[In the following essay, Hussman illustrates how in his "marriage group" tales, which Hussman argues are the best of Dreiser's short stories, Dreiser explores his thematic struggle between self-interest and self-sacrifice. ]

In a series of short stories that first appeared in various magazines, Dreiser examined in detail the mostly harmful effects of marriage on both husbands and wives. Like Chaucer's "marriage group," the set of tales told by certain of the Canterbury pilgrims, Dreiser's stories focus on the need for balancing the interests of the parties to the marriage contract. For Dreiser, however, such balance is at best achieved only temporarily by two parties whose needs mesh at a given time. Since needs are constantly changing, the delicate balance cannot be sustained without the continual compromising of personal dreams and desires, but that effort at accommodation inevitably diminishes either the husband or the wife or both. The stories in Dreiser's "marriage group" turn on the conflict between one's duty to oneself and one's obligations to another which marriage imposes. They play an important role in Dreiser's continuing existential search, framed by his fiction, for ethical moorings. In the give and take of marriage, he found a paradigm of the larger conflict between self-interest and self-sacrifice that is at the center of all social relationships.

"Married," which first appeared in Cosmopolitan in September 1917, was an episode dropped from the manuscript of The "Genius" and some-what altered for separate publication. The most autobiographical of the "marriage group," it concerns a concert pianist named Duer and Marjorie, his wife of several months. The conflict in the story arises out of the differing values that the two bring to their marriage. Duer (patterned after Dreiser) is a connoisseur of the New York studio life, a man with a rich and volatile artistic nature, while Marjorie (patterned after Sara White) is a conventional and conservative farm girl from Iowa. The first indication of trouble in this marriage occurs when Marjorie becomes jealous of the women invited to the studio—women with "their radical ideas, their indifference to appearances, their semisecret immorality." Since she is thoroughly grounded in the doctrine of "one life, one love," she cannot understand her husband's attraction to such women, and when she reproves him for being flippant with one of them at a studio gathering, Duer begins to see the dimensions of his mistake in marrying. He dreads his wife's increasing censure and control, an encumbrance that was not in evidence before their marriage. But mindful of the concessions demanded by marriage and already disposed to compromise out of a sense of guilt for having failed to be faithful to his engagement vows, he chastises himself for being too free, for laughing and singing too boisterously. Dreiser's meaning is clear. With each such adjustment, freedom is eroded and personhood diminished.

When Duer and Marjorie are invited to a dinner party at the Plaza, they are thrust into the company of social types different from the artists. They meet a music critic, a museum curator, a wealthy opera sponsor, and their wives. Marjorie is attracted to these men with their airs of impressive business achievement and their wives whose interests cluster about children and housework. After the dinner, Marjorie comes to feel that Duer should choose such solid people for his friends. She believes that if he were limited to this sort of society, he could be remade into a "quiet, reserved, forceful man"—her idea of the perfect husband. But he cannot give up his artistic friends, and when he neglects her at a studio party, the first marital crisis ensues. Marjorie, having been "unable to hold her own in the cross-fire of conversation, unable to retain the interest of most of the selfish, lovesick, sensation-seeking girls and men," throws herself on Duer's pity, pathetic in her humiliation. Seeing that she is "feeling neglected, outclassed, unconsidered, helpless," which is "more or less true," he is led by his compassion for her to falsely deny that he finds her dull and conventional. Dreiser attributes Duer's lie to the demand in such a situation for "kindness, generosity, affection, her legal right to his affection." In a speech reminiscent of Ames's attempt to bolster Carrie, Duer tells Marjorie that she is "emotionally great" beyond the hopes of the studio types and that no common soul could have such depth of feeling. Duer partly believes what he says, for the quality that had originally attracted him to her had been her emotional side, developed through her closeness to nature on the prairie farm. But unlike Carrie, Marjorie has no artistic talent through which to channel her emotions, and Duer reflects that her self-portrait of dullness had been just. With sad resignation, he looks forward to the necessity for reassuring her with lies: "He would always be soothing and coaxing, and she would always be crying and worrying."

"Married" explores not only the tragedy of temperamental incompatibility of husband and wife, but also several of the negative aspects of what has recently come to be called the "closed marriage." Marjorie's jealousy of Duer's female friends, her assumption that she owns her husband, her unwillingness to allow him to be himself, her attempts to fit him into a mold of her own design—all of these things contribute to the undoing of the relationship. Instead of loving Duer for what he is, for his ability to function in his artistic circle, she loves him in spite of his interests and friends. His response is predictable—not an increase in love but a demeaning pity spurred by guilt and the first questioning about whether he has ever loved her at all. But neither Duer nor Marjorie is cast as the villain of the piece. The wife's point of view is as sympathetically portrayed as the husband's, the simple virtues of Midwestern life as admirable as Eastern sophistication. This inherent fairness was one of the reasons that Sherwood Anderson was so taken with the story. But if Duer and Marjorie come off reasonably well, the institution of marriage does not. The tragedy is that the structure of marriage often traps two very different people in a situation they are incapable of handling or escaping. Marriage calls for a legislated self-sacrifice which few spouses can achieve without a residue of resentment. Marjorie cannot understand or tolerate Duer's social dreams. Duer's very recognition of his obligation to be compassionate to and understanding of Marjorie detracts from the freedom that alone can purify those virtues.

"The Second Choice" appeared in Cosmopolitan in February 1918. This story concerns a woman named Shirley whose commonplace life is uplifted by the arrival of a brilliant and attentive suitor named Arthur. For a while they enjoy an idyllic affair together, and his buoyant personality and passionate nature put all of Shirley's previous acquaintances in a demeaning perspective. But Arthur's visits become less frequent and finally he writes to her that he is taking a job in Java and that he is too young to marry anyway. The romantic world Arthur had created suddenly crashes around her, and she is forced to consider marriage to Barton Williams, a "stout, phlegmatic, good-natured, well-meaning" and essentially boring admirer, whom she had been keeping at a distance while Arthur was seemingly available. Since marriage is "her only future," she decides to take up with Barton again, but she cannot expunge the memory of what it would have been like to be married to Arthur or cease her conjecture about what would happen if Arthur returned to find her married to Barton. After reviving her relationship with Barton, she feels that she has been forced by something beyond her control to sever her ties to the romantic past. When the train taking her to her suburban home passes over a river whose destination is the sea which she and Arthur had loved so much, her infinite longing is stirred: "Oh, to be in a small boat and drift out, out into the endless, restless, pathless deep! Somehow the sight of this water, to-night and every night, brought back those evenings in the open with Arthur at Sparrows Point, the long line of dancers in Eckert's Pavilion, the woods at Atholby, the park, with the dancers in the pavilion—she choked a sob." When she arrives home she watches a neighbor preparing dinner in her kitchen while her husband reads the newspaper on the front porch, and she contemplates the flow of sad, gray years that lie ahead of her with Barton: "'My dreams are too high, that's all. I wanted Arthur, and he wouldn't have me. I don't want Barton, and he crawls at my feet. I'm a failure, that's what's the matter with me.'"

"The Second Choice" concerns the tragedy of marriages of compromise, which most seem to be. Seldom, if ever, do two souls who share the same dreams with equal intensity marry one another. The implication in the story is that Arthur's aspirations were larger than Shirley's, just as Shirley's were larger than Barton's. Arthur wants the world, Shirley wants love and marriage, and Barton wants only Shirley. Caught in the middle, Shirley will be forced by society's irrational insistence on marriage—she capitulates to Barton in order "to save her face before her parents, and her future"—to compromise before she becomes too old to make any match at all. Dreiser's point is that a marriage based on such self-sacrifice cannot bring fulfillment to anyone.

"Free," first published in the Saturday Evening Post in March 1918, is Dreiser's finest story and one of the most compelling in American literature. A long narrative concerning the thoughts of a sixty-year-old New York architect during his wife's medical crisis, "Free" describes the conflicts of a man caught between his dreams of personal fulfillment and the obligation to forego those dreams for the good of his family. The architect, ironically named Haymaker, has devoted over forty years of quiet desperation to his conventional, socially sensitive wife and to his children, all the while lamenting the fact that he has never had the kind of woman that he really desires. The story opens with Haymaker, his eyes "weary and yet restless," brooding over the news from his wife's physician that she is in imminent danger of death because of a heart lesion. His wife's condition has revivified his longing to be free, to spend his last few years doing only what he really wants to do. But this longing is balanced by his recognition of his selfishness, and throughout the story he vacillates, alternately wishing his wife will die, and being ashamed of his thoughts. Haymaker is described like other Dreiserian drifters, "wondering if time, accident or something might not interfere and straighten out his life for him, but it never had." The drift is caused by the paralyzing curse of the thinking person—the ability to see all sides of a given situation. The more he longs to be free of his wife the more tender and compassionate toward her he becomes, all the while sacrificing his own fulfillment in his wish to see her and the children happy. But outside his home the call of desire induces in him the infinite ache, and on the way to his office, he longs to be one of the bustling young businessmen possibly destined for a rendezvous with a charming young wife. The spires of the city skyline evoke in him his unextinguished hope. He does not recognize that the young men he envies are doubtlessly headed for their own marital tragedies and that the city is a seducer dealing in doomed dreams. Instead, Haymaker longs still, even though he remembers that his marriage to his wife so many years before had been an ideal love match—that she had appeared to him "a dream among fair women." But like Dreiser, he had been unable to marry immediately, and between the first promise and the marriage, his point of view had been altered by larger experiences. Nonetheless, he had married because of his belief that "an engagement, however unsatisfactory it might come to seem afterward, was an engagement, and binding." His duty to go through with the marriage had been compounded by his duty to stick by it for the rest of his life, acting as if he were satisfied.

Of late, however, Haymaker had begun to wonder what the compensation for a life of such sacrifice might be. He sees in the possibility of his wife's death a last chance at fulfillment with a woman who could truly understand him, but his conscience will not allow him even now to contemplate with equanimity such a denouement. Haymaker has insight into his own futility and recognizes the remedy: "Unless one acted for oneself, upon some stern conclusion nurtured within, one might rot and die spiritually. Nature did not care. 'Blessed be the meek'—yes. Blessed be the strong, rather, for they made their own happiness." One such strong personality is Zingara, another architect and former friend of Haymaker's who had never married and had become a distinguished success in his field. Despite the fact that earlier Haymaker's wife had disapproved of Zingara's poverty and had forbidden Haymaker to associate with him, Zingara had pursued his profession indifferent to what might be said about him. But Zingara's life is meant to show that even those who live free cannot make their own happiness. He has spent his last years a "dreamy recluse," the equally sad destiny of those who, refusing to submit to fatal compromise, find themselves alone.

After Haymaker's wife's rally and relapse, which induce in him a variety of emotional responses ranging from hope to sorrow that she might not recover, she does, in fact, die. Haymaker is finally free, but a glance into a tall pier mirror tells him that his freedom has come too late, for he is "old, weary, done for!" The story ends with Haymaker musing on the innate cruelty of life: "'Free! I know now how that is. I am free now, at last! Free! . . . Free! . . . Yes—free . . . to die.'"

"Free" is perhaps the most brutally honest story about the married state ever written. Haymaker's marriage, undertaken in a state of youthful idealism and transient sexual attraction, is portrayed as a tragic mistake, compounded with each passing day of self-sacrifice and burning longing to be free. But clearly, the architect's life would have been blighted even had he left his wife years earlier, because the guilt he would have felt over his failed obligation and responsibility would have allowed him no peace of mind. This is made clear at the end of the story when Haymaker, finally released by his wife's death, reproaches himself for having caused her to die with his thoughts: "So then his dark wishing had come true at last? Possibly his black thoughts had killed her after all. Was that possible? Had his voiceless prayers been answered in this grim way? And did she know what he had really thought? Dark thought. Where was she now? What was she thinking now if she knew? Would she hate him—haunt him?" Mrs. Haymaker's reach beyond the grave at the conclusion of "Free" may well have influenced Steinbeck's classic short story "The Harness." In that piece, the devoted husband and farmer Peter Randall, whose life is defined by his ministering to his sickly wife, decides at her death that he will cut himself loose from his past and live a new life unencumbered by care. But like Haymaker, he discovers that his self-denial has become so ingrained that he cannot change, and he is led to remark ruefully that his wife "didn't die dead."

Dreiser's analysis of Haymaker's sacrifices in "Free" is not altogether negative. He does not disparage the intimate feelings the architect has displayed toward his wife during their marriage. There is no reason to regard them as anything but genuine. The compassion and tenderness he shows for his wife is as close to love as one can approach in marriage, which is an institution based on the denial of the most fundamental law of life—the law of change. In stories like "Free," Dreiser uses marriage as a stage set within which the conflict between man's desire for both freedom and structure, for personal fulfillment and loving dedication to another, for the many and the one is played out with no resolution forthcoming. "Free" is especially disturbing since its considerable length allows for a full exposition of the crippling ambivalence that is the inevitable outcome of marriage for the man or woman who is introspective. In The "Genius," Dreiser had imagined himself confronted with the premature death of the wife he no longer loved. In "Free," he showed what life is like for the many who lack the courage to end a marriage that has been frustrating or disappointing.

"The Lost Phoebe" first appeared in Century magazine in April 1916. One of the most frequently anthologized of Dreiser's stories, it is also atypical in that it deals with a happy marriage. It concerns an old farmer named Henry Reifsneider, whose wife of forty-eight years, Phoebe Ann, has just died. Henry and Phoebe Ann had been devoted to each other, and when death separates them, Henry slowly loses his grip on reality until he hallucinates his wife back among the living. Spurred on by a vision he believes to be Phoebe Ann, the farmer is finally led over the edge of a cliff to his own death. Some readers have been tempted to see in this poignant story Dreiser's underwriting of the doctrine of "one life, one love," but it should be remembered that he attributes this enduring marriage to a want of imagination in both Henry and Phoebe Ann: "You perhaps know how it is with simple natures that fasten themselves like lichens on the stones of circumstance and weather their days to a crumbling conclusion. The great world sounds widely, but it has no call for them. They have no soaring intellect. The orchard, the meadow, the corn-field, the pig-pen, and the chicken-lot measure the range of their human activities." Hence: "Old Henry and his wife Phoebe were as fond of each other as it is possible for two old people to be who have nothing else in this life to be fond of." In its rustic subject matter, "The Lost Phoebe" is as anomalous among Dreiser's works as Ethan Frome is among Edith Wharton's. But the story evokes the devotion of a simple man in such a moving manner that it deserves the critical attention it receives. And in it Dreiser reveals that if he could not devote himself exclusively and unlongingly to one woman, he could see beauty in the lifelong devotion demonstrated by Henry Reifsneider. "The Lost Phoebe" foreshadows the treatment of marital fidelity in The Bulwark, wherein Solon and Benecia Barnes abide in commitment and peace.

"Chains" first appeared under the title "Love" in the New York Times in May 1919. A long stream-of-consciousness narrative, it recreates the thoughts of a businessman named Garrison during a train trip from a convention city to his hometown. The subject of his thoughts is Ideile, a woman half his age to whom he has been married for three years and to whom he is "chained" through his irrational need. He had met her by chance in the office of a physician friend of his, and he had fallen in love with her because she was so beautiful and because she reminded him of a former lover. In Garrison's mind, Ideile turned out to be like her predecessor in many ways—restless, selfish, cruel, and varietistic. "Chains" explores the resistless attraction some men have for women whom they know or perhaps wish can only hurt them. Garrison is portrayed as conservative and society-minded, but also as a self-destructive fool with a weakness for beauty and a need to show off a younger woman to his envying associates. The more Garrison gives to the relationship, the more he believes Ideile has heartlessly toyed with him. As the train carries him closer to his home, he rehearses all of his wife's lies and assorted transgressions (perhaps inventing some of them and perversely enjoying his own torture), and he resolves to leave her if she does not meet him on his arrival as promised. When he gets to the house he discovers that she has left him a note asking him to join her at a friend's house party. Intent on following through with his plan to leave, Garrison packs his bags but decides to join his wife at the party instead, unable to break the bonds of his peculiar passion. While Garrison is on the train, his stream-of-consciousness is frequently interrupted by the sights and sounds along the way. At one point, his musing is appropriately disturbed by "the crashing couplings" of the train cars, for this is the story of the helplessness of a man who may be seen as the self-willed victim of his own "crashing coupling."

Wray, the subject of "Marriage—For One," a story which first appeared in Marriage magazine in 1923, tries purposefully to avoid making the kind of mistake that ruins Garrison's later life in "Chains." With his "clerkly mind," he methodically sets out to find "a woman of sense as well as of charm, one who came of good stock and hence would be possessed of good taste and good principles." She must be liberal and intelligent as well—in short, someone whom he can regard as his equal. And he takes care to seek out a woman he could genuinely love. Soon he meets a stenographer who seems to fit his requirements except that she has a rather conservative religious background. Unbeknown to her parents, Wray sets about remaking her in a more liberal mold. He succeeds in developing in her an interest in books and art to the point where he deems her worthy to marry him. Soon after the wedding, however, she comes under the influence of several "restless, pushing, seeking" New York women who so embellish her education in books and the arts that she begins to regard her husband as excessively narrow. When she leaves Wray, he is left to contemplate the ashes of his dreams until, on the advice of the narrator of the story, he induces his wife to return on her terms and convinces her that they should have a child. This proves not to be the solution, however, since the intellectual gap remains. Before long, the wife has found a more suitable man, and the Wrays have separated permanently.

It remains for the narrator of the story to gloss Wray's attempt at playing Pygmalion. When Wray comes to him for advice, he is hesitant to provide it because he realizes that "the mysteries of temperament of either [Wray or his wife] were not to be unraveled or adjusted save by nature—the accidents of chance and affinity, or the deadly opposition which keep apart those unsuited to each other." He concludes that the couple had represented "two differing rates of motion, flowing side by side for the time being only, his the slower, hers the quicker." The more Mrs. Wray had come to despise her husband, the more her husband had loved her, and the narrator is "shaken" by this irresolvable situation. The story ends with the narrator brooding over "the despair, the passion, the rage, the hopelessness, the love" which the situation bespeaks: "He is spiritually wedded to that woman, who despises him, and she may be spiritually wedded to another man who may despise her." In Dreiser's world, feeling within marriage is almost never reciprocal because men and women constitute "differing rates of motion," which by their very nature seldom "flow side by side" and only during brief interludes. The mutual needs that must be addressed if marriage is to fulfill both partners demand a brittle balance between giving and receiving which is nearly impossible to sustain.

"The Shadow," originally entitled "Jealousy," appeared in Harper's Bazaar in August 1924. The story is divided into two parts. The first is written from the point of view of Gil, a man who fears that his wife, Beryl, is guilty of infidelity because of his fleeting glimpses of a person he takes to be her in various suspicious situations. He eventually decides on the basis of circumstantial evidence that she is having an affair with a violinist, but her denials lead him to doubt the justice of his accusation. In the second part, the same situation is described from Beryl's point of view. We learn that she has indeed had an affair, but with a novelist named Barclay whose realistic portrait of a woman much like herself had inspired her to write to him. Her motivation is familiar. Gil is a clerk "with a clerk's mind and a clerk's point of view," whose love for Beryl exceeds her love for him. Beryl's dissatisfaction with the marriage is fueled by her husband's propensity to be "too affectionate and too clinging." She had married him primarily because he was "rather handsome" which had "meant a lot to her then." She had realized her mistake "only after she was married and surrounded by the various problems that marriage includes." Like the wife in "Marriage—For One," Beryl had quickly grown past her husband. She gives up her affair and resolves to stay with him only because she realizes that if her indiscretion is discovered, she will lose her right to her three-year-old son, whom she loves deeply. Thus, the price she pays for her child is a married life of repressed hostility. The story ends on a note of Dreiserian irony as Beryl remembers that in Barclay's novel, which had drawn her to him, "the husband had gone away and the architect had appeared."

If Dreiser's portrait of the institution of marriage in the fiction of his middle career was almost uniformly depressing, he was sometimes able to see some advantages in the married life, as he demonstrates in one of his unpublished essays, "Rebellious Women and Marriage." The essay was produced after he had been totally immersed in the question of individual responsibility while writing An American Tragedy. It sets out to examine the modern woman's restless absorption with rights and freedom and the strain this puts on the traditional marriage. It begins with an analysis of the moral situation at the moment, an analysis in which Dreiser offers a self-revealing explanation of the temptations of modern society: "I myself think that in the matter of our emotions and our morals many of us are at loose ends. We are perhaps too much shaken by the passing of dogma, if not convention and most certainly we are considerably loosened by not only the vastly increased opportunities for social contacts and exchange, but the amazing and arresting lures to the same." But he cautions those who want sexual freedom: "one thing is sure and that is that apart from such passing pleasure or entertainment as there may be in either polygamy or polyandry or the varietistic attitude in general there is little or no genuine romance." The reason is: "Romance centers around two and two only." Although the so-called varietist does not consciously recognize his need, he is always desperately searching for real romance, which is necessary for personal peace: "without that capacity for love of one and one only—or a genuine understanding of and so harmony with one other, how is any single individual to be content, let alone happy in marriage." Dreiser goes on to say that he approves of divorce, but only as a necessary instrument through which the unhappily married person can renew the search for the one partner who can bring peace and bliss. But he is quick to point out that his recognition of the necessity of divorce does not lessen his respect for marriage: "I am for more marriages of an enduring character where they can be built on genuine understanding and sympathy and so mutual helpfulness—none more so." The rest of the essay constitutes some gratuitous advice to married couples, admonishing them to work at preserving their marriages. He suggests trying "all forms of compromise" before ending a marriage because, "as the years roll on, both sexes are certain to find that more and more they require a certain personal as well as social stability which they can never find in varietism and without it they are likely to prove mental as well as emotional tramps of the road—hoboes." The effort expended in sustaining a good marriage is worthwhile because: "In the long run—the later and soberer years—how wise and even beneficial will seem the compromise." Dreiser seldom wrote in this vein before The Bulwark, but another instance occurs in the sketch of a woman he had known, fictionalized as "Reina" in A Gallery of Women, He portrays the profligate Reina as a lazy loafer married to a "workaholic" and excoriates her for taking no pains to fulfill her half of the couple's marital vows. But even in "Rebellious Women and Marriage," Dreiser recommends that if a person finds himself in a union in which there is no romance, he should immediately "move and seek the real thing." Indeed, in the midst of his discussion of the strengths of marriage, Dreiser interjects a set of questions that implicitly and contradictorily applaud his own proclivities and undercut his whole argument: "Have you the strength of the varietistic life? The real courage? If not,—then what?—." The essay clearly demonstrates his characteristic need for the one and the many in his sexual relations—a need that he was never to outgrow. Throughout his life, he longed for and actively pursued the tempestuous exhilaration of sexual variety at the same time he desired the emotional stability of monogamy. Whatever attitudes Dreiser expressed about marriage in his essays, his fiction remains the repository of his deepest feelings about this as well as most other subjects. The short stories of the "marriage group" reveal that "genuine understanding and sympathy and natural helpfulness" within the married state are extremely rare. When two people join in a sanctioned and sustained relationship in Dreiser's stories, they form an unstable compound—each striving for control, seldom intersecting spiritually, socially, emotionally; changing and growing at differing rates; never achieving the elusive balance between giving to and receiving from the other that could create harmony and happiness. This unstable compound is inevitable since most marriages result from short-lived sexual passion or temporary individual dreams or social pressure. The many personal tragedies that follow are owing, not only to the relative inaccessibility of divorce in Dreiser's day, but also to the fact that divorce does nothing to ease the inevitable guilty self-questioning which often leaves permanent emotional scars.

Ironically, however, Dreiser achieved a harmonious and happy wedding of content and form in his short stories about marriage. The expression of certain writers' ideas is better suited to one genre than another. Sherwood Anderson, for example, was a master of the short story. But the ideas in his novels, stretched beyond the requirements of the single moment of character illumination, did not hold up well. On the other hand, Dreiser's lumbering style and gigantic, brooding imagination were best suited to the form of the novel. Not often was he able to narrow his focus and effectively encase his ideas within a short story. By far his most successful ventures into the shorter form were the stories in the "marriage group." They allowed him to concentrate on the dialectic which was at the very core even of his most sprawling and sometimes directionless novels—the dialectic between giving and getting, observable in the microcosm of marital relationships. His next novel would dramatize his deepest soundings yet of the human heart, torn between desire and responsibility.