I have been interested in watching you as you have sat by my bedside. You have not tried to touch me. Theo could no more have done that than he could have stopped breathing. All his life he has had an uncontrollable urge when near a woman to lay his hand upon her and stroke her or otherwise come into contact with her.79
Dreiser was laconic about his problem: “It’s not my fault,” he once told a friend. “You walk into a room, see a woman and something happens. It’s chemical. What are you going to do about it?”80
Dreiser preferred women who responded to his passion with passion of their own. He was fond of paying lip service to the beauties of “free love.” But as for sexual freedom in the concrete, while Dreiser embraced “varietism” for himself, he demanded total faithfulness from his women. Kirah Markham recalled, ‘‘If a man so much as sat by the fire with me while [Dreiser] was off of an evening with another woman there were horrible scenes the next morning. … With his own promiscuous code, he could not believe in my faithfulness.”81
Ironically, the qualities Dreiser valued most in a real-life companion — within limits — turn out to be precisely those qualities that Billy Brown herself may have had, qualities that the World’s reporters, and then Dreiser himself, erased from their representations of her. What precisely those limits were become apparent if we examine Dreiser’s letters to Marguerite Tjader Harris — secretary, editor, and lover during his later years. Harris struggled to push those limits while Dreiser struggled to contain her. In the end, he would see Harris through the same gendered blinders that he saw Billy Brown.
From the start of their relationship Marguerite Tjader Harris’s intellectual curiosity and openness attracted Dreiser intensely. “I think of you as active, resourceful, brave, interested in so many things, and so intelligently,” he wrote.82 Later on he would write, in a similar vein, “Whether you know it or not you are always somewhere in my mind shining brightly as a mental and tempera mental prodigy. The girl with a wild heart and a free mind — one actually driven by the creative force of nature itself.”83
As Marguerite Tjader Harris proved her skills as his assistant and helpmate, Dreiser expressed his awe at her competence:
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Marguerite Dear:
Wasn’t that a hectic week! And you the swell, loving industrious, capable and clever secretary and hostess and sweetheart and bed-fellow — doing not only everything on the dot but getting it done. Truly it was delightful having you so near me and taking care of so many things [crossouts] I have never known a more capable and diplomatic and socially and mentally fit person. I can only think of Lord Nelson and his gifted and guiding Lady Hamilton. You should have been a general’s or a statesman’s wife or sweetheart. You’d be famous either way.84
Dreiser’s comment that the best that this enormously capable woman might have aspired to be was a “general’s or a statesman’s wife or sweetheart” — rather than a general or a statesman herself — might seem to run counter to the many other occasions when Dreiser urged women to become achievers in their own right. It is oddly reminiscent, however, of a conversation he had with Harris the evening they first met.
As Harris recalls the occasion, “After dinner we sat on a stiff studio couch and talked casually for a time. But then Dreiser asked me what I was doing. It did not seem enough to him that I was married and took part in the rushing social life of New York. ‘Nothing but a parasite,’ he teased, ‘I can put you to work.’”85 Dreiser did, in fact, put Harris to work. He asked her to comb New York galleries for illustrations that “might fit into the mood” of the prose-poem he had just completed, “My City,” which was to be published in a special art edition. As Harris recalls,
I promised to do so, since I frequently made the rounds of the New York galleries. He told me that there was also literary work with which I might help. His hand was on my knee in a way which was both paternal and confident.86
While someone who ‘‘was married” (to someone else) and “took part in the rushing social life of New York” might be, from Dreiser’s perspective, “a parasite,” someone who let him put his hand on her knee and who was willing to rush around New York on his errands was in a different category entirely. As Dreiser came to rely more and more on the panoply of “wifely” and other services Harris performed for him, he does not seem to have been struck by any inconsistency on this front. He initially pulled her into his orbit by accusing her of being a “parasite,” but his ploy was only too transparent. It was not putting her to work for her own sake that concerned him — it was getting her to work for him.
Dreiser offered Harris a “way out” of the tug of war that pulled so many women of her time in opposite directions. Women, like
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Harris, who wanted more than conventional married life offered, but less than all-out rebellion against the culture’s norms, were caught in a bind. How could they reconcile the desire to be intellectually stimulated and professionally challenged with the desire to retain one’s attraction to men, to be feminine, to not challenge directly the ubiquitous “marriage plot” that women had been socialized into from birth? I suspect that it is precisely the contested nature of that territory in the culture that helped Dreiser live with his own contradictory tendencies to push women out into the world, on the one hand, and to pull them into his own personal sphere (as lover, assistant, helpmate, hostess, etc.) on the other. For Dreiser, it was easy for a woman to “have it all”: all she had to have was a preternatural devotion to him.
As for Harris’s sexual drive, Dreiser celebrated it blissfully during those periods when it was directed towards him. He did an about-face, however, when he responded to a letter from her stipulating that she would come out to California to work on The Bulwark with him only if he agreed to follow what he referred to as certain “school marmish instructions” she had set forth regarding his conduct. His comment — a revisionist version of their past involvement — was clearly designed to infuriate her. He wrote: “As it were you were so driven by your own desires as to be compelled to continuously explore all phases of the sex act — almost to the exclusion of the literary creative act.—87
Once Marguerite Tjader Harris made it clear she was not interested in being involved sexually with Dreiser, he tried to deny the value of the intellectual and creative work she had performed for him professionally. His claim that she had been so absorbed in sex — deviantly so — as to almost overshadow or neglect the job she had been hired to do simply does not hold up. His letters from the period she was working with him tell a different story. They document the care and competence with which Harris performed the professional tasks Dreiser assigned her. Dreiser was simply rewriting the past in light of his frustrations in the present.
As he took seriously the intellectual aspirations of the young women who came to him for guidance, as he nurtured and supported their careers, and as he urged them to express their sexual passions, Dreiser challenged the dominant ideology of gender of his time. Yet his challenge was neither consistent nor truly subversive.
While he may have unwittingly reinforced the reporters’ erasure of Billy Brown’s intellectual curiosity, her pride in her work, and her natural interest in sex, it was with all his wits about him
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that he endeavored to erase those same qualities in his representations of Marguerite Tjader Harris. Dreiser’s progressive theories and practices were stymied by his obsessive jealousies and sexual compulsions. His empathy and understanding were limited by his egotism and self-absorption. The sexual politics that informed Dreiser’s personal relationships and his work mirror the tensions that inhered in the culture itself — and are as contradictory and complex. Dreiser both challenged and reinscribed the discourse of gender of his day in his art and in his life, in ways we may never, perhaps, fully disentangle.
Notes
1. I am grateful to Robert Crunden, Milton Fisher, Miriam Gogol, Lawrence Hussman, Thomas P. Riggio, Lillian Robinson, and Jeffrey Rubin-Dorsky for conversations, comments, and criticism that helped shape my thinking about Dreiser in this essay.
2. Susan Wolsterholme, “Brother Theodore, Hell on Women,” in Fritz Fleischmann, ed., American Novelists Revisited: Essays in Feminist Criticism (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1982), pp. 243–264. (Quotation, p. 264.) Although other women critics have written on Dreiser, they have not generally done so from a feminist perspective.