Theodore Dreiser:
Beyond Naturalism
Contents:
Acknowledgments v
Introduction
Miriam Gogol vii
Part I Gender Studies: Women and Dreiser
Dreiser and the Discourse of Gender
Shelley Fisher Fishkin 1
Sexualizing the Female Body: Dreiser, Feminism, and Foucault
Irene Gammel 31
Recontextualizing Dreiser: Gender, Class, and Sexuality in Jennie Gerhardt
Nancy Warner Barrineau 55
Part II Gender Studies: Men and Dreiser
The Secrets of Fraternity: Men and Friendship in Sister Carrie
Scott Zaluda 77
Part III Psychoanalysis and Dreiser
“That oldest boy don’t wanta be here”: Fathers and Sons and the Dynamics of Shame in Theodore Dreiser’s Novels
Miriam Gogol 95
Page iv
Lacanian Equivocation in Sister Carrie, The “Genius,” and An American Tragedy
Leonard Cassuto 112
Part IV Philosophy
On Language and the Quest for Self-Fulfillment: A Heideggerian Perspective on Dreiser’s Sister Carrie
Paul A. Orlov 134
Part VFilm Studies
Squandered Possibilities: The Film Versions of Dreiser’s Novels
Lawrence E. Hussman 176
Part VI Popular Literature
Carrie’s Library: Reading the Boundaries Between Popular and Serious Fiction
M. H. Dunlop 201
Part VII New Historicism
Sister Carrie’s Absent Causes
James Livingston 216
Works Consulted 247
Contributors 261
Index 263
Page v
Acknowledgments
I extend special thanks to Florian Stuber, Albert Ashforth, and Madelyn Larsen, all of whom gave very generously of their time in reading and revising portions of this book.
My gratitude is extended as well to the library staff of the Theodore Dreiser papers, Department of Special Collections, the University of Pennsylvania. Quotations from unpublished Dreiser manuscripts were used with the permission of The Trustees and copyrighted by them. Grateful acknowledgment is made to the University of Calgary Press for granting permission to reprint material in Irene Gammel’s essay, ‘‘Sexualizing the Female Body: Dreiser, Feminism and Foucault” (Sexualizing Power in Naturalism [Calgary, 1994]) and to the University of North Carolina Press for permission to reprint sections of James Livingston’s “Sister Carrie’s Absent Causes” (Pragmatism and the Political Economy of Cultural Revolution, 1850–1940 [Chapel Hill, 1994]).
I also thank Zanvel A. Liff for his encouragement and inspiration over the years. Without his help, this volume would not have come into existence. I dedicate my portions of this book to D. Fred, Ariella, and F. Gogol.
Miriam Gogol
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Page vii
Introduction
Miriam Gogol
To his contemporaries, Theodore Dreiser was best known for his “naturalism” and for his defiance of the genteel tradition of American letters. For most of his career, he was surrounded by notoriety, and after the publication, in 1925, of An American Tragedy, his name was a household word. Fifty thousand people bought copies in the first few years, many more read the book, and still more read of attempts in Boston to have the book banned.1 With time, though, naturalism became absorbed within the larger tradition of American writing, the genteel literary establishment lost its power to sway readers, and the controversies that swirled about Dreiser in his lifetime were largely resolved. Dreiser’s reputation, however, has not merely survived; it continues to grow. Hardly a year passes that does not see the appearance of a new edition of Dreiser’s writings, including such volumes as the unexpurgated Sister Carrie (1981), American Diaries, 1902–1926 (1982), An Amateur Laborer (1983), Dreiser–Mencken Letters (1986), Newspaper Days (1991), and the restored Jennie Gerhardt (1992). And the works keep coming. New editions are planned from the University of Pennsylvania, the Library of America, and Oxford University Press.2
Today Dreiser is considered a classic American writer and has a global following. His fiction is required reading in many American literature courses in colleges and universities in the United States and abroad, including universities in India, Japan, China, Germany, Hungary, and the former Communist-bloc countries. His work is also heavily anthologized.
To a large extent, Dreiser’s strength of character has contributed to his enduring popularity with readers. Where other writers succumb to the urge to judge and censor, Dreiser merely describes. He told the truth as he saw it, and in doing so, he focused on
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subjects that have become primary concerns in modern American fiction. Even his life inspires readers: As the son of a poor immigrant, he struggled for social recognition; as an unskilled worker, he fought for a salary that would provide the necessities for survival; as a young author, he strove to make his voice heard above the cacophony of a robust democratic society. If readers identify with Clyde Griffiths in An American Tragedy and Hurstwood in Sister Carrie, it is because they identify with Dreiser himself. Dreiser’s honesty is the source of the power in his writing; that honesty makes it possible for readers to understand the powerful desires that drive his characters to crimes of passion. Without judgment, without censorship, Dreiser reports what he sees and what he knows. As we are learning through overwhelming media coverage of sensational trial cases — description does yield explanation and insight.
In many ways, Dreiser is a greater author than Henry James, against whom he was pitted in Lionel Trilling’s essay “Reality in America” (1950).3 Like James, Dreiser gives us in-depth studies of the psychic struggles of his characters but, unlike James, Dreiser is willing to get his hands dirty. The world of Dreiser’s fiction is so much larger than that of James. He shows us the external forces that shape his characters’ lives and provides some of the first authentic portrayals of working-class people.
But Dreiser’s fiction goes beyond these evident truths. He was drawn to ideas and subjects that continue to engage readers’ imaginations. Take, for example, the question of feminism. Contemporary feminists have interestingly ambivalent feelings toward Dreiser.4 On the one hand, they are repulsed by some of his own relationships with women. He was a known womanizer, who was not above writing identical love letters to two different women; in fact, he often wrote to at least two lovers at the same time. By his own account, to have to remain faithful to any woman would almost have “killed” him (6 June 1917, Diaries). Later in life he confided to his niece Vera Dreiser that he was in love a thousand times, or “most likely never at all.’’5
On the other hand, in the first decades of this century Dreiser was one of the few American authors — male or female — who in creating characters defied many of the culture’s stereotypes of the “working girl.”6 If he was often callous to women in his life, Dreiser was gently sympathetic to them in his books. Although not true of all his female characters, many of them exhibit characteristics that we would call feminist: primarily their independence in social, economic, and vocational spheres. They pursue worldly goals and through their drive succeed in obtaining them. This is just one
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of the many paradoxes that fascinate readers and is beginning to perplex scholars.
Even though Dreiser was a forerunner in accurately describing the often squalid conditions in which struggling young women had to work, their depressing domestic surroundings, and their assorted job-related trials, the historical significance of these descriptions is only now being studied. Although scholars have traditionally shied away from intimate biographical questions, frowning on what Joyce Carol Oates labeled “pathography,”7 a growing number of scholars find it impossible to avoid considering a writer’s private life. This volume includes essays that bring this and other such current issues to a discussion of Dreiser and his oeuvre.8
It is remarkable that so few critical books and no recent collections of critical essays have been published that reflect current thinking about Dreiser’s canon. This collection, which presents new essays that treat his work as a whole and raises contemporary theoretical questions about his canon, is the first to appear in 24 years.9
Here is a writer of extraordinarily wide-ranging interests, whose work draws global attention, but who until recently has had virtually one aspect of his art be the principal focus of professional studies. More than any other American novelist, Theodore Dreiser has been associated with naturalism.10 And much of the significant writing about him since the mid-1960s has focused on the issue of whether he is a naturalist, which suggests that this controversy has become one of the permanent centers of Dreiser criticism.11
This collection, however, goes “beyond naturalism,” hence the title. But what does that mean, and what is “naturalism” anyway? In this time of radical changes in ways of looking at literature and especially of classifying it, all terms have come under new scrutiny. And certainly ‘‘naturalism,” which has been defined and redefined particularly since the late 1940s, has been viewed with suspicion. George J. Becker (1949), defining all naturalism, including American, considered it “no more than an emphatic and explicit philosophical position taken by some realists,” the position being a “pessimistic materialistic determinism.”12 Lars Ahnebrink (1950), in the first major study of the naturalist movement in America, defined it largely in terms of its European antecedents, as found in Flaubert, Zola, Turgenev, and Hardy. Charles Child Walcutt (1956) analyzed its roots as indigenous to American Transcendentalism or realism and argued that its major themes involved determinism, survival, violence, and taboo.13 Donald Pizer (1984) agreed that naturalism derived from previous American movements and described the naturalist novel as primarily populated