A C T A U N I V E R S I T A T I S L O D Z I E N S I S
FO LIA LITTER A R IA A N G LIC A 1, 1997
Agnieszka Salska
T H E USES O F T H E FEM A LE PR O TA G O N IST IN T H E AM ERICAN NOVEL O F T H E 1890s:
CRANE’S M AG GIE, D R EISER ’S CARRIE, C H O P IN ’S EDNA PO N T E L L IE R
I propose to bring together three Am erican novels o f the 1890s. All three have become securely established as classics of national literature. All three feature heroines in their centers and by this characteristic participate in the realist-naturalist phenom enon of exploring new thematic: social, philosophical, and psychological concerns through the medium of the female protagonist. W hereas H aw thorne’s The Scarlet Letter still appeared m ore o f an exception than the rule, with the great realists, E uropean as well as Am erican, a wom an character in the center of the novel became alm ost m ore usual than a m an. Evidently, with the realists, the tissue o f society could not be properly examined w ithout analysing m arital and familial relations. W riters of the naturalist generation m ake further use o f this innovation.
It seems, however, pertinent to notice that H aw thorne employed a female protagonist in The Scarlet Letter because a woman on her own, deprived of the protection of a husband, was unconditionally exposed to the chastisement of the norm ative system. Setting Hester, rather than any of the male characters, directly in conflict with the repressive Puritan society dram atizes the central issue of the novel. Because Hester is a woman, her life is m ore open to external pressures and so her battle to justify her own right to self-determ ination m ust seem m ore heroic. It is, I suggest, a similar recognition of the relatively greater openness o f female life to the external determinants th at the naturalist writers share with H aw thorne. But, o f course, they utilize the perception from within a different philosophical and aesthetic context.
M y definition o f naturalism follows the argum ent of the chapter on “ N aturalism and the Languages o f Determ inism ” in Columbia Literary
H istory o f the United States. There Lee Clark M itchell m aintains that
philosophical determinism” and not by any “particular attitude or assumption, ... specific technique or style” . ... “The particular constellation o f influences a t work on writers now thought o f as naturalists disappeared w ith W orld W ar I. By contrast, realism is generally agreed to transcend a specifically historical era, since it seemed to depend on a set of mimetic conventions coterm inus with the life o f the novel” (p. 545).
Even publication stories o f the selected novels underline the intensity of the historical conditioning at th at literary m om ent. All three books became som ething o f publishing scandals and their distribution was obstructed. C rane felt that he had to release Maggie. A Girl o f the Streets (1893)1 under the assumed name of Johnston Smith. Dreiser was so discouraged with the publisher’s treatm ent and the critical reception of Sister Carrie (1900)2 that he stopped writing fiction for several years. The Awakening (1899)3 also came as a shock to the genteel reading public, causing hostility am ong the critics and bitterness for the author. A nother novel relevant here is H am lin G arland’s Rose o f Dutcher’s Coolly (1895) whose text, however, I could n ot locate in Poland. A nd one can look to E dith W h arto n ’s The House o f M irth (1905) for further exploration o f alm ost all the them atic concerns of the aforementioned books.
The earliest o f the stories, C rane’s Maggie. A Girl o f the Streets, is a New Y ork slum novel whose highly stylized setting is to convey the brutality, not so m uch o f a particular social milieu, as o f the Universe. N aked force and fighting instinct rule throu gh ou t. Individuals assert themselves in such a world through violence inflicted on others. Their aspirations and pleasures exclusively concern the gratification of appetite. In the well know n opening o f the novel small boys fight with elemental aban d o n and fury while the indifference o f adult spectators sanctions youth violence as the norm . The scene leads in crescendo to a series o f fights between adults and then between adults and children. Finally, it is M aggie who gets trapped and beaten while Jim m y is listening to her screams from the safe distance o f the hallway. He does not venture to help his sister, though a m om ent ago she was trying to give him whatever sym pathy and com fort she could offer under the circumstances.
W hen the initial series o f fights subsides, we learn in the very first sentence o f chapter IV that “The babe, Tommie, died” . He was, o f course, the weakest one and “He went away in a white, insignificant coffin, his small waxen hand clutching a flower th at the girl, Maggie, had stolen from
1 S. Crane, Prose and Poetry (New Y ork: T he Library o f America, 1984).
2 T h. D reiser, Sister Carrie, Jennie Gerhardt. Twelve M en (New Y ork: T he L ibrary of America, 1987).
an Ita lia n ” . M aggie is thus m arked as the next one to go in some “ insignificant” way, for her responses o f clumsy tenderness and craving for beauty express a strain o f weakness th at in a reality governed by self-serving instincts associates her with the ’’babe” . Unlike her m other, w ho can fight back and win the upper hand in contests with the children’s father, M aggie has no fighting instinct. H er basic instinct is for love. T h at it does not develop into self-love and self-protection is precisely w hat m akes M aggie unfit to survive. M aggie’s m other takes it out, in fits o f drunken fury, on whoever and whatever comes her way. Maggie, by contrast, seeks escape in the fictional reality o f the m elodram a shows, to which Pete takes her in an effort to impress on her his superiority o f taste and powers:
Maggie always departed with raised spirits from the showing places o f the m elodram a. She rejoiced at the way in which the p o o r and virtuous eventually surm ounted the wealthy and wicked. The theatre m ade her think. She wondered if the culture and refinem ent she had seen im itated, perhaps grotesquely, by the heroine on the stage, could be acquired by a girl who lived in a tenem ent house and worked in a shirt factory, (p. 37)
Thus Maggie is hardly a slum novel in the sense of aspiring to a credible, full picture o f slum life. M uch m ore, it is a program m atic novel o f a young writer fascinated by the deterministic view o f the Universe. T he slum setting becomes stylized so th at it represents a world governed by prim itive instinct and brutalized strength. The contrasted women figures in it, i.e. M aggie and her m other, are equally stylized to show the alternatives available: adjustm ent with all its repulsive consequences or elim ination with all the betrayal and disillusionment involved. In the surroundings dom inated by physical violence, where em otional bonds and m oral norm s are em pty conventions skillfully m anipulated for the gratification o f selfish interests, M aggie with her m elodram atic cravings for beauty and m oral order stands for the helpless, and hopeless, doom ed rom antic attitude. Verisimilitude is not the point. The point is to inculcate the bleak tru th o f the deterministic vision and M aggie serves both as a foil to it and as dem onstration of the workings o f its inexorable law.4
4 M any critics have commented on C rane’s acquaintance with the theories o f D arw in, on M aggie’s utter passivity, and on the ideological inconsistency o f the novel which, on the one hand, seems to ask for some sympathy for Maggie and on the other, to postulate nothing but outraged revulsion as reaction to the rem aining characters. I f everybody is absolutely determined by circumstances, everybody is equally innocent and deserving o f sym pathy, the usual argum ent goes. M y own position coincides w ith D onald B. G ibson’s statem ent a t the end o f his chapter “ C rane Among the D arw inians” : “ ... Maggie has a t its center a completely passive character, one incapable o f dealing w ith her environm ent in any m anner. T he am bivalent attitude expressed by C rane tow ard such people should perhaps suggest his dissatisfaction with the determ inistic scheme. He could n o t accept it nor could he let it go”
In a m anner looking forward to The Sound and the Fury, the degradation to prostitution and the squandering o f M aggie’s capacity for love symbolically assess the nature o f reality under the new law. In other words, M aggie’s rom antic qualities fall victim to the doctrine o f Social Darwinism. But unlike The Sound and the Fury, where Caddie’s fall is followed by the corruption o f her daughter, C rane’s novel has to end with M aggie’s death since the essence o f the cultural change lies not in the comm ercialization o f old values but in the recognition of the brutal mechanisms o f personal survival. In the new scheme they have nothing to do with virtue or m oral order but everything to do with physical advantage, with aggression and violence. Crane thus shares the insight of some o f the m ost im portant A m erican writers th at the female experience visibly indicates developm ents in the culture, th at w om an’s situation is the barom eter o f change.
Resembling C rane’s later works in its acceptance of the deterministic outlook, Maggie is less like them in the helplessness of its m oral outrage discernible behind the savage irony. The choice between M aggie’s fate and her m oth er’s fate is really no choice at all, merely a dem onstration th at the social survival of the fittest means, in fact, the survival of the anim al in m an. The centrality of the female protagonists in the novel dram atizes the ruthless law since both the annihilation o f the young potential for purity and love in M aggie and the beastly degradation o f the ideal of m otherhood in the character o f her m other m ock the dearest and the m ost sentimentalized o f the rom antic and genteel cultural conventions. C rane’s m ore m ature works will go beyond the simple focus on the mercilessness o f the rules o f survival. M ore typically, they will point to ways in which m an wrestles his hum anity from the inhum an forces th a t govern the Universe, regardless o f how disproportionately little strength he com m ands. These later works, however, usually feature male protagonists. In Maggie C rane needed an absolutely helpless figure in the center. W ho could be m ore appropriate than a girl endowed, except for her background, with the characteristics o f the rom antic virgin?
It is a well-known fact th at Carrie M eeber combines in her career the experience o f the Dreiser siblings. She is literally Theodore D reiser’s sister and young Theodore himself, who full o f wonder lust and still at an impressionable age, ventured out to Chicago on his own. D reiser’s at the tim e shocking lack o f m oral judgem ent on C arrie was n o t so m uch m otivated ideologically by his reading of Spencer, Huxley, and Tyndall or, Crane-like, by his reaction against the rom antic upbringing as, somewhat
(The Fiction o f Stephen Crane, Carbonsdale: Southern Illinois Univ. Press, 1968, p. 39). Accordingly, the slum setting in the novel functions first o f all as situational context for the new law, and n o t as a section o f social reality to be presented and explored.
similarly to K ate Chopin, by a considerable degree o f identification between the w riter’s and the heroine’s personal experience. Dreiser shares C arrie’s aspirations and her passion for self-growth overriding every conventional m oral scruple. W ith the keen insight o f a destitute im m igrant child, he understands that m aterial com fort is the condition sine qua non of every kind o f advancem ent.5 In C arrie’s eyes, as in the eyes o f th a t o th er archetypal visionary of Am erican success - Jay G atsby, m aterial possessions: nice clothes, beautiful interiors, places where one dines or seeks entertainm ent acquire a truly transcendent luster. They point to life’s ever new, ever finer possibilities. The thing is to keep the inner sensibility alive to the potential. The thing is not to let the imagination die. Thus, m ore than M aggie, m ore even than Edna Pontellier, Carrie is a type o f an artist, n ot by her aesthetic sensibility, her talent or discipline, but by the unhesitating fidelity to the vision within. Everything in her life gets subordinated to th at vision. The m en she lives with are im portant only by the possibilities they open up and only until she becomes ready to go further on her own.
W hat m akes Carrie so strong is th at she is purely instinctive. Yet Dreiser is not interested in exploring the psychology of female sexuality, neither is he really interested in shocking with the novelty of sexual explicitness. C arrie’s “ fall” is rendered in the novel indirectly, through recounting a dream her virtuous but miserable sister dream s that night. In the dream , she is vainly trying to protect Carrie from going down the old m ine shaft or sinking in unfam iliar waters or falling off a rock. C arrie’s prim ary instinct is for improving the quality o f her life. The nature o f the improvement is not very specific. She wants w hat at the m om ent she does n o t have but w hat her range o f vision at the particular stage of her developm ent m akes her capable o f appreciating. D rouet with his showy elegance m ust precede the quality conscious style o f H urstw ood, just as the chorus-girl success naturally comes before dream s o f a serious acting career. Carrie’s vision, thus, is a m atter o f instinct, o f developing and educating through experience an appetite for the quality o f life, m ore than it is a product o f conscious aspiration to some aesthetic or personal goal. Incorporated in Carrie is an
5 Alfred K azin expressed m ost sensitively the instinctive quality o f D reiser’s insight into w hat drove American life in the last quarter o f 19th century: “ ... D reiser was w alking the streets o f Chicago, the symbolic city which contained all th at was aggressive and intoxicating in the new frontier world th at lived for the m ad pace o f bull m arkets and the joys o f accum ulation. He was n o t of th a t w orld, but he understood it. W ho could resist the yearning to get rich, to scatter champagne, to live in lobster palaces, to sport the gaudy clothes o f the new rich? I t was easy enough for those who had made a religion o f their desire; it was easier still for a p o o r young w riter who had been so h u rt by poverty and the p o o r th a t the call o f pow er was the call o f life” (On Native Grounds, New Y ork: D oubleday, 1956, p. 63-4). Leslie Fiedler called Sister Carrie “ a P o rtrait o f the A rtist as a G irl G one W rong” (Love and Death in the American Novel, revised edition, New Y ork: Stein and D ay, 1975, p. 252).
insatiable hum an urge to move beyond what is given. W hen this instinct is lost, when it no longer provides the driving force, the m arch of life turns into sliding tow ard death, as H urstw ood’s decay and ruin dem onstrate. A lthough Carrie does not become a m other, she nevertheless personifies the life principle. Its essence for Dreiser is not nourishm ent but aspiration, the constant crying o f the inner voice “I want, I want, I w an t” . C arrie’s figure becomes symbolized in consonance with such an expansive, romanticized conception o f determinism. She prefigures the later female protagonists of
The Great Gatsby, M anhattan Transfer or The Day o f the Locust, whose
m ain function in the novels is to symbolize the allurement and disillusionment o f the mirages o f desire. But whereas Daisy Buchanan, Ellen T hatcher and F ay G reener are held responsible for the m oral and physical destruction o f their partners to exactly the extent to which the m ale protagonists have been seduced by the false values o f the culture which the women embody, Carrie is free from all responsibility. This is because Carrie is simply the law o f life. The other side o f it is H urstw ood, who incorporates the law o f death. The sympathy we feel for Carrie has little to do with m orality or the lack of it and everything to do with choosing life rather th an death. It is instinctive like Carrie herself: D reiser’s sister, but first of all - ours.
Unlike Maggie, who embodied a sentimentalized stereotype o f the female capacity for love and so had to be destroyed in confrontation with life ruled by the principle o f adjustm ent for survival, unlike Edna Pontellier, who wanting to test the power o f the m any determ inants preventing her from leading an authentic life, eventually had to confront the biological trap o f m otherhood, Carrie is helped rather than hindered in her ascent by the recognition of her gender and her sexuality as m arketable goods. Realizing quickly th at hard work, no m atter how virtuous, will never give her access to the things she desires, Carrie as a wom an still has resources on which to draw at the start o f her career w ithout coming in conflict with the law (at it happened in the case o f D reiser’s later m ale hero). If for E dna Pontellier the recognition o f her own sexuality becomes an added vulnerability, Carrie, from very early in the game, treats her body and her emotions as she does the men she lives with, as instrum ents for pursuing her aspirations. H er sex and sexuality become a resource in her struggle for the position o f advantage. The price of such an abuse o f herself is the em otional emptiness she feels at the end o f the novel, when she realizes with some pain that her audiences also treat her merely instrum entally, th at her friends “ bow and smile in acknowledgement o f her success” (p. 453) but th at in fact she is alone pursuing a mirage “ o f that radiance of delight which tints the distant hills of the w orld.” (p. 455)
The Awakening takes a different attitude. The initial premise o f this
o f a Lady (1881). While Isabel Archer began with a willful insistence on
choosing her own way in life and in the climax o f the story accepted full responsibility for her m istaken decision, E dna Pontellier’s initial discovery is precisely that she never knew what she was doing, even when she was getting m arried and having children. E d n a’s dram a then is a struggle not for the freedom to shape but to unshape her life, to disentangle it from the determ inants th at have m oulded her fate w ithout her own conscious consent. Edna wants to shed responsibilities and dependencies that had beset her while, so to say, she was not looking. She is prepared to accept only those th at are vitally related to her new, self-determining identity. E d n a’s program , thus, is a program o f psychological realism, a Jam esian program and a Jam esian am bition. Her findings, however, are convergent with the postulates o f naturalism : she cannot free herself from the forces th a t pull at the strings o f her life. Even if she defies the conventions of social respectability, even if, conveniently, she m ay feel th at her children are well taken care of, there still rem ain her own sexual instincts which betray her into relations she refuses to accept as p art of her real self. Old doctor M andelet form ulates the principle of life’s brutal ways m ost clearly:
The trouble is ... th at youth is given up to illusions. It seems to be a provision of N ature, a decoy to secure m others for the race. A nd N ature takes n o account o f m oral consequences, o f arbitrary conditions which we create, and which we feel obliged to m aintain a t any cost. (p. 184)
In her struggle for the right to self-determination E dna needs, first of all, a partner who would have courage equal to her own in defying the conventions o f respectability, yet at the same time refuse to take advantage o f her, even when aware o f her vulnerability. T he two m en she gets entangled with ap art from her husband illustrate the difficulty, m ore, the impossibility of finding such a partner. A robin can defy the conventions b ut he has no scruples exploiting “the latent sensuality, which unfolded under his delicate sense o f her n ature’s requirem ents” . R obert, on the other hand, lacks the nerve to stake his life on their love. Still, in the final count, in choosing death it is nature m ore than the accepted social norm s that E dna defies. N ature has trapped her into a life-long responsibility for her children:
The children appeared before her like antagonists w ho had overcome her, who had overpowered and sought to drag her into the soul’s slavery for the rest o f her days. But she knew a way to elude them . (p. 189)
The finality o f her entrapm ent in the bondage o f m otherhood, from which there is no escape except through a radical denial of life, gets inculcated during E dna’s participation in M adam e R attignolle s labour
ordeal. She got through her own dazed by the “ odor o f chloroform ” , hardly conscious o f the brutality o f this supposedly supreme female experience. M adam e R attignolle’s injunction “T hink o f the children” , she realizes, constitutes the m otto o f every m o th er’s life after that. A nd so swimming to her death, E dna asserts her freedom to choose against the deterministic power of nature. But, exactly as in the world o f M aggie, rebellion against the animal in m an equals inability to survive. Despite the challenging, trium phant gestures Edna makes at the end o f the novel undressing “ to stand naked under the sky!” , despite the seductive sensuousness o f the closing sentence: “There was the hum of bees, and the m usky od or of pinks filled the air” , the fact of the suicide as an escape from the life, whose pattern is dictated rather than chosen, retains its dead end quality and its pessimistic ring. The alternatives are presented in the self-sacrificing life o f M adam e Rattignolle, who cultivates even her musical talent only in the service o f family life or in Mademoiselle Reisz, whose life seems impoverished and distorted by the fact that she had to give up n ot only the expectation o f m aterial com fort but so m uch of the hum an intercourse in order to rem ain loyal to her art. Edna, it seems, was asking m ore than it is hum anly possible to have.
H er story is, in fact, a version o f H uck F in n ’s story w ithout the rom antic benefit o f the “T erritory” for which to “light o u t” . The T erritory is not there n o t so m uch because the frontier had been closed (it was already closed in H u ck ’s time as well). The Territory is not there because E dna became painfully conscious o f the lifelong responsibility o f m otherhood, which she did not knowingly assume, yet is pressed to accept as the only fullfilment o f w om anhood. The Awakening thus points to all the twentieth century novels in whose centers stands a single protagonist trying to secure for herself (or himself) a m argin o f freedom for personal fullfillment in the conditions o f intensifying entrapm ent.
W hat all the three novels share in their use of the female protagonist is the awareness o f the several ways in which both culture and nature turn women into objects, m ore often that not with wom en’s own, unconscious or willing co-operation. The realization m akes it clear why a female protagonist m ust have seemed attractive to the naturalist writers. A wom an was obviously m ore drastically determined in her life choices. T he forces th at converged on her life were com parable in their intensity to the forces th a t converged on the male protagonists in such extreme situations, as for instance, war.
Heroines in the center o f the three novels help to expose the determinism o f hum an existences but, even m ore im portantly, they highlight the m oral indifference of the mechanisms o f survival. K ate C hopin’s perception goes furthest here, since she seems to be suggesting that it is nature itself that
turns an individual wom an, a fine sensibility and often a talent, into but an instrum ent for the prolongation o f the species, with utter disregard for her personal aspirations. Social conventions and the structure o f family life only reinforce th at basic pattern. The bitterness of the perception sends E dn a swimming to the point o f no return. Despite its enticing sensuousness, the ending o f this novel seems to me bleakly in tune with the naturalist vision. On the other hand Carrie, who does not have to deal with the dilemma o f m otherhood, seems m ost m odern in her recognition of the reality o f the power struggle at the base o f the whole game o f love and life. She is quick to recognize th at her gender and sexual attractiveness are her only weapon. Wielding it freely, she follows the instinct for self- -advancem ent only to realize a t the end of the novel th at she too is being used, even as she has used others. Except for the act o f suicide, we never really stand in the center o f our lives able to take full charge. Fem ale protagonists proved serviceable to the naturalist writers in inculcating this tru th. Beyond that, the way in which the three novels o f the 1890s present and use their female protagonists points to the developm ents in the Am erican novel in the twentieth century, where women figures powerfully absorb m ajor symbolic functions and female experience, intimately analyzed becomes emblematic o f the dilemma of m odern m an, who to rn between the need for em otional fulfillment and aspirations to power and career repeatedly finds the two desires incompatible.
Institute o f English Studies U niversity o f Łódź
Agnieszka Salska
FUNKCJONOWANIE POSTACI KOBIECYCH W POWIEŚCI AMERYKAŃSKIEJ KOŃCA XIX WIEKU
W powieściach am erykańskich publikowanych w ostatniej dekadzie X IX w. i początkach X X w. szczególnie uderza częste występowanie postaci kobiecych w rolach głównych bohaterów . D o analizowanych w artykule powieści: Maggie. A Girl o f the Streets Stephena C rane a, Sister Carrie Theodore’a D reisera i The Awakening K ate Chopin nietrudno byłoby dodaw ać dalsze tytuły, np. Rose o f Dutcher's Coolly H am lina G arlanda (1895) czy The House o f M irth Edith W harton (1905). Tę nagle eksponow aną rolę postaci kobiecych, kontrastującą z tradycją am erykańskiej powieści rom antycznej, k tó ra właściwie (z w yjątkiem The Scarlet L etter H aw thorne’a) ignorow ała kobiety, wiążę p o przeanalizowaniu powieści z filozoficznym i ideo logicznym wpływem naturalistycznego determinizm u. K obiety w rolach głównych bohaterek pozwalały pisarzom ze szczególną ostrością demonstrować potęgę i bezwzględność sił warunkujących
jednostkow e losy ludzkie, a także lub może przede wszystkim - ich całkowicie am oralny charakter. W ten sposób losy bohaterek nie tylko ilustrowały, ale wręcz zostały utożsam ione z istotą przem ian kulturow ych, funkcjonowanie zaś postaci kobiecych w takich powieściach, ja k np. Siostra Carrie D reisera zapow iada już wyraźnie symboliczną rolę kobiet w reprezen tatywnych powieściach amerykańskiego m odernizm u: Wściekłości i wrzasku F aulknera, Wielkim Gatsbym Fitzgeralda czy Dniu Szarańczy Westa.
