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Finally, like the narrator–author of “Emanuela,” most of Dreiser’s fictional narrators and most of his male characters not only celebrate but claim as their right the disruption of sexual conventions. At the same time, they claim to speak the “truth” of sex, a truth that promises to liberate the body from repressive social constraints. And yet, for most of the female characters, this celebrated sexual liberation is an illusion, as their bodies and sexualities are evoked only in terms of a goal that prompts the males to impose their own sexualities and to search in women’s bodies for what D. H. Lawrence — another problematic sexual “liberator’’ — has described as the “bedrock” of her nature. Insisting on imposing the norms of what they claim to be a “normal” sexuality, Dreiser’s narrators and male characters elevate their own male sexuality to the “true” standard, which not only erases any notion of a woman’s sexuality but also marginalizes female sexual activity into the “abnormal.” To a large extent Dreiser’s fiction affirms, even celebrates, this masculine sexuality, as it affirms the Don Juan philosophy of most of its male characters with all its misogynistic implications.
And yet, what makes Dreiser’s fiction rewarding — even from a feminist perspective — is that it simultaneously exposes the gender bias, the duplicity, and the arbitrary power politics of its male characters and narrators. Dreiser’s writing is full of contradictions and tensions between the male narrators’ omniscient voices on the one hand and the erupting female voices on the other; between the narrators’ rejection of conventions and their embracing of biological normality; between the female characters’ claims for independence and their subjection to male sexual conquests. It is the internal contradictions and tensions of the texts that inevitably expose the inherent gender bias, and thus the texts themselves partly critique their narrators’ misogyny from within.
Not only are our sympathies drawn to “Emanuela” we cannot help but admire her apparently Quixotic resistance against “normalization.” Yet through Emanuela, we also witness the tragic fact that it is “normalization” that triumphs in the end. As a mature woman, Emanuela confesses to the narrator: “I should have married or given myself to you” (721), a confession that stands out as a sad reminder that she has “failed” to become sexually “normalized” and pays the price in human isolation, once her “beautiful” body of eighteen has metamorphosed into mature womanhood. Still, the narrator ends his sketch on a deliberately ambiguous note: “It may be that she is dead — although I doubt it” (721). He does not dare close the door completely, and thus there remains a slim chance that Emanuela may have discovered
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a new life, a life that is, however, far beyond the narrator’s realm and imagination, a life that he is not capable of writing and that is therefore relegated into the gaps of his text.
Notes
1. Philip Fisher, Hard Facts: Setting and Form in the American Novel (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), pp. 165–6.
2. Leslie Fiedler, “Dreiser and the Sentimental Novel,” in Dreiser. A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. John Lydenberg (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1971), p. 47.
3. Charles Glicksberg, The Sexual Revolution in Modern American Literature (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1971), p. 35.
4. Alfred Kazin, “Introduction,” Sister Carrie by Theodore Dreiser (New York: Penguin American Library, 1983), p. ix.
5. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, vol. 1, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage, 1980), p. 20.
6. For a theorizing of this fruitful intersection of Foucault’s and feminist theories, see especially Chris Weedon, Feminist Practice and Poststructuralist Theory (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1987), pp. 107–35, as well as the collection of essays edited by Irene Diamond and Lee Quinby, Feminism and Foucault: Strategies for Resistance (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1988). For a feminist argument against the linkage of feminism with Foucault’s philosophy, see Nancy Hartsock, “Foucault on Power: A Theory for Women?’’ in Feminism/Postmodernism, ed. and intro. Linda Nicholson (New York: Routledge, 1990), pp. 157–75.
7. Theodore Dreiser, “Emanuela,” in A Gallery of Women, vol. 2 (New York: Horace Liveright, 1929), p. 683. Further references will appear parenthetically in the text.
8. I do not mean to suggest that the narrator’s reading of Emanuela and Freud’s theory are identical, as the narrator occasionally misreads Freud as much as he misreads Emanuela. Nevertheless, Kate Millett has criticized Sigmund Freud for accepting female frigidity to some degree as evidence of women’s lesser libidinal energy, and she has criticized him for suggesting that frigidity may be partially rooted in the “organic,” in Sexual Politics (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1970), p. 194.
9. Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, trans. and ed. H. M. Parshley (New York: Vintage, 1974), p. 439.
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10. Weedon, Feminist Practice, p. 128.
11. Weedon, Feminist Practice, p. 128.
12. Ellen Moers, Two Dreisers (New York: Viking, 1969), pp. 262–3.
13. Foucault, History of Sexuality, p. 153.
14. Theodore Dreiser, Sister Carrie (New York: Modern Library, n.d.), p. 307.
15. Dreiser, Sister Carrie, p. 241.
16. Although the unexpurgated edition is sexually more explicit and daring (Carrie and Hurstwood for example make love before they are married), the sexual roles are not essentially different from the 1900 edition of Sister Carrie.
17. For a discussion of Carrie’s moral ambiguity, see Terence J. Matheson, “The Two Faces of Sister Carrie: The Characterization of Dreiser’s First Heroine,” Ariel 11 (October 1980): 71–85.
18. Dreiser, Sister Carrie, p. 91.
19. Dreiser, Sister Carrie, pp. 89–90.
20. See Joseph Church’s discussion of Minnie’s dream as a reflection of her “own frustrated desires,” in “Minnie’s Dreams in Sister Carrie,’’ College Literature 14 (1987): 184.
21. Dreiser, Sister Carrie, p. 101.
22. Theodore Dreiser, An American Tragedy (New York: New American Library, 1981), p. 344.
23. Dreiser, Sister Carrie, p. 101.
24. Theodore Dreiser, A Book about Myself, His Autobiography 2: Newspaper Days (Greenwich, Conn.: Fawcett, 1965), p. 272.
25. Theodore Dreiser, Dawn, His Autobiography 1: The Early Years (Greenwich, Conn.: Fawcett, 1965), p. 509.
26. Dreiser, A Book about Myself, p. 272.
27. Dreiser, An American Tragedy, p. 102.
28. Dreiser, An American Tragedy, p. 49.
29. Dreiser, Myself, p. 280.
30. Dreiser, Myself, p. 26.
31. Dreiser, Dawn, p. 224.
32. Dreiser, Dawn, p. 225.
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33. Michel Foucault, “Afterword (1983): On the Genealogy of Ethics: An Overview of Work in Progress,” in Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics by Hubert L. Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), p. 243.
34. See Walter Benn Michaels, “Sister Carrie’s Popular Economy,” Critical Inquiry 7 (Winter 1980): 373–90; Lawrence E. Hussman, Dreiser and His Fiction: A Twentieth-Century Quest (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1983); June Howard, Form and History in American Literary Naturalism (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1985); Fred G. See, Desire and the Sign (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1987).
35. Walter Benn Michaels, ‘‘Critical Response III. Fictitious Dealing: A Reply to Leo Bersani,” Critical Inquiry 8 (Autumn 1981): 165–71.
36. Foucault, History of Sexuality, p. 81.
37. See especially Luce Irigaray’s argument that women play at experiencing a desire which is really not theirs: “Elles s’y retrouvent, proverbialement, dans la mascarade. Les psychanalystes disent que la mascarade correspond au désir de la femme. Cela me parait pas juste. Je pense qu’il faut l’entendre comme ce que les femmes font pour recuperer quelque du chose désir, pour participer au désir de I’homme, mais au prix de renoncer au leur. Dans la mascarade elles se soumettent a l’économie dominante du désir,” Ce sexe qui n’en est pas un (Paris: Les Editions de Minuit, 1977), p. 131.
38. See Dreiser, Sister Carrie, p. 112.
39. Dreiser, Dawn, p. 409.
40. Toril Moi, Sexual/Textual Politics: Feminist Literary Theory (London and New York: Methuen, 1985), p. 134.
41. On reciprocal looking in Sister Carrie, see also June Howard, Form and History, pp. 149–51.
42. Dreiser, Sister Canie, p. 121.
43. Dreiser, Jennie Gerhardt (Cleveland: Dell Publishing, 1963), p. 20. Also, in the Trilogy of Desire Dreiser stresses Cowperwood’s “magnetic” eyes in the seduction of women, just as Clyde in An American Tragedy seduces women with his sensitive gaze.
44. Theodore Dreiser, The Titan, Trilogy of Desire, vol. 2 (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1974), p. 36.
45. Dreiser, The Titan, p. 68.
46. Theodore Dreiser, The “Genius,” (New York: John Lane Company,
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1915), p. 296.
47. Dreiser, The “Genius,” p. 542.
48. “Eugene,” ‘‘Geni” and “genius” are etymologically linked to Latin gigno, genui, genitum, which means to beget, to bring forth, to produce.
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Recontextualizing Dreiser:
Gender, Class, and Sexuality in Jennie Gerhardt1
Nancy Warner Barrineau
Theodore Dreiser has not often been labeled a feminist, and I do not intend here to claim this designation for him. When it comes to honest, realistic treatment of American women, there is admittedly much that a late twentieth-century critic (especially a feminist) might wish to see in his work which is plainly beyond its scope. For instance, lesbians and women of color are all but invisible in Dreiser’s fictional world, as they were, in essence, in his social world. But Dreiser’s major novels do offer a vital portrayal of the world of white heterosexual women of the laboring classes, that group of women dubbed “working girls” by their real-life contemporaries, a group until then severely underrepresented in American fiction. Even here, Dreiser is not polemic, and he does not hammer home a thesis. In fact, his presentation of “women’s issues” mirrors what critics have always recognized about his work: it is, in the words of Stanley Fish, not a “rhetorical’’ but a “dialectical presentation,” one that stimulates its readers to provide their own conclusions rather than offering them a clear synthesis.2 Nonetheless, Dreiser’s willingness to represent this much of the spectrum of American women’s lives should stimulate us to refocus our attention on issues that his books raise but that our readings usually leave submerged.