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シオドア・ドライサーの短篇作品におけるセンチメン タリズムと回帰する「母」
Sentimentalism and the Return of the Maternal in Theodore Dreiser’s Short Stories
相木 裕史 Hiroshi AIKI
東京外国語大学世界言語社会教育センター
World Language and Society Education Center, Tokyo University of Foreign StudiesIntroduction
1. “Nigger Jeff” and an Artist’s Nightmare
2. “St. Columba and the River” and the Recurrence of the Mother 3. “My Brother Paul” and the Sentimental Mother
4. A Joyous Death in “The Lost Phœbe”
キーワード： アメリカ文学、シオドア・ドライサー、自然主義、センチメンタリズム、「母」
Keywords: American literature, Theodore Dreiser, naturalism, sentimentalism, the maternal
要旨
本稿を通じて私が提示しているのは、シオドア・ドライサーの作品におけるセンチメンタリ ズムを考察するための新たな視点である。世紀転換期に作家としてのキャリアを開始したドラ イサーは、しばしばアメリカにおける自然主義文学の最も重要な担い手とみなされるが、彼の 作品における語りは主にそのリアリスティックな側面が注目されてきた。その反面、彼の作品 におけるセンチメンタリズムを、リアリズムとは相反する芸術的瑕疵として指摘する批評も少 なくない。そのような批評史的背景を念頭に、ドライサーのテクストにおいてセンチメンタリ ズムがどのように表出しているかをより具体的に検討するため、本稿では、ドライサーが作家 としての草創期に書いたもののこれまで批評的に十分検討されてこなかったいくつかの短篇作 品を分析する。とりわけ、これらのテクストにおいて「母」のイメジがどのように表出してい
るかに注目し、そのイメジが、センチメンタリズムを自らの小説作品の中で統御しようと模索 するドライサーの芸術家としての試みと密接に連関していることを論じる。彼の短篇作品にお いて、「母」のイメジは突如として、かつ抑制された形で表出するが、そのようなイメジをテク ストに書き込むことを通して、ドライサーは自らのリアリスティックな語りのうちにセンチメ ンタリズムを昇華させようと試みていたと考えられる。このように、本稿はドライサーの詩学 の発展における重要な側面に光をあてるものである。
Abstract
The aim of this article is to provide a new perspective on how the sentimental mode is incorporated in the works of Theodore Dreiser. As one of the most influential figures of so-called American naturalism at the turn of the century, Dreiser’s works have been discussed primarily in the context of the realist mode of writing. Some critics, Kaplan and Fiedler among others, have pointed out the sentimental aspect of Dreiser’s fiction as detrimental to the realist authenticity.
To expand the current discussion on Dreiser’s sentimentalism, I examine some of his short stories written during the formation years of his literary career, many of which critics have not paid enough attention to. In particular, I focus on how Dreiser’s texts represent the maternal image, and propose that the recurrent emergence of the maternal results from the author’s continuous attempts at negotiating sentimentalism. In many of Dreiser’s short stories, readers find a pattern of the maternal image suddenly appearing on the surface of the text in a subtle, indirect manner. By allowing the maternal figure to emerge momentarily in his texts, Dreiser seeks to negotiate sentimentalism in his realist narrative. My argument thus attempts to shed light on an important part of the development process of Dreiser’s poetics.
Introduction
As one of the most influential figures of so-called American naturalism at the turn of the century, Theodore Dreiser has been well known mainly for his novels Sister Carrie (1900), Jennie Gerhardt (1911), and An American Tragedy (1925). Dreiser’s works have been discussed primarily in the context of the realist mode of writing. Some critics have pointed out the sentimental aspect of Dreiser’s fiction as detrimental to the realist authenticity. To expand the current discussion on Dreiser’s sentimentalism, I examine some of his short stories such as
“Nigger Jeff,” “St. Columba and the River,” “My Brother Paul,” and “The Lost Phœbe.” Those stories, written during the formation years of his literary career, have not attracted much critical
attention. In my analysis of the short stories, I particularly focus on how Dreiser’s texts represent the maternal image, and propose that the recurrent emergence of the maternal results from the author’s continuous attempts at negotiating sentimentalism. In many of Dreiser’s short stories, readers find a pattern of the maternal image suddenly appearing on the surface of the text in a subtle, indirect manner. By allowing the maternal figure to emerge momentarily in his texts, Dreiser seeks to negotiate sentimentalism in his realist narrative. My argument thus attempts to shed light on an important part of the development process of Dreiser’s poetics.
1. “Nigger Jeff” and an Artist’s Nightmare
“Nigger Jeff” is a short story written at the starting point of Dreiser’s literary career. In 1899, he visited his friend Arthur Henry at his house in Ohio, and Henry suggested that Theodore should write a novel. Encouraged by his friend’s words, he promptly wrote four short stories, and
“Nigger Jeff” was one of them. After that he started to write his famous first novel, Sister Carrie, which was published in 1900.
The protagonist of “Nigger Jeff” is Elmer Davies, who is a competent newspaperman living in a city. The story can be regarded as an autobiographical account: In the character of Davies, the author apparently reflects his own experiences in the 1890s as a journalist. In the story Davies is sent to a village to collect news materials on the lynching of a “Negro.” The plot is based on an actual event that Dreiser came to know in January 1894 [Newlin 2003: 282-83, Dreiser 1987: 1136]. Like the story’s protagonist, Dreiser was so deeply embarrassed by the cruelty of the event that he determined to resign the newspaper office in St. Louis.
The focus of the story is on how Elmer Davies’s sense of values changes in the course of his movement from the city to the country, and his witness of the lynching. As the story’s historical background suggests, the characterization of Davies is fundamentally influenced by the novelist Dreiser’s own self-image. More specifically, Davies reflects Dreiser’s deep concern about what an
“artist” should be. In “Nigger Jeff,” Dreiser does not only intend to denounce the collective violence and its lawlessness that brings a helpless individual to death, nor the universality of such violence. It is quite important that the ultimate object of the story is not a social one, but a personal one. The story intends to manifest what kind of recognition is achieved by Davies/Dreiser as an “artist,” who experiences some essential transformation in his sense of values by witnessing the lynching. The closing part of the story well reveals this personal concern:
Davies swelled with feeling. The night, the tragedy, the grief, he saw it all. But also with the cruel instinct of the budding artist that he already was, he was beginning to meditate on the character of story it would make—the color, the pathos. The knowledge now that it was not always exact justice that was meted out to all and that it was not so much the business of the writer to indict as to interpret was borne in on him with distinctness by the cruel sorrow of the mother, whose blame, if any, was infinitesimal.
“I’ll get it all in!” he exclaimed feelingly, if triumphantly at last. “I’ll get it all in!”
[Dreiser 1989: 182]1
Despite the fact that the story not only deals with the tragic death of Nigger Jeff but also chooses his name as its title, the narrator concludes his story by showing the almost heroic figure of Elmer Davies whose exclamation sounds “triumphantly.” In other words, the narrator transforms Nigger Jeff’s story of tragic defeat into the artist Davies’s story of triumph.
Throughout the story, Davies continuously ponders on how he can create his own “story”
from his experiences. For example, he wonders “when, if ever, this story was to culminate, let alone he write it” [166]. At first, Davies expects that he can write “the story of a defeated mob”
[169], the story that is conventional rather than troublesome, satisfying his old sense of values which leads him to see the world as “a fixed and ordered process of rewards and punishments”
[157]. However, after witnessing the mob defeating Nigger Jeff, Davies realizes that he himself is also defeated as a storywriter, whose optimistic prospect is totally shattered. He then discovers some vision as an artist in a curiously triumphant manner.
Of course, this “triumph” of the narrator could be regarded as a selfish conclusion. Some readers may feel that the narrator (and Dreiser) is selfishly romanticizing the death of Nigger Jeff in favor of his own self-realization.2 In other words, the appearance of Davies’s “artist” side is so abrupt that it damages the artistic balance of the story. While acknowledging such possible novelistic flaw of “Nigger Jeff,” I would propose that this very abruptness or disproportion of the story is the crucial sign of Dreiser’s inner conflict as an “artist.”
It should be noted that Davies’s triumph is achieved by the unexpected encounter with Jeff’s mother, who is weeping alone in the dark corner of the room where Jeff’s dead body is laid.
Although the narrator recounts that Davies visits Jeff’s home just for “additional details” [178] of his story, the episode of his witnessing Jeff’s mother is where Dreiser’s story should “culminate.”
In a word, Davies/Dreiser can achieve his triumph as an artist by encountering the maternal figure.
Davies swelled with feeling. The night, the tragedy, the grief, he saw it all. But also with the cruel instinct of the budding artist that he already was, he was beginning to meditate on the character of story it would make—the color, the pathos. The knowledge now that it was not always exact justice that was meted out to all and that it was not so much the business of the writer to indict as to interpret was borne in on him with distinctness by the cruel sorrow of the mother, whose blame, if any, was infinitesimal.
“I’ll get it all in!” he exclaimed feelingly, if triumphantly at last. “I’ll get it all in!”
[Dreiser 1989: 182]1
Despite the fact that the story not only deals with the tragic death of Nigger Jeff but also chooses his name as its title, the narrator concludes his story by showing the almost heroic figure of Elmer Davies whose exclamation sounds “triumphantly.” In other words, the narrator transforms Nigger Jeff’s story of tragic defeat into the artist Davies’s story of triumph.
Throughout the story, Davies continuously ponders on how he can create his own “story”
from his experiences. For example, he wonders “when, if ever, this story was to culminate, let alone he write it” [166]. At first, Davies expects that he can write “the story of a defeated mob”
[169], the story that is conventional rather than troublesome, satisfying his old sense of values which leads him to see the world as “a fixed and ordered process of rewards and punishments”
[157]. However, after witnessing the mob defeating Nigger Jeff, Davies realizes that he himself is also defeated as a storywriter, whose optimistic prospect is totally shattered. He then discovers some vision as an artist in a curiously triumphant manner.
Of course, this “triumph” of the narrator could be regarded as a selfish conclusion. Some readers may feel that the narrator (and Dreiser) is selfishly romanticizing the death of Nigger Jeff in favor of his own self-realization.2 In other words, the appearance of Davies’s “artist” side is so abrupt that it damages the artistic balance of the story. While acknowledging such possible novelistic flaw of “Nigger Jeff,” I would propose that this very abruptness or disproportion of the story is the crucial sign of Dreiser’s inner conflict as an “artist.”
It should be noted that Davies’s triumph is achieved by the unexpected encounter with Jeff’s mother, who is weeping alone in the dark corner of the room where Jeff’s dead body is laid.
Although the narrator recounts that Davies visits Jeff’s home just for “additional details” [178] of his story, the episode of his witnessing Jeff’s mother is where Dreiser’s story should “culminate.”
In a word, Davies/Dreiser can achieve his triumph as an artist by encountering the maternal figure.
To comprehend the peculiar significance of the maternal figure in Dreiser’s self-formation as an artist, we should pay attention to the symbolical identification of Davies with Nigger Jeff. After lynching, the village people return home, and Davies remains on the lynch scene alone. There he feels keen sympathy for Jeff’s dead body: “Only the black mass swaying in the pale light over the glimmering water seemed human and alive, his sole companion” [177]. In the succeeding scene, Davies is deeply touched by the natural beauty surrounding Jeff’s hanged body, thinking, “Life seemed so sad, so strange, so mysterious, so inexplicable” [178]. His emotionally vague response to the violence indicates that his identification with Nigger Jeff occurs not so much in a political sense as in an aesthetic sense. Another scene of his identification with Jeff takes place when the excited mob is about to break into the shed where Jeff hides. There Davies sympathetically imagines Jeff’s “wondering and praying” [174] figure. Such an attempt of (or desire for) identification is effectively emphasized by a casual comment of a village man watching Nigger Jeff beside Davies: “I’d hate to be that nigger” [174]. Distancing himself from such collective hatred toward Jeff, Davies is willing to imaginatively “be that nigger.”
For Davies, the budding artist who for the first time confronts the inexplicableness of life, Nigger Jeff functions as his double self. If so, we could say that not only Davies but also Nigger Jeff reflects Dreiser’s self-consciousness as an artist. As Richard Lehan argues, “Nigger Jeff” can be read as “Dreiser’s own nightmare vision of what might happen to him, or to any man of passion, who was suddenly carried away by impulse and committed a crime, his fate a source of horrible pain to the mother” [Lehan 1969: 24]. Lehan also emphasizes that “the agony of the Negro’s suffering mother” [Lehan 1969: 24] is a crucial motif for Dreiser. As Lehan’s argument as well as the story’s closing scene suggests, “Nigger Jeff” is not a story that attempts to objectively “indict” the society characterized by the dwindling of the individual self and subjectivity, often depicted in many of naturalistic literary texts by Dreiser’s contemporary authors. Rather, it is a story that attempts to subjectively “interpret” Dreiser’s own “nightmare vision” as an artist, through aestheticizing the violent death of a black man. At the heart of that nightmare is the “mother” image and “the agony of the Negro’s suffering mother.”
2. “St. Columba and the River” and the Recurrence of the Mother
As an aspiring young artist, Dreiser wrote the short story “Nigger Jeff.” What he did in it is to establish a standpoint where he can capture “the color, the pathos” that are essential to his art.
As F. O. Matthiessen comments on “Nigger Jeff,” Dreiser seems to succeed, through writing the
story, in achieving “the kind of hardness that the artist must have, the hardness that will enable him to express what he has to say” [Matthiessen 1951: 54]. However, what is crucial in the narrative of “Nigger Jeff” is its form rather than its content. That is, the story well exemplifies Dreiser’s circumventive and indirect way of narrating especially when it concerns the issue of art or artist. It is quite significant that Davies/Dreiser can tell his story only by mirroring his self in the figure of his double Jeff, and, more importantly, by encountering Jeff’s mother. Through his identification with Jeff, Davies/Dreiser can confront the maternal image in an indirect manner.
As I have suggested, the abruptness of the appearance of the maternal image and Davies’s triumph seems to shed light on Dreiser’s certain artistic dilemma. What we find in many of Dreiser’s short stories is the peculiar fact that Dreiser continuously avoids the direct and conspicuous representation of the maternal. In other words, the abrupt appearance of Jeff’s mother reveals Dreiser’s almost unconscious hesitation in telling about the maternal.
In order to consider such a possibility, I will examine Dreiser’s another short story, “St.
Columba and the River.” Like “Nigger Jeff,” the story is based on his own experiences as a journalist. The plot derives from an article he wrote in 1904 when he was a journalist, as well as from his experience of manual labor [Newlin 2003: 327-28]. Apparently, it is the story of “triumph”
[97] achieved by the protagonist Dennis McGlathery, who inherits the courage of his dead coworker, faces the fatal emergency, and survives the crisis, becoming the hero of Sunday newspapers. On the one hand, “St. Columba” is highly praised for the depiction of economical and religious conflicts of those in the working class, and for the lively description of tunnel digging enlivened by a lot of historical facts. On the other hand, however, readers cannot deny that the plot of the story seems too unrealistic, considering the fact that the text was written in the age of American naturalism. McGlathery’s escape from the tunnel is so ridiculous that it would just be suitable for sensational articles of papers which favor that sort of “strange adventure” [97]. In fact, the narrator of the story attempts here and there to impress readers by the sensationalism of the plot, stating, “Reader—a miracle!” [96].
However, such an almost absurd plot of the story can be read as a narrative device that covertly reveals Dreiser’s self-consciousness as an artist. Near the end of the story, the narrator wonders whether McGlathery’s “miracle” is brought about by St. Columba, to whom McGlathery devotes his faith all his life.
But none the less, in the final extremity, had he [St. Columba] not acted? And if not,
story, in achieving “the kind of hardness that the artist must have, the hardness that will enable him to express what he has to say” [Matthiessen 1951: 54]. However, what is crucial in the narrative of “Nigger Jeff” is its form rather than its content. That is, the story well exemplifies Dreiser’s circumventive and indirect way of narrating especially when it concerns the issue of art or artist. It is quite significant that Davies/Dreiser can tell his story only by mirroring his self in the figure of his double Jeff, and, more importantly, by encountering Jeff’s mother. Through his identification with Jeff, Davies/Dreiser can confront the maternal image in an indirect manner.
As I have suggested, the abruptness of the appearance of the maternal image and Davies’s triumph seems to shed light on Dreiser’s certain artistic dilemma. What we find in many of Dreiser’s short stories is the peculiar fact that Dreiser continuously avoids the direct and conspicuous representation of the maternal. In other words, the abrupt appearance of Jeff’s mother reveals Dreiser’s almost unconscious hesitation in telling about the maternal.
In order to consider such a possibility, I will examine Dreiser’s another short story, “St.
Columba and the River.” Like “Nigger Jeff,” the story is based on his own experiences as a journalist. The plot derives from an article he wrote in 1904 when he was a journalist, as well as from his experience of manual labor [Newlin 2003: 327-28]. Apparently, it is the story of “triumph”
[97] achieved by the protagonist Dennis McGlathery, who inherits the courage of his dead coworker, faces the fatal emergency, and survives the crisis, becoming the hero of Sunday newspapers. On the one hand, “St. Columba” is highly praised for the depiction of economical and religious conflicts of those in the working class, and for the lively description of tunnel digging enlivened by a lot of historical facts. On the other hand, however, readers cannot deny that the plot of the story seems too unrealistic, considering the fact that the text was written in the age of American naturalism. McGlathery’s escape from the tunnel is so ridiculous that it would just be suitable for sensational articles of papers which favor that sort of “strange adventure” [97]. In fact, the narrator of the story attempts here and there to impress readers by the sensationalism of the plot, stating, “Reader—a miracle!” [96].
However, such an almost absurd plot of the story can be read as a narrative device that covertly reveals Dreiser’s self-consciousness as an artist. Near the end of the story, the narrator wonders whether McGlathery’s “miracle” is brought about by St. Columba, to whom McGlathery devotes his faith all his life.
But none the less, in the final extremity, had he [St. Columba] not acted? And if not,
how would you explain the fact that the tug Mary Baker was just at hand as he arose out of the water two thousand feet from shore? [98 italics original]
At this point, the narrator abruptly mentions the fact that the name of the tug boat is Mary Baker. The name derives from Mary Baker Eddy (1821-1910), who founded Christian Science in Massachusetts in 1879. The way the name Mary Baker emerges at the climax of the story is strikingly similar to the way Jeff’s mother appears in “Nigger Jeff” in its abruptness and indirectness. To be more specific, what is suggested here by the name of the tug boat Mary Baker, and by the real religious leader of that name, is the image of “mother,” that is, the Holy Mother. In Dreiser’s autobiographical novel The “Genius” (1915), the protagonist reads a book written by Mary Baker Eddy, Science and Health, with Key to the Scriptures (1875). The protagonist ponders over the significance of the scientists’ faith in “the immaculate conception of the Virgin Mary” [710], which strangely affects “his sense of the mystery of life” [710]. This episode curiously suggests Dreiser’s nominal association between Mary Baker and “the Virgin Mary.” In “St. Columba and the River,” it must also be mentioned that the name “Mary” evokes the middle-name of Dreiser’s real mother, Sarah Mary Schänäb Dreiser. The abrupt appearance of “Mary” all the more reflects the internal conflict in the mind of the young author. As he does in
“Nigger Jeff,” Dreiser weaves into the story his private self-consciousness as an artist, reflecting himself on the character of Dennis McGlathery. “St. Columba and the River” is, as it were, the covert and indirect portrait of the artist as a tunnel digger.
Curiously, such a covert design is revealed in one of the most realistic scenes of the story, which depicts McGlathery and his coworkers laboring devotedly in the deep, dark underground.
Stripped to the waist, in mud-soaked trousers and boots, their arms and backs and breasts mud-smeared and wet, their hair tousled, their eyes bleary—an artist’s dream of bedlam, a heavenly inferno of toil—so they labored. [84]
The laborer McGlathery should be the ideal figure for the artist Dreiser to mirror his self-image in, because both are quite similarly engaging themselves in “a heavenly inferno of toil.” Just as McGlathery, Dreiser had to live with this contradiction of “heavenly inferno,” and to write about the life of McGlathery was nothing but the act of exploring the chaotic realm of “an artist’s dream.” And, just as Davies in “Nigger Jeff” is given his triumph by Jeff’s sobbing mother,
McGlathery/Dreiser has to be rescued from his bedlam dream by the maternal Mary.
In this context, it is noteworthy that the body of McGlathery, when it is hovered from the underground tunnel to the surface of the river, is depicted as “a black object” [96]. When Dreiser reflects his self-consciousness as an artist on his writings, the artist figures in these writings tend to be curiously associated with blackness.
Some of Dreiser’s other short stories highlight this point. “McEwen of the Shining Slave Makers” is one of the four short stories Dreiser wrote at the very beginning of his literary career, most probably the first short story he wrote. The plot of the story is apparently based on the evolutionary theory of Herbert Spencer. However, what is more crucial than such ideological framework is the simple fact that Dreiser identifies his protagonist Robert McEwen with “black”
[99] ants. Actually, Dreiser emphasizes the blackness of McEwen by juxtaposing him with “Red”
[109] ants. Moreover, the author makes McEwen realize that his dreamy world of black ants is governed by “the powerful and revered ant mother” [103]. Thus, the story carefully reminds readers of the fact that the ant world McEwen temporarily drifts into is characterized by the centrality of maternal presence. Just as McGlathery in “St. Columba and the River” is rescued from the bedlam sphere of an artist’s “dream,” McEwen awakens out of “a dream” [114] in the end. It is quite important that McEwen acquires from his trip to dream “a vague, sad something out of far-off things which had been there” [115], just as Davies in “Nigger Jeff” realizes that life is “so sad, so strange, so mysterious, so inexplicable.” It suggests that Dreiser’s real intent in writing this story is not so much the novelistic adaptation of Spencer’s evolutionary theory as the psychological exploration into the realm where an artist’s creativity emerges. As Matthiessen comments, “McEwen of the Shining Slave Makers” should be read as “the groping after words corresponding to the groping of the thought” [52].
Another example of Dreiser’s “black” artist can be found in one of his most celebrated short stories, “Free.” The protagonist Rufus Haymaker is an architect, and he is characterized by his mood of “the artist” [37] and his “quite poetic” [37] sensitivity. His wife Ernestine is dying because of heart disease, but Rufus is gripped by the ruthless feeling that his wife’s death will make him free of all restrictions their marriage life has imposed on him. As the narrator says,
“There was actually a haunting satisfaction in the thought that she might die now” [59]. Rufus’s wish for Ernestine’s death makes him black: He continuously confronts with “his black thoughts”
[62], and occasionally blames himself, thinking he “must rid himself of these black wishes” [63].
And the most curious aspect of the artist Rufus is his covert attachment to his mother. Readers of
McGlathery/Dreiser has to be rescued from his bedlam dream by the maternal Mary.
In this context, it is noteworthy that the body of McGlathery, when it is hovered from the underground tunnel to the surface of the river, is depicted as “a black object” [96]. When Dreiser reflects his self-consciousness as an artist on his writings, the artist figures in these writings tend to be curiously associated with blackness.
Some of Dreiser’s other short stories highlight this point. “McEwen of the Shining Slave Makers” is one of the four short stories Dreiser wrote at the very beginning of his literary career, most probably the first short story he wrote. The plot of the story is apparently based on the evolutionary theory of Herbert Spencer. However, what is more crucial than such ideological framework is the simple fact that Dreiser identifies his protagonist Robert McEwen with “black”
[99] ants. Actually, Dreiser emphasizes the blackness of McEwen by juxtaposing him with “Red”
[109] ants. Moreover, the author makes McEwen realize that his dreamy world of black ants is governed by “the powerful and revered ant mother” [103]. Thus, the story carefully reminds readers of the fact that the ant world McEwen temporarily drifts into is characterized by the centrality of maternal presence. Just as McGlathery in “St. Columba and the River” is rescued from the bedlam sphere of an artist’s “dream,” McEwen awakens out of “a dream” [114] in the end. It is quite important that McEwen acquires from his trip to dream “a vague, sad something out of far-off things which had been there” [115], just as Davies in “Nigger Jeff” realizes that life is “so sad, so strange, so mysterious, so inexplicable.” It suggests that Dreiser’s real intent in writing this story is not so much the novelistic adaptation of Spencer’s evolutionary theory as the psychological exploration into the realm where an artist’s creativity emerges. As Matthiessen comments, “McEwen of the Shining Slave Makers” should be read as “the groping after words corresponding to the groping of the thought” [52].
Another example of Dreiser’s “black” artist can be found in one of his most celebrated short stories, “Free.” The protagonist Rufus Haymaker is an architect, and he is characterized by his mood of “the artist” [37] and his “quite poetic” [37] sensitivity. His wife Ernestine is dying because of heart disease, but Rufus is gripped by the ruthless feeling that his wife’s death will make him free of all restrictions their marriage life has imposed on him. As the narrator says,
“There was actually a haunting satisfaction in the thought that she might die now” [59]. Rufus’s wish for Ernestine’s death makes him black: He continuously confronts with “his black thoughts”
[62], and occasionally blames himself, thinking he “must rid himself of these black wishes” [63].
And the most curious aspect of the artist Rufus is his covert attachment to his mother. Readers of
“Free” may find that Rufus does not apparently appreciate familial value and marriage life.
However, it should be noted that he shows his love for his family members, in a peculiarly distorted way, through the image of mother. For instance, when Rufus thinks of the name of his daughter Ethelberta, he compares it with his mother’s name: “How he had always disliked that name!—largely because he had hoped to call her Ottilie, a favorite name of his; or Janet, after his mother” [50]. Again, the connection between the artist and the maternal is quite indirect and circumventive, and Dreiser consistently avoids bringing the maternal image to the forefront of the narrative. Rufus’s subtle craving for the maternal takes shape most vividly in his love for his dead son, Elwell. His deep affection toward Elwell is felt “in some chemic, almost unconscious way” [51], and, curiously enough, related to his own mother.
On his part, Haymaker came to be wildly fond of him [Elwell]—that queer little lump of a face, suggesting a little of himself and of his own mother, not so much of Ernestine, or so he thought, though he would not have objected to that. Not at all. He was not so small as that. [51]
Although Rufus reads in Elwell’s face the image of “his own mother,” he instantly insists that he is not so small as not to recognize his wife’s connection with Elwell. His gesture of camouflaging the preference to the maternal, of making his love for mother less noticeable, is quite characteristic of Dreiser’s stories about the “artist.”
3. “My Brother Paul” and the Sentimental Mother
As I have discussed so far, in Dreiser’s short stories, there can be traced one characteristic pattern of an artist’s indirect encounter with the maternal. Two questions should be considered:
Why is the maternal so important to Dreiser, and why does the maternal image have to be represented in an indirect manner? It has been well known that Dreiser had an exceptionally deep affection for his mother Sarah throughout his life, though she died in 1890 when Theodore was only 19 [Lehan 1969: 4-5]. Of course, it is not strange that people have to have more difficulty in articulating how they feel toward the one they love, especially if they hold affection on a deeper level. In Dreiser’s case, the reluctance he shows in openly talking about the mother seems to be attributed to his dilemmatic or ambivalent attitude toward his own standpoint as an artist.
I would argue that, for Dreiser, the distance he carefully keeps between himself and the maternal comes from his negotiation with his sentimental tendency as an artist. “My Brother Paul” is one of the most typical writings that show such dilemma of the author. “My Brother Paul”
is one of the twelve essays he published as Twelve Men (1919) in which he recollects twelve impressive figures he met. “My Brother Paul” tells about his relationship with his older brother Paul Dresser (1857-1906). He cordially encouraged and helped his brother Theodore, who suffered from depression after the publication of Sister Carrie.
At the beginning of the essay, the narrator (who can be identified as Theodore himself) introduces his brother Paul, who was a successful popular song writer as well as Broadway actor, in the following way:
The man [Paul] had a genius for the kind of gayety, poetry and romance which may, and no doubt must be, looked upon as exceedingly middle-class but which nonetheless had as much charm as anything in this world can well have. [244]
In the essay, the narrator continuously puts an emphasis on the “middle-class” trait of Paul’s entertainment business, and his audience’s “middle-class” character. However, as the above quotation clearly suggests, the narrator Dreiser’s evaluation of Paul’s art of middle-class entertainment is quite ambivalent. This ambivalence is expressed again in the passage where he comments on Paul’s popular songs. He almost derogatively summarizes Paul’s songs as “mere bits and scraps of sentiment and melodrama in story form, most asinine sighings over home and mother and lost sweethearts and dead heroes such as never were in real life” [261]. However, shortly after this passage, Dreiser admits the positive side of Paul’s songs, especially regarding the music of it. He says:
They [Paul’s songs] bespoke, as I always felt, a wistful, seeking, uncertain temperament, tender and illusioned, with no practical knowledge of any side of life, but full of a true poetic feeling for the mystery and pathos of life and death . . . . [261]
In this way, Dreiser considers that Paul’s entertainment art does hold some true “poetic” sense, even if it is imbued with undoubtedly middle-class “poetry.” It follows that the narrator Dreiser cannot help admitting the presence of some complex, yet positive poetics in Paul’s art, despite
the fact that his art clearly embodies blatant sentimentalism.
In this context, it is worth noting that Dreiser shows an exceptionally alert response toward the representation of the maternal when he talks about Paul’s sentimental popular songs. Among Paul’s works dealing with “home and mother and lost sweethearts and dead heroes,” the narrator lists some titles as examples:
. . . and followed by such national successes as “The Letter That Never Came,” “I Believe It, For My Mother Told Me So” (!), “The Convict and the Bird,” “The Pardon Came Too Late,” “Just Tell Them That You Saw Me,” “The Blue and the Grey,” “On the Bowery,” “On the Banks of the Wabash,” and a number of others, . . . . [261]
Of the eight song names he enumerates, Dreiser attaches an exclamation point to only one, “I Believe It, For My Mother Told Me So.” The reason of such an exceptional emphasis should be that the author cannot turn a blind eye to the embarrassingly open expression of love for “My Mother” that the title shows. Just as “Mary” in “St. Columba and the River,” here again the maternal image emerges on the surface of the text in an abrupt and subtle manner. And this moderated expression of the maternal, which takes shape in the casual exclamation point in “My Brother Paul,” implies that the way Dreiser represents the maternal reveals his conscious negotiation with sentimentalism, which is one of the most crucial issues of the artistry of this
“naturalist” author. In a word, it shows the artist Dreiser’s fatal dilemma regarding his own sentimental aspect.
For Dreiser who has often been regarded as one of the leading figures of “naturalism,”
sentimentalism has been the crux in the critical assessments of his art. So far, Dreiser’s sentimentalism has been considered rather negatively, as a flaw that undermines the authenticity of realism in his art. Amy Kaplan, whose rereading of Sister Carrie attempts to appreciate Dreiser’s sentimentalism as an effective device of his narrative strategy, summarizes critics’s view of his sentimentalism as “everything that seems the antithesis of a realism that directly portrays social conditions in lucid and unencumbered prose” [Kaplan 1988: 141]. Leslie Fiedler’s comment on Dreiser’s art succinctly depicts the author’s ambivalent standpoint: “For better or worse, Dreiser is bound in weakness and in strength to the values of the sentimental lower middle class” [Fiedler 2003: 249]. His word “For better or worse” seems to signify that Dreiser is not the kind of artist who can confidently and successfully control his sentimental side through
self-consciously relativizing or thematizing the very mode. Rather, it seems that he is the kind of novelist who tends to unconsciously repress or disguise his sentimental inclination. And this repression should be the reason why the maternal recurrently appears on the surface of his texts in a circumventive and indirect way.
“My Brother Paul” tells the author’s mixed feeling toward his brother, who flourished in the field of entertainment art with no hesitation in his reliance on the sentimental mode. He detests his brother’s “asinine sighings,” while at the same time he wants to appraise “a true poetic feeling”
of Paul’s art. Near the end of this essay, Dreiser emotionally tells that he is writing “the romance”
[269] of Paul’s life because his brother could not write it himself despite his earnest wish to do so.
That is, the artist Theodore Dreiser is taking the place of, or identifying with, the artist Paul Dresser, writing the romance to be dedicated to his dead brother as “a thin little flower” [269]. It could be said that, in this essay, Paul is the double self of the artist Dreiser. The author reflects in Paul his own self-consciousness as an artist.
The important point is that this identification with Paul enables Dreiser to engage himself in the sentimental mode of writing and, consequently, in the recurrent evoking of the maternal image. Throughout the essay, Dreiser continually superimposes the maternal image on Paul, as if what he really wants to talk about was his mother. Paul’s eyes are described as “those of a mother contemplating a sick or injured child than those of a man contemplating life” [250-51]; his voice and behavior are also “those of mother, the same wonder, the same wistfulness and sweetness, the same bubbling charity and tenderness of heart” [251]; his characteristic briskness is “always somehow suggestive of my mother, who was never brisk” [258]; and Dreiser depicts Paul who comes to support him who is suffering from depression as “a distrait mother with a sick child more than anything else” [266]. Most importantly, Paul is the only one who understands and sympathizes with Dreiser’s “artist” self as deeply as his mother:
As I look back now on my life, I realize quite clearly that of all the members of my family, subsequent to my mother’s death, the only one who truly understood me, or, better yet, sympathized with my intellectual and artistic point of view, was, strange as it may seem, this same Paul, my dearest brother. [245]
As I have discussed in the preceding sections, the “black” protagonists of Dreiser’s short stories are all the reflection of the author’s inner concern for the desirable state of “artist,” and all
of those figures have to awaken from their “dream.” The process of this awakening takes shape in the transit either from the country to the city, from the underground to the ground, or from ant to human. For those artists, it is not permitted to indulge perpetually in sentimentalism severed from actuality. However, they are, and Dreiser is, able to struggle for the realistic art in the real world, if they can touch the maternal image just momentarily. If so, the narrator Dreiser who obstinately desires to remain in his “dream” must be showing his positive assessment of Paul’s sentimental poetics, as the closing sentences of “My Brother Paul” indicates: “It was a dream. It is. I am. You are. And shall we grieve over or hark back to dreams?” [270].
4. A Joyous Death in “The Lost Phœbe”
In my discussion of Dreiser’s writings about an “artist,” I have demonstrated a characteristic pattern of the artist’s indirect encounter with the maternal image, and interpreted it as an indication of the author’s inner, and possibly unconscious, artistic dilemma over sentimentalism.
Of course, the author’s repression of sentimental inclination and its return in the form of the maternal should be regarded just as one aspect of Dreiser’s relationship with sentimentalism.
However, I believe that my discussion of Dreiser’s sentimentalism and the maternal will provide a new perspective on the author’s complex yet intriguing negotiation with his own sentimental side.
Probably the story that exemplifies my point in the subtlest manner could be “The Lost Phœbe.” As one critic says, this is “Dreiser’s strangest story” [Shapiro 1962: 120], and obviously what makes this story so strange is its openly sentimental plot. It tells the story of an old farmer, Henry Reifsneider, who cannot accept the death of his wife, Phœbe Ann, with whom he has been married for nearly fifty years. After some years of his solitary life as a widower, he begins to see the ghost of Phœbe. He then starts asking around all the people around him whether they have seen Phœbe lately, or where she may be. All the neighbors of the community think Henry becomes insane, but decides to let him alone. Henry continues his wandering travel in search for Phœbe for as many as seven years, all alone by himself. At the end of the story, miserably tattered Henry finally finds out Phoebe, “the full charm of her girlish figure as he had known it in boyhood, the pleasing, sympathetic smile” [286]. Desperately he dashes toward the young figure of Phœbe, and blindly falls from the edge of a cliff. The last paragraph of the story shows people finding the dead body of Henry under the cliff: “No one of all the simple population knew how eagerly and joyously he had found his lost mate” [286].
Although the exceptional dependence on sentimental plot has embarrassed some critics (“it is somewhat puzzling . . . for the realist for whom the Fact was glorious enough” [Loving 2005:
241]), “The Lost Phœbe” is probably the most popular of Dreiser’s short stories. Not only the general readers but also many critics have expressed their appreciation of the beauty of the story, many of them calling it “poetic.”3
On the one hand, the poetic sense of this story seems to derive from the sympathetic focus on the significance of the past and its influence on the individual, which is rather exceptional in Dreiser’s narrative. However, I would argue that the poetry of “The Lost Phœbe” can also be attributed to the author’s self-reflective depiction of the “joyous” death of Henry.
Despite the fact that the story deals mainly with the relationship of husband and wife, it can be read as another version of the indirect encountering with the “mother.” As Jerome Loving suggests, the character of Henry Reifsneider is based on Dreiser’s father John Paul Dreiser, who died in 1900 [Loving 2005: 231]. Shortly before writing this story, Dreiser made a trip to a countryside “in search of his father’s homeland in Mayen” and wrote a sketch titled “The Father”
[Loving 2005: 231]. If Dreiser is imagining in “The Lost Phœbe” his own father’s unexpressed feeling toward his wife, he is simultaneously searching for the image of the lost mother. Just as the narrator’s taking Paul’s place in “My Brother Paul” enables him to tell “the romance” and to continually recollect the mother image, so is the narrator of “The Lost Phœbe” able to allow himself to indulge in the excessively sentimental plot of seeing the lost sweetheart, and the lost mother. Phœbe’s “sympathetic smile” is another sign of the return of the maternal, or, the author’s remembrance, in “My Brother Paul,” of his own mother who “sympathized with [his]
intellectual and artistic point of view” [245].
Henry’s joyous death in “The Lost Phœbe” well resembles the pseudo-death that the protagonist of “McEwen of the Shining Slave Makers” experiences, who says to himself, “I died there—or as well as died there—in my dream” [114]. For the author, to die in the story should mean to die in his sentimental dream. If so, the death of Henry is much more “joyous” for Dreiser, because it enables him to awaken to the real world, to grope after the authentic artistry as a
“naturalist” artist, with the sympathetic promise of the mother.
Although the exceptional dependence on sentimental plot has embarrassed some critics (“it is somewhat puzzling . . . for the realist for whom the Fact was glorious enough” [Loving 2005:
241]), “The Lost Phœbe” is probably the most popular of Dreiser’s short stories. Not only the general readers but also many critics have expressed their appreciation of the beauty of the story, many of them calling it “poetic.”3
On the one hand, the poetic sense of this story seems to derive from the sympathetic focus on the significance of the past and its influence on the individual, which is rather exceptional in Dreiser’s narrative. However, I would argue that the poetry of “The Lost Phœbe” can also be attributed to the author’s self-reflective depiction of the “joyous” death of Henry.
Despite the fact that the story deals mainly with the relationship of husband and wife, it can be read as another version of the indirect encountering with the “mother.” As Jerome Loving suggests, the character of Henry Reifsneider is based on Dreiser’s father John Paul Dreiser, who died in 1900 [Loving 2005: 231]. Shortly before writing this story, Dreiser made a trip to a countryside “in search of his father’s homeland in Mayen” and wrote a sketch titled “The Father”
[Loving 2005: 231]. If Dreiser is imagining in “The Lost Phœbe” his own father’s unexpressed feeling toward his wife, he is simultaneously searching for the image of the lost mother. Just as the narrator’s taking Paul’s place in “My Brother Paul” enables him to tell “the romance” and to continually recollect the mother image, so is the narrator of “The Lost Phœbe” able to allow himself to indulge in the excessively sentimental plot of seeing the lost sweetheart, and the lost mother. Phœbe’s “sympathetic smile” is another sign of the return of the maternal, or, the author’s remembrance, in “My Brother Paul,” of his own mother who “sympathized with [his]
intellectual and artistic point of view” [245].
Henry’s joyous death in “The Lost Phœbe” well resembles the pseudo-death that the protagonist of “McEwen of the Shining Slave Makers” experiences, who says to himself, “I died there—or as well as died there—in my dream” [114]. For the author, to die in the story should mean to die in his sentimental dream. If so, the death of Henry is much more “joyous” for Dreiser, because it enables him to awaken to the real world, to grope after the authentic artistry as a
“naturalist” artist, with the sympathetic promise of the mother.
Notes
1) Hereafter all the page references to “Nigger Jeff,” “St. Columba and the River,” “McEwen of the Shining Slave Makers,” “Free,” “My Brother Paul,” and “The Lost Phœbe” will be to The Best Short Stories of Theodore Dreiser.
2) In this context, Lelekis’s observation is quite suggestive in that the spectators depicted in “Nigger Jeff”
witness the violent event with active engagement, rather than merely watching it, thus complicating the modern concept of spectatorship as a form of passive, visual aestheticization. See Lelekis 23-42.
3) See, for example, Matthiessen 181 and Farrell 11.
Works Cited Dreiser, Theodore 1987
Sister Carrie, Jennie Gerhardt, Twelve Men, Ed. Richard Lehan, New York, Library of America.
Dreiser, Theodore 1989
The Best Short Stories of Theodore Dreiser, Ed. Howard Fast, Chicago, Ivan R. Dee.
Dreiser, Theodore 2008
The “Genius,” Ed. Clare Virginia Eby, Urbana, U of Illinois P.
Farrell, James T. 1956
“Introduction” to The Best Short Stories of Theodore Dreiser, Cleveland, World P.
Fiedler, Leslie A. 2003
Love and Death in the American Novel, Illinois, Dalkey Archive.
Kaplan, Amy 1988
The Social Construction of American Realism, Chicago, U of Chicago P.
Lehan, Richard 1969
Theodore Dreiser: His World and His Novels, Carbondale, Southern Illinois UP.
Lelekis, Debbie 2015
American Literature, Lynching, and the Spectator in the Crowd: Spectacular Violence, London, Lexington Books.
Loving, Jerome 2005
The Last Titan: A Life of Theodore Dreiser, Berkeley, U of California P.
Matthiessen, F. O. 1951
Theodore Dreiser, Scranton, William Sloane.
Newlin, Keith (ed.) 2003
A Theodore Dreiser Encyclopedia, Westport, Greenwood P.
Shapiro, Charles 1962
Theodore Dreiser: Our Bitter Patriot, Carbondale, Southern Illinois UP.
