Seduction and the Class Struggle-II
FIEDLER, LESLIE A.
WRITERS and WRITING Seduction and the Class Struggle—II By Leslie A. Fiedler IT IS ONLY Theodore Dreiser who proves capable of reviving the theme of seduction for serious literature, for he takes...
...His notion of a passionate interchange between lovers involves such "poetic" apostrophes as, "Oh, Flower Face...
...There is power in Dreiser, to be sure...
...If, on the one hand, the daughters of the non-Anglo-Saxon American poor find in him a voice, on the other, the stickier writers for women through him achieve literary respectability...
...There is in him none of the detachment and cynicism of Crane, none of the utter blackness and pessimism of Twain: he is as "positive" through his tears as any female scribbler...
...In your rocking chair, by your window dreaming, shall you long alone...
...Surely, the quasi-religious pun is intended...
...If there is a fundamental flaw in Dreiser, it resides neither in his stylistic clumsiness, which for strength's sake is easily forgiven, nor in his truly elegant literary vocabulary—the kitsch interior-decorating with which he cannot forbear touching up his scenes—but in the fact that his novels are in fact "uplifting"—which is to say, sentimental rather than tragic...
...It is the lyrics of a popular song again—"Old Rocking Chair's Got Me," obligato...
...no one gives better the sense of the dazzled entry of the small-town girl into the big city...
...For better or worse...
...Dreiser came of the kind of people who copulate in the dark and live out their lives without ever seeing their sexual partners nude...
...Much is made by his friendlier critics of the fact that just before the beginning of his writing career Dreiser discovered Balzac: much more should be made of the fact that long before that encounter, his imagination had already been formed by Ouida and Laura Jean Libby...
...The death of the girl who had fallen...
...The Bohemian, no "tainted fiction...
...Eugene Witla (his barely disguised self-portrait), as beginning with a love of the painting of that insufferable anti-artist Bouguereau, this is not just a revelation of the author's insufficient culture: it is also a revelation of his fundamental taste...
...Nobody's fault...
...Oh, Myrtle Bloom...
...Crane had already provided that in a book which no one would print, which sold even fewer than the 650 copies of Sister Carrie out of the one thousand printed...
...How, to begin with, could so conventional an account of a small-town girl, seduced first by the flashy drummer, Drouet, then talked into a bigamous marriage with the repentant embezzler, Hurstwood, so horrify the wife of Dreiser's publisher...
...When Dreiser in " 'The Genius' " describes the young artist...
...In his first article, which appeared here last week, Fiedler laid the groundwork for an assessment of Theodore Dreiser's achievement by tracing his use of the "seduction-and-class-struggle" theme back to George Lippard, a virtually forgotten popular American writer of the 1840s...
...What magnetism there was she could never know...
...Not even Montraville or Hollingworth had been so degraded for their offenses...
...but stories that testified to their authors' "knowledge of life as it is...
...and the friends who worked so hard to save him from the deleterious effect of such "hack work" —and finally persuaded him to abandon it—understood nothing...
...and by the end of the story, when she is translated into a kind of un-churched nun, celibate, lonely and dedicated to charity, it seems even more appropriate...
...Before that, he has been harried from failure to failure, his pride and virility broken until he crawls in the slush, begs a few dollars from the woman he has wronged...
...How, then, did Dreiser come to be, as one of his publishers was later to put it, "the one man to have first created an audience for daring books," the defendant in obscenity trials which came to seem to his contemporaries forums at which the cause of a new, frank literature could be advocated...
...know, then, that for you is neither surfeit or content...
...He held her quite close...
...Now he slipped his arm about her and she struggled, but in vain...
...It is no accident that for several years he was able to edit successfully the Butterick magazines, purveyors of fashion, fiction and useful articles ("What to Do When Diphtheria Comes") to lower-middlebrow women: nor was his writing for such an audience an unfortunate inThis is the second of three installments from a chapter of Leslie A. Fiedler's Love and Death in the American Novel, to be published by Criterion on March 18...
...Even Carrie, though she has the kind of success denied her seducer, and achieves the material comforts of which she once scarcely knew how to dream, cannot find happiness in her career as an actress or in herself...
...Oh, Silver Feet...
...and Mrs...
...are the sole symbols that move him to write, and it is with the fallen girl that he begins his career...
...If Dreiser managed to please such a group of readers, it was because at the deepest level he shared their values...
...terruption in his career, a prostitution of his talent...
...Meeting her married sister in Chicago at the beginning of the book, Caroline Meeber is hailed by that full title, "half affectionately" bestowed on her, Dreiser tells us, by her family...
...It is hard now to see the sense in which Dreiser s books, whatever their other merits, are daring at all...
...Professor of English at Montana State University, Fiedler is also the author of An End to Innocence...
...To make the point clear, Dreiser lingers almost tearfully over Carrie's melancholy figure at the end, pausing to apostrophize her: "Oh, Carrie, Carrie...
...Dreiser is qualified first of all by his essentially sentimental response to the plight of the oppressed, by what he himself calls—attributing the feeling to one of his characters—an ''uncritical upswelling of grief for the weak and the helpless...
...His many sins, however, were for the moment all forgotten...
...his subject was, like theirs, when erotic at all, the traditional "consequences of seduction...
...and Sister Carrie, like Jennie Gerhardt after her, is a household image, one of those sisters of his own, who were always getting into trouble: running off with married men or embezzlers, coming home pregnant...
...and yet, first of all, Carrie is not the sister of her fictional family or even a Little Sister of the Poor, but one of Dreiser's own sisters, redeemed from the shabby failures of her actual life...
...Blood...
...Instantly there flared up in his body the all-compelling desire...
...Doubleday want...
...WRITERS and WRITING Seduction and the Class Struggle—II By Leslie A. Fiedler IT IS ONLY Theodore Dreiser who proves capable of reviving the theme of seduction for serious literature, for he takes it seriously: finding in the impregnation and abandonment of helpless women no mere occasions for melodrama (as in Mark Twain) or for exercises in irony and contrasting style (as in Stephen Crane...
...His affection took an ardent form...
...and his concept of poetry is perhaps best indicated by the metrical chapter titles in Sister Carrie: "And This is Not Elf Land: What Gold Will Not Buy," "The Way of the Beaten: A Harp in the Wind...
...Why, then, did it irk and shock so many readers...
...The man who makes good and the girl who goes bad, these stereotypes of the folk (occasionally reversed, for variety, to the girl who rises and the man who falls...
...It is banality raised to the power of evasion, an implicit denial of the reality of passion...
...It is all a little like what his brother, Paul Dresser (also the champion of the fallen woman in "My Gal Sal"), was doing in the popular song...
...Fiedler suggested that the difficulty we have traditionally had in understanding Dreiser's meanings is perhaps "rooted in the fact that he is not a 'modern' novelist at all, neither the prophet of naturalism nor the pioneer of sexual freedom we have taken him to be, but the last and greatest of the 19th century sentimentalists...
...and he was brought up on the kind of book which made it impossible for him to write convincingly about the act of love...
...Certainly, they do not describe the sexual act or its more passionate preliminaries with a frankness or pornographic intensity comparable to George Lippard's...
...Yet because the deceived woman, the seduced virgin, are for Dreiser the images through which he understands America and himself, he stumbles into scandal...
...She found him lifting her head and looking into her eyes...
...broad, simple, good-natured...
...The fine side of things—the idealistic—is the answer for us . . .'" he was not merely playing with a straight face the part for which he had been hired...
...no one renders better the seedy milieu of the status-hungry on their way up or down: but no American writer is more the victim of the sentimental wound, less capable of dealing with passion...
...Even his famous determinism is essentially sentimental at root, amounting effectively to little more than the sob of exculpation: "Nobody's fault...
...The erotic, that is to say, demanded for him a veneer of the poetic...
...one hint of condescension gives the game away...
...The phrase which came unbidden into his mind was not a simple girl's name, as in the typical woman's book, but "Sister Carrie," and in the novel itself he tries to justify the first word in various ways...
...When he wrote on rejection slips sent to contributors to The Delineator, "We like realism, but it must be tinged with sufficient idealism to make it all of a truly uplifting character...
...He is in fact the avenging brother that earlier writers only imagine...
...When he resists the impulse to poeticize, Dreiser does love scenes like this: "Carrie rose up as if to step away, he holding her hand...
...In your rocking chair, by your window, shall you dream such happiness as you may never feel...
...There is no apparent moral ambiguity in Dreiser's presentation...
...What more did Mr...
...He could never portray, for all his own later hectic career as a lover, any woman except the traditional seduced working girl of sentimental melodrama...
...Both Hurstwood's robbery and Carrie's love affairs are called evil, and Hurstwood is quite satisfactorily punished, degraded to the level of a skid-row panhandler, left ready to commit suicide in a flophouse...
...To his good friend H. L. Mencken, to whom surely he could speak frankly, he wrote in quite the same vein that he would like for another of his magazines (this one presumably freer from outside control...
...If not a brother's vengeance, Sister Carrie is his amends...
...Dreiser is bound in weakness and in strength to the values of the sentimental lower middle class...
...Nobody, as many writers have learned to their grief through both success and failure, can deceive such an audience for very long...
...Legend at least tells us that she was so dismayed that she persuaded her husband not to promote the book which he had already contracted to print...
Vol. 43 • February 1960 • No. 8
