Gender Stereotypes at the Turn of the Century
Work outside the home for a woman was viewed, throughout most of the culture, as a sometimes necessary and always unfortunate way station along the road to marriage.25 For this reason, whether a woman was good at her work simply did not matter. Marriage was really the only plot women could enact in literature as well as life.
Charlotte Perkins Gilman bemoaned the pervasiveness of the tyrannous love plot as the only story women could tell or enact: “Love and love and love — from first sight’ to marriage. There it stops — just the fluttering ribbon of announcement, ‘and lived happily ever after.’ Is that kind of fiction any sort of picture of a woman’s life?”26 William Dean Howells, as well, recognized the ubiquitousness of the love plot: “A love intrigue of some sort,” he wrote, “is all but essential to the popularity of any fiction.”27
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The love plot was no less pervasive in life — particularly for working-class women. In The Long Day: The Story of a New York Working Girl Told by Herself (1905), Dorothy Richardson writes of a woman worker, “She has become successful in the only way a woman can, after all, be successful. Minnie is married.”28 Mary McDowell, a labor organizer, cited the dominance of the love plot as the key obstacle to organizing “wage-earning women to better their economic conditions,” and noted that the same dreams animate young women of all economic classes: “The workers are young — they dream of marriage, of giving up the world of wages to make a home for ‘that not impossible he, wrapped up in mystery.’ The girls do not differ from the young in any walk of life. They no more consider the welfare of that mysterious future than does the daughter of their boss.’’29
In popular culture, as well as in the testimony of organizers, social workers, and fiction writers, the love plot loomed large in young women’s imaginations, as this turn-of-the-century Yiddish folk song sung in New York makes clear:
Day the same as night, night the same as day.
And all I do is sew and sew and sew.
May God help me and my love come soon.
That I may leave this work and go.30
A headline that ran next to the lead headline, “Gillette Found Guilty of First Degree Murder” in the World was, “Factory Girls, 14 of ‘Em, Wed in a Day.” The factory owner was glad to “wish them all happiness,” but was worried about how to replace them; obviously, there was no question of their returning to work after marriage.31 If work was something to be left for marriage as soon as possible, there was no point in developing any pride about it. Absent, for the most part, from both popular culture and high culture were stories in which women took pride in a job well done.32
A woman’s thirst for intellectual stimulation was also, as far as the dominant paradigms of the culture were concerned, beside the point. Popular psetidoscientific discourse argued that women had “inferior brain weight” or “a tendency to brain fever if educated.”33 The president of Harvard proclaimed that American women “should recognize that the most satisfying intellectual pursuits of women are those associated with marriage, childrearing, and the schooling of young children.”34 Although by the end of the century more than 5,000 women were graduating yearly from the nation’s colleges and the majority were moving into the labor force,35 popular stereotypes still generally ignored women’s inter-
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est in things of the mind and focused on their concern with fashion or domesticity, as the women’s pages in the nation’s newspapers during this period testify.
As for women’s sexual drive, despite challenges from Free Love advocates like Victoria Woodhull and Emma Goldman, the message from mainstream popular culture at the turn of the century was fairly clear: respectable women didn’t have it.36 Or if they did, they channeled it quietly into their marriages and certainly did not talk about it. In the pervading popular paradigm, women were divided into two classes, those who were “pure” and those who were “impure.” A popular nineteenth-century advice book to young women, for example, prints sketches of the two paths women might take on two opposite sides of the page, and accompanies them with verbal descriptions. There is a direct progression from sketches labeled “At 15, In questionable company” to “At 20, Idle and immodest,” to “At 26, Immoral and outcast,’’ to “At 40, In poverty and wretchedness.” On the opposite side of the page there is a direct progression from “At 15, Studious and modest,” to “At 20, Virtuous and intelligent,” to “At 26, A happy mother,” to “At 70, An estimable grandmother.”37 When sexual relations took place outside of marriage — even if marriage was the result — the popular assumption was that the woman had been seduced and betrayed, not that she might have been expressing her own sexual desires.38
Roberta Alden
The fact that Dreiser’s initial encounter with Billy Brown came mediated through the formulaic sensationalism of the turn-of-the-century popular press was a key factor shaping the representation of her that he wrote into his 1925 novel. In many ways, Dreiser simply passed along to readers of his novel the stereotyped Billy Brown the reporters had presented in the press. In his version, as in theirs, her competence at her job and any intellectual curiosity she may have had, are largely erased. Roberta Alden takes no special pride in her work. Her mind is empty of all but inarticulate yearnings — yearnings after affection, love, social status, and material goods39 — and the only book she opens in the course of the novel is a seed catalogue (294).40
Her attitudes towards sex may be more complex than those which the reporters ascribed to Billy Brown in the newspapers, but ultimately she is characterized as passive, reactive, and weak.41 Roberta Alden fantasizes, for example, that she and Clyde “might sit and talk and hold hands perhaps. He might even put his
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arms around her waist, and she might let him.” But she checks herself in the next sentence: “That would be terrible, as some people here would see it, she knew. And it would never do for him to know that — never. That would be too intimate — too bold” (262). Later, when Clyde escalates physical contact, Dreiser tells us, in words that could have come straight out of the mouth of the District Attorney, “he held her while she resisted him,” but then adds, “although it was almost impossible for her to do so” (274). Ultimately, Dreiser has Clyde succeed with Roberta over her protests, after weeks of calculated psychological manipulation.
It is worth noting, however, that the prose with which Dreiser limns the change in their relationship is as lacking in active verbs as the murky ambiguous prose he uses to describe the drowning: “The wonder and delight of a new and more intimate form of contact, of protest gainsaid, of scruples overcome! Days, when both, having struggled in vain against the greater intimacy which each knew that the other was desirous of yielding to, and eventually so yielding, looked forward to the approaching night with an eagerness which was as a fever embodying a fear” (299). Floating noun clusters and exclamations replace active verbs. As in the drowning sequence, the absence of a subject and verb in the sentence makes it hard to assign responsibility for activities that transpire.42 Roberta’s tendency to be demanding, victimizing, and self-victimizing are natural extensions of her own victimization: the essence of her character is still that of pure, passive, vulnerable, pitiable victim.
One should not assume that all of Dreiser’s characterizations of women fit this mold. On other occasions — in works that earned him less popular acclaim, such as Sister Carrie and A Gallery of Women — Dreiser departed from these gender stereotypes in notable ways. Dreiser’s Carrie (an actress), his Olive Brand (a poet), and his Ellen Adams Wrynn (an artist) are examples of women who took pride in their work. Carrie reads a little; Olive Brand reads a lot. Both are portrayed (sympathetically) as intellectually curious. And all three of these women are more sexually autonomous, as Dreiser paints them, than was Roberta.43 The fact that Dreiser was capable of writing against the culture’s gender stereotypes on these occasions does not negate the fact that in An American Tragedy, his most famous and most widely read novel, for the most part he accepted them. It is even possible that his adherence to the culture’s stereotypes in this book may help explain the novel’s stunning commercial viability. As Philip Gerber has noted,
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the popular success of An American Tragedy was immediate and unprecedented. Despite its having been issued in two volumes (at a whopping five dollars a set), by the end of 1926 the novel had sold more than 50,000 copies, and its publisher, Horace Liveright, had negotiated the sale of screen rights to Famous Players for $90,000, in that day a startling sum for residuals.44