SOURCE: "The Dream of Success in Dreiser's A Gallery of Women" in Zeitschrift Fur Anglistik und Amerikanistik, Vol. 27, No. 3, 1979, pp. 236-46.

[In the following essay, Hakutani examines Dreiser's treatment of women characters in A Gallery of Women, paying particular attention to the character's dream of success.]

I

Although Theodore Dreiser is often regarded as a pioneer among modern American novelists for the characterization of woman, very little critical attention has been paid to A Gallery of Women (1929). Upon its publication, this collection of fifteen semifictional portraits was compared to his Twelve Men (1919), a well-received volume of biographical portraits. Despite his disclaimers to the contrary, Dreiser did not have the same intimate knowledge of his women as he did of his men. Undoubtedly Dreiser portrayed women whom he had come across in his career, but his portraits lack conviction. Critics agree that the best portraits in Twelve Men are those of his brother Paul and his father-in-law Arch White, or men like Peter McCord and William Louis Sonntag, Jr., both most inspirational in his early journalism. Dreiser's readers had thus expected as much authenticity in A Gallery of Women as in Twelve Men, but they were disappointed. And yet later readers still persisted in the same expectation. Considering A Gallery of Women as the companion volume to Twelve Men, F. O. Matthiessen, for instance, looked for Dreiser's technique in differentiating women characters but concluded that such skills "deserted him when he tried to handle details that must have seemed to him more intimate" [Theodore Dreiser, 1951].

But the comparison was grossly unfair. The cool reception that has attended A Gallery of Women might have resulted not so much from Dreiser's treatment as from his subject-matter. Readers in twentieth-century America have shown a tendency to minimize the importance of woman in fiction. Only recently have Kate Chopin's short stories attracted serious attention; Sister Carrie was suppressed for seven long years. Such a tendency is hard to understand, for in the late nineteenth century the public accepted as a matter of course the greater freedom in the selection of themes in fiction than before. Needless to say, James' The Portrait of a Lady (1881) is a monumental work concerned with the problem of an American woman. A realist like Howells, too, responding to the libertarians' attack on the socially enforced misery of marriage, successfully treated a divorce for his subject in A Modern Instance (1882). In modern times, there has been no question about American novelists' willingness to deal with the woman question.

The difficulty, however, lies with the reading public. Ironically, even H. L. Mencken, Dreiser's staunch supporter, dismissed A Gallery of Women as a work inferior to Twelve Men:

. . . if the collection is not quite as interesting as its forerunner, then that is probably because women themselves are considerably less interesting than men. Not one of them here is to be mentioned in the same breath with Dreiser's brother Paul, the shining hero of Twelve Men. . . . The rest are occasionally charming, but only too often their chief mark is a pathetic silliness. What ails most of them is love. They throw away everything for it, and when they can't get the genuine article they seem to be content with imitations. And if it is not love, real or bogus, that undoes them, then it is some vague dream that never takes rational form—of puerile self-expression, of gratuitous self-sacrifice, of something else as shadowy and vain.

["Ladies, Mainly Sad," American Mercury, Vol. 19, February, 1930]

Moreover, what disappointed many early readers was the lack of variability they felt in Dreiser's characterization. For a reviewer who had expected to find as great a variety of preoccupations in women as in men, A Gallery of Women left the impression that "Mr. Dreiser believes there is one kind of women—the one who is over-troubled with sex" [Rollo Walter Brown, "Fifteen Women," Saturday Review of Literature, Vol. 6, February 8, 1930]. But this is far from true, for many of the heroines are not even remotely concerned with sex. Ernita, for example, is an American revolutionary who has voluntarily joined the communist movement in Siberia and is not at all tormented by sex. If she is over-troubled by her life, it is not because of sex, but because she immerses herself in the ideology of communism. If Dreiser's ideal woman calls for an equilibrium of mind and heart, Ernita serves as an example of the woman who lacks heart. After an unwilling experience with what Dreiser calls "free love", in which she fails to satisfy herself, Ernita finally decides to return to her lawful husband. She confides to Dreiser: "I walked the floor, suffering because of my mind—this unescapable Puritan conscience of mine". In Dreiser's denouement, Ernita, if anything, is "under-troubled" with the problem of sex.

The same holds true of the portraits of the fortuneteller Giff and an invincible ghetto woman named Bridget Mullanphy. Both are the types that are untroubled with sexual problems of any kind, and they are the ones who survive the most persecuting tyranny of life itself. In that world, however, as one critic observes, Dreiserian women are temperamental rather than intellectual; "so inevitably, as they strive to escape a dilemma not truly of their own making, they fare badly" [John J. McAleer, Theodore Dreiser: An Introduction and Interpretation, 1968]. This dilemma destroys an ill-prepared woman like Esther Norn, who lets her lovers exploit her. But such a predicament is not what distresses other women in the same book. Under the circumstances, stoic women such as Bridget and Albertine fare magnificently because they are the types of women that Dreiser knew are endowed with unusual strength of character. Their success in life, furthermore, is demonstrated in terms of the qualities of mind and heart that make those of men glaringly inferior and shameful.

Whether heroines in A Gallery of Women fare well or not thus depends upon their individual merits and faults. For some, their lovers are wealthy and only seek sexual enjoyment in them; for others, their lovers are sexually content but only interested in their money. Being women, they are all subjected to various predicaments, but their ultimate success or failure in life is determined not by their circumstances but by themselves. In case after case, Dreiser's portraits suggest not a seemingly meaningless and ferocious struggle for existence, but an affirmation of individual worth. Always sympathetic with his heroine's potential as an individual being, Dreiser strives to present her in the best light. In their quest for success, Dreiser's women are unmistakenly drawn here to emphasize their own special needs for fulfillment. In brief, his intention was not a rehash of social determinism.

Thus, what distinguishes A Gallery of Women from a book like Twelve Men is that Dreiser's attitude toward his material is more psychological than social. The character traits that fascinated him in A Gallery of Women are not defined in terms of the social patterns that determined the characters in Twelve Men. The idiosyncrasies of Dreiser's women seemed more internal to him than those of men. This was perhaps why Mencken, commenting on Dreiser's difficulty with A Gallery of Women, argued that women in general "remain more mysterious and hence more romantic". Even though Giff appeared strangely nebulous in her intellectual outlook, or Olive Brand seemed only vaguely motivated by her sexual freedom, Dreiser did not fill in his abstract moral equations with the kind of realistic detail expected of a naturalist writer. Rather, he left the mystery inscrutable to the last.

Dreiser's attempt to be a "romantic" writer, however, did not result in ambiguities in his characterization. He made the best of his material, and of his knowledge about woman. He was persistent in search of truths about feminine temperament and what he understood to be woman's fate. His method was thus analytical, and to some of the portraits he adopted a psychological, if not consistently psychoanalytical, approach. For revelation of feminine secrets, Dreiser was occasionally preoccupied with Freudian theory, which was already fashionable in the 1920s. But here, too, Dreiser was curious rather than convinced, openly experimental rather than theoretical. Dreiser's open-mindedness about his subject and treatment in A Gallery of Women was thus indicated by his mention of the project as early as 1919. "God, what a work!" he told Mencken, "if I could do it truly—The ghosts of Puritans would rise and gibber in the streets" [Letters of Theodore Dreiser, 1959].

II

One of the major themes that bind together the various portraits in A Gallery of Women is the American dream of success. Dreiser's women regard themselves as protagonists in their battle for success among male antagonists. In many of the stories, however, the heroine craves for success in her profession not so that she can rise superior to men, but so that she can achieve pride and peace of mind as an individual. By the time Dreiser planned to formulate these portraits, the dream of success for men had been so finely engrained in American life that it had become an essential part of the American psyche. Dreiser was only expected to modify this tradition as it would have applied to women. Unlike the characterization of the hero in a success story—in which the author's avowed emphasis was on the man's natural survival tactics in society—Dreiser's focus in A Gallery of Women was upon the heroine's personal motives and actions rather than the social and economic forces that would also determine her life.

Despite the variety of women portrayed in the book, and its length, the details of social and familial contexts that mark a Dreiserian novel are indeed scarce. This is a clear departure from Dreiser's use of imagery and symbolism derived from the concrete details of the character's reality—streets, houses, rooms, furniture, and clothes—as in Sister Carrie or a short story like "The Second Choice". Instead his portraits abound in verbal impressions, conversations, confessions, points of view, and abstract authorial explanations of various kinds. The successful portraits are those in which Dreiser effectively structures these details to show how his heroines are trying to fit their temperaments to their struggles despite repeated failures. In particular, Dreiser's primary interest lies in an exposé of the intricate and complex relationships which a woman writer, painter, or actress holds with her husbands, lovers, and gigolos. In the most successful of his portraits, such as "Esther Norn", Dreiser's denouement creates pathos, since the heroine's "pursuit of happiness" is constantly hindered by the turn of the events that stem from her own errors in judgment.

Dreiser's portraits of the women professionals derive in large part from his own experiences in Greenwich Village in the twenties. He was fascinated by their lives, as he says at the beginning of each tale, because they were young and beautiful and they appeared intellectually competent. But as the story develops, the narrator—in most cases Dreiser himself—gradually informs the reader with some hesitation that the woman in question lacks the qualities of mind necessary for the realization of her dream. Clearly, Dreiser is dealing here with a "second-rate" personage in a particular profession. It is interesting that Dreiser as a magazine writer in the 1890s was convinced of the gift and originality attributed to many a woman professional—artist, writer, composer, lawyer, musician, singer. Perhaps Dreiser of the twenties was a much more severe critic of woman's abilities than Dreiser of the nineties.

In any event, A Gallery of Women as a whole suggests that the dream of success in fields like art and writing could be realized only by independent, strong-willed women. This implication does have some relationship with Dreiser's latent prejudice against woman's intellectual abilities. In 1916 Dreiser told his first biographer, Dorothy Dudley Harvey, a graduate of Bryn Mawr, that he had found it difficult "to name one woman of any distinction or achievement out of the twenty-five years of that institution" [Dudley, Dreiser and the Land of the Free, 1946]. Later in "Life, Art and America", included in Hey Rub-a-Dub-Dub, Dreiser thus declared:

There is not a chemist, a physiologist, a botanist, a biologist, an historian, a philosopher, an artist, of any kind or repute among them; not one. They are secretaries to corporations, teachers, missionaries, college librarians, educators in any of the scores of pilfered meanings that may be attached to that much abused word. They are curators, directors, keepers. They are not individuals in the true sense of that word; they have not been taught to think; they are not free. They do not invent, lead, create; they only copy or take care of, yet they are graduates of this college and its theory, mostly ultra conventional, or, worse yet, anaemic, and glad to wear its collar, to clank the chains of its ideas or ideals—automatons in a social scheme whose last and final detail was outlined to them in the classrooms of their alma mater. That, to me, is one phase, amusing enough, of intellectual freedom in America.

What ultimately prevents Ellen Adams Wrynn, one of the heroines in A Gallery of Women, from becoming a successful painter is the lack of independence and freedom in her character. Although Dreiser emphasizes at the outset how this "young, attractive, vigorous, and ambitious" blonde will benefit the free spirits and creativity associated with the bohemian life of the Village, he predicts that "her enthusiasm would not last the numerous trials and tribulations of those who essay illustration and painting in general" (Gallery). Ellen marries Walter Wrynn, a young broker, for "the delight of sex as well as the respect and material prosperity and social advancement that sometimes went with marriage for some". The marriage is obviously doomed and Dreiser uses Jimmie Race, a novice in painting much like Ellen, to serve as a foil to Walter. Dreiser's argument is that there is nothing wrong with a young woman's—much less an artist's—being a "varietist". More significantly, Ellen's problem is caused by her attitude toward sex; she takes sex lightly and lets her success dream pre-empt her desire for fulfillment. Despite her innate beauty and intelligence, she deliberately seeks the habits and mores antithetical to those one must acquire as an artist. For the benefit of her husband, she functions merely as a form of "sex worship"; for Race, her first lover, she remains a listener to his sophormoric discourse on art and poetry.

Ellen's static personality, shown by the lack of spiritual communion with her sexual partner, is also reflected in her work. Though she travels to Paris and studies first hand the Post-Impressionists by living with one painter after another, she fails to he recognized for her work. One of her most influential lovers and mentors is a Scotish painter, Keir McKail, whose workmanship gives a clue to what is lacking in hers. While Dreiser admires the exotic color and thought in her painting, he notices the internal solidity behind the paint in McKail's work. "Naturally", Dreiser comments, "he avoided with almost religious austerity any suggestion of the sterile eccentricities that spoiled so much of the work of others . . . whereas beneath her surfaces was no real depth".

Another flaw in her character is reflected in a rigid and extreme relationship she establishes with her lover. She either dominates him or lets herself be dominated by him. Domination, in Dreiser's scheme for this story, means some compensation for the one who is dominated. Thus Ellen, dominated by McKail, learns a great deal from him about painting, and her workmanship improves. The irony is that from the other men she has dominated, she gains nothing but what she does not need for purposes of her art. From her husband she gets his physically strong manhood and their unwanted child; from Race, his complaints and lectures on abstract subjects. The most significant point is that Ellen lacks an independently motivated discipline of art. This initial deficiency in her character is proved by the fact that as soon as McKail leaves her, her workmanship declines and she is once more doomed to be a failure.

Another heroine in A Gallery of Women who fails in her career is an Hollywood actress named Ernestine De Jongh. She later commits suicide in New York at twenty-nine. At the close of the story, Ernestine relates to Dreiser another tragic story in which an actress she knew in Hollywood went downhill and committed suicide. Dreiser listens to her observation that Hollywood actresses "counted the years from sixteen to twenty-eight as the best of those granted to woman. After them came, more than likely, the doldrums" (Gallery). Ernestine's account here not only points to the age phobia from which many women in that profession suffered but more significantly reveals the lack of confidence underlying her own character. As in Ellen Adams Wrynn's career, Ernestine always ecounters the problem of identity. She is an actress as anyone recognizes, but she does not take advantage of her own beauty and "sex appeal"—the undeniable asserts in her that Dreiser emphasizes.

The most serious problem Dreiser discovers, however, in Ernestine's career as in that of any other woman here is the lack of development in her character. It is true that Ernestine's becoming the mistress of Varn Kinsey, a poet and an altruistic intellectual of the community, enables her to reject the tinsel world of Hollywood. She recognizes through him, for example, that the order of the day in Hollywood is an orgy of self-satisfaction totally oblivious of art and creativity. And yet she deliberately seeks fame and power in that world by succumbing to an incompetent director whose main interest is in sexual orgies rather than in film-making. Despite her gift and ingenuity, she always remains secondary to a leading actress. Ironically, "she was looked upon as rather serious . . . and directors desired and required types which were all that youth and beauty meant but without much brains. In Dreiser's assumption, then, she is neither brilliant nor ignorant; she is neither accomplished nor innocent. Like Ellen Adams Wrynn, Ernestine is denied possible success because of a dilemma: although she has sufficient intelligence to reach the top of her profession, given the guidance of a lover like Kinsey, she can never reach her goal, nor is she content to take a secondary role in her profession.

In Dreiser's conception of the success dream, the lack of flexibility and growth in the woman's training for her profession has a direct corollary to the degree of her failure. Ernestine's failure, unlike Ellen's, is tragic not because of her suicide, but because there has been less interaction in her relations to her lovers than in the case of Ellen. The problem Ernestine faces in her life with Kinsey is thus more serious than that of Ellen in her relations with McKail. Ellen can gain artistic insights from her domineering lover; for Ernestine, however, her lover's dictatorial demeanor does shut off the channels of intellectual and artistic influence which she desperately needs. Even though Ernestine, like Ellen, displays her sympathy and admiration for her lover's noble spirits, she must dictate her own code of behavior and thus ruin her meaningful relationship with him. This naiveté is also evident in her sexual life. Ernestine's attitude toward sex is immature, for her beauty and physical appeal are used only for self-satisfaction and for mercenary gain. Dreiser suggests that she is guilty of isolating her sexual life from the meaningful communion between man and woman. For she makes sex the touchstone of her own pleasure and, in particular, her vanity in quest of success.

Ernestine's attitude toward sex thus contrasts with Albertine's. Albertine is a strong-willed but graceful woman—a wife, a mother, and the mistress of a sculptor. Dreiser admires Albertine because she is capable of making sex grow beyond the realm of the physical. For her, unlike Ernestine, sex represents a search for human relatedness, a way out of her otherwise meaningless social and economic struggle. Besides saving herself from loneliness and isolation, she gives birth to an illegitimate child whose identity is kept only to themselves. Ernestine's way of life, on the contrary, is sterile. For Ernestine, the call of sex is not transformed in character since it is not supported by a genuine feeling of love and responsibility. In short, Ernestine's sexual life neither enriches her life nor improves her talent as an actress.

The weaker qualities of mind and heart exhibited in the failures these heroines have faced in their careers can be related to their backgrounds. Except for Esther Norn, all of the women in search of success in their chosen fields come from wealthy, conservative families. In the case of Emanuela, her family's Puritan heritage—despite her broad education in literature—has made her sexually frigid for life. Failing to seduce her at a crucial point in their relations, Dreiser bluntly tells her: "You're suffering from an inhibition of some kind against sex, your normal relationship to men and life" (Gallery). Isabel Archer in The Portrait of a Lady, who seems to live with a fear of over-sexed men, is nevertheless capable of feeling the power of sex as shown in her final encounter with Goodwood. If Isabel is considered a morally and sexually independent spirit, as she is by most critics, Emanuela in A Gallery of Women is clearly a pathological case. At the final moment in her encounter with Dreiser—who has by then lost all his passion for her—she confesses: 'Oh well, you may be right, I don't know. I'm not going to try to explain or adjust myself now". Ernestine De Jongh's background is equally conservative and affluent: she is the daughter of a prosperous dairyman in America's northwest. Although she is not sexually inhibited as Emanuela is, her family education has not helped her become a free spirit. The irony in her life is that her most esteemed lover is involved in many liberal causes—woman suffrage, child labor, and publication of radical magazines.

Thus, Dreiser's women professionals like Emanuela and Ernestine share their common family backgrounds that are intellectually stifling and detrimental to their growth and development. Esther Norn, on the other hand, does not come from such a family, but she is handicapped in another way. Losing her mother in her youth, she was raised by her father. Because he was often unemployed, as in many of Dreiser's stories as well as in his own life, Esther was forced to subject herself to a series of menial jobs. Like Sister Carrie, she manages to obtain a small part in a play and thus begins her career to realize her dream. She falls in love with a young poet of the Village—"an on-the-surface eccentric and clown or court-jester". As this relationship wears off, another self-styled poet, Doane, comes into her life. Though she marries him. Doane turns out to be financially dependent upon her. The significant point in her character, however, is that her actions of sacrifice for the benefit of her husband are not caused by his inability or unwillingness to secure a livelihood for them, but derived from her own upbringing. The reader is constantly reminded of the fact that Esther's father, like her lovers, has always been what Dreiser calls a "loafer" and "woman-chaser". This image in her girlhood was so strongly imprinted in her mind that she takes her father's way of life for that of all men. Unlike Hurstwood, who falls a victim in a similar predicament, Doane can instead prey on Esther. For example, Doane encourages Esther, his lawful wife, to be sexually involved with a theatre manager so that she may succeed on the stage. Dreiser's advice against such an adventure for Esther's sake suggests that not only is Doane a moral coward, but also that she is destined to be a failure as well.

In A Gallery of Women, then, the loss of self-confidence an heroine suffers in seeking success seems to result partly from her early life. The respective backgrounds of Esther and Ernestine, for example, represent two extreme cases of family influence. Esther's life is perverted by the ever-present parasitic way of life led by her father; Ernestine's is misdirected by the cloistered existence in her early life. Each in her own way struggles to lead an independent life in spite of the earlier influences and experiences which are detrimental to her new spirit. Some women, such as Ellen, come close to the realization of their dreams. In fact, Ellen does reach a point of excellence in her career. But she cannot maintain that excellence, let alone go beyond, without the help of a superior artist and philosopher who also serves as her lover.

This pattern of failure, however, applies to Dreiser's heroines who are deliberately seeking success in the professions formerly monopolized by men. There are no such dreams cherished by women like Bridget and Albertine. Bridget, a wife and mother, is the virtual head of a household inhabited by her drunken husband, an old daughter with an illegitimate child, and relatives: and yet she succeeds in putting her family together and survives with dignity. Albertine is the loyal wife of a businessman who is bankrupt and charged with a fraud, but she too survives the ordeal and successfully raises her children. For the woman whose function in life is to be a wife and mother, her dream of success is survival. But for the woman whose dream is to achieve success in a man's world, she is necessarily handicapped, and no matter how bravely she pursues her goal she fails to reach it.

Why is it that a woman professional fails in America despite her promising potential? Dreiser attempts to answer this central question in A Gallery of Women. The international critic of women who appears in "Ernestine" describes American women in a lengthy commentary:

These American girls are astonishing, really. They are not always so well equipped mentally, but they have astounding sensual and imaginative appeal as well as beanty and are able to meet the exigencies of life in a quite satisfactory manner, regardless of what Europe thinks. . . . By that I mean that your American girl of this type thinks and reasons as a woman, not as a man, viewing the problems that confront her as a woman, studying life from a woman's viewpoint and solving them as only a woman can. She seems to realize, more than do her sisters of almost any other country to-day, that her business is to captivate and later dominate the male, with all his special forces and intelligence, by hers, and having done that she knows that she has bagged the game. Now I do not count that as being inferior or stupid. To me it is being effective.

However, what is finally lacking in a woman like Ernestine De Jongh is a stable and independent philosophy that transcends the narrow confines of feminine mentality. Dreiser's prediction, stated before her story unfolds, is that she is "too much inclined, possibly, to look for worth in others—too little to compel it in herself". Dreiser's conclusion, therefore, is just opposite of the European observer's view: the way in which an American woman of Ernestine's type is prepared in her quest for success is simply not effective.

III

There is no doubt about Dreiser's compassion for these ill-prepared heroines in A Gallery of Women, just as one is reminded that Dreiser has shown more sympathy for Jennie Gerhardt than Carrie Meeber. A Gallery of Women, moreover, exhibits a consciously developed pattern in which the less self-reliant the heroine is the higher price of injury she has to pay for the battle of life. Because she is not mentally well equipped, she develops a tendency to rely on men for spiritual and financial securities. Because she has a limited vision and understanding of her lover's worth, she can be swiftly exploited by him. All this happens to Ernestine, Emanuela, and Ellen with equal intensity.

The most complex pattern Dreiser weaves into the success stories in A Gallery of Women is that of Esther Norn. It bears a structural resemblance to Sister Carrie. Both women, under twenty, start out in a huge, friendless city, looking for employment but in vain. Then they are both rescued by men. Esther's first lover is, like Drouet, a good, carefree man "in search of pleasure and things to interest him", and he maintains a bachelor apartment on the borders of the Village. Esther's second lover is Doane, who is, like Hurstwood, more sophisticated than his rival in every way. Once Esther and Doane are married, Doane's infatuation with Esther wears off and Doane, like Hurstwood, becomes financially dependent upon his wife who can make more money in the theatre. Unlike Carrie, however, Esther lets Doane take advantage of her livelihood. The third man who appears on the scene for Esther is a liberal social worker named J. J. As in Carrie's relationship to Ames, Esther is greatly fascinated by J. J.'s intellectual abilities but avoids any emotional, much less sexual, involvement with him. The most important difference between the two heroines is obvious: while Carrie is "bright" to begin with and able to cultivate a free spirit in her development, Esther is not.

Dreiser's conception of the success dream in A Gallery of Women is thus crystalized in the story of Esther Norn. For Esther figures as a clear antithesis to what Carrie stands for in a woman's struggle for success in the modern world. Esther is not motivated by honorable intentions as Carrie is; financially Esther becomes the mistress of her fate as Carrie does not. From the beginning Esther falls in love with a well-intentioned rich man only for security, but she does not possess a temperament, a vital spirit, that must serve as proof against the wheel of life. As her consumptive health well demonstrates, her striving for success is set back by every change of fortune; Esther is the type of woman that cannot fulfill ever higher potentialities of being. Each of her affairs, unlike Carrie's, does not serve to facilitate her emotional and artistic growth. Even when Doane becomes unemployed and his character begins to degenerate, she fails to take over and dominate him. She has none of Carrie's resourcefulness and eagerness to face up to and venture into all that life has to offer. Most pathetically, while Carrie at the end of the novel is on her way to "success" in her profession, Esther dies in a sanatorium only wondering about her husband who has long neglected her.

The most serious failing Dreiser finds in the women who cherish the dream of success is their dependence upon men. This idea which pervades A Gallery of Women is based on Dreiser's conviction that success attends only those truly liberated women who can resist men's intellectual and economical influences. Marguerite Tjader, who perhaps knew Dreiser more than anyone else living today, writes [in Theodore Dreiser: A New Dimension, 1965]:

Women's characters and experiences interested Dreiser endlessly. He loved to question them about themselves, their impressions, their reactions to this and that. He was never tired of studying the likes and dislikes that made up, what was to him, the mystery of feminine behavior Women were tremendously stimulated by him, because he always wanted to build them up to whatever superior qualities they might have, wanted them to be their best, most daring, selves. At the same time, he had come to be afraid of making commitments to any woman who might want to depend on him too much.

Such testimony by a woman reader clarifies the places of various heroines in Dreiser's feminism. A woman of Esther's type that immediately reminds us of Jennie Gerhardt is a battered heroine of beauty and gentleness, thus generating our pity and sympathy. But the character of such a woman is decidedly inferior to the contrasting stature of Carrie, whom Dreiser calls a "little soldier of fortune" (Sister Carrie). Carrie is better armed for the battle of life, can outlast any man placed in a similar predicament. And, in the end, even after breaking the conventions of society—in which "All men should be good, all women virtuous"—by becoming the mistress of one man after the other, she is still too strong to suffer any anguished pangs of remorse as a Jennie or an Esther is not. It is understandable that genteel American readers could swallow neither Carrie's success at the close of the novel nor her indifference to society's so-called "moral" laws. From the standpoint of liberated women, however, Dreiser's ending of Sister Carrie could have elicited nothing but their admiration and respect. Given a male point of view, on the other hand, it is not difficult to understand why the stories of Jennie and Esther can bring in the reader not only compassion but a deluded sense of relief and satisfaction.