie’s passive acceptance of sexual intercourse — is sanctified by the main narrative voice as having a biological basis, thereby excusing her transgressions against society’s prohibition of premarital sex. Critics have commented that in crucial moments Carrie displays a striking passivity, which seems to absolve her from any responsibility for her actions, a passivity that ultimately protects her ‘‘virtue.”17 This is typically Dreiserian, we might argue, characteristic of both men and women in his fiction. After all, passively wavering, Hurstwood turns into a thief, Clyde Griffiths into a “murderer.” Yet the important difference is that Carrie’s passivity extends mainly into the sexual realm, a realm in which Hurstwood storms ahead with the passionate single-mindedness of the enamored lover.
From the omniscient narrator’s point of view, Carrie is never a subject of the sexual act. Rather, sexuality, apart from being innate and constituting her body, is something that happens to her. The narrator easily accepts this as a “normal” bodily reality, in tune with biology and nature, and ultimately sanctioned by the fact that it is pleasurable for the male. When Drouet invites Hurstwood to his newly established “house,” thus signaling to his friend the fact of his sexual success, Carrie, as Drouet’s kept woman, is only present in the gap of the male characters’ dialogue.18 “I’ll introduce you,” is all Drouet tells Hurstwood about her, while the object of the introduction remains suspended in a linguistic silence, not even given a name but somehow magically attached as a sexual body to Drouet and his “house.”
In this instance, the effect of this gap is that the woman’s sexuality is activated through others; it comes into being and gains a life not by itself, but detached from her own body. It is activated not in the sex act, but in the pleasurable discourse of two males. This conversational gambit, in which Carrie connects the two men through her very absence, occurs significantly in a club that is “for men only,” Chicago’s prestigious Fitzgerald and Moy’s. This reenforces the impression that the woman has no control over her sexuality. In this instance, fe-
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male sexuality is part of a male network, easily conjured up as a gap, a hole to be filled by the male desire which it generates.
And yet, Dreiser’s narrative should not be completely identified with its narrator, as the narrative itself occasionally counters and subverts its omniscient voice, for example, by presenting a second voice that implicitly calls into question the narrator’s comments. For instance, the only passage in the novel where Carrie is portrayed as being a subject of the sexual act is filtered significantly through the mind of a woman, Carrie’s sister Minnie, who dreams during the night of Carrie’s initiation that Carrie is descending into a black pit: