SOURCE: "Don Juans and 'Dancing Dogs': A Note on Dreiser's A Gallery of Women," in Indian Journal of American Studies, Vol. 13, No. 2, July, 1983, pp. 147-55.

[In the following essay, Vinoda suggests that Dreiser's portrayal of women in A Gallery of Women is far from being as woman-affirming as other critics have argued, presenting women primarily as physical objects and defining them mainly in terms of their relationships with men.]

American society was not ready to receive Dreiser's Sister Carrie (1900) and Jennie Gerhardt (1911) when they appeared, since the portraits of women presented in them were far ahead of the times: the female protagonists in them were shown to adopt unconventional social means in their struggle for success and fulfilment. As F. O. Matthiessen has argued [in "A Picture of Conditions," Sister Carrie, 1970], contrary to the prevailing ideology concerning projection of women in fiction, Dreiser created characters who deserved punishment but who were set free in a manner that outraged his contemporaries; worse still, he did not even regard them sinful for their transgressions. Many contemporaries of Dreiser, like Sherwood Anderson and Dorothy Dudley, are said to have hailed him for his forward-looking views on women, although his books were often published without enthusiasm and some were even sought to be suppressed ["A Picture of Conditions"]. Dreiser was aware of his unconventionality himself:

The world, as I see it now, had trussed itself up too helplessly with too many strings of convention, religion, dogma. . . . Is it everybody's business to get married and accept all the dictates of conventional society—that is, bear and rear children according to a given social or religious theory? . . . And, furthermore, I am inclined to suspect that the monogamous standard to which the world has been tethered much too harshly for a thousand years or more now is entirely wrong. I do not believe that it is Nature's only or ultimate way of continuing or preserving itself.

[A Book About Myself, 1922]

The moral and ethical agnosticism of this confession should sound the key-note to many of the attitudes and assumptions that manifest in his fiction especially in regard to woman and her relations with man. Dreiser's views naturally appeared anarchistic to the nation founded by Puritans. His writings aroused a great deal of antagonism as they were unlike anything written before.

The American novel has traditionally reflected the sexist bias emphasizing the role-conception of woman as a home-keeping private creature who must be dependent, submissive, pure and loyal; transgression and violation of the social degree were generally punished in American fiction. Wendy Martin has effectively demonstrated that American novelists from Susanna Rowson through Hawthorne to Hemingway have enacted in their tales the lives of fallen women who, like Eve, have paid for their sin through dependency, servitude and ignoble death. Contrary to this image Dreiser's fictional women reject the social norm, declare their independence and venture forth in pursuit of higher ambitions. Their asocial placement has predictably offended the Puritan sensibility of his contemporaries. However we will be amazed to find, on closer examination, that these women do not always seem real in their unconventionality. Matthiessen's perceptive observation that Dreiser robs Carrie of warmth and that "she is never a woman in love" should be a pointer. This weakness of Sister Carrie points today to a much larger artistic failure—a failure on the part of Dreiser to follow the situation of his fictional women to its logical end by endowing them with a psychology that makes them truly liberated. The artistic failure, then, would turn out to be a failure of imagination. From this study it will be seen that Dreiser, thwarted by a sexist bias, created women who are not as liberated as they are mistaken to be.

Dreiser has often claimed to see life as it really is from a detached distance, but after Wayne C. Booth, George P. Elliot and such others we know today that there is no such thing as absolute detachment and that writer's judgment of facts is always implicit in his fictional transmutations. The author as "meddler" could be accordingly seen in the particular situations and events in Dreiser's fiction where his assumptions about women clearly suggest themselves. This study attempts to crystallize these assumptions from the examination of a limited number of fairly representative stories to which women are central. The stories I examine here are all included in A Gallery of Women which Dreiser scholars have significantly included in the category of "non-fiction" or "sketches." If the account of Dreiser's secretary, William C. Lengel, could be relied upon, the "sketches" of women in A Gallery were all based upon Dreiser's knowledge of real life figures [Introduction to A Gallery of Women, 1962]. The flimsy fictional garb given to the narrator-spokesman-painter of these portraits has furnished me a further reason for choosing A Gallery for study here since the attitudes crystallized from them would be even more authentic than those elicited from pure fiction.

William C. Lengel was probably unaware of the devastating irony of his words when he said that in Dreiser America found a genius whose fiction presents "evidence of one man's mastery of 'the eternal feminine'." Lengel seems to have meant that Dreiser's portraits of women transcend limitations of time and that they are of universal interest. But Goethe's phrase "eternal feminine" [in Faust] applied to Dreiser is really misplaced since Goethe attributed an upward influence to the female. Goethe was in a long tradition of mythology, poetry and religion where woman has been glorified as transcendence (as opposed to immanence), as the divine grace, as Beatrice guiding Dante in the beyond, as Laura beckoning Petrarch to sublime heights of poetry, as harmony, Reason, as Minerva, as glorified substance (and not flesh) to be adored, as an eternal being Virgin Mary representing pity, tenderness, and so on. Lengel unwittingly evokes all the associations surrounding this feminine mystique by applying the resonant words "eternal feminine" to the women in Dreiser's A Gallery, but he seems to be swayed off his feet by his personal admiration for Dreiser. In truth Dreiser deflates the myth of the eternal feminine by projecting an image of the female whose terms of being do not extend beyond the fact of her gender appeal to the male and who is never allowed to achieve the dignity of interacting with man's world in the way she aspires. To be sure, Dreiser's much vaunted realistic method might claim that in man's world woman's presence is directly felt in desire, in embrace and love, but Dreiser could never conceive that from even a commonsensical point of view there is more to woman's being than this. Aspiring women of whom we see many in A Gallery do nothing more than try to define their existence in relation to man; they never aspire away or apart from man as if such a thing does not exist. There were indeed women like Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Margaret Fuller and Anne Bradstreet in America and it was not as if Dreiser was unaware of such women. In fact one of the stories of A Gallery, "Olive Brand," mentions the rebel woman Emma Goldman who was his contemporary. Paradoxically, Dreiser received much undue praise for being unconventional although his projections of woman were not unconventional enough: they were far from being such revolutionaries as Emma Goldman. In fact Olive Brand appears in the story of that title as an activist writer who is said to have participated in labor strikes and met Emma Goldman, but she is nevertheless shown to end up as the Muse of a failed writer called Jethro whom she desired to inspire to good writing. The story thus betrays its own promise and conception.

It has never been sufficiently recognized that women in Dreiser's stories do not transcend their physicality since they are essentially creations of a "hedonist, a voluptuary and a varietist" [Lengel]. As a consequence we find in the tales an unresponsiveness to the self-generated moral issues; they even reveal a double standard that men have always adopted in their relations with women. Worse still, the "center of consciousness" in the stories approves of this double standard. The source of this double standard morality, it seems to me, could be traced to Dreiser's views said to be "loose in formulation, and inconsistent . . . his theory of the relativity of morals is as inconsistent as it is challenging" [Literary History of the United States: History, 1963]. In a way the stories reflect what Lengel observed of Dreiser the man:

He displayed a casual indifference towards women. He was a hedonist, a voluptuary and a varietist—but he did believe in a double standard. While he was a free agent and let his fancies roam, the girl who was the temporary object of his affection had to be, as Caesar's wife, beyond suspicion (italics added).

It may not be unfair to speak here of the author's own attitude to women, especially when the evidence of the stories points beyond their fictional frame and reinforces Lengel's personal observations. It would indeed be methodologically wrong to state these personal attitudes first because that might prejudice the discussion of the stories. But the evidence presented in the next few pages will be seen to refer back to what Mark Schorer called the "author's secret world of value" regarding women ["Technique as Discovery," Critical Approaches to Fiction, 1966]. It is, however, possible to consider the evidence independent of the external support and arrive at the same conclusions as those we arrive at after reading Lengel's personal observations.

Most stories in A Gallery are patterned to show relationships between men and women which are governed by more or less similar assumptions and attitudes. Women in them generally take to unconventional professions—unconventional for those times—while uncommitted men are continually on the look out for sexual adventures. The ambitious pursuit of these sexually liberated women generally forces them out of their rigidly puritanical backgrounds and leads them to challenging occupations: they struggle for success as writers, movie stars, actresses, intellectuals, painters, and so on, but eventually are thwarted by the relations they bear to men. For in the course of their search they meet what Dreiser repeatedly calls "varietistic" men. It would be interesting to note that the word "varietistic" is often used in the stories without a trace of disapproval. In fact loyalty and marriage appear to be despised bourgeois virtues for these men. Women's higher search in these stories, then, is generally matched by the libidinous search of the men. Paradoxically however the writer's heavy hand seeks to present the Don Juans as saviors of these women. As it turns out fulfilment for the woman often defines itself as nothing more than a sexual liaison with a man of taste and culture or with a man of superior achievement in the field in which she aspires.

In "Ellen Adams Wrynn" Ellen at first has a "foolish" notion that marriage was necessary for woman, but two or three years after her first marriage she realizes that it is a "reprehensible illusion or mistake." Soon she dispenses with the "silly business of wife and mother and social flutterings," leaves the child to the care of her in-laws never to think of it again, and goes off with a painter, Jimmie Race because she believes at that time that Race satisfies her artistic craving, her need for "spiritual depth and sincerity." Eventually Race gives way to McKail when she realizes that he lacks "material strength which she could truly respect." In McKail she finds vigor, liveliness, aggressive masculinity, sincerity, superior artistic skill and talent, iron will and so on. Her art flourishes while she is with him, her paintings partaking of the nature she admires most in him. As the narrator suggests, Ellen reaches the highest success in her painting career while working under McKail's shadow:

At any rate in the case of McKail and Ellen, it had been as plain as anything that artistically and emotionally she was his slave. . . . As an artist Ellen rested on McKail as on a rock, and from heavy but sure physical base took her flight.

On his part McKail does not take seriously either her art or her as person. The narrator makes this clear: "And I could see that at last and probably for good she was dominated by one who was not likely to take her too seriously, not he." Ellen finds artistic success and personal happiness while under McKail's powerful influence, but when he abandons her for another fascinating woman she loses grip on her life and art. She withers like a wilted flower; her success seems to derive from McKail's superiority as a man and as an artist although, however, she or any woman in her place makes little difference to his own professional success. The assumption here is that Ellen and McKail represent, as the narrator explains, the "essentially masculine and feminine" and that woman's growth and success needs man's superior strength while the man himself can find his destiny quite independently. The narrative further assumes that male and female natures are distinctly antithetical and that however socially liberated the latter is, it is essentially physical and sensuous, as opposed to the mental or intellectual. These assumptions become explicit especially in the narrator's interpretations of Ellen's paintings which relate, rather subjectively, the various phases of her life with the paintings of those periods:

There was a certain homey femininity about her which puzzled me. For how came this unity of something extremely feminine with these quite powerful and almost gross canvases on her walls? For they were not only lush and fecund and floreate—canvases which might well spring of an aphrodisiac mood—but broad and comprehensive and strong . . . broader and more comprehensive, more colorful and imaginative than anything which came from McKail. Yet, with all this, an exceedingly soft, feminine, and even sensuous voice and manner, a body that suggested graceful rhythms of flesh: eyes, arms, shoulders, neck, cheeks, all speaking of harmonies physical rather than mental (italics added).

In this description the narrator defines not merely Ellen's difference but that of what he regards as distinctively feminine. That such a bold, free and apparently independent minded Ellen should manifest this essentially female nature "puzzled" the narrator. But the narrator succeeds in seeing in Ellen's paintings the qualities of female of which he has definite notions. Ellen should represent the female in spite of her unfeminine worldly success; in spite of her proven ability to pursue her artistic ambitions without leaning on a man, she must achieve success only under the shadow of a superior man. These notions are borne out by her art as well as her life. So Ellen must fail when McKail abandons her. Had it not been for Dreiser's inability to conceive of success for woman independent of man's redeeming support, Ellen at the end of the story would not be looking for a substitute for McKail, for "some one man of force or distinction or both in the walk of arts."

More or less similar assumptions have given shape to the lives of women in the stories, "Ernestine" and "Emanuela." Like Ellen, Ernestine preferred career to marriage, and her restlessness for higher achievement goads her, in much the same way as does Ellen's to abandon the comfort and security of marriage in her challenging search for success as an actress. Much against her first man's pleasure Ernestine accepts even the corruptions of Hollywood in order to get opportunities of acting in films. On his part Varn Kinsey, her first man, decides to leave her because he was "too vigorous and interesting a man to share the favors of any woman, however attractive, with another, and that was what success in this work [in Hollywood] for Ernestine appeared to mean." The narrative here coolly glosses over Kinsey's hypocrisy either when he swindles large sums from charity collections or when he practices duplicity for a while living with his wife (a woman of "ability and charm who was a painter and illustrator") as well as Ernestine. If anything, the moral center of the story seems to approve of him as the ideal whose absence in Ernestine's life creates an inconsolable emptiness at the height of her success in Hollywood. What is especially significant in this story is that Ernestine, like Ellen, could not live without man's nutritive love and security in spite of her liberating worldly success.

"Emanuela" too shows the life of an intellectual woman going to seed for want of love and union with man. The narrator's opening description of what he regards as unfeminine intellectuality should anticipate the hollow conclusion to the life of the woman intellectual. It surprises the narrator that woman's life should find a meaningful context other than that of man's 'love':

How could any one so beautiful, so voluptuously formed, be so indifferent to every eligible and likable youth within her ken? No visible emotional interest in any one! Only thoughts, lofty thoughts. . . .

It appears incongruous that so much beauty should be so coldly intellectual; it is shocking that the woman intellectual should reject femaleness as the primary condition of her being. After such rejection what can be expected of her? What is essentially wrong in this perspective is that woman's being is seen opposed to intellectuality. Why should a woman be imagined as an intellectual if she should at all be damned for being frigid unless intellectuality is held responsible for it in some way? The basic question is whether woman would be unsexed, Lady Macbeth like, if she takes over what has been a man's province? If Dreiser faced this question Emanuela at the end would not feel that her life was wasted because she neither married nor gave herself to the narrator:

Oh, what's the use of life anyhow? I used to think I understood what it was about, but now I know I don't. And I'm indifferent or not suited to it any more I guess. I should have married or given myself to you. I know that now, but just knowing what life is really like now doesn't help me. It's too late, I guess.

Of all the other stories of A Gallery "Emanuela" is perhaps the most explicit in positing the view that nothing at all would make a woman's life complete if she does not find her man.

Man, however, is not similarly placed in Dreiser's worldview. For his men do not see love as the beginning of responsibility—not in the narrow sense of taking on the burdens of marriage, family, etc.—but as what Dreiser elsewhere termed "an intellectual sublimation" of lust [Hey Rub-A-Dub-Dub, 1920]. To understand a self-confessed immoralist like Berenson it would be necessary to know Dreiser's views on sex stated plainly quite early in his literary career:

What is actually true is that via sex gratification—or perhaps better, its ardent and often defeated pursuit—comes most of all that is most distinguished in art, letters and our social economy and progress generally. It may be and usually is "displaced," "referred," "transferred," "substituted by," "identified with" desire for wealth, preferment, distinction and what not, but underneath each and every one of such successes must primarily be written a deep and abiding craving for women, or some one woman, in whom the sex desires of any one person for the time being are centered. "Love" or "lust" (and the one is but an intellectual sublimation of the other) moves the seeker in every field of effort.

[Hey Rub-A-Dub-Dub]

This attitude seems to explain the conduct of many such men as Dan of "Relia," Doane of "Esther Norn," McKail of "Ellen Adams Wrynn," and so on. "Varietism" in sexually liberated women, of course, is welcomed, but the way it affects men and women is shown to be radically different. McKail of "Ellen Adams Wrynn" and Varn Kinsey of "Ernestine" are men to whose success their women contribute little; they continue to thrive in their chosen vocations even after separation from their women. The women, however, lose all sense of direction in life when abandoned by men. This double standard, already referred to earlier, is even more obvious in the story, "Albertine." In this Berenson seduces the faithful housewife Albertine in the name of gratifying her finer longings for culture and art. Eventually when an illegitimate child is born he complacently thinks that he had done her a good turn because she wanted a child by a man of culture:

. . . she [Albertine] had wished that she and I might have a child. And now here it was! And should she, for want of a little courage, throw away this opportunity? Never! Besides, then and always she would have something of me with her, something of me that she could love and he happy with, and that long after I was gone—as soon ! would be, never fear! . . . Yet all things considered, and particularly since Albertine wished it [the child], I was not opposed. For this was not the first instance of the kind. Others. Others. But not without the consent and wish of the woman in each instance. I never forced any one to go it alone, to do what they did not wish to do (italics added).

Berenson's "love" knows no commitment and for him Albertine is only one woman in a series. His "varietism," however, cannot be extended to Albertine since that would upset him, as indeed he is when he hears that she is attracted to another man during her tour of Europe. If he expected Albertine to be like him—i.e. without loyalties—he would not feel enraged on hearing about her involvement with Stetheridge. In anger he flails and flagellates all womankind along with Albertine for its weakness for "brains and taste . . . as well as an exceedingly grand manner." Far from feeling guilty for betraying his best friend by taking on his wife, Berenson feels revulsion for being betrayed by her when in fact his own value system allowed such a free "love." Varn Kinsey of "Ernestine" similarly refuses to share Ernestine with the movie producers when he had himself lived with her while still married to a woman of charm. The irony in this story is that it is Ernestine who in spite of her sexual amorality has loved Kinsey deeply enough to carry with her the emptiness created by him to the willed end of her life. The "center of consciousness" in these stories, as in others, no doubt sympathises with these women but at the same time it does not seem to disapprove of the wantonness of the men.

The point that needs special emphasis is that the finer longings of women, as in the case of Albertine, become a mere pretext in these stories for bringing them close to men like Berenson, just as the liberating aspirations of women turn out to be a helpful ground on which Dreiser's Don Juans enact their erotic fancies. "Olive Brand" and "Emanuela" provide yet another pattern where women aspire to a life of intellect, but one of them ends up as what Cynthia Ozick calls the "Muse," the inspirer of man, and the other finds her life sterile for not being similarly useful to man.

A truly liberated woman, then, has no place in Dreiser's gallery of women. His inability to imagine a woman for whom man is only a part of her aspirations has consistently thwarted him in presenting convincing portraits of women in these stories, although they have been traditionally admired for wrong reasons. The reason why Hurstwood sounds more convincing than the central figure Carrie could now be attributed to the sexist bias in Dreiser's imagination. Carrie succeeded in offending the sense of propriety of his contemporaries, but her portrayal prefigured the sexist bias so obvious in A Gallery.