Gérôme’s nudes are a very apt mirror image of Aileen’s picture as well as the real Aileen. (The picture also evokes Carrie, who, in one of her roles, parades on the stage as a harem girl.) Just as Gérôme’s harem suggests a potential cornucopia of sex for the male potentate, so its complementary mirror image, the picture of Aileen, celebrates sexual vitality and draws a whole number of male spectators. They dream of sexual pleasure with her, but are simultaneously made conscious of the “lack” of this pleasure in their own lives; they are “chained” into “conventional” relationships with “cold” and “possessive” wives.
The juxtaposition of the two visual representations in the same gallery — of Aileen and the harem — work together to draw attention to what is really absent in both pictures: the male as owner of the picture as well as “master” over the female body. Cowperwood triumphs over all of the male spectators, who are aware that he is the only one to have access to the beautiful body they admire in the picture. As the owner of the gallery, Cowperwood presents himself as a lover of beauty. At the same time, his role as a powerful master–accumulator–owner is inscribed in the gaps of the representations he owns.
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But The Titan also draws attention to the danger of being the center of a representation, as Aileen is in the beginning of the novel. After Cowperwood’s first social event in Michigan Avenue, in which Aileen is offered as the representational “centerpiece,” it is in fact Aileen who is dismissed by Chicago society as “too showy” and “vulgar.” The Cowperwoods’ social failure is repeatedly attributed to Aileen; she is sacrificed not only by the socially prominent in Chicago but also by Cowperwood, who distances himself from her.
Whereas Aileen is dismissed by conventional society, Carrie is the ultimate triumph as an art object, albeit through the authorial manipulation of filtering her stage acting exclusively through the gaze of yearning male spectators. Acting on the amateur and professional stage, Carrie’s success is not so much explained by her outstanding artistic performances, but by the fact that she is an art object into which can be read any desire, all the better as she is not monogamously attached to anyone, as is Aileen. As Carrie and Aileen are turned into sexualized art objects, so the sketch of “Emanuela” is characterized by Dreiser’s mythologizing of the beauty of his loved-one, of evoking her so blatantly in terms of Greek goddesses and other idealized images that Emanuela is thoroughly transformed into a fictional creature. In front of our eyes, she becomes a product of the artist’s mind, a fiction of beauty rather than a creature of flesh and blood, an art object, rather than the artist she yearns to be.
This Pygmalion motif is most clearly thematized (and satirized) in The ‘‘Genius” (1915), the novel about the rise and fall and subsequent rise of the artist–painter Eugene Witla. His self-confessed ideal of feminine beauty is the woman at eighteen, an ideal he supports with century-old social practices as proof of the naturality of such male desire: “That was the standard, and the history of the world proved it”46 The last third of The “Genius” focuses on Eugene’s love for what he perceives to be his ultimate ideal, Suzanne Dale, who is half his age and who is willing to (but never does) give herself to him with no marriage chains attached, the ultimate “gift” of the female to the male in Dreiser’s fiction. “You changed me, made me over into the artist again,” he exclaims enthusiastically.47
But when Eugene celebrates the “pathos of [Suzanne’s] voicelessness,” the reader realizes the irony and the power play of a relationship in which a middle-aged man reads his own dreams and ideals into her blank smile. Suzanne constitutes an intense energy, which she offers as a “gift” to be formed and rewritten by the artist–Pygmalion Eugene. The power play becomes most evi-
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dent when Eugene — eulogizing change, activity, movement in his own life and art — expects Suzanne not to change. When she does and turns away from him, she stirs up deep aggressions in Eugene. She is cast out of his life like an evil witch, but his memory of her is transformed into art, leaving traces in his paintings.
This is the same movement that Dreiser enacts in the sketch of “Emanuela,” in which the woman, after having been cast out of his life, is transformed into art, whereby her name, turned into the title of his artistic production, becomes an integral part of the “Gallery of Women” he has created and owns. It is interesting that the narrator–author writes about Emanuela after her beauty has faded and after the “real” woman has “died’’ in his life. There is no doubt that the narrator’s friendship has ended with the fading of Emanuela’s physical charms: “But from that day to this I have never seen nor heard of Emanuela. It may be that she is dead — although I doubt it” (721).
Emanuela’s figurative “death” in the narrator’s life is important. In Dreiser’s fictional world, creation and life are almost inevitably linked to sacrifice and death. Through the eyes of the male protagonists (and the narrators), Angela and Aileen appear to be aging and fading quickly. This prompts Eugene and Cowperwood to cast them aside and to “replenish” their own youth and creativity in new relationships with younger women. In The “Genius,” Angela’s birthgiving, the dramatic climax of the novel and the archetypal image of female production, ends in Angela’s death, thus setting the artist free from the yoke of marriage. We recall the death of the pregnant Roberta as well as the fact that Jennie’s child Vesta dies and that Lillian’s children from Cowperwood are relegated into the margins of the text, their existence silenced, so that we almost forget that they were ever born.
Indeed, in Dreiser’s world the female’s role as productive and creative icon has been usurped by the male. In The “Genius,” the female is sacrificed and displaced as “producer” by the male artist, as Eugene carries his destiny as “producer” even in his name and the epithet, the “genius.”48 Despite Dreiser’s distance from Eugene — he deliberately puts the “genius” in quotation marks — the sexual economy celebrated by the narrator makes it almost impossible for female characters to be artists. Granted, the singer Christina Channing in The “Genius” is a successful artist with her own reverse philosophy of promiscuity, but the fact remains that she is present in the narrative only to be sexually initiated by Eugene, after which she conveniently disappears from the text.
Moreover, the sketch of “Ellen Adams Wrynn” in A Gallery of Women presents a woman painter with promising talent but who,
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monogamously attached to a painter-lover who cannot live with her competition, is no longer capable of painting after her lover leaves her. Her artist’s career disintegrates into nothingness, while her former lover, promiscuously happy, establishes himself as a successful painter. Although Dreiser’s sympathies in this sketch are without doubt with the woman–painter, he seems to struggle with the same problem of a woman’s artistic competition in the sketch of “Emanuela.” As the narrator–author of the sketch, Dreiser appears to be driven by an obsession to reestablish his power over a woman who not only rejects him sexually, but who has been more successful as a young writer than he was.
Grudgingly acquiescing that Emanuela is a successful popular writer and, as an editor, even publishing her stories in his magazine, he nevertheless ridicules her writing as “conservative” and “conventional.” Infuriated that she should criticize his novels, it is indeed with sadistic pleasure that the narrator insists on convincing the reader of his aging friend’s bodily disintegration, which is accompanied by her creative stagnation. The latter is inevitable because she has “never functioned properly as a woman” (719). He would like to see himself as the initiator of Emanuela into true art — not by discussing art with her on an intellectual level, but by initiating her into sexuality, thus establishing her contact with “real life’’ and giving birth to her capacity to reproduce life in literature. Yet the fact remains that, given the narrator’s understanding of sexual economy, sexual contact with Emanuela would give him a double, albeit a somewhat paradoxical, advantage: that of becoming a midwife in her artistic career and of awakening in her the monogamously yielding woman, that sacrificial spirit which she lacks, but which would most certainly kill her as an artist, as it does in the case of Ellen Adams Wrynn.
Alas, in the sketch of “Emanuela,” the narrator’s sexual success is thwarted, which means, however, that he has only lost a sexual battle, not the war. With the support of Freud’s theoretical weapons, he is eventually in a position to pronounce his “victory.” When Emanuela, as a mature and no longer “beautiful” woman, turns to him for help in an artistic and personal crisis, he pronounces a vindictive judgment on her whole life: “Emanuela, you have never really expressed yourself as a woman, and so you do not know men and women or life” (719). The fact that Emanuela refused to be sexually active “castrates” her as an artist in his eyes. Only through the experience of sex might Emanuela have “better understood life, acquired that grip on reality which would have vitalized the literary or narrative gift that she had” (720), even though sex for her would have to involve a submission to rape.