碩士論文
Graduate Institute of Foreign Languages and Literatures College of Liberal Arts
National Taiwan University Master Thesis
友伴式婚姻之渴求：
德徠賽〈自由〉及〈獨舞的婚姻〉評介與中譯 The Yearning for Compan ionate Marriage:
A Critical Reading and Chinese Translation of Theodore Dreiser’s “Free” and “Marriage—For One”
劉憶萍 Liu, Yi-Pin
指導教授：李欣穎 博士 Advisor: Hsin-ying Li, Ph.D.
中華民國一〇三年六月 June 2014
‘the woman problem.’
婚姻〉(“Marriage—For One”)，透過「友伴式婚姻」的觀點，體現人們對於營造夫妻親密 情感之渴望。一方面，我仿照原文風格將之譯成中文；另一方面，我假定十九世紀的中產階 級面臨婚姻的兩難，須兼顧實質上的財富、地位或利益等考量以及情感上難以自抑的奔放流 淌，友伴式婚姻強調婚姻的締結由重視社會資產、道德責任轉而重視個人自由、戀愛的可能 性。此外，我也主張，儘管十九世紀晚期美國的中產階級宣稱不含感情成分的婚姻形同災難，
同時期的自由戀愛主義者甚至堅決婚嫁。理由是，他們認為婚姻讓女性背負了過於沉重的社 會批判及多重身分，既要賺錢養家、協助家務，還須贏取他人肯定。因此，想要落實女性真 正的獨立，就只能對婚姻說不。
本文接著探討〈自由〉及〈獨舞的婚姻〉的內涵。〈自由〉一文的旨趣，在於摹寫十九
世紀步入婚姻的中產階級男女，如何為了成為獨特的個體而奮力一搏。他們不甘被運氣、命 運、愛情來電、宿命論、父母介入、或社會義務所擺佈。他們要主宰自己的人生。我發現故 事的主人翁郝梅克先生，夾雜在對婚姻愛情的憧憬，與索然無味的婚姻現實之間，掙扎不已。
在〈獨舞的婚姻〉故事中，德徠賽精心描繪了造成那對新婚夫婦不睦的核心要素：身為 妻子的貝西，她的性格較為自由奔放，對於丈夫希望她能永遠保持矜持、恬靜、心思單純的 想法嗤之以鼻。小說的篇名恰恰呼應了丈夫內心對於封閉式婚姻的期待，也就是非你莫屬的 愛情觀的執著，以致於在現實生活中，無法兌現基於自由個體選擇而結合的婚姻。
關鍵字： 友伴式婚姻觀; 十九世紀中產階級婚姻; 十九世紀中產階級; 自由戀愛; 女性 本質執迷; 男主外女主內; 西奧多‧德徠賽
reveal a longing for sentimental closeness between partners in the name of companionate marriage.
On the one hand, I translate the two literary texts into Chinese by following similar language style used in the original work. On the other hand, I posit that 19th-century middle class faced with a dilemma between marriage as a result of interested motive, such as wealth, social position, or other advantages and marriage as a result of a predominantly affectionate outpouring of impulse.
Companionate marriage is the movement from individualistic liberty and romantic possibility to social propriety and moral responsibility. Moreover, I argue that whilst late-19th-century middle class announced that passionless marriage was a tragedy, contemporaneous Free Lovers rejected marriage because it bears so important public judgment and status for women such as economic support, assistance, or respectability that women’s true independence necessitates an opposition to marriage.
Then, I examine “Free” and “Marriage—For One” in my thesis. “Free” features 19th-century middle-class men’s and women’s struggle to become a unique individual who enters a marital structure, not as an object of luck, fate, chemistry, determinism, parents’ interference, or compulsory social obligations, but as a subject. What I find is that the male protagonist, Haymaker, is sandwiched between his longing for conjugal love and an essential prosaicness of his marriage.
In “Marriage—For One,” Dreiser portrays what he believes to be the very core component in the newlyweds’ dissonance: the wife, Bessie, is more liberalized and goes so far as to reject her husband’s preference for her stagnation in a more innate, inactive, and unchanged state of simple-mindedness. The title of the short story echoes the husband’s expectations of a closed marriage for life with complete emotional exclusiveness that in actuality destroys the promise of forming a marital relation on the basis of free, individual choice.
Keywords: Companionate Marriage; 19th-century middle-class marriage; 19th-century middle class; Free Love; the Cult of True Womanhood; separate sphere; Theodore Dreiser
Table of Contents
Introduction: Cultural and Social Context: Companionate Marriage ... 1
Section One: Dreiser’s Commitment to the Short Story ... 13
Section Two: Companionate Marriage in “Free” ... 19
Section Three: Companionate Marriage in “Marriage—For One”... 31
Conclusion ... 43
Works Cited ... 47
Chinese Translation of “Free” ... 54
Chinese Translation of “Marriage—For One” ... 82
Introduction:
Cultural and Social Context: Companionate Marriage
In this thesis, I choose to study Theodore Dreiser, whose works reveal a longing for sentimental closeness between partners in the name of companionate marriage. Theoretically, this thesis explores the middle-class cult of and striving for companionate marriage. Critics have mostly focused on discussions of Dreiser’s novels, his female characters, and his feminist perspectives. I investigate instead the potential benefit from companionate marriage in his two short stories, “Free”
and “Marriage—For One,” written around the turn of the 20th century. The former is the title story of Free and Other Stories and “perhaps the best in the collection” (Griffin 54). Lawrence E.
Hussman, Jr. distinguishes, in a chapter called “‘The Marriage Group,’” “Free” as “the most brutally honest story about the married state ever written (118). He argues that “Haymaker’s marriage, undertaken in a state of youthful idealism and transient sexual attraction, is portrayed as a tragic mistake, compounded with each passing day of self-sacrifice and burning longing to be free”
(118). Finally, “Marriage—For One” with the word “marriage” for its title echoes my thematic concern.
On the one hand, I would like to translate the two literary texts into Chinese by following similar language style used in the original work. I attempt to preserve the verbal quality of the original text. Necessary notes and annotations would be added. To take the onset of “Free” for example, it is replete with Haymaker’s nervousness over Mrs. Haymaker’s blood affliction. The few paragraphs on the first page of “Free” impress the reader with Haymaker’s mental exhaustion and his general feeling of debility that has no discernible cause. In my translation the focus is on Haymaker’s depressive mood. I try to translate Haymaker’s tendency to melancholia, chronic fatigue, and bouts of insomnia. Haymaker’s depressed mental state is a good example in which the atmosphere of the story is established and the characterization of Haymaker is vividly given.
On the other hand, in the critical reading, I would like to discuss the two stories on the topic of companionate marriage. Compared to companionate marriage of our own time, a network of
enforcement surrounded marital relationships between middle-class men and women in Victorian America. They lived through adulthood without questioning this traditional practice. After they exchanged public promises to remain together—for better, for worse, for a lifetime, they did not give up on marriage. Divorce meant crossing forbidden boundaries and such behavior affected public censorship and self-repression for 19th-century middle-class couples. Lifelong commitment was a common goal.
Dreiser wants companionate marriage, a marriage that could render 19th-century lifelong marriage obsolete. He wants an era of serial marriage, with multiple marriages and remarriages becoming the norm. In “Free” and “Marriage—For One” he does not depict marriage and love as if the second follows inevitably from the first. As husbands in the two short stories find themselves dissatisfied and their marriages in danger, their fear of divorce should be understood as not only a response to both these individual crises but also the hue and cry about a crisis in a society at large.
Whilst divorce is not allowed in Victorian society, I posit that Dreiser envisions a future of companionate union soon to be more fully developed, at the same time exposing 19th-century middle-class straddled attitude towards the nascent, affectional view of marriage. The old-fashioned middle-class protagonists in the two stories not only strive to conform to established conventions of marriage but also desire to get rid of suffocating marital morality. The characters thus reflect a tiptoed attitude towards the revolutionary idea of marriage.
On another level, companionate marriage means a sexual politics of the culture that destabilizes a gender hierarchy that undermines Dreiser by suppressing his publication and that his works, in turn, helps undermine. Dreiser’s rejection of traditional marriage and suggestion for love matches made him meet with a negative reception among editors. In his works, he infers that a soulless union is immoral and ought to be dissolved without dishonor. Comparatively speaking, “[a panoply of American authors in the 19th century] are more concerned with delineating their overriding visions [of the moral adequacy of marriage] than with marriage itself” (Stein 5). As often as not, “marriage plot . . . serves as an index to the social, ethical, and historical orientation of the
novelist . . . What marriage symbolizes . . . is the movement from individualistic liberty and romantic possibility to social propriety and moral responsibility” (Hinz 902-903). Instead, Dreiser is dissatisfied with the maintenance of appearances. To understand Dreiser’s yearning for marriage to be defined as a private agreement, it is necessary to first dissect how the idealized view of marriage appears and spreads.
Historians predicate that marriage had undergone a transformation from a patriarchal institution to a new level of relationship premised on equal and emotional fulfillment by the end of the 19th century. They coin the phrase “companionate marriage” to describe the revolution in late-19th-century marriage, according to which social and economical considerations were more or less replaced by an emphasis on and intensification of companionship as marital ideal for the middle class.
It is difficult to pinpoint the timing of the inception of the new, egalitarian mechanism for marriage with precision. Some scholars point to the culmination of long-term trends to explain companionate marriage. Glenna Matthews discovers that people’s emotional lives had received relatively little notice by studying patterns of marriage during the colonial period (9). Carl N.
Degler dates the emergence of the modern American marriage, characterized by companionate norms, as occurring between the American Revolution and about the 1830s (At Odds 8). Similarly, Joseph Allen Boone argues that following a general “cultural awakening to the gentle, tender, and softening emotions ‘most amenable to domestic needs and desires’ . . .” (60), in the two decades after the American Revolution, New Englanders began to demand true love to be at the forefront of an ideal marriage.
Besides, one cannot place too much importance on 19th-century controversy over marriage as a result of interested motive, such as wealth, social position, or other advantages and marriage from a predominantly affectionate outpouring of impulse (Coontz 145-160). On the one hand, Coontz contends that starting in the Middle Ages, marriage of convenience—of finance rather than romance—was common. There was an old veneration for the proposition that the demands of living
up to one’s class position should forestall the desire to marry without money. In the generations preceding the 19th century, marriage contracted for monetary gain was in general accepted, according to which the young should select a partner with financial security in view. Their parents displayed their conviction that far from tainting a loving marriage, marriage for the existence of plenty of money would solidify the partnership and indeed lead to increased love. Finally, conservatives of the 18th century believed since the wife in marriage with a sound financial footing need not become a drudge, marriage for a certain amount of money presumably produced a more economically and thus emotionally stable union.
On the other hand, 19th-century middle class gradually drew a more direct link between fortune-hunting marriage and fallenness (Washington 50-73). After the late 18th century, there was a link between the disagreement over marriage made solely for one’s wealth and the argument against prostitution. As William R. Greg puts it, “For one [prostitute] who . . . sells herself to a lover, ten sell themselves to a husband” (12). Although the chain of causality seems a bit tenuous, the link between seeking good fortune rather than love and respect in marriage and chasing a thoughtlessly easy, spoiled, dissipated life of vice reveals much about 19th-century middle-class mindset.
Henceforth, the idea that it was prudent to marry with pecuniary concerns was disproved to some extent. More than likely, therefore, companionate marriage became more widespread. Under the heading of “The ‘Marriage Question,’ or Marriage as Discourse,” Josef Ehmer recognizes that marriage coerced by parents or contracted solely for economic reasons began to incur social disapproval. Choosing a marriage partner on the basis of fondness came to enjoy higher public regard (282-286).
Whilst some historians trace the evolution of companionate marriage, other scholars elucidate it. Karen Lystra explains that “Nineteenth-century companionate marriage was based upon an atomistic ideal of two individuals mysteriously but permanently bonded by romantic love . . .”
(193). In two researches of a similar nature, Paul Popenoe’s “Family or Companionate?” (129-138) and M. M. Knight’s “The Companionate and the Family: The Unobserved Division of an Historical
Institution” (257-267) point out that this kind of marriage encompassed a developing social vision of wedlock, according to which intimate, irresistible bonding more often than not formed the basis of late-19th-century middle-class marriage. Making the same points from a slightly different perspective, Rebecca L. Davis stipulates, in her essay “‘Not Marriage at All, but Simple Harlotry’:
The Companionate Marriage Controversy,” that companionate marriage to the mind of gender conservatives was “no kind of marriage at all” (1139). If the choice of a marriage partner was a personal decision, critics of companionate marriage argued, an access to easy divorce was encouraged and marriage loosened its social and symbolic orthodoxy. By all accounts, towards the end of the 19th century, “courting couples expected . . . to create a ‘union of heart and mind and soul’ that would last through marriage” (Spurlock, “Married Love” 319).
The following paragraph probes how 19th-century middle class reconsidered the theological, social, and political aspects of marriage. To begin, Roderick Phillips states that since the Middle Ages, the long-term progress of secularization had a marked effect on marriage. Its influence reached new heights towards the close of the 19th century (Putting Asunder 361-402; Untying the Knot 47-63). When individuals were guided by religious creeds, marriage was ordained by God.
The practice of matrimony meant cultivating Christian virtuousness. The failure of marriage was a failure of piety. The typical spiritual, puritan view was that love developed during rather than before marriage. Christian theologians warned that husbands and wives who loved each other too much committed the sin of idolatry.
Nevertheless, owing to Enlightenment, there was a slow decline in the influence that religion wielded in regulating marriage after the second half of the 19th century. It is the time when policies, doctrines, and laws were gradually determined by secular criteria. Norma Basch’s Framing American Divorce: From the Revolutionary Generation to the Victorians shows marriage for
late-19th-century middle class lost its sacred quality. They challenged the view that Christian-model doctrines should monopolize monogamy, stressing that marriage is essentially a matter for civil law.
Espousing informal marriage and snap weddings, several states did not require ceremonies and
created greater accessibility to marriage (Riley 3-9). Supporting flexibility in marriage, the middle class conceived of matrimony as susceptible to change (O’Neill 203-217). They allowed marital separation and the freedom of one of the parties to engage in a subsequent love relationship (Rhode 164-173). Tandem marriage had become an integral element in the system of marriage itself (Wilson 479).
In addition, while once arranged marriage had been seen as a fundamental unit of larger social alliances determined by families’ wealth or place within the rigid hierarchy, by the 19th century individuals were encouraged to consider themselves only. To begin with, in the 19th century, “[t]he expanding economy freed young men from traditional occupations [in farming villages] as the spread of the franchise and competing political parties involved them in the business [or]
government” (Spurlock, Free Love 4). This seismic social shift spurred a change in marriage norms.
The spread of chances in the commerce or politics of the day made young people less dependent on their parents for a start in life. A man did not have to delay marriage until he inherited land or took over a business from his father. He could marry as soon as he was able to secure financial settlement. Conversely, in most early modern societies, marriage was hardly conceivable for new couples with no plans to settle down, i.e. who lacked the resources to start a separate household (Fauve-Chamoux 221).
Besides, as Industrialization advanced, production and exchange were increasingly separated from the domestic arena, making the division between “world” and “home” (Wurst 225-238). At this juncture, the market became the frontier, the venue upon which business partners probably
“contracted suspicion for one another” (Spurlock, Free Love 17). Marriage, then, appeared to be a retreat from strife in an uncertain world and the separation of home and workplace in the 19th century polarized feminized love in marriage (Cancian 692-709). A wife, despite her ignorance of practical matters, such as politics and economic life, could often serve as a moral “mentor” to what may have seemed dangerous. In a sense, “[w]ithin the sentimental culture of Victorian America, [a mysterious force called] influence was believed to be the power by which any person’s character
affected the characters of others, for good as well as for evil. . . . [A]s a force for evil, influence was compared to a poison, a disease, a source of contamination and corruption” (Halttunen 4). Typically, women were educated to prepare for the cause of saving husbands from this ruin of character. The code for them was ministering to their husbands who were producers and who were nursed back to health from the wounds of dehumanizing agitation of the marketplace (Bloch 101-126).
The ideal of separate spheres prevailed in the early and middle 19th centuries. Some historians ascertain the parallel between husbands’ economic motor and wives’ sentimental core by titling their chapters with coined symmetrical phrases. Carol Hymowitz and Michaele Weissman name a chapter “Bread and Roses” (234-263); G. J. Barker-Benfield entitles a chapter “Strong Men over Orderly Women” (43-54); Gail Collins calls a section “Man is Strong—Woman is Beautiful”
(85-88); Laura F. Edwards refers to a chapter as “‘Rich Men’ and ‘Cheerful Wives’: Gender Roles in Elite White Households” (107-144).
Society’s benign approval of feminine domesticity offered disadvantages as well as advantages to middle-class wives. On the one hand, by combining piety with wives’ moral superiority, there was no doubt that the Cult of True Womanhood circumscribed wives’ independence and economic utility. The narrowing of middle- and upper-class wives’ role to carrying emotional weight led to the belief that they did not have sufficient reasoning powers to handle political and economic reform (Cott, Bonds 63-100). The dichotomy smoothed the way to popular acceptance of intrafamilial activities by wives (Kerber 16). They were best suited to doing “unskilled,” interruptible, nurturing work and appropriately rewarded primarily by love (Kerber 28). The separation was associated with the victimization of wives for these scholars. Put simply, the polarization of husband’s and wife’s traits reinforced the traditional male-public/female-private hierarchy.
On the other hand, the practice of separate spheres among middle-class wives was a vehicle for closing off avenues to harsh realities of working people’s life (Barker-Benfield, Horrors 43-54).
The middle class manifested their class and financial differences as husbands advertised their actualization of domestic kingdoms presided over by ladylike wives. Middle-class housewives
depended on their husbands’ wages without working as laborers or domestic servants (Lerner 188-191). Additionally, they were commonly associated with ties with their families and friends or services to the community. Outside activities for privileged wives were largely made up of attending church and visiting friends (Yalom 175-225). They conveyed images of leisure, civility, and delicacy, all of which stood for a pre-eminently class-determined, mercenary hallmark. In a way, as the basic social and ideological mode of the middle-class changed during the Age of Jackson1, so did the experience and functions of marriage. In short, for earlier-19th-century middle class, the nature of their marital relations is primarily influenced by industrial capitalism and the public affirmation of respective gender roles.
After clarifying theological and social background to marriage for the scope of my project, I would like to outline the influence of political development over marriage. If the husband provider marriage until the mid 19th century was the dominant marital pattern, by the close of the 19th century, a more equalitarian marriage had became widely accepted. Nancy F. Cott admits that essayists, activists, and nonconformists of marriage politicized it (Public Vows 56-76). She draws a comparison between husband-wife domestic relations to that of master-servant: “The most important commonality between the two institutions [of marriage and slavery] was the husband-master’s power to command the dependent” (Public Vows 62). Enlightened, late-19th-century socialists, feminists, and antiracists of America, who emerged from within the antislavery movement, contended that both institutions, slavery and marriage, harbored inequalities inconsistent with American principles of liberty and equality. Women’s rights reformers, who found slavery repugnant, raised a complaint in public about their own positions vis-à-vis their husbands (Hartog 6-39). They drew a historical parallel between the abolition of the unpleasant slaveholding and the contemporaneous demand for divorce.
The above-mentioned paragraphs consist of a brief overview of the secularization of
1 The Age of Jackson has never been easy to define. Broader than his presidency (1829–1837), and narrower than his life (1767–1845), it roughly describes the third, fourth, and fifth decades of the nineteenth century.
marriage—the means by which 19th-century middle class redefined theological, social, and politicized marital dynamics that operate in a culture. It is conceivable that companionate marriage was an innovative kind of marital development in all these fields. Beyond this, marriage from the late 19th century to the first decades of the new century is first saturated with the intensification of affection and then with the contention over wives’ changing sexuality. On the one hand, as John D’Emilio and Estelle B. Freedman write, “[19th-century-] middle-class courting couples internalized sexual restraint, confid[ing] their mutual yearning for physical intimacy in highly romantic, even spiritual, terms” (76). On the other hand, the middle class during the early 20th century were more preoccupied with unleashing sexual gratification in marriage, initiated by the New Woman (Coontz 196-215). Prior to World War I, American wives were “liberated from the strictures of
‘Victorianism,’ now an epithet deserving criticism . . .” (McGovern 316). A closer look at the celebration of wives’ new position of freedom and choice by reformers of modern era supplies an overview of the role female autonomy plays in marriage.
The following paragraph focuses on 19th-century contention over the sexual subordination of women. To begin, the Christian belief system up to the 18th century called unsanctified earthly women devil’s agents. They tempted men who were considered more prone to deviate from virtues by carnality in their “fallen” state. Men’s rational control was weaker as they were susceptible to concupiscence. As a result, it was objectionable for the daughters of Eve to exercise sexual initiative, if anything (Welter 137-157). By extension, “sexual appetite was a male quality . . . If a woman showed it, she resembled a man” (Barker-Benfield, “Spermatic Economy” 54). From this religious perspective, 19th-century sexual ideologists accentuated the view that wives lacked sexual aggressiveness (Cott, “Passionlessness” 220). Wives, whose lack of inclination to yield to “baser nature” were epitomized by dispositional and physiological theories (Ortner 28-31), thereby were given greater emphasis to put caring for others first (Degler,“What Ought to Be” 1468). As Charles E. Rosenberg writes, “[wives were subordinated] within the . . . traditional role of female as giving and nurturant . . .” (150).
By the late 19th century, wives’ values and virtues had gradually shed their Christian, moral nature. Advocates of the New Woman opposed mid-19th-century notion of “angels in the house” and sexual “anaesthesia,” as Cott calls it, among the so-called respectable wives (“Passionlessness” 219).
What is more, John C. Burnham writes, “two fundamentals of [19th-century] morality [were challenged by reformers of the progressive atmosphere], the conspiracy of silence [about sex-related matters] and the double standard . . . for [wives], strict purity, and for [husbands], freedom to indulge” (885-886). Together with these historians’ contentions, Marilyn Yalom’s A History of the Wife (2001) foregrounds wives’ right to be a more active participant in marriage
(263-293). Simply put, these scholars propound new forms of wives’ sexual subjectivity that break with male-dominant gendered marriage.
Furthermore, if late-19th-century middle class announced that passionless marriage was a tragedy, contemporaneous reformers of Free Love Movement upped the ante to abolish the institution of marriage (Spurlock, Free Love 202-230). Both companionate marriage and Free Love Movement took root as the 19th century drew to an end, but the campaigners of each marital revolution defended their cause differently. While the supporters of companionate marriage wanted to transform the institution of marriage, Free Lovers defined their goal as “[a] demand for marriage as a free contract . . . [, a contract] with the object of overthrowing marriage. . . . Love alone constitutes marriage” (Spurlock, Free Love 211, 217). Carole Pateman establishes that Free Lovers
“[take] a ‘contract’ to be an agreement between two equal parties who negotiate until they arrive at terms that are to their mutual advantage” (154-155). More to the point, Christina Simmons proclaims that antimarriage radicals challenge not only old-fashioned bourgeois scrutiny of informal unions but also their oppressive control of women by the advocacy of the sanctity of marriage (178-181). Free Lovers decline marriage because it bears so important public judgment and status for women such as economic support, assistance, or respectability that women’s true independence necessitates an opposition to marriage (Simmons180). As Taylor Stoehr highlights:
“[E]very . . . free lover, male or female, was also a feminist” (3). Finally, Sandra Ellen Schroer
indicates that for Free Lovers “freedom was aligned with nature and an internal Divinity . . .” (93).
That is to say, Free Love radicals maintained that “[i]f all people have constitutional rights to life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness[,] then the law can have no power over marriage” (Spurlock, Free Love 211).
There are some similarities between the rationale of companionate marriage and that of Free Love, but the middle class at the turn of the century looked upon the two practices differently. On the one hand, both exponents advocate self-fulfillment and individuated sovereignty, placing a premium on the naturalness of passion. They profess the importance of a spontaneous attraction between potential partners: “Convulsive experience of love, which comes of itself, cannot be reasoned with, and must be obeyed” (Sumner 274). Due to the efforts of the proponents of companionate marriage and Free Love, marriage became more of a private and personal affair before the beginning of the next century. With the advent of cohabiting, the free play of desire was affirmed, as well as the claims and practice of companionate marriage and Free Love.
On the other hand, the adherents of Free Love Movement encouraged overturning the institution of marriage, “invit[ing] . . . moderates to engage in ‘an unqualified and persistent demand for the immediate and unconditional abolition’ of marriage” (Spurlock, Free Love 217). In reality, the radicals’ view that mutual satisfaction relies more on love than on marriage diverged from majority viewpoints over the next several years of the 20th century (Spurlock, Free Love 209).
At odds with the modern middle class’ new conceptions of sexuality within marriage, Free Love lost its prominence and was considered an attack upon prized middle-class values, values set out to credit a popular culture saturated with marriage. By contrast, companionate marriage shifted from its initially installed place centering on open, interdependent commitment to that centering on female sexual emancipation within marriage, as V. F. Calverton suggests in a chapter called
“Companionate Marriage and the Sexual Impulse” (145-166).
After addressing the background of companionate marriage, I would like to explicate the design of my thesis. Following the Introduction, my project comprises Section One, Section Two,
Section Three, and the Conclusion. The Introduction has recorded the historical context of 19th-century middle-class marriage, be it theological, social, and political, without neglecting the philosophy of companionate marriage. More specifically, the notion of Free Love was incorporated in the Introduction. In Section One, I will unearth Dreiser’s feminist thinking, commitment to the short story, and critical reception. Dreiser’s gender politics, with its insistence on undoing alienated, ostensible marriage and removing the double standard of matrimonial morality, was hardly much in demand at his time. In Section Two and Three I will claim separately that the two middle-class protagonists, Haymaker and Wray, are starved of the intoxicating feeling of sweetness and lovableness in unforgettable marriages. In Conclusion, I would like to tease out the tortured innermost self of the middle-class male protagonists, Haymaker and Wray, in the light of Dreiser’s autobiographical elements. As I illustrated earlier, the purpose of this project is to excavate the uninspiring married relationships and Dreiserian yearning for companionship within marriage. In all important respects, love marriage, brought about by 19th-century middle-class reformation of marriage, becomes the popular notion and perhaps even the norms from where the potentiality of marriage nowadays is given birth.
Section One:
Dreiser’s Commitment to the Short Story
To support the contentions I made earlier, I would like to apply the above descriptions to Dreiser’s text. That reciprocity in man-woman relationships is an absolute prerequisite for companionate marriage is all the more evident in Dreiser’s novels. In this view, Dreiser is considerably less sanguine about the heterosexual ties he describes in Sister Carrie (1900) and Jennie Gerhardt (1901). In his two major novels, enjoyable relationships are dissolved and the
possibility for marriage is denied, let alone a companionate one. The reason why I discuss the two canonic novels here is that they furnish a starting point for Dreiser’s tales of married life. The main concern of my study, however, is to offer a more subtle analysis of marriage in Dreiser’s “Free” and
“Marriage—For One.” Essentially, I attempt to exceptionalize marriage as both a central episode and a dominant motif in the two stories.
In Sister Carrie, Carrie at first has a hankering for traditional, husband breadwinner marriage.
Drouet, her first lover, pays her to live with him and is finally willing to marry her. However, she drifts from him because he is insensitive to her feelings. Likewise, she tires of Hurstwood, her second lover, a saloon manager. She meets him at the moment he has fallen out of love with his wife. He pursues Carrie fervently and breaks mores by escaping from his failed marriage. Carrie initially wants to marry him. While she seems to be reluctant to run away with him, she finally lets it happen and Dreiser does not make it clear how she can believe that Hurstwood has deserted rather than divorced his wife. Carrie learns afterwards that she has a slim chance at marriage, inasmuch as Hurstwood does not divorce his wife.
Afterwards, Carrie decides that she must fight her way out of poverty in a public realm. She is temperamentally suited to Broadway. Thenceforward, the novel goes on to report in detail her self-presentations on stage. Her star quality wins recognition. What is noteworthy is that she is financially self-supporting and therein lays the cause of her new-found unmarried self-sufficiency.
As she thrives in New York, readers are led to believe that marriage detracts and obstructs the way
to her female self-awakening. Her lovers are consigned by their lack of opportunities and resultant effeminacy. Through Carrie and the economic discrepancies between her and her lovers, Dreiser exploits the theme of a female seeking fulfillment not met within marriage.
Contrastingly, in Jennie Gerhardt, Jennie wants most to be a wife, but has spent years living under the tutelage of men out of wedlock. She, an innocent and virginal girl, has an infatuation with marriage and views it as a means to support herself and her family. She is seduced by and reliant upon wealthy men. Instead of marrying her, her two lovers successively keep her as their mistress, and their relationships are financial. She stays faithful to them and her dependency on them reinforces their power over her. Her self-abnegation makes her wish to live within a limiting, domesticated, asymmetrical marriage. Her hope of being a protégé backfires. The novel deals with Jennie’s suffering resulted from an irreconcilable clash between her desire for marriage regardless or in spite of societal pressure and the prevailing view that marital compatibility is judged by outward symbols, a view grounded in established attitude in society. Dreiser articulates his sensitivities to the unreconciliation between romantic excesses and the respectable surface of matrimonial criteria, such as property, reputation, family, and social standing.
Scholars have paid limited attention to the marriage plot in Dreiser’s novels and short pieces alike. Not surprisingly, the clarification of marriage politics in every work by Dreiser is found wanting. Earlier critics choose to devote attention to Dreiser’s best-known, eponymous works, Carrie Sister and Jennie Gerhardt. Among the studies, the two female figures, rather than the nature
of marriage, are surveyed. More important, with the tide of feminist theory, scholars adopt an approach of feminism to construe Dreiser’s crusade against gender stereotypes. Considering that Dreiser’s gender criticism, strictly speaking, his feminist urge, has attracted much critical interest, I would like to investigate Dreiser’s discourse of feminism, before I enunciate his policy of marriage of his time. An examination of Dreiser’s campaign against social construction of sex and gender illuminates the psyche and impediments of 19th-century married middle class.
Four feminists have commented on Dreiser’s attempt to defy gender systems and cultural
stereotypes of women. Two scholars specifically state that Dreiser portrays women less as passive receptors than as active agents. Miriam Gogol notes that “[m]any of them exhibit characteristics that we would call feminist: primarily their independence in social, economic, and vocational spheres. They pursue worldly goals and through their drive succeed in obtaining them” (viii). In a similar vein, Clare Virginia Eby agrees, in her “Dreiser and Women,” that the current critical climate encourages “depict[ing] Dreiser as challenging conventional views of women . . . [and finding an] aspect of feminine power which he traces through economic [and] social . . . accomplishment . . .” (142-143). Gogol and Eby emphasize that Dreiser’s female characters deliberately use their power to achieve supremacy.
Further, James Lundquist features, in a chapter called “Dreiser’s Women,” Dreiser’s open sympathy for fallen women as an important aspect of his disaffection with restrictive American Puritanism (27-51). What is shocking and innovative about his treatment of a spectrum of women is Dreiser presents them “without moral bias” and their rises are results of their falls (44). Finally, Susan Wolsterholme compresses her review into an autobiographical conclusion: To a certain extent, Sister Carrie and Jennie Gerhardt are drawn from the experience of Dreiser’s sisters. Since Dreiser
persisted in expressing sympathetic and sensitive portraits of women through plotting the careers of his sisters, Dreiser is, “if not a feminist, at least a fellow traveler, allied with feminists in a struggle against patriarchy” (261). The above feminists, Gogol, Eby, Lundquist, and Wolsterholme, confirm Dreiser’s representations of female assertiveness. To sum up, Dreiser problematizes “the contingency of the dominant male tradition” (Fishkin 2).
In the previous paragraph, I elaborated the theorization of Dreiser’s feminist analytic mode. It is acknowledged that he works against the legitimacy of “female spirituality” that contributes to the devaluation of women. Nonetheless, the pursuit of marriage by male or female in his novels is passed over by reviewers and, needless to say, in his short stories. Above all else, Carrie and Jennie do not get married and the two novels are devoid of marital agenda. Shelley Fisher Fishkin argues, in a section called “Gender Stereotypes at the Turn of the Century” (8-10), that Dreiser defied the
general trend towards “the pervasiveness of the tyrannous [marriage] plot as the only story women could tell or enact[, particularly for working-class women]” (8). To a larger extent, as Fishkin remarks, under “the ubiquitousness of the [marriage] plot” (8), “[w]ork outside the home for a woman was viewed, throughout most of the culture, as a sometimes necessary and always unfortunate way station along the road to marriage” (8). In this way, far from assuming that the dream of marriage “loomed large in young women’s imaginations” (9), Dreiser transcends this traditional and even stereotypical assumption. He unveils “the dominance of the [marriage] plot as the key obstacle . . . [for] ‘women to better their economic conditions,’ ‘[as they give] up the world of wages to make a home . . .’” (Fishkin 9). In Sister Carrie, a canonical novel taking its title from the name of the leading female character while displaying none of the proper names of men, Carrie shows herself to be an aspiring career woman and actress. Carrie develops pride in her job and is unwilling to give up a job well done to make marriage. Dreiser disputes the fact that a marriage intrigue of some sort is all but essential to the popularity of any novel (Fishkin 8-10).
Since marriage is something to be left out in Dreiser’s novels, his short stories become prime movers of examining his strength in seeing the dominant ideology of marriage of his day. Dreiser’s progress from novels like Sister Carrie and Jennie Gerhardt to short stories like “Free” and
“Marriage—For One” concludes itself in his shifting concern from women with romantic-minded individualism to couples in the expectation of a whole-hearted love within marriage. In my opinion, Dreiser’s preoccupation, put forward by the marriage theme in the two stories, is to postulate a mutual consideration and intrinsic gratification in marriage. It follows that Dreiser’s evaluation of marriage is prone to protest cultural conventions, according to which marriage is motivated by and accustomed to social or financial desirabilities (Herman 298-315). It could be argued that Dreiser uses the short story as a genre to lambaste marriage of convenience. In a comprehensive way, “[the short] story which deliberately examines only a single brief episode or encounter avoids the tendency of the conventional full-length novel to come to definite conclusions . . .” (Stubbs 104). In the following paragraph, I would like to quote some critics’ comments on Dreiser’s assumptions
about fashioning stories in order to validate the claim that short story’s narrative compression is acceptable to Dreiser if not instrumental in his insight to matrimony.
Joseph Griffin remarks that “Dreiser was able to place . . . [in his] stories . . . his vision of life”
(19). Sherwood Anderson declares, in his introduction of Dreiser’s collection of short fiction, Free and Other Stories, that Dreiser rejects “the ‘trickery’ and plot orientation of conventional magazine
fiction [catered for the middle-class taste]” (Griffin 24). The lack of the boost for middle-class moral and social normalcy in Dreiser’s works can be explained in part by his denunciations of the popular demand, whose major criterion he refers to as “[making sure] the beauty and peace and charm to be found in everything, the almost complete absence of any reference to the coarse and the vulgar and the cruel and the terrible” (A Book 490). As a result of the gulf between the manuscripts he sent magazine editors and their expectations about what magazine fiction ought to be, Dreiser evokes little positive reaction from the popular magazines. More than once, he is on the point of collapse because of the censorship of Victorian gender segregation that came from editors of large-circulation periodicals, a system that deserves condemnation for him by his in-depth feminist thought.
Not only do Dreiser’s short stories deviate from regular magazine fare2, they manifest the author’s ambivalent attitude towards his career as a short-story writer or novelist. In the following paragraph, I would like to include some biographical materials to give a backdrop for Dreiser’s interest in short narratives as literary production. That is, Dreiser the novelist is compared with Dreiser the short-fiction author.
Although his Sister Carrie was published with poor sales, Dreiser’s short fiction was even less welcome. James L. W. West, III, observes that “volumes of short stories . . . brought in [Dreiser]
needed money—but not a great deal, since the sales figures for these books were usually modest”
2 Occasional acceptance of Dreiser’s fiction came from editors who risked popular or professional censure. George Horace Lorimer of the Saturday Evening Post, who accepted “Free” on the basis of Dreiser’s reputation, was deluged with “dozens of telegrams and hundreds of letters” from readers who condemned the story (Swanberg 227).
(20). Griffin proposes that the author tends to flaunt traditional family values and blur the boundaries between conventional male and female conduct in the state of marriage, with the result that generally Dreiser’s short stories received repudiation by magazine editors. Besides, the publishers reasoned with Dreiser that “you are known as a novelist and every time anything by you is published, except a novel, people ask for a novel by you” (Griffin 24). In one respect, “Dreiser seemed driven by the desire to [overcome the unfavorable market]” and editors’ tendency “to glorify the traditional values . . . [of the select group]” (Griffin 18). The fact that Dreiser kept producing short stories even if they met with constant objection can be regarded as professional rather than economical necessities.
To seek acceptance from upper-class magazines without compromising his doleful tales of common life, Dreiser resorts to male-female relationships (Hussman 113-125). Particularly, mismating provides Dreiser access to the mainly harmful effects of “bowing to convention and to the opinions of others” (Gerber 70). In his two short stories, “Free” and “Marriage—For One,”
Dreiser airs a dissenting view of marriage in which the couple unite out of duty or pity instead of love. It is more often dejection, indifference, and unhappiness rather than loving care that surface in Dreiserian marriage. By depicting disappointing mismatches, Dreiser himself envisages companionate marriage as a preferable form of human relation, which is not so easily attainable. Yet even if, under the marital strains, Free Love becomes a tempting alternative, it is never the first choice. The main aim of the thesis is to develop a more well-rounded understanding of marriage in the particular stories analyzed.
Section Two:
Companionate Marriage in “Free”
After identifying the causes of a change in attitude towards marriage in the Introduction and Dreiser’s utilization of the short story in Section One, I attempt to contextualize “Free” in this section. On the whole, the story demonstrates how the implication of romantic love undercuts duty, custom, public opinion, current beliefs, and community obligations with respect to marriage, putting new strains on them. To begin, “Free” is a thought-oriented story apropos of the sentiments of a sixty-year-old New York architect during his wife’s medical crisis over a four-day period: the three days before and the day of his wife’s death. During these days, the astonishing resurrection of his wife, Ernestine, from her physical symptoms obtrudes upon the meditation of the architect, Rufus Haymaker. He has gathered the fact that his conventional, socially sensitive wife is not the kind of woman that he really craves: “All these years he had wanted, wanted—wanted—an understanding mind, a tender heart, the some one woman—she must exist somewhere . . .” (“Free” 49). Most of all, he has devoted over forty years of apparent servitude to his wife, all the while hoping to terminate his compromisation with social norms.
The story opens with Haymaker, his eyes “weary and yet restless” (“Free” 37), brooding over the news from his wife’s physician that she is in imminent danger of death because of a heart lesion.
His wife’s condition has revivified his longing to be free, to spend his last few years doing only what he heartily wants to do. As it is put early in the story, “yet how often, viewing his life in retrospect, had he wished that his life had been as sweet as his dreams—that his dreams had come true” (“Free” 40).
In the meantime, Haymaker’s longing is complicated by his self-criticism about his pensive mood, evoked by a strange mixture of self-imprecation and self-assertiveness: “to be unfaithful to a wife, even unkind to her—what a crime . . . Such people ought to be drummed out of the world.
They were really not fit to live—dogs, brutes! . . . There was actually a haunting satisfaction in the thought that she might die now” (“Free” 46, 59). To put it differently, Haymaker aspires to summon
not only self-control over susceptibility but also disobedience to other people’s appraisal of his wife’s impact on him:
He had resolved to do better in his thought, but somehow, in spite of himself, he had never been able to do so. . . . [The] doctor, who imagined that he was old and weak and
therefore in need of this loving woman’s care and sympathy and understanding! . . . Also his children . . . thought him dependent on her and happy with her; his servants and her and his friends [thought] the same thing, and yet he really was not. (“Free” 53, 39;
emphasis mine)
Throughout the story Haymaker vacillates between his wish that she will die and his built-in protest.
The plot arrangement knits together the seesaw of his alternative self-perception. At one time, she makes a partial recovery; at another, she suffers a relapse. In a word, the prolonged exposure of Haymaker’s deep thinking is sharply directed by his wife’s astonishingly vacillating turn of illness, and then death.
Critics have usually underscored the ramification of the naturalistic concept on Haymaker, on which Dreiser unmistakably concentrates. Dreiser has a unique way of depicting Haymaker’s marriage as “some overpowering force, some love or hate or fear, inhibition, jealousy, or greed that has chained its protagonist to his fate” (Matthiessen 214). Consistently enough, two scholars investigate the depth of Haymaker’s stress under finding himself a stultified husband. They uncover Haymaker’s passivity and incapacity to act upon his life as his story is reduced into a pure reconciliation to and disillusionment with fettered, inevitable responsibility. Robert H. Elias presumes that Dreiser’s short story serves to show that Haymaker, impaired in his elements of determination, is limited by feelings or circumstances, steeped in cultural and social rules, limits, and guidelines (209). Griffin contends that Haymaker has lost control over his colorless recollection (54-61). His self-infliction and self-capitulation are so closely juxtaposed as to be inextricably mixed in the overall texture of his reminiscence. According to Elias and Griffin, worried at the outset, Haymaker has forfeited his chances for liberation and has precipitated into a disparity
between his love-seeking wishfulness and outward reality “[that] had suggested to him the love time or youth that he had missed” (“Free” 60).
To complicate the matter further, Griffin prioritizes Haymaker’s conscientiousness (54-61).
Noticing the fact that Haymaker’s recrimination racks him so agonizingly, Griffin shows how Haymaker sees perfectly his ulterior motives as reprehensible. Griffin supports the view that Haymaker so rarely succeeds in ridding himself of his demons that he reckons it is his evil curse that is killing his wife. For Griffin, Haymaker’s devastating guiltiness has become so paralytic that Haymaker cannot change and that he is led to remark ruefully his wife’s reach is beyond the grave.
In my view, the above-mentioned reviewers’ naturalistic interpretation, briefly described, doubts the possibilities of Haymaker’s recovery from his sapped confidence. All things considered, they shed light on not only the sensibility of the romantically gloomy Haymaker but also the prevalent pessimism the narrator has expressed towards Haymaker’s story. What has gone unnoticed is that they, in one way or another, may be more concerned with the unfulfillment the one-side repressive marriage per se contains rather than clarifying Haymaker’s effort to overcome not only his ostensibly pleasant marriage but also an external equation of marital obligation with social and moral self-discipline. In that case, their assessment, powerful in their announcement of the environmental and institutional force over an individual’s agency, does not recognize the self-willed man in Haymaker who teaches himself to act on emotive principles. Their readings lean a bit towards a consequentialist stance that relays only to Haymaker’s final letdown.
Whilst these critics have extrapolated Haymaker’s inactivity and inescapability from his discouragement from marital confinement at the end of the story, in this project, I, instead, am more optimistic than informed sources about the likelihood that Haymaker’s unhappy marriage furnishes compensating humanistic dignity which emerges from his attempt at finding a mutually committed woman. On the one hand, his yearning for being crazy about, preoccupied with, and addicted to a woman reflect a human being’s striving for escaping the formula of unheroic, circumstantial pessimism as the total meaning of marriage, even if his quest is in principle conditioned and
controlled by the dull round of daily marital existence. In his character, one sees he is an uncompromising figure who, at least on the surface, has not abandoned his search for purposeful love, for a responsive partner, and for the betterment of his love-life. In his attempt to not only make decisions about the direction of his lovesickness but also satisfy his existential longings for the beloved other, one finds a capacity for humanitarianism. His expectations about feeling loveable with an impassioned lover in marriage lead one to believe that man, for whatever reason, has potential to launch a campaign against the listless dullness of his life even in the face of circumstances over which he has little control.
On the other hand, he further affirms the significance for being an individual in his cogitation on the moral complexities and ambiguities about his unexecuted extramarital affair. By highlighting Haymaker’s personal faith in the possibility of a better and freer life, Dreiser directs his attitude towards and thinking against the undue emphasis on ideas about man as an ethical being. With a deep compassion Dreiser seldom assumes the right to pass moral judgment upon Haymaker. No where in “Free” is there a moral. There is no suggestion that there ought to be. Haymaker’s yearning for a life-giving lover, instead of a publicly praiseworthy wife and home life, is in no wise judged; and even more astonishing, this illicit love is shown to be a haven in a heartless world. The necessity for Haymaker to love and to be in love goes deeper than self-complacence or mute acceptance of moral standards.
Before I identify and examine the humanistic merits underlying Haymaker’s endeavor to seek value in his commonplace marriage, it is necessary first to turn our attention to a historical analysis of late-19th-century urban culture. The particular readjustments and redirections that 19th-century men underwent in their adopted cities altered traditional expectations of marriage as an institution of childbearing, kin, and property relations. By answering at first what the particular urban upheaval that 19th-century men went through, I can argue that Haymaker’s attempt at demanding greater privacy and freedom in his unconsummated marriage is of humanistic extraordinariness.
Haymaker’s marriage may be conceived of an emotional state wrestling with the whole social
fabric. Compared with earlier generations, there seemed to be ever fewer points at which city-dwelling youths’ idea of an exemplary lover and that held by small-town people intersected. To begin, under the aegis of the blossoming expansion of an industrialized world, a crowd of 19th-century unemployed country residents emerged in capitalist cities. By swarming into buzzingly capitalized and industrializing metropolis, the jobless broadened their horizons. They flocked to cities of rapidly glowing population for financial gain. As Industrialism grew, newly-developed job-hunters severed their link to values in the home that contained a courtly reverence for marriage.
In “Free” Haymaker incarnates this relocated ambivalence. As a youngster of humble rural origin emblematic of an augmentation of staid, stagnant, and ingrained impasse, Haymaker leaves home before adulthood. He becomes a newcomer in the city and eventually ascends to the middle class well above average in income and intellectual urbanity. His point of view has been altered by virtue of his growing knowledge of the rechargeable, competitive atmosphere of urbanized environment: “[t]he great city, larger experiences—while [Ernestine] was still enduring the smaller ones—other faces, dreams of larger things . . .” (“Free” 43). Haymaker remembers living in separate cities and provinces during the interim years between the first promise and marriage to Ernestine, his childhood sweetheart, her flowing of charm that drops into an abyss of joylessness.
Admittedly, in their initial long-distance attachment, he holds expectations of an optimal match that will bring the reward of a sense of togetherness: “It had been . . . a love match at first sight with them. She had seemed so sweet . . . a dream among fair women” (“Free” 43). However, his wide real-world experience deprives him of Ernestine’s attractiveness.
Although life and work have wasted away his premarital ardor of courtship, Haymaker does not intend to cancel the engagement, “to wound [Ernestine], to undo her, to undo her life” (“Free”
44), acknowledging the necessity of exchanging her love for loyalty even at the expense of gratifying his own inclinations. Clearly, he has so uncomplaining a sense of responsibility as to cause me to suppose that his life would have been frustrated even had he left his wife years earlier.
The reprehensibility he would have felt over his failed obligation would have allowed him no peace
of mind. In other words, there is an unpredictability in his married life as he ironically first experiences love without marriage and then marriage without love—as if the two are incompatible.
His vacillation between resisting to moral consideration and subsequently, painstakingly realizing it gives voice to how 19th-century middle- and upper-middle-class men struggled between the moral dictates of the patriarchal marriage and the liberal subjectivism that helped them to try to envision themselves as an individual with self-worth and self-justification rather than subsumed followers meeting with social and moral approbation.
To put it another way, Dreiser depicts the binary of mate-choices, which we might term the
“romantic” and the “socioeconomic” dilemma. The author explicates these two arguments not as complementary elements but as radically and even necessarily opposed tensions that are harmful not only to married individuals but also to the system of marriage in the abstract. The author sees the “socioeconomic” or contractual side of marriage as interfering with and damaging to the touchstone, which he emphasizes, of marriage that is an intrinsically sentimentalized union of two inherently equal persons. For one thing, Haymaker’s expectations for marriage are of heightened sentimentality about honor, fascination, and bewitchment of love. For another, Haymaker struggles to reach a degree of reason, nobility, and moral contribution in his socioeconomically sound marriage. Compellingly, this opposition between the two constituents of marriage becomes a driving force behind the plot of “Free.”
Shortly after his marriage, Haymaker realizes what a total creature of convention he has married. Love, he laments, is truly blind. As the course of the story unravels, it turns out that being an undemonstrative husband has come to be the mainstay of marriage. In this sense, he reveals his true character to very few people at the very time his wife lies dying. Of late, he has thought of himself as resembling the legendary Spartan boy who keeps the raging fox hidden beneath his cloak and never lets on that the animal has afflicted him: “Like the Spartan boy, he had concealed the fox gnawing at his vitals” (“Free” 45). Haymaker is in essence presented as a wonderful husband. Since he follows a set of beliefs that extols scrupulous duties, his reputation is verging on the excellent:
“He had not complained. He had been, indeed, the model husband, as such things go in conventional walks” (“Free” 45). To summarize, by arguing that his marriage is guided by the moral landscape that Haymaker finds himself in, I believe Dreiser points out acutely in “Free” that companionate marriage with any woman might only be illusory for Haymaker.
By presenting my observance of Haymaker’s adherence to moral precepts and social requirements, I assume that Dreiser constructs a critique of the long-standing idea of sex-typed spousal obligations. The conception of maleness and the idealization of husband in fact limit a man’s psychological richness even while they apotheosize him. The almost inviolable prescription of separate spheres encapsulates the belief that husbands are supervisors and protectors while wives are cooks, nurturers, moral guides, and childrearers. Haymaker meets the public-private dual role as both a provider and a sympathizer. He experiences an obvious anxiety over a role-bound domain, being a man of the heart and of the pocketbook. From a romantic perspective, he prefers to be free of his wife and to search for a sympathetic companion without barriers of communication between themselves: “He had dreamed and dreamed of something different until it had become almost an obsession” (“Free” 47). Yet his wild, fiery, impetuous, unencumbered self would be inappropriate by reason of his class position:
[T]he mere breath of a scandal between them, separation or unfaithfulness . . . would have led to endless bickering and social and commercial injury . . . All her strong friends—and his, in a way—those who had originally been his clients, would have deserted him. Their wives, their own social fears, would have compelled them to ostracize him! He would have been a scandal-marked architect . . . (“Free” 56)
The ill effect of his perception of society takes its greatest toll when Haymaker is overlaid with discreet, circumspect self-awareness. His moral compass of right and wrong reinforces his situation to identify completely, powerfully, and sympathetically his future with his wife’s during his life with her. He curbs his fervor for getting, keeping, recovering, or rediscovering love out of wedlock:
[B]ecause of duty and current belief and what people would say and think . . . [h]e had
never even dared whisper [the throes of and unattainable dream about his romantically defined involvements with some woman] to any one, scarcely to himself. . . . [H]e had by then been married so long that it was almost impossible to think of throwing her over . . . (“Free” 49-50, 56)
Haymaker renders a de-sexed, deepening recounting of being a person who not only provides for marriage but also is a sentimental valentine, all the while burying his baffling and uncontrollable soul. He is confronted with an intermediacy between claims of selfhood and social acceptability in marriage, facing contradictory demands. He himself can not get rid of conservative expectations of marriage. Nor can he “make up his mind on the side of moral order, sympathy, and be at peace”
(“Free” 61).
A look at the other architect in the short story, Zingara, draws an outline of Haymaker’s alter ego. Zingara is Haymaker’s former friend, who has pursued his profession despite what might be said about him. He has been cut off relations with Haymaker for years since Mrs. Haymaker disapproves of his poverty and slovenly habits and forbids Haymaker to associate with him.
Zingara’s constitution is completely opposite from Haymaker’s, a man with no marital want and who has never married. His vocation and peculiarity complement each other and he has become a distinguished success in his field. To put it more straightforwardly, Walter Blackstock gives an explanation as to the situation in his “Dreiser’s Dramatization of Art, the Artist, and the Beautiful in American Life” (63-86): A convergence of creative activity and noncomformative lifestyle seems the most appropriate pursuit for artists.
Culturally speaking, within 19th-century historiographical outline of gender, the middle class thought men as a gender lacked the heartfelt capacity for the intricate, incomprehensible web of love, praising masculine sanity above feminine irrationality (Cott, Bonds 161-162). In an age when middle-class women had greater vulnerability and men gained more economic power and individuality, the intensity of Haymaker’s reticence about either his intensified boredom or his unacted extramarital affairs, about his bedeviled tension over the popular attitude towards his
reputation, and about his near-violent proclamation of the necessity of preserving his sparkless marriage intact take me by surprise. By penetrating Haymaker’s superior intuition to love or feel, Dreiser seeks to cancel the distinctive identification of husbands with the qualities of wise authority in public realms.
Although Haymaker’s behavior seldom evinces a recognition of marriage as a catalyst for passionate inputs in his life, years of marriage usher in Haymaker’s effort to maintain an emotional involvement in his wife’s final, tentative, dramatic situation, irrespective of all sorrowful, pessimistic atmosphere in the story to dispel it. Haymaker actually displays pivotal, considerate, and transcendent caretaking towards his sickly wife:
During all this period Mr. Haymaker had been, as usual, most sympathetic. His manner toward her was always soft, kindly, apparently tender. . . . He was always glad to see her . . . humanly happy . . . [H]e had been . . . sensitive and kindly . . . to her mental and physical comfort . . . (“Free” 41, 44-45)
As he is tenderer and more emotionally malleable, he consoles, comforts, and listens to his wife’s concern for household, children, and domestic harmony:
[Ernestine] still believ[ed] that he found pleasure and happiness in being with her, a part of the home which together they had built up, these children they had reared . . . He nodded and smiled and told her bits of news [of the house]. (“Free” 45, 64)
More than that, he attaches particular concern for his wife’s sickness by taking the so-called
“interest factors,” his money or financial support, into account:
He had never really begrudged her anything—nothing certainly that he could afford. . . . [He] insisted that no expense must be spared. If her life was in danger, save it by any means—all. . . . [I]f she recovered . . . he would . . . take her away for the summer to some quiet mountain resort . . . (“Free” 41, 61-62)
Haymaker’s demeanor is genuine as he comports himself respectfully and affectionately. One cannot disparage his dedication with all its concomitant bonds of warmth. Most important, the
compassion and tenderness he panders to his wife are as close to love as one can approach entering companionate marriage. He has stuck by her, in his wish to see her happy. Haymaker’s attempt at breeding love in his marriage offers an example that the idea of love-based marriage has contextually evolved over the course of the mid and late-19th centuries. I arrive at this assertion after deriving inspiration from Steven Seidman’s well-written book Romantic Longings: Love in America, 1830-1980 in which he expounds on 19th-century middle-class men’s and women’s struggle to become a unique individual who enters a marital structure, not as an object of luck, fate, chemistry, determinism, parents’ interference, or compulsory social obligations, but as a subject. Seidman’s reading invests a new conceptualization into Haymaker’s in-between state. Haymaker is sandwiched between his longing for conjugal love and an essential prosaicness of his marriage. On the one hand, Haymaker has an unquenchable, unresolved desire for a near-constant soul mate. On the other hand, Haymaker is content to let love fade away after tying the knot, tolerating a friendly rapprochement after the first few years of all the bracing uncertainty of happily-ever-after haze have dimmed. In his voluntary kindness and unsparing thoughtfulness towards his wife, one sees an oscillation between unmatched ecstasy of married life and a habitual routinization that has more to do with an unbroken chain of the bondage of domestic life.
Although Haymaker appears to use muted equanimity to compensate for lovelessness in order to stay together with his wife, I believe his artistic bent is intertwined with his fantasies about a love affair. He diffuses beauty and sensuality into his creation of architectures: “[H]e could lose the memory in his work that his love-life had been a failure” (“Free” 42). Ultimately, he, as an artist, seeks solace in “many interesting and beautiful buildings he had planned . . .” (“Free” 47). His artistic edge, courage, and strength open up an outlet for his eagerness for love:
[H]e was an artist by nature, brooding and dreaming strange dreams and thinking of far-off things . . . [such as t]he nuances of his craft, the wonders and subtleties of forms and angles . . . (“Free” 46)
Haymaker’s artistic musings play a crucial role in his rebellion against the crippling restriction of
