Content area
Full Text
GOGOL, MIRIAM, ed. Theodore Dreiser: Beyond Naturalism (New York: New York University Press, 1995). xvii + 269 pp. $45.00 cloth; $19.00 paper.
As her subtitle suggests, Miriam Gogol wants to take Dreiser criticism beyond discussions of the environmental and biological determinism associated with literary naturalism. Dreiser "is a greater author than Henry James," Gogol argues in her introduction, for he "is willing to get his hands dirty" (p. viii) by confronting the problems of working-class Americans and by sympathizing with the efforts of women to find economic and sexual liberation. Earlier criticsDonald Pizer, Charles Walcutt, Ellen Moers, Richard Lehan-have done much to overcome an elitist bias against him; now, Gogol proclaims, it is time to confront the "paradoxes in Dreiser's life and work in the context of modern cultural criticism" (p. xi). Four of the collection's ten essays place Dreiser in the context of gender studies, two in the context of psychoanalysis, and one each in the contexts of philosophy, film studies, popular literature, and new historicism. The first collection of original essays in a quarter century to treat Dreiser's work as a whole, Theodore Dreiser: Beyond Naturalism is an important, readable, and provocative contribution to Dreiser studies.
The collection's first two essays demonstrate the complexity of Dreiser's attitudes towards women. Dreiser is not simply the closet feminist earlier readers have found him to be, writes Shelley Fisher Fishkin in "Dreiser and the Discourse of Gender"; he is "a knot of contradictions" who reveals all his culture's "ambivalences and tensions regarding women" (p. 1). In comparing Billy Brown, the victim in the Chester Gillette murder case, with her fictional counterpart, Roberta Alden of An American Tragedy, Fishkin concludes that Dreiser relied too heavily on newspaper accounts that turned the intelligent, sexual Brown into an innocent victim in a "gendered morality play" (p. 6). Giving only a couple of pages to this argument, Fishkin turns to a long discussion of "the power differential" (p. 17) Dreiser maintained with women, from whom he demanded absolute faithfulness while he pursued his own varietistic pleasures.
Fishkin is doubtless right about Dreiser's inability to transcend entirely his culture's assumptions, but she does not do justice to An American Tragedy as a work of art. Roberta Alden enters the novel as...