Dreiser's antipodal attitude toward the
American dream of success in the progressive period : Sister Carrie and Jennie Gerhardt
著者（英） Takashi Sasaki
journal or
publication title
Doshisha literature
number 29
page range 54‑82
year 1979‑12‑30
権利（英） English Literary Society of Doshisha University
URL http://doi.org/10.14988/pa.2017.0000016504
DREISER'S ANTIPODAL ATTITUDE TOW ARD THE AMERICAN DREAM OF SUCCESS
IN THE PROGRESSIVE PERIOD:
SISTER CARRIE AND JENNIE GERHARDT
T AKASHI SASAKI
I
·With the closing years of the nineteenth century, the whole economic and cultural life of the United States underwent a profound revolution. These years witnessed the disappearance of the Western frontier line, the completion of a transcontinental railway system, and the transfer of economic and politicalcenters from the country to the city. While rural regions were suffering from a profound and pro- longed agricultural malaise, an unprecedented concentration of control of the processes of manufacture, transportation, communication, and banking in trusts and monopolies proceeded. It was also during this period that big business and the successful businessman as a hero emerged.
Professor Henry Steele Commager, therefore, refers to this period as "the watershed of American history" and he depicts its charac- teristics as follows:
On the one side lies an America predominantly agricultural;
concerned with domestic problems; conforming, intellectually at least, to the political, economic, and moral principles inherited from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries-an America still in the making, physically and socially; an America on the whole
self-confident, self-contained, self-reliant, and conscious of its unique character and of a unique destiny. On the other side lies the modern America, predominantly urban and industrial; in- extricably involved in world economy and politics; troubled with the problems that had long been thought peculiar to the Old World; experiencing profound changes in population, social institutions, economy, and technology; and trying to accommodate its traditional institutions and habits of thought to conditions new and in part alien.1
In fact, change itself was not only quantitative but also qualitative, and Americans were, for the first time in their national experience, confronted with a challenge to their philosophical assumptions. On the other side of the "go-getting" spirit of the self-made man, the note of confidence which had characterized America gave way to doubt, self- assurance to bewilderment, and resolution to confusion. Vlfe can see one of the typical examples of this bewilderment in Henry Adams.
Henry Adams was certainly one of the atypical minds of the so called "Progressive Period" because of his extraordinary intelligence and sensitivity. However, since he was endowed with extremely acute historical insight, those who are interested in the Zeitgeist of the age cannot omit studying his experience during the period-especially, his experience at the World's Columbian Exposition at Chicago in 1893, which celebrated the 400th anniversary of the discovery of America.
Adams was so impressed with the Exposition that he visited Chicago twice to see it. In The Education
if
Henry Adams, however, he confesses,"education ran riot at Chicago."2 At that time Adams felt for the first time since 1870 that "something new and curious" was about to happen to the world. And the Exposition presented this "something"
in a symbolic form. Of all the exhibits, he was particularly interested
in the dynamos, and he reflected and lingered long among them; but the "naYve" questions of the historian could never be answered by the men of science. Therefore, the only thing he could do was sit and ponder on the steps beneath Richard Hunt's dome. He writes:
J\1en who knew nothing whatever-who had never run a steam- engine, the simplest of forces-who had never put their hands on a lever-had never touched an electric battery~never talked through a telephone, and had not the shadow of a notion what amount of force was meant by a watt or an ampere or an erg, or any other term of measurement introduced within a hundred years- had no choice but to sit down on the steps and brood as they never brooded on the benches of Harvard College, either as student or professor, aghast at what they had said and done in all these years, and still more ashamed of the childlike ignorance and babbling futility of the society that let them say and do it. The historical mind can think only in historical processes, and probably this was the first time since historians existed, that any of them had sat down helpless before a mechanical sequence.3
Adams brooded: "Here was a breach of continuity~a rupture III
historical sequence! Was it real, or only apparent?"4 Thus, even one of the most outstanding intellectuals of the period was bewildered in contemplating the historical meaning of the drastic changes which were taking place in the contemporary American scene.
Confronted by these enormous social and cultural changes of the country, American literature also experienced a profound revolution.
Although literature after the Civil War had been regional and romantic, toward the end of the Century it became sociological and naturalistic.
In addition to Henry Adams, many of the other writers of the period could not enjoy the privilege of cozily dwelling in the spiritual world.
They too Were overwhelmed by their own society and its materialism,
and, therefore, they needed a new literary technique and philosophy which would be more suitable than traditional ones to delineate the new phases of American life.
In addition to Hamlin GerIand, Stephen Crane and Frank Norris, Theodore Dreiser represents the culmination of American "naturalistic"
writings. These writings made an effort to strive for scientific objec- tivity in their portrayal of characters who are conceived of as being motivated primarily by impersonal biological, economic and social forces. And it is my belief that Dreiser is the greatest literary figure during the Progressive Period, one who attempted to bring current American fiction into harmony with the tone and mood of contempo- rary American life.
Furthermore, we may say that not only his works but also Dreiser himself was a typical social product of the period. Born and raised in poverty, struggling desperately to be successful as a newspaper man, and looking on with a certain envy at all the superficial evidences of the happiness to be found in wealth and position, he too earnestly wanted to make money, enjoy sex, and achieve the prevailing American idea of success.
Reared in an economically struggling family, Dreiser had seen too much of the sadder sides of life to accept the conventional American standards in fiction. In order to convey the materialistic tone of the age, he too needed a new literary technique and philosophy. And he found his literary and philosophic masters and models in Honore de Balzac and Herbert Spencer.
Surely, it was Balzac who crystallized Dreiser's wish to be a novelist. In discovering the work of Balzac, Dreiser wrote:
A new and inviting door to life had suddenly been thrown open
to me .... It was for me a literary revolution. Not only for the brilliant and incisive manner with which Balzac grasped life and invented themes whereby to present it, but for the fact that the types he handled with most enthusiasm and skill ... were, I thought, so much like myself .... His grand and somewhat pompous philo- sophical deductions, his easy and offhand disposition of all manner of critical, social, political, historical, religious problems ... fasci- nated and captured me as the true method of the seer and genius."
Balzac's greatest aim was to describe and interpret the age in which he lived. His favorite theme was that of the ambitious young pro- vincial fighting for advancement in the competitive world of Paris.
He believed that external circumstances, a man's antecedents, environ- ment, upbringing, and profession, would shape his destiny. And we will find that almost all of these literary features of Balzac's are adopted in Dreiser's works.
Motivated by Balzac to be a novelist, Dreiser read Herbert Spencer's First Principles a few months later. It is true that Darwinism or Spencerism was nothing but a theoretical explanation of what Dreiser had observed and experienced in his own life. However, when he encountered the book, he wrote:
... and then taking up First Principles and discovering that all I deemed substantial-man's place in nature, his importance in the universe ... -all questioned and dissolved into other and less understandable things, I was completely thrown down in my con- ceptions or non-conceptions of life. 6
Thus, Spencer "blew him to bits." But III reading this book, Dreiser was finally led to the conviction:
Of one's ideals, struggles, deprivations, sorrows and joys, it could
only be said that they were chemic compulsions, something which for some inexplicable but unimportant reason responded to and resulted from the hope of pleasure and the fear of pain. Man was a mechanism, undevised and uncreated, and a badly and carelessly driven one at that [nowhere].?
To be sure, the primary criteria of naturalism IS a rejection of the principle of freedom. To Dreiser, therefore, society was a counterpart of nature, a chaos of inscrutable forces, a "chemic drift", in which wealth and poverty were inevitable facts, and man was merely an atom who was not to be blamed for anything he did or failed to do.
FUl,thermore, Dreiser also learned from Spencer the theory of
"the Survival of the Fittest." In his essay, "Life, Art and America,"
Dreiser states:
In short, I was beginning to find the world a seething, stormy, bitter, gay, rewarding and destroying realm, in which the strong and the subtle and the charming and the magnetic were apt to be victors, and the weak and the homely and the ignorant and the dull were apt to be deprived of any interesting share.s
"Vhen we discuss American naturalism, as Professor Alfred Kazin observes, it must be remembered that naturalism has been not so much a school as a climate offeeling which is almost in the very air of modern American life.9 It is not a coherent philosophy but a kind of literary attitude toward man and society. Although it might have been catalyzed by French naturalism, it has been more directly derived from the unique characteristics of contemporary American life.
Undoubtedly, American naturalistic writings would have been impossible before the Civil War. At that time the existence of the frontier, the huge area offree land, and the temper of people's thinking
encouraged every man to consider himself the master of his fate.
However, as we have seen in the very beginning of this essay, during the period from the mid-eighties to the Spanish-American 'Var, a new attitude prevailed. It was fostered by the new organization and meth- ods of industry, and by the rapid concentration of the population in the cities. The individual workman, who was no longer master of his trade or of himself, began to lose his optimism and his confidence in himself, and he began to be convinced that he was the slave of the machine. At tha same time, the relatively new phenomenon of the urban development and the expansion of the city created a mass psychology, and men began to think of themselves in terms of the anonymous crowd, rather than in terms of independent Americans.
Thus, as Professor Russel Blankenship says, "The machine age was giving America a new mind." 10
About this "new mind" in America, Dreiser observes:
All men, in the ~ind of the unthinking American, are still free and equaL .. Yet, life here, as elsewhere, comes down to the brutal methods of Nature itself .... And although by degrees the average American is feeling more and more keenly the sharpening struggle for existence, yet his faith in his impossible ideals is as fresh as ever.
God will save the good American and seat him at His right hand on the Golden Throne.l l
Dreiser also criticizes this disparity between the reality of American life and its religious paranoia:
Why? I have a vague feeling that it is the American of Anglo- Saxon origin only who has been most vivid in his excitement over religion and morals where the written, printed, acted or painted word was concerned, yet who at the same time, and perhaps for this very reason was failing or deliberately refusing to see the
61 contrast which his ordinary and very human actions presented to all this.12
It is true that the period from 1880 to 1920 was the "Progressive Period" in various fields of human activity in America. But it should be kept in mind that the period still maintained counter-progressive elements, and, ironically enough, the popular concept of "progress"
itself nurtured these counter-progressive elements: some of these were, tor example, the disparity between the rich and poor, and the tensions between the city and country. And, it would not be an exaggeration to say that Dreiser is one of the most gifted writers who both understood and successfully delineated this "equivocality", which was indeed the major characteristic of the period. Actually, Sister Carrie, Jennie Gerhardt, The Financier, The Titan and An American Tragedy are all faithful mirrors of the national psyche during the period, and the characters in these novels grew out of the American soil during that period.
In this essay, however, I would like to concentrate my attention on his first two novels, Sister Carrie and Jennie Gerhardt. By studying Dreiser's attitude toward Carrie and Jennie, his two major female protagonists, I think we can grasp Dreiser's attitude toward the values which were accepted by Americans in the Progressive Period. Al- though both Sister Carrie and Jennie Gerhardt have many things in common, the nature of the tragedies which Dreiser developed in these two works is quite different. They make, therefore, an illuminating pair from which two major streams of Dreiser's works (one flows to An American Tragedy and another to The Bulwark) derive.
II
Dreiser's Sister Carrie defied the literary conventions of America
because the work is ostensibly a "success story" of a flirtatious and ambitious woman. Instead of selecting a virtuous young man who succeeds by diligently pursuing a moral life, Dreiser selected an am- bitious young woman and allowed her to achieve remarkable success while pursuing a life of dubious virtue. As Professor Richard Lehan notes, "Dreiser took the conventions of a Horatio Alger story and turned it morally upside down."13
In the novel neither Carrie nor Hurstwood are subject to the
"laws" of morality. They both "sin"; one, however, profits and the other suffers in the course of events. There is absolutely no relationship in the novel between what one does against society and the consequences of one's behavior or conduct. And this is the reason why the first publication of Sister Carrie, in 1900, was utterly unsuccessful. Harper Publishing Company hesitated to publish it, and the House of Double- day unwillingly published only one thousand copies of the book without any advertisement. Mrs. Doubleday had convinced her husband that the book was immoral and, therefore, unprofitable.
In fact, Mrs. Doubleday was right in her conjecture. The publish- er could not sell more than 456 copies because the "naturalistic view"
of the book did not fit the taste of people who had been nurtured in the
"genteel tradition." In contrast to Dreiser, who intended to be faithful in delineating the "equivocality" of the period, those descendants of the New England Brahmins and their followers gave prominence to the possession of good manners or appearances, and a genuine but frigid culture. Of course, they were determined not to admit the existence of anything unpleasant. They accepted the optimism of romanticism, but they erased the ebullient romanticism of French revolutionary philosophy or the spiny individualism of William Godwin and Percy Bysshe Shelley. Therefore, only the romantic pruderies remained, and
63 this particular feature of the genteel tradition was more marked III America than in France or England. Referring to the disparity between the reality of American life and people's conceptions of it, a sociologist, Robert N. Bellah, comments:
The American ideal, as it increasingly came to be stated in the 19th century as a tensionless harmony of moral and religious idealism and the quest for economic success, required a peculiarly innocent conception of human life. In order to keep this har- monious ideal intact Americans have had to brush aside the darker moral ambiguities of life, the tragic dimension of human existence, and maintain stalwart optimism and "positive thinking."14 Given this American social background, it is easy to understand why almost all critics, except Frank Norris, ignored Dreiser's master- piece, and why almost ten years elapsed before they began to discuss his works seriously. Finally, however, by the beginning of the second decade of the twentieth century, a considerable number of opponents of the "genteel tradition" had come of age, and they began to attack the American version of "Victorianism." Thus, the critical battle over Dreiser became a representative battle between two literary groups-the group which defended old values and the group which attempted to overthrow them.
One of the most famous early critics who attacked Dreiser was Stuart P. Sherman. He declared in his famous essay, "The Barbaric Naturalism," that he did not find any moral value nor any moral beauty in Dreiser's works. ID He argued:
By thus eliminating distinctively human motives and making animal instincts the supreme factors in human life, Mr. Dreiser reduces the problem of the novelist to the lowest possible terms ....
He has deliberately rejected the novelist's supreme task-under- standing and presenting the development of character; he has chosen only to illustrate the unrestricted flow oftemperament .... He demands for the demonstration of his theory a moral vacuum from which the obligations of parenthood, marriage, chivalry, and citizenship have been quite withdrawn or locked in a twilight sleep. At each critical moment in his narrative ... Mr. Dreiser sinks supinely back upon the law of the jungle or mutters his mystical gibberish about an alteration of the chemical formula. 16 Reading the passage, it is clear that Professor Sherman was irri- tated with Dreiser, because he thought that Dreiser utterly ignored the traditional Christian virtues, such as, the moral obligations of parent- hood, marriage, chivalry, and citizenship. He firmly believed that Dreiser had totally eliminated human motives from the literary works and confined the writer's task to a representation of animal behavior.
It would not be wrong to say that Sherman's was a typical view held by people in his period who wanted to defend the "genteel tradition."
Nevertheless, it might be asked whether Dreiser really was an
"immoral" writer who evaded moral responsibility and rejected the novelist's supreme task-"understanding and presenting the develop- ment of character." As a matter offact, in reading Sister Carrie we find ourselves rejecting Professor Sherman and his followers and launching a refutation against them. As Professor Alfred Kazin says, "His [Dreiser's] people are not simply doomed .. 0 0 Dreiser is too little the prisoner even of his own theory, vague as it is, to fit his characters to a rule."l7 They are "still more than an instance of the social mech- anism, a portion of the human tragedy."18
Actually, we may easily trace Carrie's spiritual development throughout the work. It is clear that Carrie's story is not merely a
story of her initiation from the countryside to the cities or from poverty to wealth. It is also a story of her initiation from a materialistic life toward a spiritual life. And in the delineation of the process of her spiritual development we read Dreiser's serious "moral" attitude toward life and, therefore, toward literature.
To be sure, in the beginning of the work both protagonists, Carrie Meeber and George Hurstwood, are "wisps in the wind" tossed about by the wind and waves of society. Both characters reacted to external stimulations according to their own instinct and desire-money, clothes, enjoyment and fame were what they craved. Carrie says,
"Ah, money, money, money! What a thing it was to have! How plenty of it would clear away all these troubles. "19
It must be remembered, however, that the author did not depict Carrie as a mere "wisp" driven by her instinct alone. On the contrary, he says, "She seemed to have some power back of her actions. She was not like the common run of store-girls. She wasn't silly."20 She had more imagination and taste than Drouet. Furthermore, Dreiser also points out that there was a constant moral conflict in Carrie's mind.
He writes: "In Carrie .. .instinct and reason, desire and understanding, were at war for the mastery."21 To delineate this conflict the author uses the word "waver" very often. For example, when Carrie received Drouet's money and settled in his cozy apartment, he placed her before a large pier-glass mirror. Dreiser writes:
She looked into her glass and saw a prettier Carrie than she had seen before; she looked into her mind, a mirror prepared of her own and the world's opinions, and saw a worse. Between these two images she wavered, hesitating which to believe.22
Carrie had a sense of conscience from the beginning. But, in spite
of the moral conflict in her mind, "She followed whither her craving led" in the beginning of the work, and "was as yet more drawn than she drew."23 After she meets with Ames, however, Carrie's mind gradually changes. Ames' words, which shattered everything she had trusted, gave her a tremendous shock. Sitting at Mrs. Vance's gor- geous table at an expensive restaurant, Ames says, "I shouldn't care to be rich ... not rich enough to spend my money this way .... A man doesn't need this sort of thing to be happy."24 Ames was indeed a totally unique Geist with whom Carrie had never been familiar.
Dreiser suggests that he seemed wiser than Hurstwood, saner and brighter than Drouet, and was far ahead of her in his clairvoyant view of life.25 Thus, confronting a totally unique mind in his intelligence and farsightedness, Carrie was beginning to "see" through a fog of longing and desires.26
Even from the above brief outline it is already clear that Dreiser has a definite "moral" point of view in his work and seriously assumes the literary responsibility to present the development of character.
In order to defend Dreiser effectively from Professor Sherman's attack, however, it would be most appropriate to study the final pages of the novel.
In the end of the novel, Carrie is in her comfortable hotel chambers at the Waldorf and is reading Pere Goriot, which Ames had recommended to her. Now she has achieved the "dream of success" and has every- thing she has craved for-money, beautiful clothes, a comfortable dwelling, and fame. And yet, the narrator says, "Amid the tinsel and shine of her state walked Carrie, unhappy."27 One day, sitting at one of the windows in her room, which looked down upon Broadway, Carrie says to her friend Lola, "I don't know I get lonely; don't you?"
And even when Lola suggests that she seek some diversion, she replies,
67
""Vhere can I go?", "I don't want to go with these people who write to me. I know what kind they are."28
11rs. Doubleday and other critics argued that it is "immoral" to write about Carrie, a "vulgar character", as a "successful" woman.
As we observe Carrie in the last scene, however, it would be difficult to say that Carrie has achieved "genuine success." Stimulated by ex- ternal powers and driven by her instinct and desire, she has finally gained everything she wanted; but Dreiser leaves her lonely and unhappy. This is the most important point of the work, in my esti- mation, and I think here exists the "moral cent er" of Sister Canie.
If Dreiser had written Carrie's story as a "success story," his masterpiece would have been a literary failure. It would have been another cheap "success story" in the mode of Horatio Alger. How- ever, by delineating Carrie as lonely and unhappy at the end of the work, Dreiser reveals to us the "emptiness" of the "dream of success"
which had been the dominant dream of the American people. Before the Civil vVar, success and virtue might have been compatible. But when the frontier disappeared and monopolization rapidly proceeded, it became more and more difficult to win both material and spiritual success at the same time.
Therefore, Carrie, who is another victim of the "dream of success", is now lonely in her rocking-chair by the window, and is dreaming just as she was dreaming when she was a poor factory girl in Chicago. Yet, the dream she is now dreaming is not the same one which she dreamed in her sister's apartment in Chicago. The door to a higher desire-the desire for beauty-was unlocked by Ames.29
III
Dreiser's second novel, Jennie Gerhardt, was published by the
Harper Publishing Company in 1911, some eleven years after the publication of Sister Carrie. This time, although there were still quite a few critics who severely attacked Dreiser's naturalism, many op- ponents of the "genteel tradition" hastened to Dreiser's side. The most famous was H. L. Mencken. In his essay, "A Novel of the First Rank,"
Mencken observed, "I am firmly convinced that 'Jennie Gerhardt' is the best American novel I have ever read, with the lonesome but Himalayan exception of 'Huckleberry Finn'."3o
It would be an exaggeration to say that Jennie Gerhardt is a work comparable to Huckleberry Finn. Nevertheless, it can be claimed that Jennie Gerhardt marked a technical advance over Sister Carrie. Although the second novel does not contain the power and poignant intensity which sustain the account of the relationship between Carrie and Hurstwood, it is more smoothly written and more skillfully organized than the first one. Dreiser stood foremost among American naturalists by publishing these two novels.
As Richard Lehan argues, In Sister Carrie Dreiser might have identified himself with both Carrie and Hurstwood. According to Professor Lehan, Carrie's rise was a fantasy projection of Dreiser's own success dreams, while Hurstwood was the imaginative product of Dreiser's own fear of failure and of his obsession with poverty which had lingered from his childhood.31 Furthermore, the episode of his sister Emma's elopement with L. A. Hopkins was also adapted for Dreiser's novelistic purposes. In 1886, L. A. Hopkins, who was fifteen years older than Emma, deserted his wife and children after stealing thirty-five hundred dollars from the safe of a saloon where he was working (most of which he later returned), and ran off with Emma, first to Montreal, and then to New York.
Dreiser's personal experiences are also strongly reflected In his
69 second work. Professor Charles Shapiro says, "The novel is probably the most autobiographical of Dreiser's fictional works."32 In fact, although the Gerhardts are not carbon copies of Dreiser's unhappy family, they do represent, in spirit, the author's impression of his troubled childhood. In the novel Dreiser also adapted episodes from the lives of his sisters, Mame and Sylvia. Like Mame, Jennie becomes pregnant by an influential politician who gave her money and helped her to get her brother out of jail. And, like Sylvia, J ennie falls in love with a son of a rich family and is deserted.
Thus, both Sister Carrie and Jennie Gerhardt are heavily autobio- graphical and have numerous similar features. For example, both female protagonists in the novels bear a close resemblance. They are both beautiful but poor in the beginning of the stories. Later they are freed from economic problems.
In the beginning of Sister Carrie Dreiser depicted Carrie as "a fair example of the middle American class. "33 And J ennie is also deline- ated affectionately as a girl "full of youth, health and that hopeful expectancy which .. .is so suggestive of all that is worth begging of Providence."34 Both heroines, however, had to struggle for their lives from the beginning. Carrie was one of the great number of girls of that period who drifted from the farm to the city, yearning for pretty clothes and fascinated by the superficial picturesqueness of the metro- polis. Jennie's economic situation was far worse than Carrie's. As the eldest daughter of a large family of German immigrants, whose main breadwinner, William Gerhardt, was ill in bed, J ennie had to work not only for her bread but also for her brothers and sisters.
The most important resemblance between Carrie and Jennie is, however, that in the vast world both girls are mere creatures of circum- stance, driven by violent forces which they did not create and cannot
control. As we have seen in the former section, although Carrie is not a mere "wavering wisp inthe wind," she "was as yet more drawn than she drew." As for Jennie, using Lester's words, Dreiser says, "all of us are more or less pawns. We're moved about like chessmen by circum- stances over which we have no control."35 In a sense, Jennie's life was, indeed, "a patchwork of conditions."36 Lehan says, therefore, "If Dreiser reiterates one idea [in his fiction], it is that society tries to make man into something that he is not."37
Although there are numerous common features between Sister Can-ie and Jennie Gerhardt, there is an irreconcilable difference between Carrie's story and Jennie's story. In fact, it is quite obvious that while Carrie is a successful heroine and a woman who sacrifices others for herself, J ennie is an unsuccessful heroine and a woman who sacrifices herself for others.
In Sister Carrie, Dreiser delineated Carrie as "a little soldier of fortune"38 or "an apt student of fortune's way."39 At the very begin- ning of the work, the author says, "she was interested in her charms, ambitious to gain in material things"; and "self-interest" was her guid- ing characteristic.40 Her imagination was always focussing upon money, looks, clothes, or enjoyment. All other characters around her were mere stepping stones in Carrie's progress from rags to riches.
When Carrie finds it impossible to realize her dream at her sister's house, she leaves the apartment to live ,vith Drouet who takes her to an expensive restaurant and buys her pretty clothes. However, when Carrie sees that Hurstwood can offer her a more opulent life, she quickly discards Drouet and gravitates to Hurstwood. Furthermore, she reveales her character when she refuses to sleep with Hurstwood when he loses the means to support her.
Of course, it would be an exaggeration to say that Carrie did not
have a weak attachment for these men. She may have believed, at least once in a while, that she loved them. Nevertheless, we cannot help concluding that her relationship to the men in her life was crassly financial. Ames was the only exception whom she could respect and admire, and probably loved spiritually.
In contrast to Carrie, who is essentially selfish, Jennie is selfless and idealistic. The author says, "from her earliest youth goodness and mercy, had molded her every impulse,"41 and in her mind "sympathy was always a more potent factor than reason."42 Born as the beautiful and eldest daughter of a poor and large family, without education, training, and even the ability to fight and scheme as Carrie did, Jennie was doomed to yield to men from the beginning. It must be re- membered, however, that J ennie receives money from men, not for her own sake, but because of her affection and devotion to her family. It is said, very explicitly, that "Jennie's affections vY'ere not based in any way upon material consideration," and that "her love of life and of personality were free from the taint of selfishness. "43
When Jennie gave herself to Senator Brander, it was to rescue her brother Bass from jail. Dreiser writes: "She stood stock-still" on the dark street, "wavering and doubtful; then the recollection of Bass in his night cell came over her again and she hurried on [to Brander's hotel]. "44
It was also her affection for her family that compelled Jennie to yield to Lester Kane. When she was wondering how she should answer Lester, who met her at }.ifrs. Bracebridge's and was asking her to see him again, a letter came from Youngstown which informed her that her father was seriously injured by an accident at the glass-works. Again fate had intervened, and "She realized ... that fate had shifted the burden of the situation to her. She must sacrifice herself; there was
no other way."45
Finally, Jennie knew that Lester, whom now she loved dearly, would lose his fortune and social position because of his affair with her.
And again she decides, "Whether he wanted to or not, I must not let him make this sacrifice. I must leave him-if he would not leave me."46 A superficial reading of the novel may lead us to the conclusion that Jennie is a wanton woman. As we have seen, however, the truth is that she is a woman of self-sacrifice. In spite of her devotion to her family and lover, she loses everything and gains nothing in the end of the novel. She loses her parents, her most beloved child Vesta, and finally even her only lover, Lester. But the question at issue remains:
does she really lose everything?
Ostensibly, Jennie is an "unsuccessful heroine." And yet, in contrast to Carrie, Jennie could love people. Carrie regarded the individuals in her life as "stepping stones." Her love was not a true love but "a semblance of affection." About Carrie's affection to Hurstwood, for example, the author writes, "There was no great passion in her, but the drift of things and this man's proximity created a semblance of affection .... True love she had never felt for him."47
In sharp contrast to Carrie, it is said that "the strength oflove was with her [JennieJ, the support of patience and the ruling sweetness of sacrifice. "48 J ennie had courage to sacrifice herself for others. And, Dreiser says, "it is in such supreme moments [of self-sacrifice J that growth is the greatest.... We may still tremble, but we grow."49 After Jennie gave herself to Senator Brander for her brother's sake, the author notes, "She was already years older in thought and act."50
\,yhile Carrie grows through exploiting her lovers, J ennie grows through self-sacrifice. It must also be remembered that Dreiser never abuses Jennie for her loss of chastity. Far from denouncing her, he views
Jennie with a tremendous affection:
Under dead leaves and snow banks the delicate arbutus unfolds its simple blossom, answering some heavenly call for color. So, too, this other flower of womanhood. 51
For Dreiser, Jennie remains the "delicate arbutus" whose mind still retains all the innocence and unsophistication of youth. Indeed, she transcends her physical disgrace.
Furthermore, we will remember that, unlike Carrie, Jennie is more sensitive to life's "song." She is more moved by "nature's fine curves and shadows" and is more happy in the garden or forest. She felt even in the midst of her unhappiness that "there must be something-a higher power which produced all the beautiful things-the flowers, the stars, the trees, the grass. Nature was so beautifuIl"52 Therefore, Brander says to Jennie, "You're the dearest little day-dreamer in the world. Of course you could write poetry. You live it. You are poetry my dear."53
It is true that, ostensibly, Jennie lost everything in the end of the novel. Endowed with an ability to love and a delicate responsiveness to nature, however, Jennie was finally rewarded by the words of love from her lover at his deathbed. Suffering from fitful paroxysms, Lester says to Jennie, "It seems strange, but you're the only woman I ever did love truly. We should never have parted."54 For Jennie these were the words that signified everything she had hoped for:
It was the one thing she had waited for all these years-this testi- mony. It was the one thing that could make everything right- this confession of spiritual if not material union. Now she could live happily. Now die SO.55
At the end of the novel Jennie is left with nothing but two children
whom she had taken from the Western Home for the Friendless.
However, she was endowed with a naturally sunny disposition and a saving sense of eternal justice in life, and also was sustained by Lester's love. We are convinced, therefore, that the rest of her life will not be lonely, for it was Jennie who believed that "Life at worst or best was beautiful-had always been so. "56
IV
Carrie and J ennie began their initiation into society from almost the same chronological point-a pretty but poor eighteen-year-old girl. But a great difference developed in each girl's progress.
Carrie has succeeded in the world and obtained every thing- money, beautiful clothes, and fame. At the end of the novel, however, she is lonely in her rocking-chair in an expensive hotel room 'while she dreams of genuine values. In contrast, Jennie has lost everything;
but she is nevertheless rewarded by her lover's "words oflove", the one thing she had wanted, and the surrounding company of the children who need her.
By delineating these two women's lives in such a contrastive way, it is obvious that Dreiser suggested that Carrie's ostensible material success, in which the average American believed, did not mean genuine success. Similarly, Jennie's ostensible failure, which Americans may have interpreted as futile, was not a genuine failure.
Certainly, Dreiser ended both novels in the pessimistic tone of Ecclesiastes, and did not pass moral judgement on either woman's life.
But no one will forget the literary posture of aloofness the author seems to take toward Carrie in concluding her story. At the very end of the novel, Dreiser addresses Carrie:
Know, then, that for you is neither surfeit nor content. In your
rocking-chair, by your window dreaming, shall you long, alone.
In your rocking-chair, by your window, shall you dream such happiness as you may never feel. 57
Although Dreiser's attitude toward Jennie is also equivocal in the end of Jennie Gerhardt, his high praise for J ennie is pervasive from the beginning to the end of the novel. We know that Dreiser admires Jennie when he writes, "She was not a cheap, ambitious, climbing creature. She was a big woman and a good one. It would be a shame to throw her down."58 I think we can read Dreiser's evaluation of Carrie and Jennie in this passage, because Carrie was "a cheap, ambitious, climbing creature" before meeting Ames.
To be sure, Carrie was led to a higher desire-the desire for beauty by meeting Ames. Vve remember, however, that beauty is the value J ennie felt instinctively. In Jennie Gerhardt, Dreiser writes:
No artist in the formulating of conceptions, her soul still responded to these things [nature's fine curves and shadows], and every sound and every sigh were welcome to her because of their beauty.
When the soft, low call of the wood-doves, those spirits of the summer, came out of the distance, she would incline her head and listen, the whole spiritual quality of it dropping like silver bubbles into her own great heart. 59
Senator Brander, therefore, tells her that she lives poetry and that she is poetry. Professor Lehan suggests that "in one sense she [Jennie]
begins where Carrie leaves off, becomes what Carrie aspires to be- come."60
Perhaps it may be argued that Carrie and Jennie represent two different aspects of Dreiser's psyche and that of the American psyche itself. It is also plausible that Dreiser had a strong attachment to
both protagonists; after all, the novelist himself was the victim of the
"American dream of success." By contrasting the antipodal ways of life represented by Carrie and Jennie in his first two novels, however, it is highly probable that Dreiser's central intention was to criticize the materialistic American values during the Progressive Period. By presenting these contrasting female protagonists to his contemporaries, he wished to evoke their (and perhaps his own) reflections upon the way a life of integrity and genuine values should be lived.
Furthermore, Dreiser did not stop criticizing the materialistic American way of thinking to the end of his life. For example, in
"Life, Art and America", he observes:
To me the average or somewhat standardized American is an odd, irregularly developed soul, wise and even forward in matters of mechanics, organizations and anything that relates to technical skill in connection with material things, but absolutely devoid of true spiritual insight, correct knowledge of the history of literature or art, and confused by and mentally lost in or overcome by the multiplicity of the purely material and inarticulate details by which he finds himself surrounded. 61
Reading this interpretation recalls Van Wyck Brooks' discussion about "Highbrow" and "Lowbrow" in his America's Coming of Age, in which he pointed out the disparity between "the current of overtones"
and "the current of undertones" of the American mind. Dreiser was indeed a keen observer of the social realities of his day. He realized that by creating and encouraging artificial goals, society was perverting its valuable institutions and, more importantly, it was robbing the individual of his chance to live a full and significant life.
In spite of the rapid materialistic growth of the country, Dreiser could not ignore the growth of counter-progressive elements. More-
77 over, it seemed to him that these counter-progressive elements overcame the progressive elements, and thus created a chaotic world.
Facing such a chaotic world, Dreiser seems to have suggested in Jennie Gerhardt that even if it was difficult to realize a harmonious happy life among people in the world of his day, it might be possible to realize some relative tranquility for certain individuals. Actually, Jennie trusted in the existence of a "higher power which produced all the beautiful things," and she believed that "Life at worst or best was beautiful-had always been so." And yet it must be noted that life was beautiful to Jennie because she "endured" it.
To Dreiser, the Progressive Period was "an age in which the impact of materialized force is well-nigh irresistible," and in which "the spiritual nature is overwhelmed by the shock."62 If a man's spiritual nature is not overwhelmed by the impact of materialized force, his life can be "a thing of infinite beauty."63 But in reality, as men are caught in the dualistic situation of being part both of an artificial environment and of physical nature, they are forced to compromise with institutions and conventions. Therefore, even if they wished to escape from this complicated world and sought, instead, the absolute freedom of organic harmony with nature, such transcendence would be almost impossible in the lifetime of men and women in his age. 64 Thus Dreiser's pessi- mism about society and human existence deepens.
Dreiser's pessimistic ideas about human existence and society were, however, greatly different from the ideas of his contemporary pro- gressives. In the l890s Americans witnessed the frontier of virgin land being replaced by industrialism. If they defined industrialism as cultural complexity, then their dream of the United States as a restored Eden was ended. But the progressives defined industrialism as a frontier force that destroyed cultural complexity and led to natural
harmony. Defining industrialism in this way, they escaped the pessimism of the 1890s to participate in an increasing optimism that a new and more democratic order was about to appear.65
In fact, at the turn of the century, numerous progressives emerged m almost every field of man's activity from business to religion. In the field of architecture, art and music, for example, we can name Louis Sullivan, Robert Henri, and Charles Ives. Trusting in the power of industrialism, Sullivan designed steel-framed tall buildings which, he believed, were not only an art but a symbll of democracy.
He saw himself as an evangelist who would save the young architects from their profane profession. Like the young painters of the so-called Ash-Can School, Henri celebrated the work of lower-class people and painted the narrow and dingy streets and tenements of the city which the artists of the traditional National Academy of Design never accepted as appropriate subject matter. Like
J
ane Addams he believed that these common people were the foundation for a new democracy. Ives too rejected the staleness of the traditionalists and experimented with unconventional forms of music which, he hoped, would unite all of humanity.Thus, while industrialization and urbanization were proceeding with unprecedented speed, Americans were more and more willing to believe that industrialism would purge the complexity and chaos and would bring about a new peaceable kingdom. In the field ofliterature, too, one of the other naturalists, Frank Norris, believed that even if nature is violent, it is nonetheless benevolent and redemptive. He believed that a living and dynamic nature is making evolutionary progress toward an ultimate good, even if the process may appear superficially dreadful and cruel. 66
In sharp contrast to these progressive minds, Dreiser's despair with
society and humanity was far more serious. As Professor Commager asserts:
It is a measure of his despair with that society that he could explain its grossness and its inhumanity only on the theory that men could not, after all, help themselves.67
However, Commager also argues in the same passage:
.. .it was an indication of his own identification with that society that he tried, nevertheless, through his novels, to paint a picture so revolting that his fellow men might be moved to repudiate it and to imagine a better one.68
By criticizing the shallow American dream of success, Dreiser hoped to rouse Americans to a restoration of the true values which would facilitate the progress of man and society. And both Sister Carrie and Jennie Gerhardt, which one may refer to as "sister volumes," represent his ideological intentions in novelistic form.
Notes
1. Henry Steele Commager, The American Mind (New Haven: Yale Univer- sity Press, 1950), p. 41.
2. Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams (New York: The Modern Library, 1931), p. 342.
3. Ibid., p. 342.
4. Ibid., p. 340.
5. Theodore Dreiser, A Book About 111yself (New York: Boni and Liveright, 1922), pp. 411-412.
6. Ibid., pp. 457-458.
7. Ibid., p. 458.
8. Theodore Dreiser, "Life, Art and America," Hey Rub-A-Dub·Dub (New York: Boni and Liveright, 1920), p. 255.
so
9. Alfred Kazin, "American Naturalism: Reflections from Another Era," The American Writer and the European Tradition eds. Margaret Penny and William H. Gilman (Minneapolis : University of Minnesota, 1950), p. 121.
10. Russel Blankenship, American Literature; As an Expression of the Nation- al Mind (New York: Cooper Square Publishers, 1973), p. 519.
11. Hey Rub-A-Dub-Dub, p. 272.
12. Ibid., p. 264.
13. Richard Lehan, Theodore Dreiser: His World and flis Novels (Carbon- dale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1969), p. 76.
14. Robert N. Bellah, The Broken Covenant (New York: The Seabury Press, 1975), p. 8I.
15. Stuart P. Sherman, "The Barbaric Naturalism of Mr. Dreiser," The Nation, Cl (December 2, 1915), 648-650. Compiled in Dreiser: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. John Lydenberg (Prentice-Hall, 1971), pp. 63-73.
16. Ibid., pp. 68-69.
17. The American Writer and the European Tradition, p. 123.
18. Ibid., p. 128.
19. Theodore Dreiser, Sister Carrie (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1957), p. 63.
:20. Ibid., p. 66.
21. Ibid., p. 71.
22. Ibid., p. 87.
23. Ibid., p. 71.
:24. Ibid., p. 293.
25. Ibid., p. 293.
26. Ibid., p. 294.
27. Ibid., p. 453.
28. Ibid., p. 413.
29. Strangely enough, a distinguished critic of Dreiser, Professor Kenneth S.
Lynn, seems to have failed in understanding this point. About Carrie's loneliness in the last scene, Professor Lynn says, "Dreiser was unable, con- sciously, to say why this was so; he recorded Carrie's feelings, but he could not dredge to the surface of the novel any satisfactory explanation for them."
Kenneth S. Lynn, The Dream of Success (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1955), p. 33.
30. The Smart Set, Nov. 1911. p. 153. cited by Professor Hisaji Okano in his essay" A Spiritual Meaning in Jennie Gerhardt," Annual Reports of Studies, val. 24-1, (Kyoto; Doshisha Women's College, 1973), p. 85.
31. Theodore Dreiser: His World and His Novel, p. 58.
32. Charles Shapiro, Theodore Dreiser: Our Bitter Patriot (Carbondale : South- ern Illinois University Press, 1963), p. 14.
33. Sister Carrie, p. 4.
34. Theodore Dreiser, Jennie Gerhardt (New York; The vVorId Publishing Company, 1946), p. 7.
35. Ibid., p. 401.
36. Ibid., p. 430.
37. Theodore Dreiser: His World and His Novels, p. 87.
38. Sister Ca!Tie, p. 72.
39. Ibid., p. 93.
40. Ibid., p. 4.
41. Jennie Gerhardt, p. 16.
42. Ibid., p. 23.
43. Ibid., p. 368.
44. Ibid., p. 44.
45. Ibid., p. 136.
46. Ibid., p. 361.
47. Sister Carrie, p. 261.
48. Jennie Gerhardt, p. 92.
49. Ibid., p. 93.
50. Ibid., p. 80.
51. Ibid., p. 99.
52. Ibid., p. 405.
53. Ibid., p. 51.
54. Ibid., p. 54.
55. Ibid., pp. 422-423.
56. Ibid., p. 100.
57. Sister Carrie, p. 454.
58. Jennie Gei-hardt, p. 290.
59. Ibid., p. 16.
60. Theodore Dreiser: His World and His Novel, p. 86.
61. Hey Rub-A-Dub-Dub, p. 252.
62. Jennie Gerhardt, p. 132.
63. Ibid., p. 15.
64. David Noble, The Progressive Mind, 1890-1917 (Chicago: Rand McNally College Publishing Company, 1970), pp. 146-147.
65. Ibid., pp. 165-166.
66. Ibid., p. 145.
67. The American Mind. p. 116.
68. Ibid., p. 116.
