A Study Of Body Politics In Theodore Dreiser’s Jennie Gerhardt

Theodore Dreiser(1871-1845),a celebrated American novelist of the 20 th century,was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1930.His novel,Jennie Gerhardt(1911),has been widely regarded as one of his most notable works.Drawing on his rich political experience and his keen awareness of the embodiment of power in the body,Dreiser depicts the plight of the disadvantaged in American society,where the body has become the battlefield of political power struggles and has been penetrated by power in social relations,such as the upper class to the lower class,men to women,religion to believers,and white men to the underprivileged in the novel.This thesis employs Michel Foucault’s theoretical system of body politics to analyze the relationship between the body and power in Jennie Gerhardt.Specifically,it argues that the underprivileged are manipulated through three hierarchical body needs: the need for food,sex,and body ownership,and Jennie uses her body to resist the power as the group representative.The thesis elaborates on how the starving bodies of the characters are subject to class division and control,how the expansion of capitalist power has enslaved and expropriated the body in the realm of sexuality,and how the body is branded with the invisible socio-political markers resulting in the loss of ownership.Jennie’s resistance is awakening body consciousness and exploring subjectivity,which reconstructs new power relations to a certain extent.Through research,classical and modern power has expanded into all areas of society to govern the state and normalize society vertically and horizontally.The body is exploited to regulate social constituents and the population,consolidate the superiority of the bourgeoisie,and normalize the disadvantaged’s behavior regarding food,sex,clothing,etc.In this process,the underprivileged are deprived of body ownership,and their subjectivity declines gradually.Dreiser expresses his thoughts on body ownership and subjectivity by depicting the reconstruction of Jenny’s body consciousness,which embodies his initial conception of the ideal state of the body,inspiring us to reclaim the control of the individual body and define our own subjectivity in modern society through resistance to power and to better realize the development of the individual body free from shackles of gender,religion,and class.