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2 - Dreiser and the uses of biography
- from Part I - Backgrounds and contexts
- Edited by Leonard Cassuto, Fordham University, New York, Clare Virginia Eby, University of Connecticut
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- Book:
- The Cambridge Companion to Theodore Dreiser
- Published online:
- 28 May 2006
- Print publication:
- 12 February 2004, pp 30-46
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- Chapter
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Summary
Like Walt Whitman and Mark Twain before him, Dreiser has been read as a deeply autobiographical writer. We know, for instance, what Donald Pizer means by saying that Dreiser is “not only Jeff and Davies [in 'Nigger Jeff'[ but will also be Carrie and Hurstwood, Jennie and Lester, Clyde and Roberta, and Steward and Solon.” Yet these same characters can also be attributed to Dreiser’s penchant for writing stories about people utterly unlike himself. A short list of originals for his major characters would include his rebellious sisters, murderers, painters, financiers, show girls, his mistresses (and their relatives), prominent Quakers, ministers, politicians, his parents, and many a New Woman of his day. His interest in them is a product of a novelist’s natural curiosity about the men and women who inhabit his world. But in Dreiser’s case there is also evidence of a strong attraction to formal biography. His writing recurrently makes use of biographical genres, from the lowly interview to more elaborate popular texts, including the criminal biography, the biography of the businessman, and the historical novel.
Dreiser’s impulse to write concurrently in memoirs and in biographical forms sprang from his view of himself as both a chronicler and a representative figure of his era. He shared this trait with contemporaries as different as Henry Adams, Gertrude Stein, and Edward Bok, whose desire to break down the division between autobiography and biography led them to write about themselves in the third person. Dreiser was less technically experimental, but he resembled them in blurring the distinctions between the two types of writing. He gave high marks to the “absolutely vital, unillusioned biography such as that of Jean Jacques Rousseau’s Confessions [and[ Cellini’s Diary” and claimed them as models for his own work.
2 - Carrie's Blues
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- By Thomas P. Riggio, University of Connecticut
- Edited by Donald Pizer
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- Book:
- New Essays on Sister Carrie
- Published online:
- 05 June 2012
- Print publication:
- 26 July 1991, pp 23-42
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Summary
… the curious effect which Carrie's blues had upon the part.
-Sister CarrieWHAT most struck Sister Carrie's first readers was the clarity and understanding that Dreiser brought to the figure of Hurstwood. The novel's heroine, however, puzzled many reviewers, who found her to be, as William Marion Reedy put it, “real” but “paradoxically … shadowy.” Words like “shadowy,” “nebulous,” “paradoxical” expressed the uneasiness early critics felt about the character. Even the book's admirers tended to think that its “extraordinary power … has little to do with the delineation of foolish, worldly wise Carrie.” There was, moreover, little agreement about what sort of woman Carrie represented: some saw her as “calloused” and driven by “hard cold selfishness,” while others used terms of endearment that matched Dreiser's own sentimental language for his “waif amid forces.” Ninety years later, the situation hasn't changed much. The contradictions in Carrie's character – a narcissistic young woman in whom self-interest runs high, yet who on “her spiritual side … was rich in feeling … for the weak and the helpless” – have encouraged critics to see her as everything from a Victorian vamp and golddigger to “a naive, dreaming girl from the country, driven this way and that by the promptings of biology and economy, and pursued on her course by the passions of her rival lovers.”
Some readers attribute the wide range of critical responses to what they consider the young author's shaky grasp of Carrie's makeup.