Jennie Gerhardt. Theodore Dreiser
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of his own sisters and their friends that such a scenario rarely occurred. Young women who worked as domestics labored long hours for scant wages and with no job security. They were subject to mistreatment, rudeness, and sexual harassment. Many turned to part-time prostitution to survive; always they were worn down prematurely by their work, and when they did marry they generally found laborer husbands and existed on the margins of poverty, their families beset by unemployment, alcoholism, sickness, and petty crime. Against this background one can see that the odds are stacked against Jennie. Her decision to take up with Lester Kane becomes readily understandable: Though he does not marry her, he treats her kindly, keeps her in good style, is generous to her family, and does not abandon her financially when she grows older.
Dreiser moved ahead quickly with the manuscript of Jennie Gerhardt, producing forty chapters by the early spring of 1901. He had thirty of these typed up and submitted them to the house of Macmillan, hoping for an advance contract. Word of Dreiser’s difficulties with Doubleday had made the rounds, however, and Macmillan decided not to take a chance on Jennie Gerhardt. Dreiser approached at least three other publishing houses that spring—Century, Barnes, and McClure Phillips—but no one would sign him on. These refusals, together with the failure of Sister Carrie (by now undeniable) and the deterioration of his marriage (never truly happy or stable), marked the beginning of a long, downward-spiraling period during which Dreiser suffered from severe neurasthenia, or “nerve sickness.” This affliction would eventually drive him into poverty and thoughts of suicide before he would recover and resume his career.
During the summer of 1901 Dreiser did find a publishing firm willing to back him: J. F. Taylor & Co., a smallish remainder house of no particular distinction. Taylor agreed to publish Jennie Gerhardt once it was completed and to reissue Sister Carrie as well, if that novel could be extricated from Doubleday. Taylor staked Dreiser to one hundred dollars per month so that he could devote himself to Jennie Gerhardt. The author headed south to Bedford, a quiet town in the mountains of Virginia, and settled in for a period of hard work. His nerve sickness had begun to intensify by now, however, and he could not push the novel forward. He did make some progress in revising what he had already written, recasting the manuscript from chapter XV on and making his major characters more sympathetic. He was unable, though, to keep up his momentum and complete the narrative. After wandering from town to town in Virginia and West Virginia in the spring of 1902, he gave up all pretense of finishing and told J. F. Taylor in June that he could not continue. He would have to owe Taylor the money that had been advanced to him.
Dreiser lived in Philadelphia from July 1902 until February 1903. He went to a nerve specialist, kept a careful diary, and tried to turn out journalism for ready money. Even this simple writing, though, was too taxing for him, and he returned to New York City, where he literally came down to his last few cents before being rescued by his brother Paul, a successful songwriter and vaudevillian. Paul sent Theodore to a sanitarium in the spring of 1903 for rest and exercise; then Theodore worked for the remainder of the year as a common laborer on the New York Central Railroad—the idea being that fresh air and manual work would restore his psychic balance. By the end of 1903 he was better, and in January 1904 he resumed his career as a journalist.
Dreiser made a remarkable recovery during the years from 1904 to 1909. He eventually rose to the position of editor-in-chief of a group of Butterick women’s magazines—a highly paid and extremely demanding job—but during most of this period Jennie Gerhardt was shelved. Dreiser probably thought more than once that his career as a serious novelist was over. He had patched up his difficulties with his wife, Sara White, and was living fairly tranquilly with her during these years. His union with her was never strong, though, and he chafed within his marriage. In the fall of 1909 he became entangled in an office romance—a reasonably innocent infatuation, actually—but when his doings were made public he decided to quit his job with Butterick. He determined also to escape from his marriage; by October 1910 he had separated from Sara and rented a room where he could live alone and think about his future.
Dreiser was thirty-nine years old that autumn. He must have sensed that this might be his last chance to launch a career as a novelist. He therefore took down the manuscript of Jennie Gerhardt, engaged a literary agent named Flora Mai Holly, and began work. Dreiser was an energetic, focused writer when he was in good psychic health, and now—without the distractions of a job or a marriage—he made rapid progress. By early January 1911 he had finished a first version of Jennie and was beginning to show it to friends whose literary judgment he trusted.
The novel that he gave them to read was in part about social class, high and low. The proletarian world of the Gerhardts he knew at firsthand from his own childhood, but the more privileged world of the Kane family—industrial haute bourgeoisie from the Middle West—he had had to imagine. Fortunately there were resources he could draw upon: He had interviewed and written about several famous financiers and business figures during his days as a freelance journalist, and he had attended some of their social gatherings and observed them in their restaurants, hotels, and clubs. Certainly he did not know this opulent world as intimately as he did the poverty-stricken world of the Gerhardts, but his credentials as a journalist had given him entrée to places that he needed to observe, and the popular press of the day—which covered the doings of wealthy society quite closely—provided the rest.
Dreiser was challenging convention in this novel. His heroine is an unwed mother and a kept woman; his male protagonist is a religious skeptic and a rebel against conventional morality. Institutionalized Christianity, which Dreiser found suffocating, is criticized openly; the normal behavior of the American businessman, represented by Robert Kane, is depicted as greedy and inhumane. Dreiser, however, was after more than surface realism and social critique: He meant for his novel to have a philosophical and ethical dimension as well. Thus he cast the narrative in the form of a dialectical confrontation, never resolved, between a species of pragmatic, cynical determinism and a kind of unreasoning, romantic mysticism. These contradictory approaches to the living of human life were embodied by Lester, a deeply pessimistic determinist, and Jennie, a sensitive, nurturing idealist and child of nature. Dreiser took care to balance these two characters against one another, though he did not cause them to engage in debate. Rather, he simply allowed Lester to speak and Jennie to feel. No reader can miss the tension between these two, though, a tension complicated by their deep sexual attraction for one another and by the need of each for what the other can provide. Dreiser never resolves their dilemma: Lester, for all his rebelliousness and doubt, never really escapes the social forces that compel him to conform; and Jennie, for all her womanly potential, still finds her desires largely thwarted by accidents of birth and fate.
In this first version of Jennie Gerhardt, however—the version that Dreiser was showing to his friends—he did at least allow these two characters to marry. In the initial incarnation of the story, Lester secretly weds Jennie, then admits to having done so to his father, Archibald Kane. From that point on, however, one cannot know how the story proceeded because the original drafts do not survive. Perhaps Lester and Jennie lived happily ever after; perhaps they stayed together for a time but eventually came to a parting of the ways. One cannot be sure because Dreiser, when he revised, destroyed this first ending. We know only that his decision to revise was prompted by the advice of at least two of his readers: a young woman named Lillian Rosenthal and a journalist friend named Fremont Rider. Both advised him not to allow Jennie and Lester to marry. “Poignancy is a necessity in this story,” wrote Lillian Rosenthal in her critique. “It can only be maintained by persistent want on the part of Jennie. The loss of Lester would insure this.” Dreiser followed her advice and revised the last third of Jennie Gerhardt, producing the plot line with which we are familiar today. Jennie and Lester are kept apart: Lester capitulates to his family’s wishes, and Jennie goes into retirement. Dreiser finished this rewriting by late February 1911 and decided to seek a publisher.
Dreiser’s agent submitted the finished typescript of this revised version to Macmillan. Dreiser still hoped that this prestigious house might be interested in his work, but his subject matter was apparently still too risky for them, and they declined to offer him a contract. Dreiser therefore told his agent to try Harper & Brothers, where he knew one of the senior editors, a man