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with the poor, the uneducated, and the unsophisticated. Pizer also suggested “a compensating humanistic value in [the naturalist’s] characters or their fates which affirms the significance of the individual and of his life.”14
We owe an enormous debt to critics such as Donald Pizer, Charles Walcutt, Ellen Moers, and Richard Lehan.15 Without them we might be left with the attempts of a literary establishment (as represented by Trilling’s previously cited essay) to dismiss or suppress a writer who so clearly challenged many of its genteel assumptions about life and art.16 As an early reader of these essays pointed out, the early Dreiserians “defined an inviolate place for Dreiser in American literary history, pointed out his distinctive and distinguishing qualities, the direction of his influence” — in brief, created and sustained a critical interest in Dreiser that is a rationale for this book.
Clearly, at one time, the term “naturalism” was a useful way of letting people perceive certain characteristics of Dreiser’s art and helped to account for some of its impact. But there remains a problem with the term “naturalism.” Dreiser himself mocked the term,17 and recent theorists on literary realism, such as Eric Sundquist and Amy Kaplan, bypass it altogether.18 Walter Benn Michaels does use the term in the title of his powerful, albeit controversial, book, The Gold Standard and the Logic of Naturalism (1987), but importantly, he uses the term, he says, “not to help breathe new life into the old debate over what naturalism is and how exactly it differs from realism,’’ but to map out the historic reality in which this literature finds its place and to identify its set of interests and activities.19 Indeed, he and the other new historicists try to avoid not only that “old debate” but also the assumptions that govern it.
The works of several new critics have led us to look at turn-of-the-century American culture in very different ways. And Dreiser has provided a definitive case study for this scholarship. For these critics, Dreiser’s fiction is a repository of the era’s literary and cultural developments: the spectacle of a consumer culture, of urban aesthetics; theories of bodies, machines, and technology; forms of market culture; and others.20
This surge of interest has brought readers and scholars to look “beyond naturalism” in their approach toward Dreiser. In this collection, for example, the ten essayists offer original interpretations of Dreiser’s works from such disparate points of view as new historicism, poststructuralism, psychoanalysis, feminism, film studies, and canon formation. Indeed, the first six essays concentrate on gender studies and on psychoanalysis, areas that have
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been virtually neglected in Dreiser criticism. Several essays in this group focus on Dreiser’s ambivalent relationships to women in his life and his presentation of them in his fiction. Until now, only a handful of women scholars have written on Dreiser, and scarcely anyone has written on women in Dreiser.21 It is time that women, bringing with them new concerns and an interest in new issues, enter the debate about Dreiser’s work, and I am pleased that among the young generation of critics represented in this book half are women.
The essayists write about Dreiser’s fiction and autobiographical pieces — not only his two autobiographies, but also his diaries and letters. One essay brings new attention to A Gallery of Women (1929), Dreiser’s collection of nonfictional and semifictionalized sketches of his female friends and acquaintances. Two essays consider the new University of Pennsylvania edition of Jennie Gerhardt, which restores some 16,000 words deleted from the first-edition text printed in 1911 by Harper and Brothers. Although most of his novels are discussed at length, Sister Carrie and An American Tragedy are referred to by almost every essayist in large part because they are Dreiser’s most popular works. An American Tragedy was his only bestseller, and Sister Carrie is still required reading in colleges around the world. It seems appropriate that essays in this volume, which introduces Dreiser in new ways, focus on the books that readers know and feel they are familiar with. But all of these essays will surprise, intrigue, and disturb readers who have reached foregone conclusions about Dreiser and his art.
These essays make Dreiser harder to pigeonhole and harder to define. In fact the major significance of this collection is that despite this elusiveness the scholars presented here are beginning to understand the complexity of his vision and the largeness of his landscape, and they are able to establish connections that reveal his strengths as well as his weaknesses. In one fashion or another, all the essayists discuss paradoxes in Dreiser’s life and work in the context of modern cultural criticism; in so doing, they raise new questions about enduring aspects of his art. The first four essays discuss Dreiser in relation to feminism, men’s studies, and poststructuralism. In the lead essay, “Dreiser and the Discourse of Gender,” Shelley Fisher Fishkin explores Dreiser’s attitude toward women and the extent to which he represents the contradictions in the culture of his day. Irene Gammel in “Sexualizing the Female Body” takes a similar stand. Despite the undeniable truth that Dreiser firmly established sex as a discursive fact in modern American fiction, this deconstructive essay undermines the perception that Dreiser waved the banner
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of sexual liberation in his battle against American literary “puritanism.”
Viewing Dreiser from an opposing position, Nancy Warren Barrineau in her essay, “Recontextualizing Dreiser,” uses the University of Pennsylvania edition of Jennie Gerhardt to argue that Dreiser’s novel is radical in its historical veracity about working-class women’s difficulties at the turn of the century. Scott Zaluda also defends Dreiser’s gender presentations in “Secrets of Fraternity.’’ Zaluda focuses on what he perceives as Dreiser’s uneasiness with the dominant male ethos and men’s social power in late nineteenth-century America.
The next two essays discuss Dreiser’s fiction in relation to psychoanalysis. Surprisingly few psychoanalytical essays have been published on Dreiser’s fiction, yet Dreiser would seem to invite such readings. As Saul Bellow astutely commented years ago, more than most authors, Dreiser invites such readings because “Dreiser has more open access to primary feelings than any American writer of the twentieth century.”22 My essay, “‘That oldest boy don’t wanta be here,’” analyzes the emotional polarities of shame and pride that dominate much of Dreiser’s fiction. In another essay, “Lacanian Equivocation in Sister Carrie, The “Genius,” and An American Tragedy,” Leonard Cassuto applies the psychoanalytic theories of Jacques Lacan to analyze the contradictory wants and alienations of some of Dreiser’s major characters.
Paul Orlov’s “On Language and the Quest for Self-Fulfillment” allies Dreiser’s thinking with the philosophy of Martin Heidegger. The similarities Orlov discerns expose misconceptions in the traditional view of Dreiser, expanding his purely naturalistic worldview, while affirming his fictional artistry and his strengths as a thinker.
Lawrence Hussman discusses Dreiser’s paradoxical relation to popular culture in his essay, “Squandered Possibilities: The Film Versions of Dreiser’s Novels.” Hussman notes that many of Dreiser’s novels have been adapted by some of the world’s most illustrious directors — Sergei Eisenstein, Joseph yon Sternberg, William Wyler, George Stevens. But Hussman questions why the results have never matched the complexity of vision of the source texts, even though something approaching that complexity is attainable in cinema.
The final essays concentrate on Sister Carrie from generic, new historic, and modern philosophical perspectives “beyond naturalism.” In “Carrie’s Library,” M. H. Dunlop defines the differences between popular and serious fiction. She focuses on a seemingly minute but extremely significant contradiction in the references to
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popular novels in two different editions of Sister Carrie (Norton, 1970; University of Pennsylvania Press, 1981).
The collection culminates with James Livingston’s “Sister Carrie’s Absent Causes.” His essay addresses yet another paradox in Dreiser’s novel: Why Dreiser situated a realistic style within the apparently archaic form of romance. Livingston’s response reveals important aspects of modern American consumer culture.
The many disparate approaches in this collection reflect the reality of a richly multilayered Theodore Dreiser. By definition paradox suggests views that contradict each other but which contain truth. It is clearly possible to view all of the different and sometimes contradictory perspectives offered by these essays as true and at the same time reflective of each other, thus creating a better picture of Dreiser as a whole. These essayists show that it is possible to view Dreiser from such vastly different angles that a new Dreiser emerges, one of extraordinary depth and complexity, one who not only goes “beyond naturalism” but who clearly has all the enduring qualities of a classic American writer.
Notes
1. The controversy that surrounded Dreiser began with his first novel, Sister Carrie, in 1900, and includes The “Genius,” in 1915, whose banning was protested by almost five hundred American writers. An American Tragedy was barred in Boston in 1927 along with a number of other books. In protest, an anticensorship rally was held, and Margaret Sanger appeared with her mouth taped shut in a gesture of opposition against the city’s ban on birth control. The rally drew much newspaper coverage, and the participants were portrayed as advocates of ‘‘dirty” books. See Richard Lingeman, Theodore Dreiser: An American Journey, 1908–1945 (New York: Putnam’s Sons, 1990), pp. 138–9, 141, 288, 321–2.