Loneliness, Death, and Fulfillment in Jennie Gerhardt

LONELINESS, DEATH, AND FULFILLMENT IN JENNIE GERHARDT Mordecai Marcus* Theodore Dreiser scholars have revealed that the major revisions of the manuscript oíJennie Gerhardt were the excision of a happy marriage between Jennie and Lester and the substitution of initial compassion and affection for Jennie in place of brutal exploitativeness by Senator Brander and Lester Kane.1 Surely these changes led to deeper character portrayal of Brander, Lester, and Jennie, and to the chance for remarkable psychological penetration into men like Lester. In the novel's final published version, recurrent loneliness and looming death feed an overwhelming tension between the drive for inner integrity and fulfillment in such people as Jennie and the unconscious self-division in people like Lester, which baffles integrity and holds off fulfillment.2 The novel's portrayal of the vise of social structures for both Jennie and Lester is brilliant and accounts for much of its poignance. These social forces, however, provide a framework which Dreiser shows is constantly interacting with inner drives, divisions, and fixations to create "character." The danger of this interpretation is that it will moralize against the novel's characters for not having managed to change their fates, but this risk must be carefully run in order to study their departure from "ideal norms." The greatest weakness in both the novel as a whole and in its psychological texture is the sometimes superficial and sentimentalized portrayal ofJennie. In 1941 Oscar Cargill found Jennie impossibly sentimental : "Without brains and with conveniently few emotions. . . . Jennie is so much dough. . . . Dreiser did not really know Jennie."3 This view antedates the systematic critical reexamination of America's best-known writers, which should not keep the view from exerting a cautionary effect. In 1963 Alfred Kazin remarked that the novel "is beautiful and affecting, and the basic reason that is so is Dreiser's own admiration for his heroine."4 In 1976 Donald Pizer made an intelligent and systematic defense ofJennie as a character with solidity and depth, who undergoes signficant change. He stressed Jennie's sexual attraction 'Mordecai Marcus, Professor of English at the University of Nebraska, has published numerous articles in such journals as College English, Nineteenth-Century Fiction, and Modern Fiction Studies. His poems have appeared in over sixty journals and have been collected in part in Five Minutes to Noon (1971) end Return From the Desert (1977). 62Mordecai Marcus to Lester, her increasing worldly awareness and knowledge, and a combination of generosity and unconscious self-doubts that lead her to acquiesce in Lester's abandoning her. Despite these acute and helpful observations, Jennie's active sexuality and increasing general wisdom are not wholly convincing because they are usually presented in the form of statement and are backed up by little dramatic development like that which illustrates Jennie's pain at being held lightly and threatened with abandonment. However, Jennie and her limited but intuitive understanding of Lester are adequately convincing to back up the novel's main psychological drive and adequate for the poignance of her abandonment and loneliness, though that loneliness is no more keen than Lester's. Perhaps Lester's character should be seen more as the emotional and motivational center of the novel, for he chooses his loneliness out of a failure to love, whereas Jennie tends to give herself up to loneliness as part of her expression of love. Before the psychodynamics of Jennie and Lester are analyzed, the aura of loneliness and death that permeates the novel should be examined. Much of the novel's sense of loneliness and of unfulfillment in the face of death is rooted in its portraits of families from two levels of nineteenth-century American society: the poverty-stricken, starved, insecure , and vulnerable Gerhardts, and the wealthy, secure, arrogant, and power-driven Kanes. Each family has its representative religious conventions and duplicities, sexual appetites and restrictions, and social conformity and rebellion—all contributing to family and individual conflicts, generally lessening each individual's sense of personal identity and also weakening family bonds. Grasping poverty undermines the family life of the Gerhardts, for their relations with one another are so constantly threatened by the struggle for survival that everyday affection is clouded...