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INTRODUCTION

When Theodore Dreiser began composing Jennie Gerhardt on January 6, 1901, he could not have known that it would be more than ten years before the narrative would see print. His first novel, Sister Carrie, had been published by Doubleday, Page & Co. two months earlier, and he still had high hopes for its success. Dreiser had run into difficulties over Sister Carrie with his publisher, Frank Doubleday, but friends were still praising the book and assuring him that it would sell once the public discovered it. Doubleday had called Sister Carrie immoral and had tried to renege on his commitment to publish it, but Dreiser had dug in his heels and insisted that the book be issued. Now, in January, Dreiser was anxious to produce a second novel that would be at least as good as Sister Carrie—perhaps even better.

He took the material for this new narrative from the life of one of his own sisters—Mary Frances Dreiser, or “Mame,” as she was known within the family. As a teenager in Terre Haute, Indiana, Mame had become involved with an older man, a lawyer who is called “Colonel Silsby” in Dreiser’s autobiographical volume Dawn. This man gave Mame money and gifts while visiting her at the Dreiser home against the wishes of the father, John Paul Dreiser, who would serve as the model for William Gerhardt in this new novel. Mame had turned up pregnant—perhaps by Colonel Silsby, though she could not be sure. She had given birth to a stillborn infant in the Dreiser home; her mother had buried the child’s body in the back yard.

A few years later Mame met a man named Austin Brennan, a bluff, good-natured business executive from a well-to-do Irish family in Rochester, New York. Mame and Brennan set up housekeeping and stayed together until his death many years later. They claimed to be married, though no one knew whether this was actually true. Brennan’s family was scandalized and never accepted Mame, causing a permanent breach between Brennan and his brothers and sisters. Mame’s relationship with her father, however, was repaired during these years. He had been furious when she had been “ruined” as a teenager, but she had not wavered in her devotion to him. She and Brennan nursed him when he was old and ill, and he came to be at peace with her and to admire her innate decency. He died in her home in Rochester on December 24, 1900, thirteen days before his son Theodore began writing Jennie Gerhardt. John Paul Dreiser must have been much on his son’s mind as he began to compose this new novel.

In Jennie Gerhardt (initially called “The Transgressor”), Dreiser tapped deeply into his own family and ethnic background. Almost all of the major and minor characters are versions of Dreiser family members or of people Dreiser had known. Jennie and Lester are modeled after Mame and Brennan; Jennie’s mother and father are portraits of Dreiser’s parents; Senator Brander is an idealized version of Colonel Silsby; Bass and the Gerhardt children are Dreiser’s renderings of his older brother, Paul, and of the other Dreiser children. The novel is set in cities that Dreiser knew well, either from childhood or from his days as a newspaper reporter: Chicago, Cleveland, Cincinnati, and Columbus. And the Gerhardt home is the one in which he grew up during the 1870s and 1880s.

In Jennie Gerhardt Dreiser was recalling his upbringing as a member of a German ethnic minority. Dreiser’s father was an immigrant from Mayen, a town in the Alsace-Lorraine region, and his mother was a Mennonite of German ancestry. The Dreisers, like the Gerhardts, were part of the German laboring element—a group in turn-of-the-century America that had not yet been brought fully into the larger society. German Catholics like the Dreisers (or Lutherans, like the Gerhardts) had a distinct culture marked by German language, food, and drink, as well as by strict social practices imported from the homeland. Dreiser’s father, like Gerhardt père, read a German-language newspaper and spoke with a heavy accent. The Dreiser children, like the Gerhardt siblings, were subject to rigid controls over their dress and behavior and were not encouraged to adopt “corrupt” American ways. Both families were also exposed to economic prejudice and social condescension because of their Germanness and their resistance to assimilation.

In Jennie Gerhardt Dreiser was also writing a novel about the young female domestic laborer. The working-girl novel was a distinct genre in popular American literature of the time. Such a narrative usually featured an ethnic girl who labored faithfully, preserved her chastity, and was rewarded through some stroke of good fortune. The reward normally included matrimony, elevation in social class, and escape from domestic toil. Dreiser knew from observing the lives 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 named Ripley Hitchcock. Dreiser had met Hitchcock originally in 1901, when Hitchcock had been an editor at D. Appleton & Co. Hitchcock had been Stephen Crane’s editor at Appleton in the 1890s, and he admired Sister Carrie. He liked Jennie Gerhardt too, once he had read it in typescript, and he decided to add Dreiser to the Harpers list.

Hitchcock knew, though, that this would be a difficult and risky move. Dreiser was then known only as the author of Sister Carrie, an off-color novel with a certain underground following. His work was thought to be unnecessarily frank and potentially offensive to genteel readers. If Harpers were to publish him, they would have to do so carefully. The firm therefore placed stipulations on the contract that they offered to Dreiser: He was told that he would have to allow Hitchcock to cut and revise the typescript of Jennie Gerhardt. The narrative, as it stood, was sexually candid and philosophically bleak; Jennie was not properly punished for her liaison with Lester, and Lester did not suffer (materially, at least) for his long dalliance with Jennie. As it stood, the novel was critical of organized religion, and it contained references to birth control and alcohol—taboo subjects in 1911.

One must understand that the environment for literary publishing in America in 1911 was extremely circumscribed. The banning or suppression of books thought to be explicit or obscene was reasonably frequent. Unconventional or sexually candid works were often attacked by the Boston Watch and Ward Society and the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice—active, powerful groups that were backed by a network of columnists and book reviewers poised to attack morally objectionable literature. Harper & Brothers in 1911 was in no position to challenge these do-gooders, nor was Hitchcock himself much inclined to try. He was no rebel; he was instead a New Englander of good pedigree who had a Harvard B.A., belonged to the Century Club, and thought of himself as a gentleman. He was not going to risk his reputation, or that of his publishing house, for Theodore Dreiser.

By the same token, Hitchcock knew that Harpers was in financial trouble. The house had gone bankrupt in 1900 and been reorganized in 1901 under a new director. It had continued in the publishing trade but was still laboring under an enormous load of debt. Hitchcock, in fact, had been brought into the firm in 1906 to help put its finances back in order. He had a reputation for sniffing out bestsellers: He had brought Joel Chandler Harris’s Uncle Remus books to Appleton, and he had seen Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage into print there. His greatest coup at Appleton, however, had been Edward Noyes Westcott’s now-forgotten novel David Harum, one of the great publishing successes of the 1890s. The manuscript of this book had come to Hitchcock in 1897 in a long and muddled state, but with his blue pencil he had transformed it into a quick-moving, clever tale with light touches of humor and romance. David Harum was published in September 1898 and became an immediate hit, selling as many as one thousand copies a day at the peak of its trade run and topping out, by 1904, with a total sale of over 700,000 copies.

Hitchcock thought that a similar kind of commercial magic might be worked with Dreiser. The trick was to make Dreiser’s books walk the tightrope between what was improper and what was allowable. Novels that dealt with suspect material but struck at some point an obligatory note of piety could catch fire at the bookshops and sell quite briskly. Hitchcock had seen this happen in his own career with Maggie: A Girl of the Streets, Crane’s tale of low life and prostitution in the New York slums. He seems to have believed that Dreiser, with editorial help from him, could have this same kind of success for Harpers.

The contract offered to Dreiser guaranteed publication for Jennie Gerhardt and a reprinting of Sister Carrie, the copyright for which the author had reacquired. All Dreiser had to do was allow Hitchcock to rework the text of Jennie. Dreiser was in no position to refuse this offer. In the spring of 1911 he was an unemployed ex-editor and journalist whose reputation rested on one immoral novel issued over ten years before. Publication by Harper & Brothers, an established, respectable imprint despite its financial problems, would be of immense value to him both personally and professionally. He had waited more than a decade for a chance to finish and publish Jennie Gerhardt and to reissue Sister Carrie with a reputable firm. Both of these things were promised in the Harpers contract. Dreiser decided to accept.

While he waited for the revising and cutting to begin, Dreiser sent a carbon typescript of his novel as it then stood to a feisty young Baltimore journalist named H. L. Mencken. Dreiser and Mencken had met during the former’s tenure at Butterick and had become good friends. This was an unlikely match—the dour, melancholy Dreiser and the impish, irreverent Mencken—but the two were drawn together by a shared skepticism about life and a mistrust of authority. Mencken read Jennie Gerhardt in typescript form and was floored by the gravity and power of the narrative. He wrote immediately to Dreiser:

The story comes upon me with great force; it touches my own experience of life in a hundred places; it preaches (or perhaps I had better say exhibits) a philosophy of life that seems to me to be sound; altogether I get a powerful effect of reality, stark and unashamed. It is drab and gloomy, but so is the struggle for existence. It is without humor, but so are the jests of that great comedian who shoots at our heels and makes us do our grotesque dancing…. The two currents of interest, of spiritual unfolding, are very deftly managed. Even when they do not actually coalesce, they are parallel and close together. Jennie is never out of Kane’s life, and after their first meeting, [he] is never out of [hers]. The reaction of will upon will, of character upon character, is splendidly worked out.

Mencken followed with two more paragraphs of praise, then added this admonition: “If anyone urges you to cut down the book bid that one be damned…. Let it stand as it is.” Dreiser must have read these words with a grimace, for he knew that Hitchcock and his assistants had already taken out their scalpels and gone to work on the ribbon copy of his typescript.

By late June 1911 he could see what they had done. Some 25,000 words had been cut, and the prose had been rewritten extensively. Profanity had been removed; slang spoken by characters had been corrected; virtually all mention of sex had been muted or cut. Strictures against organized religion had been softened, and much of the detail about the social world of the Kane and Gerhardt families had been discarded. A new surface had been put on Dreiser’s prose: The original style had been blunt and direct, without flourish or adornment, but Hitchcock’s assistants had smoothed and conventionalized the language, producing a style typical of many popular, sentimental novels of the day. The net effect had been to turn a powerful piece of social realism into a touching love story isolated from much of its context.

The most intriguing of the changes made at Harpers had to do with Jennie and Lester. In the original text (as Mencken recognized in his letter), these two characters had been balanced one against the other. Lester was the pragmatic cynic and pessimistic determinist, Jennie the instinctive romantic and unreasoning mystic. In cutting the novel, however, the Harpers editors had removed nearly all of the passages that presented Jennie’s way of thinking. As a result she appears, in the 1911 first edition, not to have a point of view and to be weak and compliant. Lester dominates the narrative with his forceful pessimism, and the dialectical balance of the novel is tipped strongly in his favor. Jennie Gerhardt, in consequence, appears to be a relatively uncomplicated work—a textbook case of philosophical determinism and literary naturalism.

It is impossible to know today why Jennie’s point of view, her approach to the living of life, was edited from the novel at Harpers. Possibly a subtle sexism was at work. In 1911 women of Jennie’s status were not generally believed capable of serious thinking. Perhaps her meditations were viewed as a case of overcharacterization by Dreiser, an attempt to elevate and dignify a sympathetic heroine above her station in life. There is no evidence to guide us here: Hitchcock’s correspondence with Dreiser shows that the majority of the cutting and rewriting was done by editorial underlings at Harpers, but it does not say who they were or what their instructions from Hitchcock might have been. We do know a good deal about Hitchcock: He was conservative, courtly, genteel, quite patriotic, and deeply religious. We also know that he would have had final approval over the work of his editorial assistants. We can assume, then, that this cutting and rewriting satisfied him; certainly the blue-pencillings of profanity, slang, and sexual references must have been executed to his specifications, and the softening of the remarks about organized religion must have been done on his instructions.

But the rest of the cutting and streamlining—the removal of realistic detail and the excision of Jennie’s thinking—might simply have been done to move the plot along. Dreiser’s method throughout his career was to saturate his narratives with realistic detail and meditative digression; as a consequence he had to contend all of his professional life with trade editors who wished to cut social data and philosophical speculation from his manuscripts. Perhaps this is all that Hitchcock meant to do; Jennie’s diminished status in the novel might simply have been an adventitious result of routine cutting to increase narrative pace. On the other hand, Hitchcock and his assistants might deliberately have set out to weaken Jennie’s role. Perhaps she seemed a threatening figure, with her endurance, resilience, and quiet female strength. From the evidence that survives one can only speculate, but certainly it is possible to suspect Hitchcock and his helpers of a less than enlightened attitude toward the mental capacities and inner resources of women like Jennie.

We do know from the surviving correspondence that Dreiser was unhappy with the editorial work done at Harpers. So thorough was the revising and cutting that Hitchcock tried not to let Dreiser see his original typescript; he attempted instead to show the author a freshly typed copy of the revised and shortened text. Dreiser balked, though, and insisted on examining his ribbon typescript, the document on which Hitchcock and his assistants had done their work. This typescript, to judge from later textual collations, must perforce have been covered with cuts and revisions numbering literally into the thousands. Dreiser protested about the heavy revision and persuaded Hitchcock to restore some of what had been removed, but the text, when finally published in October 1911, was still some 16,000 words shorter than Dreiser’s original. Dreiser fretted about the editing in letters to Mencken, who was upset as well. “Such ruthless slashing is alarming,” Mencken wrote.

At the same time Dreiser must have been happy over his reviews once the book came out. Most of the New York notices were favorable: Edwin Markham, writing in the American, called Dreiser the “master of a pen that etches with power the dark side of poverty”; the anonymous Herald reviewer praised the “inexorable simplicity and reality” of the story. The review in the Globe and Commercial Advertiser was mixed but still called Jennie Gerhardt a “remarkable story”; the notice in the Times Book Review emphasized the blunt force and courage of Dreiser’s writing. A long review by Calvin Winter in the Bookman, an influential journal, was full of praise. The Chicago reviews, headed by Floyd Dell’s positive notice in the Evening Post, were favorable; and reviews in other big-city newspapers were mostly good. Mencken weighed in with an admiring notice in his own journal, the Smart Set, though when reading the review today one must keep in mind that it was based on Dreiser’s uncut typescript, not the published Harpers edition.

These notices must have pleased Dreiser. Sales were not bad either: Jennie Gerhardt sold around 14,000 copies in its first trade run and earned Dreiser something over $2,500 in royalties, a substantial amount in 1911. Harpers had surely hoped for a much stronger sale but was satisfied enough with this showing to reissue Sister Carrie in 1912 and to begin helping Dreiser put his next novel, The Financier, in shape for publication. Could the editing done at Harpers have been responsible in part for this good reception from the reviewers and booksellers? Certainly the text of Jennie Gerhardt, as originally submitted to Harper & Brothers, would have been dangerous to publish in 1911. Very likely the uncut version would have been attacked; possibly the book would have been banned in New York, Boston, and elsewhere. Such developments would have damaged the reputation of Harper & Brothers and might have dealt a death blow to Dreiser’s career as a novelist.

The 1911 edition of Jennie Gerhardt can therefore be seen as a text that was socialized and domesticated by cultural forces of its time. Its language and treatment of religion were brought into line by the Harpers editors; possibly the behavior of its heroine was shaped to fit conventional notions as well. The 1911 edition is a classic example of a collaborative, negotiated text—a product of conflicting aims and intentions on the part of author and publisher.

Dreiser never tried to have an uncut text of Jennie Gerhardt published in his lifetime. As a practical matter this would have been quite difficult. Dreiser was not a good commercial prospect until late in his career, and then only briefly. He never had strong leverage with publishers and sometimes even had trouble finding houses willing to issue his new works. He was always on bad terms with his publishers, often accusing them of timidity and underhanded dealings. He moved from firm to firm after 1914, each time trying to extricate his various copyrights from his former publishers. There was never a chance to issue uncut versions of his old works. Dreiser was usually moving forward in any case, focusing his energies on the next project and not lingering on the shortcomings of his earlier books. But he did save, very carefully, the uncut manuscripts and typescripts of his books against the day when scholars would use them to reclaim his original texts.

Fortunately Dreiser preserved a great deal of material from the making of Jennie Gerhardt: drafts and holographs and typescripts that survive today at the University of Pennsylvania and the University of Virginia. The text of Jennie Gerhardt presented in this Penguin edition is based on these documents. This edition seeks to recover the version that Dreiser would ideally have wanted to publish in 1911. Slang and profanity have been restored; the original sexual frankness of the narrative has been reinstated; Dreiser’s blunt, unadorned style has been recovered; his criticisms of institutionalized religion are present. Detail about the Kane and Gerhardt families is as Dreiser originally wrote it. Most important, Jennie’s original role has been restored, and she now functions effectively as a counterweight to Lester. Her sensitivity and mysticism work strongly against his pragmatic determinism, and the novel is put back into its original balance.

Jennie does not emerge as a proto-feminist in this restored text. She is still fearful and vulnerable, and her deprived upbringing and poor education prevent her from exercising much control over what happens to her. She can, however, be seen as a participant in the womanly tradition of nurturing and endurance, instinct and emotion, generosity and love. Almost alone among the characters in Dreiser’s fiction, she is psychologically whole and emotionally stable. Her head is not turned by money, status, or material possessions. Instead she values things that are natural and spiritual. Without being able to articulate it, she sees a wholeness and mystical purpose behind the arrangement of the universe that Lester cannot perceive. She also sees, or senses, the presence of an oversoul or organizing spirit that is hidden from him. Critics have often seen Lester, with his defiant skepticism, as Dreiser’s mouthpiece in Jennie Gerhardt—an understandable reading of the truncated 1911 text. Now, in this restored text of Jennie Gerhardt, one can see that Dreiser’s sympathies lie at least as much with his heroine. Jennie emerges as a daughter of labor who endures her lot bravely. She is a woman of large spirit and great stoicism whose life is tragically compromised by her birth and upbringing, but who survives and remains strong, setting an example by her generosity of spirit and her capacity for love.