Comstock profoundly affected the literary world, especially those realistic writers who were daring, increasingly, to write more openly about sex and its consequences. His personal slogan — “Morals, not Art or Literature” — announced baldly that medical publications were not his only targets. In fact, he once “Pronounced foreign literary classics to be more harmful than the crudest pornography. He hammered home his point by attempting to banish the Decameron, Arabian Nights, and Rousseau’s Confessions from the United States.”12 Certainly Dreiser wrote Sister Carrie with an eye tipped toward the forces of Comstock; and in 1911, while he was finishing Jennie Gerhardt, the 1873 Comstock law still prohibited honest literary treatment of sexual issues, as well as open discussion and dissemination of birth control information.
But attitudes were gradually beginning to change. Just around the corner — in 1915 — Sanger and her colleagues would coin the term “birth control.’’13 In addition, writers were gradually managing to slip past the censors, especially, it seems, in magazine articles. The Reader’s Guide to Periodical Literature, which began indexing articles in 1900, provides a wealth of information on the changes taking place in these decades. In Volume 1 (1900–1904) the heading “sex” does appear, but it includes no controversial titles. Instead, the articles deal with rather innocuous gender issues or sex traits in plants. Even by Volume 3 (1910–1914), there is, of course, not yet a subject heading for “birth control,” because the word had still not worked its way into common usage. However, related categories, like “sex (psychology),” “sex determination,” and “sexual hygiene” were proliferating rapidly. The heading “sex instruction” encompasses 65 entries, most dealing with what children should learn about sex and whether they should learn it from their mothers or public school teachers. Many of the 18 entries under “sexual ethics” — articles with titles like “What Is Your Daughter’s Chum Whispering to Her?,” “Sex O’Clock in America,” and “Necessary Evil is Not Necessary” — illustrate how
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controversial these subjects remained, but they also confirm that more open discussion, even in the press, had begun. By Volume 4 of the Reader’s Guide (1915–1918), the added category “birth control” listed 46 articles, many of which used the new term in their titles.14 A perusal of the Reader’s Guide, along with other evidence, helps support the theory of some historians that the sexual revolution (which greatly affected women, probably much more than it did men) did not begin in the 1920s, as conventional wisdom has fixed it, but was already well underway in the teens (Gordon, Woman’s Body 188).
But even considering this slowly changing social climate, Jennie Gerhardt is remarkably forthright, although some of its early reviewers missed the sexual implications. An anonymous reviewer for the New Orleans Times-Democrat wrote, “Let no one turn to ‘Jennie Gerhardt’ with the expectation of finding scenes of passion. The author is essentially reticent in dealing with the great facts of life” (Salzman 73). Admittedly, there are no explicit sex scenes in this novel. Nevertheless, Dreiser does indeed deal with ‘‘the great facts of life.” For one thing, the novel considers Jennie’s pregnancy from a number of angles. The practical and the moralistic realms merge immediately when her father discovers she is pregnant, for his rigid attitude toward her pregnancy cuts her off instantly from her family’s support. Mr. Gerhardt responds in a conventional and predictable way: he labels her a “street-walker” who “has set herself right to go to hell” (84) and that same evening throws her out onto the streets to fend for herself.
No doubt because Dreiser was anxious to prevent the similarly conventional reader from identifying with Mr. Gerhardt, the narrator sardonically explains, “‘Conceived in iniquity and born in sin,’ is the unnatural interpretation put upon the process by the extreme religionist, and the world, by its silence, gives assent to a judgment so marvelously warped” (92). Then, arguing from the evidence of modern science, he continues: “Surely there is something radically wrong in this attitude. The teachings of philosophy and the deductions of biology should find more practical application in the daily reasoning of man. No process is vile, no condition unnatural” (93). Jennie, he points out, is the “helpless victim” of an “unreasoning element of society” which could see nothing but “a vile and premeditated infraction of the social code, the punishment of which was ostracism” (94). So much, Dreiser says, for received morality.
H. L. Mencken, on reading the completed manuscript of Jennie Gerhardt, wrote Dreiser, “If anyone urges you to cut down the book bid that one be damned. … Let it stand as it is.”15 However,
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the terms of Dreiser’s agreement with Harper and Brothers, which first published the novel in 1911, included a stipulation that the publisher would fully revise the manuscript and expurgate what the editors found “offensive,” all at Dreiser’s own expense. And so Ripley Hitchcock, along with his staff, managed to cut 16,000 words from the typescript. James L. W. West III argues that, as a result, “a blunt, carefully documented piece of social analysis” became “a love story merely set against a social background.” In particular, profanity, slang, and references to alcohol disappear, and ‘‘virtually all mention of sex is muted or removed.”16 Thus, in the first edition, some of Dreiser’s commentary about Jennie’s sexuality, including her pregnancy, is lost to the reader.
Nonetheless, despite the censorship, Dreiser does confront openly at least some of the medical and social issues surrounding Jennie’s pregnancy, which instantly completes her transformation into the maternal being which she will remain throughout the novel. She thinks that it is “a wonderful thing to be a mother — even when the family [is] shunned” and “that she would love this child, would be a good mother to it if life permitted” (95–6). Her new worries about “hygiene and diet” send her quickly to Dr. Ellwanger, the family physician, who (despite being a Lutheran) knows the ways of the world. He addresses Mrs. Gerhardt’s fears about social opinion (confirming that the stance of Jennie’s father is an “unnatural interpretation”) and the physical threat to Jennie’s well-being. He says,
“Well, you mustn’t worry. These things happen in more places than you think. If you knew as much about life as I do, and about your neighbors, you would not cry. There are few places I go that there is not something. Your girl will be all right. She is very healthy. She can go away somewhere afterward, and people will never know.” (96)
Jennie listens to the doctor’s “sound and practical advice” with rapt attention, “anxious to do whatever she [is] told,” and readily answers when he probes into the identity of the baby’s father. When she tells him, he answers, “That ought to be a bright baby” (96). At this point the two editions diverge, because an editor at Harper and Brothers deleted some of the exchange. As Dreiser first wrote it (and as the passage appears in the restored text), the doctor also said, “I think it will be a girl,” and the narrator explained, “He was judging by a peculiar conformation of the muscles of the back which at this period was to him an invariable sign. Then the doctor added, ‘You need not worry,’.… ‘You will have an easy time. You are a strong girl’” (96).
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Both versions of this short scene raise crucial questions about the relationship between working-class women and the medical establishment. Perhaps the most obvious ones touch on the competence of the family physician. What kind of doctor is he? Can he indeed predict IQ and gender? Does he really know Jennie will have no trouble with childbirth, or is he merely responding as a man to whom childbirth appears “easy”? Perhaps most intriguing of all, how did Dreiser and the editors who censored the text view the folksy German doctor?
West argues that the scene as it was originally cast paints Dr. Ellwanger as “little more than a practitioner of folk medicine,” more evidence that the Gerhardts are “people trapped by ignorance and poverty, helpless before figures of authority.”17 The attitudes of Jennie and her mother toward the doctor apparently confirm this speculation; for Jennie regards the doctor as if he were a god, and Dr. Ellwanger “preside[s]” over the birth, only ‘‘assisted” by Mrs. Gerhardt, though she has survived childbirth six times and knows “exactly what to do” (97). But given what we know of the medical status quo in the 1880s, when Jennie has her baby, the passage raises other issues as well, among them why a family of the Gerhardts’ position turns to a doctor rather than to a midwife (if, indeed, Mrs. Gerhardt herself is not capable of providing Jennie with prenatal care and attending at her labor).
In “Forgotten Women: American Midwives at the Turn of the Twentieth Century,” Judy Barrett Litoff points out that during this period immigrants and members of the lower classes generally hired midwives to deliver their babies at home, rather than pay a doctor (whose services were much more restricted than a midwife’s, as they often still are) or be confined in a charity hospital. However, most American midwives received little or no training and were not considered reputable practitioners by the native-born middle and upper classes or by the medical establishment.18 By the end of the century a major struggle had evolved between midwives and physicians (almost all male) who specialized in the new field of obstetrics. As Carroll Smith-Rosenberg demonstrates, the male medical profession had fought intensely to take from women the power to regulate all those medical concerns that had in the past been assumed to be characteristically “female” — gynecology and obstetrics, including birth control, abortion, and childbirth.19 On the basis of late-nineteenth century evidence, G. J. Barker-Benfield argues that the rise of gynecology was simply a powerful expression of the male need to control women and that “gynecologists treated their patients as if they were rebels or criminals.”20