There was a deep pit, into which they were looking; they could see the curious wet stones far down where the wall disappeared in vague shadows. An old basket, used for descending, was hanging there, fastened by a worn rope.
“Let’s get in,” said Carrie.
“Oh, no,” said Minnie.
“Yes, come on,’’ said Carrie.
She began to pull the basket over, and now, in spite of all protest, she had swung over and was going down.19
This dream takes the place of a description of the sexual act itself.20 In her sister’s eyes, Carrie is not only sexually active, but even invites Minnie to join her. The narrator, in contrast, wishes to absolve Carrie of any responsibility for her action, as he surrounds her sexuality with a deliberate discourse of passivity and determinism.
And so does the author, who is partly complicitous with his narrator. After all, Minnie’s dream is filtered through the mind of a woman who has been set up earlier as thoroughly “conventional.” This is a clever authorial manipulation, as it quickly disqualifies Minnie as an “unreliable” narrative “consciousness” when it comes to judging Carrie’s “unconventional” sexual actions. And yet, by presenting this “second” voice as subconscious — it is the voice of Minnie’s dream – and by presenting it as female, Dreiser inevitably creates a classical discourse of the other, a discourse that not only speaks of female sexual activity, but that also erupts into and thoroughly disrupts the narrative’s male, rational monologue, a voice that speaks of the normality of female sexual passivity.
By contradicting the narrator’s voice, Dreiser’s text implicitly questions the “normalized” standard of female sexual passivity. Also, the fact that Dreiser chooses as his protagonist a female character who moves from one sexual relationship to the next,
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apparently planning to “give up” sexual contacts when she becomes rich, is an obvious critique of the sexual practices that the narrator presents as “normal.” If anything, the narrative implicitly exposes the fact that these “normal” sexual practices are not satisfying for women, although they appear to be highly pleasurable for men. Thus the narrative’s critique of “normalized” sexual practices is mainly inscribed into the margins of the text, with a contradictory voice erupting occasionally to ‘‘poke holes” in the dominating male narrative voice.
The male narrator strongly manipulates the reader’s responses, and yet cannot help but reveal his own gender bias in the process. Although the narrators in Sister Carrie and “Emanuela” profess to argue against the sexual “conventions” of their society, much of their discourse in fact affirms a conventional gender-specific sexual behavior. Given the early heroine’s involuntary slippage into sex and the notion that Emanuela’s body needs not so much to act in order to be “freed” but to be acted upon by a male in order to connect with life, it is not astonishing that most of Dreiser’s fictional women are described as sexually passive creatures. If sex in Dreiser’s fictional world is an inevitable factor in the constitution of a healthy body and an inseparable part of a person’s subjectivity, then the Dreiserian sexual economy is also ruled by a gender-based “equation inevitable,” a calculation of gain and loss, of power and impotence, which shifts the credit/power balance between male and female to the male side through the fact of the sexual initiation.
As the narrator–author is obsessed with Emanuela’s virginal state, so the moment of sexual initiation, in every novel ritually delayed and endowed with a titillating suspension, takes on a special significance all the more important as the sexual act itself is usually relegated into the gaps of the text and thus silenced. As a female has the power to hold the male in a powerful suspension before the sexual initiation — we only need to recall the melancholic, masochistic yearnings of Clyde for Roberta, of Eugene for Angela, of Cowperwood for Berenice — so the sexual initiation in Dreiser’s texts inevitably reverses the relationship of power between male and female. This pattern explains the narrator’s helpless and frustrated anger at Emanuela, who, by successfully and eternally delaying the sexual contact, never allows him to place her on the “debit” side of the equation.
In Dreiser’s sexual world, women inevitably lose by “giving” themselves to a partner, while the man wins: “how delicious is my conquest,” is Drouet’s reaction, while Carrie reflects, “What is it I have lost?,” after the first sexual contact has been established.21
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Similarly, in An American Tragedy, Clyde Griffiths’ sense of self grows as a result of his seduction of the factory worker Roberta; from a “simpleton” he turns into a conquering Don Juan in his own (and her) eyes, and thus becomes capable of even grander tasks and ready for the sexual conquest of rich women, the Sondra Finchleys of this world. Roberta, in contrast, feels she has given him “everything” and as a result further belittles herself in his eyes and flatters him, since her future depends on “her ultimate rehabilitation via marriage.’’22
Thus it is the first sexual contact which not so much introduces but reverses a gender imbalance “always already” present in Dreiser’s sexual world. Granted, the narrator in Sister Carrie is careful to link this phenomenon critically to society’s “arbitrary” sexual convention,23 but the fact remains that the narrator simultaneously eulogizes precisely those sexual courtship patterns that grow out of society’s prohibitions. In Dreiser’s narratives, it is in the crucial moment of the conquest of the female that the man is born into “masculinity,” and in which ideal “femininity” is constituted as passive, yielding and sacrificial, based on a biological body that is presumed to be ruled by the economy of the gift, the womb that accepts and nourishes.
As Dreiser argues in his autobiography, A Book about Myself (1922), the female tends to be more monogamous, and hence more “moral” and conventional than the male. The monogamous standard is linked to what the autobiographer Dreiser interestingly qualifies not as a law of nature but as the societal convention of the propagation of the race, a convention that Dreiser rejects in his life, but to which women, through their reproductive roles, are more strongly attached.24 Dreiser’s fiction and nonfiction are not only saturated with the narrators’ tirades against marriage, an institution that entraps and enchains the male, they are also saturated with dramatizations of powerful female sexual monogamy, an obsessive attachment of the woman to one male. This often takes the form of an almost psychological fixation, but it also turns the women into powerfully resisting creatures, paradoxically without seriously subverting the ideal of the sacrificial female.
We recall the intimidating effect of Aileen’s physical fight against one of Cowperwood’s mistresses, as we recall the strength and nagging passion of Angela, which impresses the unfaithful Eugene not a little, and we recall the superior strength of the pregnant Roberta, who firmly demands that Clyde marry her when she becomes pregnant. The women’s strength, partly based on the pressures of social conventions, is also attached to a psychological bond’ by “giving” themselves to their partners, these women
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have given up “everything,” so that their “gift” in fact attaches them sexually and emotionally to one man, with whose body they have come to establish a symbiotic relationship. Dreiser excels at dramatizing the helpless pathos of, and in fact his sympathy with, these women who are attached in a slave–master dependency to husbands and lovers who yearn to desert them for other women.
In contrast to women, Dreiser argues in the autobiography of his early years, Dawn (1931), “men [are] at heart apparently varietists.”25 In the life of a male the ‘‘monogamous standard” is “entirely wrong,”26 he argues, which inevitably entails the “law” of gender conflict, given the penchant for “female monogamy.” The sexual reality principle of sensual peace that Aileen, Roberta, and Jennie offer to their lovers cannot sustain the early ecstasy so cherished by Dreiser’s male, an ecstasy that dies with “real” sexual contact, when the supreme fantasy of desire dies in the reality of pleasurable sexual satisfaction. What keeps men such as Cowperwood and Witla from breaking with their wives is the consciousness of the women’s ultimate “gift,” which attaches the men through a chain of guilt, although one also has to wonder whether these men are not as much attached through the (never really acknowledged) motherly services and home that these women offer.
Dreiser presents the complementary “flip side” of such monogamous female attachment in Emanuela and Carrie Meeber. These women are not attached to any man but, unlike the monogamously bound female, they are desired by all men and have the gift of “eternally” arousing anew the male desire. Although the male’s interest in the truly sensual woman is bound to die in the sexual contact, the body of the eternally tempting, yet sexually aloof, woman holds Dreiser’s male forever in ecstatic suspension. Even though the narrator-author of “Emanuela” is no longer interested in his aging friend, her sexual elusiveness inscribes itself forever in his memory, as she continues to preoccupy him as a “temperament and a life that cannot be driven from one’s mind” (662). Similarly, the mature Carrie, weary of men’s advances, seems almost timelessly desirable in her lethargic and unreachable sexual aloofness as a famous Broadway actress.