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This struggle may explain why the Gerhardts turn to a family doctor rather than to a midwife.
That the Gerhardts’ doctor is Dr. Ellwanger, rather than a different kind of doctor, also makes sense in historical context; for a parallel struggle between “regular” doctors and those who practiced folk medicine — the “homeopaths, hydropaths, eclectics, [and] the large number of rural-born physicians who remained marginal to the world of urban medical schools and medical societies” (that is, the “irregulars”) — was also taking place in the late-nineteenth century. The “regulars” gradually won this battle with the passage of medical licensure laws by individual states (Smith-Rosenberg 228–33; Gordon, Woman’s Body 159). Traditionally, however, most Americans of the Gerhardts’ (and Dreiser’s) social stratum had turned to the ‘‘irregulars,” and Dr. Ellwanger is no doubt this kind of doctor.
Perhaps, as West argues, Dr. Ellwanger does represent the exclusion of the Gerhardts — especially the women of the family — from the structures of social power. But since he is clearly an “irregular” physician, himself excluded by the powerful medical establishment, he may really be their ally. And just perhaps, despite the disclaimers of the “regular” physicians, he knows what he is talking about. After all, Jennie does give birth — with no complications — to an intelligent girl. His assumption about the child’s IQ is based on a theory of heredity firmly ingrained in the nineteenth century: that “the father was responsible for a child’s external musculature and skeletal development, the mother for the internal viscera, the father for analytical abilities, the mother for emotions and piety.”21 Even with the excised sentences restored, the conflicting strands of evidence make it difficult to identify conclusively Dreiser’s attitude toward Dr. Ellwanger,22 especially because Ellwanger’s theories were not limited to folk practitioners but were probably shared by the “regulars” and by Dreiser himself. But what Dreiser preserves for us is a lively cultural debate (still unresolved more than eighty years later) about the relationship between women’s health issues, including reproduction, and the medical establishment.
A vast textual gap lies between this scene with Dr. Ellwanger, which takes place early in Jennie’s pregnancy, and the next major scene, when her child is born. Most significantly, the novel all but ignores the physical realities of Jennie’s pregnancy or the work she performs during it. Dreiser tells us only that
Going about her household duties, she was content to await without murmur the fulfillment of that process for which, after
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all, she was but the sacrificial implement. When her duties were lightest, she was content to sit in quiet meditation, the marvel of life holding her as in a trance. When she was heaviest pressed to aid her mother, she would sometimes feel herself quietly singing, the pleasure of work lifting her out of herself. (94–5)
We learn of the “many things to be done” to prepare for the baby: “clothes to be made, secrecy to be observed, care in her personal conduct of hygiene and diet observed” (96), but somehow Dreiser fails to convince me that he has fully visualized Jennie’s pregnancy.
The description of Jennie’s labor, limited to a single paragraph, is similarly censored by the author. Glossing over the dangers and pain of childbirth, still very real in the 1880s, Dreiser writes, “the child was ushered into the world” (96–7) —a rather euphemistic way to describe a passive childbirth. Then, abruptly, the scene shifts to Jennie’s relationship with her baby:
There was no difficulty, and at the first cry of the new-born infant, which came with its appearance, there awakened in Jennie a tremendous yearning toward it which covered all phases of her responsibility. This was her child! It was weak and feeble — a little girl, as Dr. Ellwanger had predicted, and it needed her care. She took it to her breast, when it had been bathed and swaddled, with a tremendous sense of satisfaction and joy. This was her child, her little girl. She wanted to live and be able to work for it, and she rejoiced, even in her weakness, that she was so strong.
She is “up and about” in only ten days, exceeding the ‘‘quick recovery” anticipated by the doctor, further evidence to Dreiser that Jennie was “born with strength and with that nurturing quality which makes the ideal mother” (97). Once again, it is possible that Dreiser was incapable of dramatizing this event realistically and convincingly. But it is also feasible that he is intentionally avoiding the censor’s pen in his discussion of a subject that still could not be discussed candidly.
Without grappling with this section of the novel, the reader cannot fully understand Dreiser’s view of Jennie. Clearly, motherhood is essential to Jennie’s nature. Thus, Dreiser may be quite simply reflecting the prevailing medical (and social) opinion that a woman’s sole purpose was childbearing. Many commentators, in fact, felt compelled to argue that this role was determined absolutely by biology. As one physician framed it in 1870, it seemed to many observers “as if the Almighty, in creating the female sex, had taken the uterus and built up a woman around it” (Smith-Rosenberg and Rosenberg 335).
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If this were Dreiser’s implication, then we could reasonably infer that he had become significantly more conservative in his assumptions about the nature of women during the last decade. After all, Carrie is a “nonreproductive woman” (as Smith-Rosenberg phrases it)23 — presumably by choice — who seems to have no maternal instincts whatsoever. But other readings of these two parallel texts are possible. It may be that Dreiser could not yet meld both attributes in the same character, or perhaps he is merely reflecting a society that has not yet allowed women to combine the variant sides of their nature. Thus, Carrie and Jennie may simply function as the opposite ends of a dialectic for which an adequate synthesis has not yet emerged. A reviewer for the Book-man adopted this stance when he wrote that “if all womankind could … be divided into two groups” the two characters “would stand as representatives of these opposite types, the woman whose pleasure lies in receiving, and the woman whose joy it is to give.” Jennie, in contrast to Carrie, he wrote, “has the inborn instinct of motherhood; she must have, always, something or somebody to whom she may make sacrifice” (Salzman 77). Although Kate Chopin, in The Awakening, takes pains to establish that not every woman (certainly not Edna Pontellier, who has two young children) is a ‘‘mother–woman” (26), most voices in that generation were not so tolerant. But Dreiser, like Chopin, refused to insist that motherhood is essential to every woman or that all women are fulfilled by motherhood alone — or by motherhood at all. Instead, he conveys to the reader that Jennie, with her “supreme motherly instincts” is the exception among women, not the rule.
If Jennie were middle class, motherhood would almost automatically mean her withdrawal from the working world. But since Brander’s death has eliminated her chance to join the middle class and thus enjoy the luxury of full-time motherhood, when Vesta is born, the novel turns its attention once more to the curious intersection of work and sex. Jennie becomes part of the paid workforce once more, and we are quickly reminded that she is still a firmly entrenched part of an underclass, clinging only barely, in fact, to working-class status. Her education, economic status, family position, and role as mother determine where she will turn; for Jennie is trained for nothing but domestic work. Although she looks for work in both the department stores and the factories first, she is almost fated to return to a domestic job, though a less grueling position than her earlier one at the Columbus House. Hired as a lady’s maid for four dollars a week plus room and board (benefits she does not enjoy because she returns at night to her family), Jennie begins working in the Bracebridge mansion,
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the scene of her encounter with Lester Kane.
Jennie’s peculiar position in the Bracebridge household confirms how well Dreiser understands the quandary that young working-class American women faced at the end of the century. She needs a job not only to support her child (whom she feels she must hide), but also to raise her status as well as that of her extended family. Yet taking the only job she is trained for virtually guarantees, because of its nature, that she will never really escape her class after all; for the position of women employed as domestic workers was in some ways even worse than that of other menial laborers, even factory workers. Working conditions were often harsh, and domestic workers’ wages averaged between two and five dollars per week. Since those who “lived in” could not punch out at the end of a shift, their hours were typically half again as long as the factory worker’s.24 And domestic workers had little hope of earning the respect of the middle class, much less of presuming to rise to it. Consequently, as the century progressed, domestic work was left more and more to immigrants (or the daughters of immigrants) and women of color. After extensively surveying domestic workers in the 1890s, historian Lucy Maynard Salmon determined that most other American women resisted this work because of its dull, unchallenging nature; the unlikelihood of promotions; the long hours which reduced their independence; and the necessity of working beside immigrant and minority women.25