| Throughout his life, Theodore Dreiser was driven by two powerful obsessions: women and success. Dreiser became a successful author, and during his life he engaged countless women as lovers, confidants, advisors, editors, cooks, and typists. As W. A. Swanberg notes (Dreiser 1965), in spite of his affection for women, Dreiser was “the relentless promoter of sexual intrigues, the love cheat who asked for a high moral order from his own standards.” This antithetical notion is woven throughout Dreiser's work.; Dreiser's contradictory impulse evidences itself in his fiction though a compassion for female characters. Critics have convincingly demonstrated that Dreiser's naturalism is tempered by his sympathy for characters at odds with society, yet no one has explored the notion that this compassion is almost exclusively reserved for women. As an emissary of his culture, Dreiser was a womanizer, but his affection for women is manifest in his first novel through his compassionately drawn portrait of Carrie. In Sister Carrie, Dreiser writes against his culture's gender stereotypes. He offers realistic portraits of George Hurstwood and Charles Drouet. In contrast to these male archetypes, Carrie is valorized as morally superior to the men in the novel.; In Dreiser's second novel, Jennie Gerhardt, Dreiser was years ahead of his time in exploring the notion that social forces may conspire to create a destructive interdependence of power and powerlessness between men and women. Through Jennie, he focuses on a woman who maintains a steady inner growth despite her inherently brutal naturalistic environment.; Dreiser's enduring female characters are more remarkable when measured against the women characters portrayed by his peers and predecessors. Kate Chopin's Edna Pontellier in The Awakening (1899), manifests a timidity that suggests a female archetype. Edna's weakness is magnified when compared to the strength of Dreiser's Carrie Meeber. Similarly, Thomas Hardy's tragic portrait of Tess, in Tess of the d'Urberville's (1892), contrasts markedly with Dreiser's optimistic portrait of Jennie in Jennie Gerhardt. Finally, Dreiser's affection for Jennie contrasts sharply with Stephen Crane's indifference to Maggie Johnson in Maggie: A Girl of the Streets (1896).; The profound influence that Dreiser had on the lives of many women, and that they most certainly had on him, differentiates him from other writers of his time. Women provided Dreiser with a distinctively sympathetic beacon that guides his work. Dreiser champions his female characters and thus allows them to rise above the inhibiting forces of social determinism. |
