22. Saul Bellow, “An Interview with Saul Bellow” Publishers Weekly 204 (October 22, 1973): 74.
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Dreiser and the Discourse of Gender1
Shelley Fisher Fishkin
As feminist critics have trained their eyes on the masculinist prism through which American culture filtered so much of women’s experiences, they have focused on the work of Cooper, Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne, James, Twain, Hemingway, Faulkner, and many others — but not Dreiser. The one feminist essay on Dreiser, published in 1982, concludes with the verdict that he is, “if not a feminist, at least a fellow traveller, allied with feminists in a struggle against patriarchy.’’2 When Theodore Dreiser has been charged with “uncaring womanizing,” as he was by male critics at an MLA panel in 1983, two of the women in his life, Marguerite Tjader Harris and Yvette Eastman, leaped to his public defense.3
Dreiser has fared well at the hands of both women critics and women in his life for good reasons. Compared with many of his fellow writers, Dreiser’s efforts to craft believable women characters in his fiction were often exemplary, a fact that has drawn talented women critics to his work. And compared with many of his male contemporaries, Dreiser’s empathy for the emotional and psychological needs and intellectual aspirations of real-life women was legendary, inspiring positive testimonials in person and in print. Dissent from this ringing consensus — such as that of biographer William Swanberg — came to be thought of as suspect, given the prudish standards of behavior that inspired the attack.
It would be naive, however, to take feminists’ silence on Dreiser as proof of his unfailing ability to extricate himself from the culture’s ideology of gender. He was both ahead of his time and a creature of his time, a knot of contradictions as intricate and complicated as the culture itself. Through him one can read that culture’s ambivalences and tensions regarding women. A man and writer as complex as Dreiser requires a second look — on this,
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as on virtually any other subject. This essay (along with Irene Gammel’s in this volume) is a first step in this reexamination.
The current critical climate encourages more subtle and complex readings of the discourse of gender than those that characterized the first wave of feminist criticism in the 1970s and early 1980s. Essay collections such as Nancy Miller’s The Poetics of Gender (1986) and Elaine Showalter’s Speaking of Gender (1989) foreground such issues as “the contingency of the dominant male tradition,” the differences between male and female writers’ treatments of a subject, and “the social conditions of literary production” (including the study of “the conditions necessary for writing at all.”)4 They also problematize, in complex ways, the means by which gender shapes the power dynamics that operate in a culture. And recent books by and about male feminists5 reveal the diversity of perspectives held by men who are openly committed (as Dreiser never was) to a feminist agenda.
These books and others suggest questions that critics have never asked of Dreiser’s work. For example, feminist critics’ concern with the “contingency of the dominant male tradition’’ might lead us to ask how Dreiser’s sources shaped the gender dynamics of his fiction. An American Tragedy was based on newspaper reports of the Chester Gillette trial, reports that ‘reiterated uncritically a range of gender stereotypes that dominated turn-of-the-century journalism. To what extent did Dreiser reinscribe those stereotypes in his fiction? Critics’ call for comparative investigation of male and female imaginative models might lead us to ask what a feminist writer might have made from the same raw materials. Contemporary interest in the “the social conditions of literary production” and “the conditions necessary for writing” suggest questions about the role women played in the creation of Dreiser’s work, and the opportunities open to young women writers in the early twentieth century. What did the aspiring women writers who linked their lives to Dreiser’s gain from what was clearly a symbiotic relationship, and what did they lose? What were they willing to give up, and why? These questions suggest that there is still much we need to learn about the sexual politics of the culture that shaped Dreiser and that his art, in turn, helped shape.
To what extent did Dreiser transcend the gender discourse of his time, and to what extent did he reinscribe it in new ways? This question is the backdrop for this essay. Given the limitations of time and space, this essay is of necessity a case study, a piece of a bigger puzzle, one small approach to this large question, a beginning. As it weaves together elements of Dreiser’s art and biography, feminist theory, and popular culture to understand both
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the conventions that dominated representations of women in the early part of the twentieth century and Dreiser’s adherence to or departure from them, it marks some potentially fruitful directions for future research.
Critics have devoted much attention to Dreiser’s best-known imaginative representations of women, Carrie and Jennie. This essay will turn the spotlight on some Dreiser women who have remained largely in the shadows. First and foremost is the central female character in the Dreiser novel which received the greatest critical and popular acclaim, An American Tragedy.6 Roberta Alden has been generally ignored by critics in their rush to comment on Dreiser’s larger themes in the book and on his masterful characterization of Clyde Griffiths, the central consciousness of the novel. Just as Roberta has been overshadowed by Clyde, the women Dreiser pulled into his orbit in real life have been overshadowed by Dreiser: we have attended to them solely as they reflect and illuminate aspects of the male figure that has been our main focus of interest. An examination of Dreiser’s relation to the discourse of gender of his time demands that we move these figures from the periphery to the center of our attention.
Before she achieved immortality as Dreiser’s “Roberta Alden,” Billy Brown7 (who was murdered in upstate New York in 1906) came to national attention through the journalists’ accounts of her during the Gillette murder trial. I will begin by exploring the ways in which the newspaper reporters’ representations of Billy Brown conformed to the dominant culture’s ideology of gender and will then examine the ways in which Dreiser reiterated or expanded on their representations in his account of this woman’s life in his novel. Both the reporters’ and Dreiser’s versions of Billy Brown will be compared with information about her that emerges from the trial transcript and other historical sources. Dreiser’s representations of Billy Brown and of other real-life women, in both his published writing and his private letters, are the result of his shaping and selection (both consciously and unconsciously) of a range of historical materials and cultural conventions. I will examine this shaping process to gain insight into the culture’s ideology of gender in the first part of this century, and Dreiser’s response to it.
Billy Brown
Dreiser’s first encounter with Billy Brown was in the pages of the New York World, and newspaper accounts remained his major source throughout his work on the novel.8 In all of the press
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coverage of the Gillette murder trial, Billy Brown was made to play her assigned role in the courtroom melodrama: victim. It was a familiar role for women under popular Victorian conceptions of womanhood.9 For the purposes of the press, the most important thing about Billy Brown was that she was dead. Beyond that, reporters were eager to tap into their readers’ readiness to read yet another story of innocence wronged, a story dripping with all the pathos that could be wrung from it, with roots in the cautionary tales that had played such a prominent role in both folk and literary traditions in this country for more than a century.
For this reason, all that the readers of the New York World learned about Billy Brown was that she had been an innocent, respectable farmer’s daughter — not unlike thousands of other farmers’ daughters in upstate New York — who had been cruelly murdered by a cold-blooded, social-climbing young man who had first violated her sexually and then refused to marry her. District Attorney Ward, for example, noted: “It will not take me long to tell you who Grace Brown was. She was a clean, pure, honest girl” (New York World, November 17, 1906). The paragraphs devoted to Billy Brown in the newspaper were primarily of two sorts: those describing her corpse, and those quoting from the pleading letters she wrote to Gillette.
It is understandable why these particular elements would dominate the newspaper accounts. Dreiser’s own memories of his experiences as a newspaper reporter in St. Louis suggest the central role murder and seduction played in turn-of-the-century journalism. Of his editor at the St. Louis Republic, Dreiser wrote, in Newspaper Days:
Deaths, murders, great social or political scandals or upheavals and the like, those things which presented the rough, raw facts of life, as well as its tenderer aspects, seemed to throw him into an ecstasy — not over the woes of others but over the fact that he was to have an interesting paper tomorrow. … “Ah, it was a terrible thing, was it? He killed her in cold blood, eh? You say there was a great crowd out there, do you? … Well! Well! Well, write it all up. Write it all up. Looks like a pretty good story to me — doesn’t it to you? … You can have as much space as you want for that — column, a column and a half, or two — just as it runs. Let me look at it before you turn it in.’’ Then he would begin whistling or singing … or Would walk up and down in the city-room rubbing his hands in obvious satisfaction.10