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Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1965), Donald Pizer’s The Novels of Theodore Dreiser: A Critical Study (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1976), Richard Lehan’s Theodore Dreiser: His World and His Novels (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1969), Ellen Moers’s Two Dreisers (New York: Viking, 1969), and Philip Gerber’s Theodore Dreiser (New York: Twayne, 1964). In The Novels of Theodore Dreiser, Pizer, for example, perceptively discusses Dreiser’s use of his “autobiographical imagination” in the creation of An American Tragedy. Pizer refers to the “prologuelike nature of the opening vignette” in terms very similar to the ones used at the opening of this essay. He suggests that “Dreiser’s memory of the immense handicap imposed upon him by his own ‘peculiarly nebulous, emotional, unorganized and traditionless’ family, and in particular his memory of a father whose primitive religiosity made him incapable of fighting the battle of life … ” contributed to the creation of the novel. (Quotation from Pizer, pp. 209–10.)
I agree that his “autobiographical imagination” helped Dreiser write An American Tragedy and other of his novels especially those in which the characters are so shame driven. My contribution in this essay is to situate Dreiser’s autobiographical imagination in a psychoanalytic context of shame. I suggest that some of most powerfully rendered fictional creations are projections of intrapsychic struggles and that his internal monitoring system of shame, guilt, and pride can be traced back in part to his overzealous father, who unrealistically demanded that his children live by otherworldly standards. In Dreiser, these internalized demands found if not resolution at least expression through re-creation in the written word.
7. Michael Kerr, ‘‘Chronic Anxiety and Defining a Self,” Atlantic Monthly (September 1988): 35–58. (Quotation, p. 35.)
8. Ibid., p. 35.
9. Carl Whitaker and T. Malone, The Roots of Psychotherapy (New York: Brunner/Mazel, 1981). (Quotation, p. xxi.)
10. See Meredith Skura, “Psychoanalytic Criticism,” Redrawing the Boundaries, pp. 349–73.
11. Although Murray Bowen asserts that individuals derive their behavior from their family systems, I do not categorically accept this position. There may be many other factors that contribute to an individual’s behavior outside the family system, including genetic and environmental influences. See Murray Bowen, Family Therapy in Clinical Practice (New York: Jason Aronson, 1978). (Quotation, p. 472.)
12. Kerr, p. 41.
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13. Samuel Osherson and Steven Klugman, “Men, Shame, and Psychotherapy,” Psychotherapy 27 (Fall 1990): 327–39. (Quotation, p. 327.)
14. William James, The Principles of Psychology (New York: Henry Holt, 1890).
15. A shame-bound family, according to psychologists, results from “a self-sustaining, multigenerational system of interactions with a cast of characters who are (or were in their lifetime) loyal to a set of rules and injunctions demanding control, perfectionism, blame and denial.” Adherence to such a code of conduct inhibits the formation of authentic intimate relationships, they state, and “promotes secrets and vague personal boundaries, unconsciously instills shame in the [individual] family members, as well as chaos in their lives, and binds them to perpetuate the shame in themselves and in their kin.’’ See Merle Fossum and Marilyn Mason, Facing Shame: Families in Recovery (New York: Norton, 1986). (Quotation, p. 8.)
16. Osherson and Klugman, p. 327.
17. Osherson and Klugman, pp. 328, 332.
18. See the discussion of Dreiser’s womanizing in the body of and in note five of the introductory essay to this book, pp. ix–xix.
19. Theodore Dreiser, Dawn (first unpublished typescript), the Dreiser Collection, Charles Patterson Van Pelt Library, University of Pennsylvania, ch. LX, 554; emphasis added. All subsequent references to the Dawn typescript (typescript) are to this edition. I have often chosen to quote from one of the typescripts rather than from a published edition of Dawn because the typescripts are more revealing and frank about Dreiser’s own feelings of rage, humiliation, and sexual shame.
20. Lingeman, p. 38.
21. In the typescript of Dawn, Dreiser says that by the time he was old enough to remember, in many ways the “war” was over between his father’s religious zealotry and his mother’s dreamy paganism, and that his mother had won, for the battle had been about the older boys. It is helpful to keep in mind Dreiser’s perspective as the penultimate child and son. He came relatively late in his parents’ lives and thus lived in the aftermath of much of the struggle. But clearly, the “war” was resurrected when Dreiser’s sisters became pubescent and to Dreiser’s father, “shameless hussies.”
22. My discussion of male-based shame could be more fully developed in light of the complexities. For instance, an infant’s early recognition of differences between himself and his mother can be shame producing. The process of “disidentifying” with mother and iden-
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tifying with father can also serve a part in this male shame-based drama. In a family context such as Dreiser’s in which his father was physically and psychologically absent much of the time, Dreiser too must have struggled with the shame of identifying with a father perceived as rejecting, disinterested, and himself inadequate. Clearly Drciser’s relationship with his father is ambivalent and complicated. See Osherson and Klugman, p. 327.
23. Fossum and Mason, p. 92.
24. Quoted in Lingeman, p. 70.
25. Theodore Dreiser, “Theodore Dreiser,” Household Magazine (November 1929), typescript, the Dreiser Collection, Charles Patterson Van Pelt Library, University of Pennsylvania, p. 2.
26. Helen Block Lewis, Shame and Guilt in Neurosis (New York: International Universities, 1971), p. 30.
27. For instance, Martha understands the family “curse” as ‘‘structural weaknesses” that led to defeat of almost all the family members: “Martha had always been a little ashamed of her family, after she became old enough to discover its structural weaknesses, and now, when this new life dawned, was anxious to make the connection as slight as possible. She barely notified the members of the family of the approaching marriage — Jennie not at all, and at the time of the actual ceremony only wanted Bass and George because they were doing fairly well. Gerhardt [her father!], Veronica and William were not included and noticed the slight. Gerhardt was not for comment any more. He had had too many rebuffs. Veronica was resentful. She hoped that life would give her an opportunity to pay her sister off” (JG 239–40).
28. To some, Elvira Griffiths would appear to be outside the spectrum of shame for she is obviously respected by those who know her and repeatedly described as a woman of “force and earnestness” (I, 5–6), “the strongest in the family — so erect, so square-shouldered, defiant — a veritable soul pilot in her cross-grained … way” (III, 215) who nonetheless was without “any truer or more practical insight into anything” (I, 10) than Asa. However, one of the dynamics that creates and maintains shame in a family, regardless of the character of its individuals, is the requirement that those who are dependent live up to standards beyond their own ability. And, like her husband, she not only lives by such standards but inculcates them into her children and preaches them to the world.
29. Like Asa, Dreiser’s father was “wholly unconscious of the danger to his sons and daughters in a too strict interpretation of a rule of
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living”: “he was all for church going, money earning and saving — in rags if necessary — a strictly self-denying attitude of mind and body” (typescript, Dawn, ch. IV, 28). But “even my mother (largely because of past religious oppression), looked upon father as an old fogy, a tyrant, a numbskull, and whatever else you choose, He (sic) was always trying to repress his children and hold them back, they — not my mother exactly but the others — said. He knew nothing of life as they knew it — which was entirely true” (typescript, ch. XLI, 335).
30. Fossum and Mason, p. vii.
31. Again, at this stage, Dreiser must have drawn on his own father, who after the death of his wife was at his most bereft: John Paul, Sr. was “an interesting illustration of a beaten or psychically (sic) depressed man and hence one who could not bring himself to enter upon any other contest with the world … ” (handwritten, Dawn, ch. XXXII, unnumbered page after p. 272).
32. Helen Block Lewis, Shame and Guilt in Neurosis, p. 267.
33. A key to defusing shame is to develop ways to talk about it, connecting words with feelings. Many men do not realize or understand what they are experiencing as shame. One patient described it: “You feel as if you’re fragmenting, coming apart, when you feel confused.” The connection between anger and shame can be made more manifest. As another said, ‘‘ok, so when I feel threatened, I attack” (Osherson and Klugman, p. 333).
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Lacanian Equivocation in Sister Carrie, The “Genius,” and An American Tragedy
Leonard Cassuto
Anyone who has read any general criticism of Theodore Dreiser will recognize one of its reigning clichés: that the vitality of the master’s characterizations overcomes the prose in which he renders them. It is a measure of his success that it remains a fresh enterprise to ask why this is so. In the protagonists of Sister Carrie, The “Genius,” and An American Tragedy, Dreiser depicts a pitched battle of ideas and urges of the mind. The author considers not only how his characters react to the environment and chance, but (crucially) he ponders why they respond as they do. The result is a complex, conflicted view of consciousness: a model that virtually describes modern psychoanalysis — though it largely antecedes it.1