It is interesting, by way of contrast, that the books in which Dreiser departed from or challenged the culture’s ideology of gender (such as Sister Carrie or The ‘‘Genius”) were, commercially speaking, largely unsuccessful.45
Stereotypes are rooted in realities; most likely there were real-life women in Dreiser’s world who resembled, on occasion, the stereotypical Billy Brown painted in the press. Dreiser clearly had sympathy for their plight and empathized with their pain. But the fact that stereotypes about women may have their roots in reality does not negate the power of these stereotypes. Once reified and interpreted by the culture to define the condition of most women most of the time, they confine and constrict a woman’s sense of herself and her possibilities.
At times, Dreiser simply accepted the reporters’ accounts. Thus, in describing Billy Brown, he chose not to reshape that material in significant ways. In the process, he naturalized the assumptions that informed the accounts in the press. That is different from the choices he made regarding Chester Gillette, as a number of critics have established.46 Dreiser changed the facts of Gillette’s life to make his character a more sympathetic “everyman” figure. This was part of his project of underscoring the normality underlying the criminal in American life.47 “The crime in the novel is truly the creative product of the author’s philosophy and experience,” Kathryn M. Plank noted, commenting on the changes Dreiser made in Gillette’s story to fit his preconceived paradigm and “observations of American society.”48 To render “the tragic reality at the center of the American dream,” Donald Pizer has observed, Dreiser felt it necessary to reshape a man represented in the press as “a shallow-minded murderer” into “any one of us.”49 Dreiser did not find it necessary to reshape a woman who had been represented in the press in equally stereotypical terms: that characterization fit his artistic needs.
The gender stereotypes that emerge in Dreiser’s representation of Billy Brown reflect those that obtained in the culture at large at the time of her death in 1906. But by the time Dreiser was writing the novel — the 1920s — they had begun to change. Dissident voices were more audible and alternative images of gender more readily
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available, both in the real world and in literature. Although Dreiser allowed the automobile culture of the 1920s to creep into his novel, which was set around 1906 and earlier, he kept the changing images of women out of it.
Alternate Realities
How might another kind of imagination have reinterpreted Billy Brown? The tragic reality at the center of the American dream for Dreiser was, on this occasion, a tragic reality seen from a masculinist perspective. What might a feminist contemporary of Dreiser’s — a Charlotte Perkins Gilman or an Edna St. Vincent Millay, for example — have done with the same raw material? Gilman was interested in the special attraction to women of men who took them seriously intellectually or professionally, who engaged them in spirited conversation. Millay was intrigued by the satisfaction women took in the erotic dimension of their lives. How might someone not content with the stereotypical portrayal of Billy, much as Dreiser was not content with the stereotypical portrayal of Chester Gillette, have reshaped her story? Might there be another Billy Brown lurking underneath the stereotype — one we can never exhume, but whom we might imagine?
This Billy Brown may have taken pride in her work, in the quickness with which she learned her job, the ease with which she related to coworkers, the intelligence with which she mastered her new environment. This Billy Brown thirsted for conversation about books and magazines and newspapers she read. She loved to talk about literary characters as if they were living, breathing human beings. She liked brief excursions into philosophy, psychology — she didn’t use those terms, of course; she simply liked talking about what made people tick. After her teacher and friend Maude Kenyon married and after Billy moved to Cortland, there was no one she could share these thoughts with, no one she could talk with about what she read. Then Chester Gillette came along. He was the one person in the factory who could carry on a conversation about books, who thought about what he read, who had been to college, who liked hearing her ideas. He was a good listener. It was such a relief to break through that loneliness, to find someone else as anxious as she was to read the next installment of the latest popular novel in the local paper. They would talk over lunch break in the factory, and she would give him candy she’d brought as a treat. She had longed for someone to talk to like this, ever since Maude had gone. She liked the way he made her feel. She liked touching him. She liked it when he touched
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her. … She wanted those talks in the parlor late at night to go on forever. …
The foregoing fiction is, of course, my own; I am not asking it of Dreiser. I have drawn it merely to suggest some alternative ways in which this same raw material might have been molded; it is designed to emphasize the malleability of the “facts” on which Dreiser’s novel was based.
We can never meet this Billy Brown. We can only imagine her. Did Dreiser meet her in a new incarnation as he worked on his novel in the 1920s? It is true that challenges to the dominant paradigm did, by this time, exist.50 “New Women” of the 1920s, like Edna St. Vincent Millay, were forthright in asserting their right to be sensual, sexual beings on their own terms. Victories won by Margaret Sanger (to whose Birth Control Review Dreiser contributed) helped clear the way for women to maintain and express more sexual autonomy. Charlotte Perkins Gilman and others argued that it was important for women to lead fulfilling, independent lives beyond the confines of the domestic sphere. However, while the 1920s did bring challenges to the ideology of gender that had dominated at the turn of the century, many of them remained relatively muted. For example, despite the fact that by the 1920s women had moved into the workforce in unprecedented numbers and had made their way into many professions, popular images of women who took pride in their work lagged far behind. As June Sochen has noted, “[Zona] Gale herself was sympathetic to the women’s movement, had written for feminist publications, and understood the positions of such New York City feminists as Crystal Eastman and Henrietta Rodman. But neither she nor Fannie Hurst dared to portray a woman who led a rich, purposeful life independent of a husband and marriage. Both authors were themselves independent, but both upheld traditional values in their writing.”51
If we cannot meet the “other’’ Billy Brown in Dreiser’s text or in the text the reporters have given us, there is one place where we can meet her — or at least her very close cousin: in Dreiser’s life. The Billy Brown we can imaginatively exhume from beneath those layers of cultural iconography bears a striking resemblance to the many real-life young women who were so important to Dreiser’s work and well-being. Why did he seek out such women, and why were they attracted to him? How did he respond to their thirst for intellectual growth, to their professional ambitions, to their sense of themselves as sexually autonomous beings? What did they gain from their relationships with Dreiser? What did
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they lose? The answers to these questions, as to nearly all other questions involving Dreiser, are contradictory and convoluted.
A subject that has remained on the fringes of both mainstream and feminist scholarship is the complex role male mentors and models have played for aspiring women writers. The influence of male writers on women writers in American literary history is beginning to be explored;52 the influence of women writers on men is also being investigated in preliminary ways.53 Generally neglected, however, is the often vexed and complex relationship these men and women had to each other in their lives, particularly in those instances when these initially intellectual relationships took on sexual dimensions as well. Perhaps the distastefulness of the sexist stereotype of the woman who “sleeps her way to the top” has discouraged feminist scholars from investigating this ambiguous and complex subject; having fought so long to define women by something other than their sexuality, even broaching this subject may seem to be a “step backward.” Underneath that stereotype, however, some fascinating chapters of social history and gender relations remain to be uncovered.
Simultaneously empowering and threatening, influential male writers had the capacity to nurture, exploit, stifle, guide, encourage, terrify, and embolden women with literary aspirations; they probably did all these things. Our understanding of the intricacies of Dreiser’s role in this process will be enriched by forthcoming publications on the subject by Lawrence Hussman and Thomas P. Riggio, both of whom are editing unpublished primary documents that illuminate Dreiser’s relationship with women.54