Jennie Gerhardt. Theodore Dreiser

       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