5. In the 1952 Paramount film version of the novel, Carrie, starring Jennifer Jones and Lawrence Olivier, she does become pregnant by Hurstwood, only to miscarry in their squalid flat. My theory is that the movie included several changes that were contrived to domesticate a Carrie who was still too threatening to the social order even fifty years after Dreiser created her.
6. Carol Hymowitz and Michaela Wesman, eds., A History of Women in America (New York: Bantam Books, 1978), pp. 297–8.
7. Ellen Chesler, Woman of Valor. Margaret Sanger and the Birth Control Movement in America (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1992), p. 200.
8. “Comstock Law, 1873.” Rpt. in Women’s America: Refocusing the Past, 3d ed., ed. Linda K. Kerber and Jane Sherron De Hart (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), p. 537.
9. Edward DeGrazia, Girls Lean Back Everywhere: The Law of Obscenity and the Assault on Genius (New York: Random House, 1992), pp. 4–5. For my information on Comstock and literary censorship, I have also relied heavily on Alec Craig, Suppressed Books. A History of the Conception of Literary Obscenity (Cleveland: World Pub., 1963.).
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10. Margaret Sanger, My Fight for Birth Control (New York: Farrar and Reinhart, 1931). Rpt. in Kerber and De Hart, 342–9. (Quotation, p. 346.)
11. Margaret Sanger, Margaret Sanger. An Autobiography (New York: Dover, 1971), rpt. of 1938 ed., p. 93.
12. Richard Lingeman, Theodore Dreiser. An American Journey 1908–1945 (New York: Putnam’s Sons, 1990), p. 128.
13. Linda Gordon, Woman’s Body, Woman’s Right: Birth Control in America (New York: Viking Penguin, 1990), p. 221.
14. In ‘‘The Dating of the American Sexual Revolution: Evidence and Interpretation,” Daniel Scott Smith points out that more articles on subjects related to sexuality — especially such topics as divorce and prostitution — appeared in the Reader’s Guide between 1910 and 1914 than in the years 1919 to 1924 or 1925 to 1928. (Michael Gordon, ed., The American Family in Socio-Historical Perspective, 2d ed. [New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1978], 426–38.) (Quotation, p. 434.) Smith’s discussion is fascinating, and his claim is technically correct. But in truth the 1910–1914 volume includes more entries under most headings than these later volumes; it is 700 pages longer than the next volume. Whether a boom in periodical literature or more fastidious indexing accounts for the difference, I do not know.
15. Thomas R. Riggio, ed., Dreiser-Mencken Letters: The Correspondence of Theodore Dreiser and H. L. Mencken, 1907–1945, (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1986), p. 69.
16. “The Composition of Jennie Gerhardt,” in Jennie Gerhardt, The University of Pennsylvania Dreiser Edition, pp. 421–60. (Quotation, p. 442.)
17. James L. W. West III, “Editorial Theory and the Act of Submission,” Papers of the Bibliographic Society of America 83 (1989): 169–85. (Quotation, p. 184.)
18. The Historian 40 (February 1978): 235–51. As Litoff points out, American midwives were held in ill favor in part because they did not receive the same training offered to their European counterparts (many of whom, of course, emigrated to the United States). However, during this period a few schools, such as New York City’s College of Midwifery and the Playfair School of Midwifery in Chicago, did provide rigorous training for American midwives (242–3). Midwives were distrusted further because many people thought that they acted as abortionists, which indeed they often did.
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19. Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, Disorderly Conduct: Visions of Gender in Victorian America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), p. 228 and passim. See also G. J. Barker-Benfield, Horrors of the Half-known Life: Male Attitudes Toward Women and Sexuality in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Harper and Row, 1976), p. 62; and Linda Gordon, Woman’s Body, Woman’s Right: Birth Control in America, p. 157.
20. “The Spermatic Economy: A Nineteenth-Century View of Sexuality,” in Michael Gordon, pp. 374–425. (Quotation, p. 389.)
21. Carroll Smith-Rosenberg and Charles Rosenberg, “The Female Animal: Medical and Biological Views of Woman and Her Role in Nineteenth-Century America,” Journal of American History 60 (September 1973): 332–56. (Quotation, p. 337.)
22. See West, “Editorial Theory,” pp. 184–5.
23. Carroll Smith-Rosenberg argues that during this period the woman who refused to reproduce generated a great deal of cultural anxiety. (See Disorderly Conduct, p. 23.) This theory may shed light on the early critical hostility toward Carrie.
24. Barbara Mayer Wertheimer, We Were There: The Story of Working Women in America (New York: Pantheon Books, 1977), pp. 209–10.
25. Lucy Maynard Salmon, Domestic Service (New York: Macmillan, 1897), rpt. as “Objections to Domestic Service” in Early American Women: A Documentary History 1600–1900, ed. Nancy Woloch (Belmont, Calif: Wadsworth, 1992), pp. 419–22.
26. Charles E. Rosenberg, “Sexuality, Class and Role in 19th-Century America,’’ American Quarterly 25 (May 1973): 131–53. (Quotation, p. 143.)
27. Rosenberg, “Sexuality, Class and Role,” p. 143. There is evidence also, of course, that some working-class women confirmed these stereotypes when they replaced or supplemented their low wages by working as prostitutes. Of the 2,000 New York prostitutes surveyed by William Sanger, 37 were factory workers, 39 housekeepers, and 933 servants of other descriptions. See The History of Prostitution: Its Extent, Causes and Effects Throughout the World (New York: Medical Pub. Co., 1913), p. 524.
28. Kathy Peiss and Christina Simmons, Passion and Power. Sexuality in History (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1989), p. 6. See also Rosenberg, “Sexuality, Class and Role,” passim.
29. Jennie Gerhardt, ed. Donald Pizer (New York: Viking Penguin, 1989), pp. 164–5. Further references to this edition will be cited within the
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text as Viking.
30. See West, “The Composition of Jennie Gerhardt,” p. 443, for a detailed comparison of this passage in the two texts.
31. Carl L. Degler, At Odds: Women and the Family in America from the Revolution to the Present (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980), pp. 210–7; and Smith-Rosenberg, and Rosenberg, “The Female Animal,” p. 346.
32. Emily Taft Douglas, Margaret Sanger. Pioneer of the Future (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1970), p. 101.
33. David Kennedy, Birth Control in America: The Career of Margaret Sanger (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1970), p. 45.
34. Linda Gordon, “Birth Control and Social Revolution,” in A Heritage of Her Own: Toward a New Social History of American Women, ed. Nancy E. Cott and Elizabeth H. Pleck (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1979), pp. 445–75. (Quotation, p. 466.)
35. Susan Householder Van Horn, Women, Work, and Fertility, 1900–1986 (New York: New York University Press, 1988), p. 46.
36. Van Horn, Women, Work, and Fertility, p. 1. The 1905–1909 volume of the Reader’s Guide indexed 34 articles under ‘‘race suicide,” which had for the first time earned a separate subject heading. In the next volume (1910–1914), only 12 titles (two by Theodore Roosevelt) appear. Some — like Seth Low’s “Is Our Civilization Dying?,” which appeared in the April 1913 Fortnightly Review — warned about the dangers of the declining native birth rate, but others pointed out the fallacies of this popular argument.
37. Robert Penn Warren, Homage to Theodore Dreiser. On the Centennial of His Birth (New York: Random House, 1971), p. 6.
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The Secrets of Fraternity:
Men and Friendship in Sister Carrie
Scott Zaluda
Little critical attention has been paid to references Theodore Dreiser made in Sister Carrie to the Elks fraternity, an important element of Hurstwood’s and Drouet’s social and commercial world during the Chicago portion of the novel. Early on, Dreiser sketches Drouet’s “type” with, among other markings, “the secret insignia of the Order of Elks” suspended from his watch chain (5).1 At one point, Drouet recognizes “the value of lodge standing and the great influence of secret insignia” for success in business (152). Hurstwood’s ‘‘considerable influence, owing to his long standing with the Elks, who were rather influential locally,” helps assure a full house of Chicago political and commercial luminaries for Carrie’s acting debut in an Elks’ theatrical benefit (174). But while these and other allusions to the Elks may be few and far between, they nonetheless offer important clues for interpreting the novel within a discourse of gender in late nineteenth-century American cities.
This essay examines how Sister Carrie represents a fraternity of men gathered in bars and restaurants or for events sponsored by the Elks; the essay also identifies ways that the novel, in the terms of Amy Kaplan, creates and criticizes white, middle-class masculinity and men’s social power in late nineteenth-century commercial society. “Against contradictory representation”2 of fraternities and male fellowship, such as those that appeared in authorized fraternal publications, or those that have appeared in historical accounts of American fraternities, Dreiser, I argue, represents a self-serving and aggressive middle-class, American male type who finds his identity both among and against a community of other men who look, talk, and act just like him — referred to ironically as a “better social order” (47) — and against a variety of
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others, men and women, whose interests contradict his own and his community’s.
In reading Sister Carrie, I direct my attention to these defining relationships between different men of the dominant social group and between those men and others in the industrial city. Men’s relations as represented in the novel appear often to bear out social historian Mary Ann Clawson’s observation that fraternalism “is above all about boundaries, in both their institutional and symbolic aspects — their construction, their bridging, and occasionally their dismantling.” Notably, Clawson says, membership in an organized group of any kind creates a boundary between members and nonmembers.3