It is women who are ultimately nonsacrificial and nonyielding who are allocated negative subject positions in Dreiser’s texts, generally as the cold status-oriented, castrating female, who is judged and condemned by the narrative’s “master” discourse as the ultimately undesirable. Mrs. Hurstwood, whose struggle for independence from her husband is fought with superior strategy and cleverness, can hardly call forth the reader’s admiration, as she is submerged in an imagery of coldness that turns her into a
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money-hungry “python,” who devours her husband, spitting him out (metaphorically) castrated, a half-man. Furthermore, truly promiscuous women who are not necessarily “yielding” — a typical example is Hortense Briggs in An American Tragedy who knows how to “capitalize [on] her looks”27 — are generally presented as cold, calculating, and aggressively exploitative, at best the classical honey trap for the male.
When Clyde Griffiths is sexually initiated in a brothel, the female prostitutes appear through Clyde’s eyes as stereotypical, “scarlet” women, who take the initiative sexually with the ulterior motive of getting at the customer’s money. In striking contrast, the main narrative voice deploys all the registers of sympathy when it comes to male prostitution, as in the case of the bellhops in the Green–Davidson Hotel, who are presented as entrapped victims seduced by the “wiles and smiles and the money’’ of lustful, rich, elderly women and male homosexuals.28
Because the moment of the first sexual contact presents the most intense and titillating interpenetration of sex and power for Dreiser’s male, and because the dominating sexual economy in Dreiser’s works is so obsessively ruled by sanctified male promiscuity which multiplies this magical first moment, it seems to be the pleasure of sexualized power rather than the pleasure of the mutual contact of two bodies that proves most desirable for Dreiser’s males. Dreiser’s males, who are ruled by a penchant for promiscuity, are in fact not interested, occasionally even retreat in horror, from sexually promiscuous women. Falling in love with the young actress Stephanie Platow, Cowperwood immediately abandons her when he learns that she also seeks sexual pleasures with other men, just as Clyde Griffiths, who admittedly longs for a “free pagan girl,” quickly dismisses as vulgar the sexually free Rita Dickerman and the sexually jocular factory women.
In his autobiographical writings, Dreiser, moreover, describes his younger self as not interested in sex when it is given too freely, a confession that is embedded in an indicative language of power: “My conquest was so easy that it detracted from the charm. The weaker sex, in youth at least, has to be sought to be worth while.”29 Indeed, the “sweetly feminine” should be “in no wise aggressive or bold,”30 because a woman who is “too assertive and even aggressive or possessive”31 can easily alienate a man, as she stirs tip deep-seated male fears of impotence, fears that Dreiser dramatizes with an authentic urgency. And conversely, women are enticing when they play the courtship game of “mock-helplessness” and become involved in a “mock-defensive wrestling
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match”32 which not only allays deep-seated male fears, but also increases the male illusion of conquest.
Michel Foucault separates sexual behavior into three parts: “acts,” that is, actual intercourse; “pleasure,” or sexual enjoyment and satisfaction; and “desire,’’ or the sexual yearning which precedes intercourse. Foucault argues that desire has taken center stage in modern Western culture, while the act itself and pleasure have been marginalized: “Acts are not very important, and pleasure — nobody knows what it is!”33 This polemical critique can be applied to most of Dreiser’s texts, and recent Dreiser critics have in fact shifted their focus from a discussion of sexuality to the more specific role of desire in Dreiser’s writing.34 Walter Benn Michaels has argued that for Dreiser Carrie Meeber embodies insatiability, and thus becomes the epitome of desire: “Carrie’s body, infinitely incomplete, is literary and economic, immaterial and material, the body of desire in capitalism.”35 It is her desire that makes Carrie a success story in her society, Michaels argues, while Hurstwood’s body and life disintegrate because he has stopped desiring and only lives to fulfill his basic needs.
Although Michaels’ identification of feminine desire with capitalism may be persuasive, it glosses over the gender configuration of the microcosmic power play that regulates the economy of desire in Sister Carrie. After all, how much is Carrie’s desire her own desire? “Where there is desire, the power relation is already present,” Foucault reminds us,36 while contemporary feminist critics highlight how much women in patriarchal cultures have been taught to “mimic” male desires.37
Very few of Dreiser’s female characters experience a direct, spontaneous desire for sex, or are sexually attracted by the sight or the touch of an attractive male body. Female sexual desire does not exist as such in Dreiser’s writing: it is generally attached to another medium. Emanuela, for example, has a strong interest in art, which the narrator analyzes as a sublimated desire for sex. Carrie’s desire appears to be not for sex but for clothes, but in the novel she has to travel the road of sex — she has to sleep with Drouet and Hurstwood — in order to fulfill her sensualized desire for a nice appearance. Jennie’s desire is the altruistic desire to help her family, but she can only help her family by becoming a sexualized kept woman. And Aileen is primarily in love with Cowperwood’s “powerful spirit” and his social status, not with his body. The effect is that in Dreiser’s fiction every aspect of female life becomes thoroughly sexualized, because every desire can be read as rooted in sex. A woman’s social ambitions, her altruism, her artistic desires, everything becomes sexual, supposedly emanating from
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a sex-filled body, and thus offering numerous angles through which her body may be seduced. As a result, the male can only establish sexual contact with the female body after engaging in the hermeneutical task of reading and interpreting the nature of her desire. Finding the right medium for fulfilling her desire is essential to gain access to her body.
Yet underneath its overt eulogy of desire, Dreiser’s fiction also presents a critique. He emphasizes that Carrie’s desire for beauty and clothes is not her own, but is always already mediated in her society’s power structures. It is usually male lovers who play powerful roles in the “mediation” of female desire, illustrating Foucault’s point that power resides not so much in repression but in pleasurable seduction. Carrie’s body, for example, undergoes a true metamorphosis under the tutelage of Drouet, who sets himself up as “a good judge” and a “teacher’’ for Carrie. He continually points out superior feminine “models,” who indicate that Carrie is “lacking.”38 Carrie imitates the body language and the dressing styles of those women whom Drouet points out to her, thus inscribing on her body not only Drouet’s but also society’s conventional ideals of femininity and perfect beauty.
In contrast to women’s mediated arousal of sexual desire, it is the act of looking at women that arouses spontaneously the male sexual desire and propels “man” forward in his chase for the ultimate sexual “possession.” In Dawn, Dreiser argues that “the form of a woman, and its energizing force is communicated through the eye,” as he makes a case for the “naturality” or the biological basis of the male obsession with gazing at “her form, that mystic geometric formula” that “inflames his passions.”39
“As long as the master’s scopophilia (i.e., love of looking) remains satisfied, his domination is secure,” writes feminist theorist Toril Moi,40 a critique that applies to Dreiser’s work not only because of its obsessive inscription of pleasurable male scopophilia, but also because many of Dreiser’s narratives involve the reader in a duplicitous voyeurism. In “Emanuela,” the narrator repeatedly savors the magical moments of the heroine’s “undressing,” her “slipping out of a heavy, blood-red velvet coat” (684), an act that he celebrates as the pleasurable revelation of the female body underneath, “for me as alluring as ever” (684). In Sister Carrie this voyeuristic pleasure of “undressing” the woman is given a twist in that Drouet enjoys the sensual moments of “dressing” Carrie with new clothing in a department store, moments that already anticipate the future “undressing.”
Dreiser emphasizes that women like Carrie and Jennie no longer “keep their eyes down,” but look back at men and thus
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challenge the social conventions of looking.41 And yet, the play of gazes is a double-edged sword in Dreiser’s fiction that does not lead to the women’s claiming their subject status, but to its opposite. In Sister Carrie, Hurstwood woos Carrie with his eyes in a theater, and she becomes the object of specular penetration when she looks back at him: “Several times their eyes accidentally met, and then there poured into hers such a flood of feeling as she had never before experienced.”42 Standing on the upper landing of a hotel staircase, Senator Brander in Jennie Gerhardt initiates Jennie’s seduction, when she looks up at him from downstairs.43
Dreiser presents another facet of this power play of desire in The Titan (1914), in which Cowperwood’s wife Aileen Butler appears like “a truly beautiful, a vibrating objet d’art,”44 whose beauty is presented to the “spectators’’ of Chicago, the socially prominent who comment and judge her like a representation. Not only does the novel interweave the motifs of sex, art, and power, but to emphasize the notion of the female as “art object” even further, Cowperwood has Aileen’s picture painted “while still young” and in the prime of her beauty. This picture becomes part of his art collection, hung opposite “a particularly brilliant Gérôme, then in the heyday of his exotic popularity — a picture of nude odalisques of the harem, idling beside the highly colored stone marquetry of an oriental bath.”45