6. Simmel, p. 369.
7. Ibid, p. 364.
8. W. S. Harwood, “Secret Societies in America,” North American Review 164 (May 1897): 617–24, gives the figure of 32,000 for the national membership of the Benevolent and Protective Order of Elks (B.P.O.E.), three years before Sister Carrie’s publication. The fifty-plus fraternal societies he surveys had a total membership of five and one half million men. The Elks were a midsized group at the time, compared, for example, with the Masons (750,000 members) and the Order of Scottish Clans (4,000 members). The Elks are also one of a handful of groups on Harwood’s list which still prosper. Clawson notes that orders such as the Elks, which experienced the greatest growth in the twentieth century, “de-emphasized ritual and offered a more couple-oriented sociability to their members” (p. 263).
9. Gunther Barth, City People: The Rise of Modern City Culture in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980), p. 145.
10. Robert Thorne, ‘‘Places of Refreshment in the Nineteenth-Century City,” Buildings and Society: Essays on the Social Development of the Built Environment, ed. Anthony D. King (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1980), p. 235.
11. Simmel, p. 347.
12. Carey McWilliams, The Idea of Fraternity in America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973), p. 80.
13. The Elks National Memorial (Chicago: Authorized by the Grand Lodge of the Benevolent and Protective Order of Elks of the United States of America and Published Under the Supervision of the Elks National Memorial and Publication Commission, 1931), p. 8.
14. Simmel, p. 345.
15. Charles Edward Ellis, An Authentic History of the Benevolent and Protective Order of Elks (Chicago: by the author, a member of Lodge #4, 1910), p. 7.
16. Simmel, p. 356.
17. McWilliams, p. 380.
18. Simmel, p. 369.
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19. Elks National Memorial, p. 8.
20. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), p. 1.
21. Ibid, pp. 5, 27.
22. Harwood, p. 621.
23. Erving Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday Anchor Books, 1959), p. 9. Discussing in the 1920s what he defined as essentially male group relations, Sigmund Freud noted that the sexualized feelings which hold men in a circle “turn into an expression of tenderness as easily as into a wish for someone’s removal.” Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, 1922, trans. James Strachey (New York: Norton, 1959), pp. 37–8.
24. Ellis notes that “Charity” is emblazoned upon the Elks’ banner, along with “Justice,” “Fidelity,’’ and “Brotherly Love.” The Chicago chapter’s yearly theatrical benefits during the late nineteenth century raised money for the social security of the lodge members as well as for outside causes (Ellis).
25. Simmel, p. 364.
26. Elks National Memorial, pp. 12–13.
27. Clawson, p. 131.
28. Ibid, p. 132. One consequence of barring blacks, Clawson notes, was a separate black fraternal movement, including an Improved Benevolent and Protective Order of Elks of the World, which has survived into the late twentieth century (p. 132).
29. Elks National Memorial.
30. Simmel, p. 363.
31. Ibid, p. 347.
32. For readings, comments, and suggestions that have helped me to shape this discussion, I am grateful to Jane Collins, Jean Gallagher, Barbara Shollar, and Miriam Gogol.
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“That oldest boy don’t wanta be here”:
Fathers and Sons and the Dynamics of Shame in Theodore Dreiser’s Novels
Miriam Gogol
As every reader of Theodore Dreiser knows, his novels are moving and powerful human documents, containing as they do characters and situations which etch themselves — often permanently — into the consciousness of readers. Despite the fact that among American writers Dreiser has had many imitators, none has ever possessed his unique ability to move readers. And even his most perceptive critics find the source of this power elusive and difficult to explain.1
Recently, in reading An American Tragedy (Boni and Liveright, 1925) and Jennie Gerhardt (University of Pennsylvania, 1992),2 I was struck by two aspects of Dreiser’s fiction: how his characters regard themselves and how they relate to others, particularly other family members. In focusing on these features, I have come to realize that many of Dreiser’s characters are shame ridden, both in their view of themselves and in their relationships with others. Invariably, they feel unable to measure up, to meet the standards of behavior set for them, with the result that they suffer under a burden of inadequacy. In their dealings with others, they feel that these inadequacies have become public and affect the way other people regard them. With few exceptions in Dreiser’s novels, it is the male characters who are plagued most deeply and poignantly by feelings of shame.3 Because shame weakens the image of autonomy that many males strive to project, they fight to keep the shame hidden; and they suffer excruciatingly when it becomes public, as it inevitably does. These portrayals are extremely realistic and persuasive, reflecting accurately the way a sense of shame and fear of exposure exert influence in the real lives of men, depriving them of the respect of others and making them weak and ineffectual.
Sharing these values and fears, readers identify strongly with these characters and sympathize with their dilemmas at a deep
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emotional level. Particularly moving in Dreiser’s novels are the relationships between fathers and sons, relationships nearly always characterized by a searing sense of shame in the son, who feels himself burdened by his father’s inadequacies and failures. There is, I feel, no question that much of Dreiser’s power as a writer stems from this ability to portray shame-wracked males in such an affecting way.
This sense of shame comes through most powerfully in the novels’ early vignettes: the unforgettable opening pages of An American Tragedy that set the stage for the mortification which Clyde Griffiths wrestles with for the rest of his life. Standing on a corner with his street-preaching parents, the adolescent Clyde feels humiliated by the pitying glances of passersby, one of whom remarks: “That oldest boy don’t wanta be here. He feels outa place, I can see that. It ain’t right to make a kid like that come out unless he wants to.” Interestingly, that person in the crowd not only observes how ashamed Clyde is but also places the blame on others, presumably the parents: “It ain’t right to make a kid like that come out unless he wants to.”4 This passage suggests that the parents are a cause of the shame felt by the children.
Shame as the novelistic keynote is also struck in the opening pages of the restored Jennie Gerhardt. Jennie’s brother, Bass, feels “mortification’’ (12)5 at the thought that his cronies might see Jennie and his mother cleaning floors in the Columbus House Hotel. Bass cautions his sister: “Don’t you ever speak to me if you meet me around there. … Don’t you let on that you know me … you know why” (12). When he concocts a ploy to steal coal to heat their home, he repeats: “Don’t any of you pretend to know me … do you hear?” (28). Like Clyde in An American Tragedy, Bass here bespeaks a shame experienced by all members of his family.
Similar to the fathers in Jennie Gerhardt and An American Tragedy, Dreiser’s own father was torn between the worldly demands of his family and his own personal need to adhere to otherworldly standards and values. Just as the Gerhardts and the Griffiths, the Dreiser family perpetuated an overpowering legacy of shame, one that haunted Dreiser throughout his life and provided the firsthand experience that he carried into his novels. The legend of Dreiser’s father’s economic failure in America would throw a long shadow over Dreiser and his family. Some of the striking similarities between Dreiser’s family and that of his characters, especially between John Paul, Senior (Dreiser’s father), and Old Gerhardt (Jennie’s father), have been noted by biographers.6 But I would like to go beyond biographical parallels
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and suggest that Dreiser’s ability to depict shame-bound families so forcefully comes from his own inherited experience of family shame.
My contention — that a family like the Dreisers could carry such a legacy through the generations — is supported by the findings of family systems theorists (Bowen [1988], Kerr [1988], Fossum and Mason [1986], Nathanson [1987], Morrison [1989], H. B. Lewis [1987, 1971], Osherson and Klugman [1990] et al.). Before the development of family systems theory, psychoanalytic theory had evolved through the study of individual patients and, as a result, viewed the family as a collection of relatively autonomous people each motivated by his or her own particular psychological mechanisms and conflicts.7 Family systems theorists reverse that perception. Rather than being seen as autonomous, the individual is perceived as a part of the family emotional unit.8 As family systems analyst Carl Whitaker states: “I don’t believe … in individuals anymore; I think they’re only fragments of a family.”9 In other words, we are all part of a larger system and play only a part in its history. To understand the part that we play, it is not only helpful, but also necessary, to analyze the individual in the context of his or her larger family system. Perhaps this is why family theory potentially holds greater appeal for literary scholars than psychoanalysis, or rather the “psyche” camp of psychoanalysis — Freudians, Kleinians, object-relations theorists, and Winnicottian interpreters. It accords more closely with the “analysis” camp, especially the Lacanians — which directs attention away from the individual mind existing before or outside the act of analysis from which we deduce its existences.10