Soft Canons: American Women Writers

"Sister Carrie" and "The Awakening": The Clothed, the Unclothed, and the Woman Undone

Discussions of Kate Chopin’s The Awakening (1899) and Theodore Dreiser’s Sister Carrie (1900) often recount the critical hostility that followed — and even preceded — the publication of the novels. Although the degree and extent to which Kate Chopin was affected by adverse criticism, either personally or professionally, has often been overstated, the almost wholly negative reviews of her novel1 communicate to the modern reader, one hundred years later, a clear picture of the specific nature of the outrage committed against prevailing morality. Chopin’s overstepping of the boundaries of decorum in the presentation of her heroine gave precisely discernible offense to contemporary reviewers. I intend not to query these critical responses but rather to concur with the essential validity of readings that viewed Chopin’s novel as full of disturbing and “unpleasant truths.”2 The novel was deeply disruptive of prevailing social mores, with Chopin’s heroine dissident in every way from received notions of womanly propriety. Chopin built into the text an indirect acknowledgment of how few of her 1899 readers would be able to see beyond the breach of bourgeois morality — in Dr. Mandelet’s words to the unhappy Edna toward the end of her life: “I am not going to ask for your confidence. I will only say that if ever you felt moved to give it to me, perhaps I might help you. I know I would understand , and I tell you there are not many who would — not many, my dear” (105). Alongside Chopin’s picture of the “soul that dares Sister Carrie and The Awakening: The Clothed, the Unclothed, and the Woman Undone janet beer and defies” (61), I want to examine Dreiser’s Sister Carrie, which received comparable — though not so consistently denunciatory — reviews. Dreiser never tired of talking up his novel as having had a serious brush with censorship before publication,3 but, I would contend, the text does not, in essentials, present as significant a challenge to the status quo in its picture of womanhood or relations between the sexes as The Awakening does. As Donna Campbell observes, “Edna Pontellier follows a path of sensual self-indulgence similar to that of men like Vandover and Theron Ware, and the end of her naturalistic ‘degeneration’ is the same as theirs: an excess of unexplored possibilities leads to an end of all possibilities, followed by actual or spiritual death.”4 When Edna Pontellier terminates her performance as wife and mother, Kate Chopin issues her most substantial refutation of any statute of limitation upon the proper province of women’s writing. I intend to scrutinize the manner in which Chopin and Dreiser present their heroines as women who can express something of the confusion and anxiety about the situation of woman in American society at the turn into the twentieth century.5 Although their location in “the” canon — or in competing canons of masculine and feminine writers — has varied over time, these writers problematize matters, ranging from women’s sexuality to women at work, that have been oversimplified; both seek to expose women unloosed from the coercive power of essentialism. Edna and Carrie aim to establish an identity at odds with the one by which they are classified — married or fallen woman — and thus, within both texts, the ontology of female stereotype is interrogated and revised. At the heart of any question of identity in this social world is essentialism, and Chopin and Dreiser, in releasing their women from stereotype, challenge received notions of the binary opposition of whore or wife — and indeed, in Chopin’s case, the binary opposition of male and female sexuality — and replace them with possibility and multiplicity. Both writers acknowledge, within the fabric of the tale, that they are writing for a society that has very particular notions of what the story of a woman’s life should look like, but that such a story is unlikely to express either the contingent or the random. To incorporate within their texts a recognition of the inadequacy of the standard narrative is therefore to critique such narratives. 168 : developing dialogues “I Am Yours Truly”: Sister Carrie In Sister Carrie, Dreiser supplies his readers with what is, in many ways, a deeply conservative portrait of a woman. However, although an intrinsic part of that conservatism derives from his reliance upon reader familiarity with narratives about the inevitable fate of the fallen woman, he...