AUTHORS STUDIED WITH DREISER

GENRES

Dreiser wrote principally within the conventions of the biographical novel as established early in the history of the genre. Each of his novels tells a life story from birth or youth through the defining acts of adulthood to equilibrium or death. His novels are rich in detail and are told in the third person, with the narrative voice given a great deal of freedom to comment on the action and move the story forward chronologically. Dreiser thus wrote against the grain of the powerful twentieth-century strain of modernistic experimentation in writing, a strain that had its origins in the 1890s in the fiction of such writers as Henry James and Joseph Conrad, and that was pursued vigorously by almost all major writers of the 1920s and beyond. Generically, Dreiser can therefore best be read in relation to the great nineteenth-century European novelists who also engaged in telling the story of a life with a full representation of the society in which the story unfolds. In English fiction his novels can be fruitfully compared to those of William Makepeace Thackeray and Charles Dickens earlier in the century and George Eliot and Thomas Hardy somewhat later.

In French fiction the work of Honore de Balzac and Emile Zola offers a similar opportunity for comparison. Particularly fertile for comparative study are novels of urban decline, such as Zola’s L’Assommoir (1877; translated as Gervaise, 1879) and Sister Carrie; novels of feminine sexuality, such as Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urbervilles and Jennie Gerhardt; and novels about the youthful aspirant in the city—Balzac’s A Great Man of the Provinces in Paris and The “Genius” or An American Tragedy.

LITERARY MOVEMENTS

Dreiser’s novels constitute the fullest expression in America of the late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century literary movement known as naturalism. Naturalism had its origin in France, principally in

the criticism and fiction of Zola, whose Le Roman experimental (The Experimental Novel, 1880) and twenty-volume Rougon-Macquart series of novels deeply affected the fiction of the time. The naturalist writer, Zola argued, in accord with the spirit of the age, must adopt a scientific perspective and depict man as determined in his thoughts, actions, and fate by his hereditary background and environmental conditions. Typically, the naturalist rendered this truth most clearly and powerfully through the depiction of lower-class life and by a stress on the persistence of destructive, animalistic qualities in human nature. Inevitably, this theory of the role and nature of fiction underwent major modifications in practice, both in Zola’s own fiction and in that of his followers in Europe and America. Thus, most discussions of Dreiser as a naturalist in recent decades have discarded the angle of approaching him as a disciple of Zola and have sought rather to answer the questions inherent in his complex relationship to naturalism: In what ways does he adhere to a naturalistic ethos, in what ways does he strike off radically on his own, and how do these interact to create the distinctive entity that is a Dreiser novel?

Because naturalism is so deeply rooted in the specific conditions of particular countries, Dreiser as a naturalist is more profitably compared with his contemporaries in the American naturalistic movement than with similar writers in France. He and Stephen Crane, for example, shared a deep engagement in the fiction of urban decline, as is seen in Sister Carrie and Crane’s Maggie:A Girl of the Streets (1893) and George’s Mother (1896). Frank Norris not only dealt with this theme in his McTeague (1899) and Vandover and the Brute (1914) but also shared with Dreiser an effort to break new ground in the depiction of feminine sexuality. Both Norris and Dreiser planned and largely completed vast fictional tapestries that sought to render the nature of economic power in post-Civil War America—Dreiser in The Cowperwood Trilogy, especially The Financier, and Norris in the Trilogy of the Wheat, especially The Octopus. Dreiser and Jack London shared an interest in the character and fate of the artist in an American society largely inhospitable to art, a theme depicted in The “Genius” and London’s Martin Eden (1909). Among later American naturalists, James T. Farrell’s Studs Lonigan Trilogy (Young Lonigan, 1932; The Young Manhood of Studs Lonigan, 1934; and Judgment Day,1935), with its vivid depiction of Irish-American Chicago life, and Richard Wright’s Native Son (1940), which resembles An American Tragedy, reveal Dreiser’s impact on writers of that generation. More recently, Joyce Carol Oates’s them (1969) and William Kennedy’s Ironweed (1983), both of which dramatize personal collapse in relation to social decay, suggest the permanent residue of Dreiserian naturalism in American fiction.

THEMES

Although Dreiser’s eight novels and his prolific work in other forms treat a multitude of themes, it is possible to isolate two central preoccupations in his fictional dramatization of American life: the destructive distinction between conventional moral codes and the actualities of human nature and behavior, and the equally destructive role of the American dream of success. The first he developed in two phases: the social condemnation of a woman for the open expression of her sexual nature (Sister Carrie and Jennie Gerhardt) and the social condemnation of a businessman for the open expression of the rapaciousness required in a business civilization (The Cowperwood Trilogy). Dreiser’s bitter attack on the falsities inherent in the American dream of success, which holds that all are capable of achieving the dream of wealth and status, occurs in An American Tragedy. Both of these themes placed Dreiser in the forefront of the many early-twentieth-century American writers who devoted themselves to depicting the gap in American life between self-serving and often destructive ethical and social conventions and the actual beliefs and actions of most Americans. During the 1920s in particular, many of the younger novelists of the period took their cue from Dreiser and explored these themes in various contexts. The dramatization of the falsity of conventional belief is a powerful common thread in Willa Cather’s My Antonia (1918), Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio (1919), Ernest Hemingway’s In Our Time (1925), and Sinclair Lewis’s Main Street (1920) and Babbitt (1922). The tragic consequences of an acceptance of the American dream of success form the theme of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby (1925) and John Dos Passos’s Manhattan Transfer (1925).