On its publication in 1911, Jennie Gerhardt, Dreiser’s second novel, received this notice in the Washington Evening Star from an anonymous reviewer (who later in the piece identified herself as a woman):
At its close one cries, out of an absorbing urgency to help: “Everyone must read this book!” Then in a minute one settles back. What is the use? Who can help Jennie Gerhardt? No one. Men cannot; their help always hurts. Women will not. In
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10,000 years from now, Mr. Dreiser, when the animosities of sex, mayhap, are somewhat mollified, put out this book again. Then we will see what can be done for your Jennie Gerhardts.3
Two things stand out most distinctly in this review (and in others like it): the writer’s blatant identification of Jennie with her real-life contemporaries — an association that Dreiser himself also made — and her assumptions that the position of these women is all but hopeless and attempts to remedy it futile. The review suggests that women’s history is not merely an embellishment for Dreiser’s readers, but instead an indispensable context if we are to grasp fully either the text or subtext of Jennie Gerhardt. I would in fact argue that, given recent debate about the canon of American literature and the place of “traditional” white male writers within it, we must reevaluate Dreiser’s fiction in the context of the lives of real working-class women in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in order to read and teach his novels effectively.
In Jennie Gerhardt, even more so than in Sister Carrie, Dreiser dramatizes without a shadow of a doubt that for working-class women (both fictional characters like Jennie and real women, such as his own mother and sisters, who served as models for these characters), gender, social class, and sexuality determine economic success or failure. Despite her remarkable intellectual and economic progress, Jennie remains a part (sometimes in subtle ways) of an underclass — defined by her status as an essentially uneducated, unskilled, and underpaid working-class woman from a not yet entirely assimilated immigrant family — from which she cannot ever completely escape. And, ironically, her willingness to exploit the sexuality she exudes in order to escape this underclass (combined with her lack of control over the consequences of her sexual choices) guarantees that she will never quite break loose from it.
Jennie’s social class and her family’s desperate financial straits ensure at least two things: that she must work to live and that the working world will be linked inextricably to her sexual initiation. In fact, from the time her story begins, it is clear that Jennie is a commodity (often sexual merchandise) passed from one “owner” to another. From the time the novel opens with its account of her first paying job — where she and her mother together earn three dollars for three days of back-breaking, demeaning work each week — it is clear that their inadequate wages help determine Jennie’s fate. For just as Sarah Dreiser had supplemented the family income in Sullivan, Indiana, when Dreiser was a child,
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the Gerhardt women begin to take in laundry at the hotel to make ends meet. In the process, Jennie is introduced to George Sylvester Brander, the well-educated, successful U.S. senator who quickly begins a sexual flirtation with her.
Jennie’s job and her ensuing relationship with Brander underscore her value as a commodity. Brander, it seems, is attracted to her mostly because she makes him feel rich, powerful, and even young again (although he is fifty, only seven years younger than Jennie’s father). Very suddenly, apparently unaware of the irony in his choice of words, he claims sexual ownership of Jennie. He tells her, ‘‘You’re my girl anyhow. … I’m going to take care of you in the future.”4 Later, after he has become the family’s benefactor, he tells her mother, “Here is your finest treasure, Mrs. Gerhardt. … I think I’ll take her.” Both his statement and her (also ironic) reply — “Well, I don’t know. … whether I could spare her or not” (38) — make it clear that Jennie is also a commodity to her family, an important component of the family economy which her parents can choose to “sell” or withhold. The family’s desperation and Brander’s generosity combine to convince Mrs. Gerhardt (like Dreiser’s mother, who did the same with his sister Mame) to accept his money and look the other way while Brander seduces her daughter. By the time he decides that he “can’t do without [her]” (48–9), Jennie is a “kept” woman and Brander is supporting the entire Gerhardt family. Although he proposes to marry her and send her away to school (presumably to conceal her until she can be transformed into a member of the rising middle class), Brander dies before he can marry her and just before Jennie discovers she is pregnant.
By allowing Jennie to suffer the natural consequences of her first youthful experience with sex, Dreiser in this novel explores territory barely glimpsed in Sister Carrie. We know, mainly by inference, that Carrie (like Jennie) engages in two long-term sexual relationships. But while writing his first novel, Dreiser censored himself much more stringently, eager to have it published despite the standards of censorship that he knew others would impose on the novel. There is no mention of birth control, and Carrie does not get pregnant or even, apparently, worry that she may.5 But Jennie Gerhardt makes a quantum leap, for Dreiser was willing this time to dramatize realistically what would most likely happen to a young woman in Jennie’s situation. Even with the censorship, this novel reveals Dreiser’s awareness that to women like Jennie — regardless of their wishes — pregnancy is the probable consequence of sex. Dreiser’s ability to imagine and dramatize the full implications of a working woman’s sexuality had advanced
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considerably since his first novel. Here Dreiser acknowledges that, in an age when unhampered access to birth control is still woefully inadequate, women must often pay a high price for their half of the sexual contract.
Dreiser was, indeed, expanding the boundaries of realism. This attempt, I would contend, can be compared to the radical struggle during those same years of Margaret Sanger, a prime mover in the American birth-control movement, who “first presented birth control as a free-speech issue,” insisting that “the most urgent need was to establish the right of birth control advocates to write and speak openly on the subject.”6 In fact, when the First American Birth Control Conference (which Sanger organized) took place in New York in November 1921, Dreiser was sufficiently interested in the topic to be one of the official international sponsors.7
It is easy to understand Dreiser’s reticence in dealing with the same issue in Sister Carrie. When he began his career as a novelist, Dreiser, like most other Americans, especially writers, was well aware of the role that Anthony Comstock and others like him played in the late-nineteenth century politics of authorship. In 1873, maneuvered by Comstock, Congress passed a law that had extensive and long-term ramifications at every level of American society. This most famous of the federal Comstock laws prohibited the mailing of information about contraception, written material about sex, and pornography — all lumped together as ‘‘obscene.” Conviction carried a penalty of six months to five years of “hard labor in the penitentiary,” combined with a fine ranging from one hundred to two thousand dollars.8 Congress subsequently appointed Comstock a special agent of the post office, in which position he diligently enforced the law until his death in 1915. He claimed that in his first six months in this capacity he confiscated “194,000 obscene pictures and photographs, 134,000 pounds of books, 14,200 stereopticon plates, 60,300 ‘rubber articles,’ 5,500 sets of playing cards, and 31,150 boxes of pills and powders, mostly “aphrodisiacs” (and, surely, abortion remedies). He also bragged that he had the power to drive his targets to suicide (fifteen women in all, according to later accounts).9
Of course, because the law criminalized the distribution of pamphlets about sex and birth control as well as contraceptive devices, its greatest impact was on those women (and men) seeking to limit their fertility. The 1873 Act was not overturned until 1938. Only then could contraceptive information be mailed legally in the United States. Even twenty years later, in 1957, Alfred C. Kinsey’s research material on female sexuality was seized by U.S. Customs (although ultimately the courts cleared Kinsey).
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Comstock’s power was so great that Margaret Sanger held him personally responsible for the inability of poor women in the United States to receive contraceptive information, as well as for her own arrest for distributing her book Family Limitation through the mail.10 In fact, when she resigned her position as a public health nurse in order to dispense birth control information full time, doctors warned her that she would not succeed (even if she could locate reliable information, a possibility about which they were skeptical). They told her, “Comstock’ll get you if you don’t watch out.”11