¹ The Financier (New York, 1927, rev. ed.), p. 135. F. O. Matthiessen, Theodore Dreiser (New York, 1951) and Alexander Kern, “Dreiser's Difficult Beauty,” Western Review, xvi (Winter 1952), 129–136, find some merit in Dreiser's style. The common view is still that of Thomas K. Whipple, Spokesmen: Modern Writers and American Life, (New York, 1928), pp. 71, 73: “His style is atrocious, his sentences are chaotic, his grammar and syntax faulty; he has no feeling for words, no sense of diction… . [His writing lacks] any sort of beauty—beauty of form, of imagery, of rhythm.”

² Sister Carrie, ed. Kenneth S. Lynn (New York, 1957), pp. 10, 11. Further references to Sister Carrie are made to this edition, and will be incorporated into the text. In his introduction to this edition Kenneth Lynn briefly discusses the sea imagery of Sister Carrie, as does Matthiessen, pp. 83–84.

³ When Hurstwood speaks of his own dissatisfaction with life, Carrie pities him: “To think … that he needed to make such an appeal when she herself was lonely and without anchor” (p. 119). When Drouet inquires about the frequency of Hurstwood's visits, Carrie lies to him because she is “all at sea mentally” (p. 125). Hurstwood himself is not immune to storms of feeling. When he watches Carrie play the role of “a cold, white, helpless object” in an amateur drama, he “blinked his eyes and caught the infection. The radiating waves of feeling and sincerity were already breaking against the farthest walls of the chamber. The magic of passion which will yet dissolve the world, was here at work” (p. 166).

⁴ Pp. 184–186. Hurstwood's relationship to his wife is also charted in terms of water. Because of his attraction to Carrie, the “river of indifference” (p. 128) which ran between Hurstwood and his wife is soon flooded by a storm, which approaches slowly; their arguments are “really precipitated by an atmosphere which was surcharged with dissension. That it would shower, with a sky so full of blackening thunderclouds, would scarcely be thought worthy of comment” (p. 188). Searching for something to justify her jealousy, Mrs. Hurstwood awaits “the clear proof of one overt deed … the cold breath needed to convert the lowering clouds of suspicion into a rain of wrath” (p. 190), When she learns merely that Hurstwood has been seen riding with a strange woman, the incident is not conclusive enough. “Only the atmosphere of distrust and ill-feeling was strengthened, precipitating every now and then little sprinklings of irritable conversation, enlivened by flashes of wrath” (p. 191). But when the storm finally comes, with Mrs. Hurstwood's announcement that she has discovered enough about her husband to enable her to dictate terms to him her manner is so cool and cynical that “somehow it took the wind out of his sails. He could not attack her, he could not ask her for proofs… . He was like a vessel, powerful and dangerous, but rolling and floundering without sail” (p. 198).

⁵ Kenneth Lynn has observed the degree to which Sister Carrie is theatrical: “the theatrical world was to Dreiser a microcosm of the glamorous city, a quintessence of its artificial splendors” (p. xii). Though this is to some extent true, it misses the point. In Sister Carrie the shoe factory, the West Side fiat, the street-car Une, and the Bowery flophouse are closer to Dreiser's conception of the quintessence of the city; the theater is rather an escape from the city's ugly reality. It is the fairy tale world of illusion, an “elf land” toward which Carrie drifts to escape “the grim world without” (p. 341). The theater in which she first appears professionally is a “large, empty, shadowy playhouse, still redolent of the perfumes and blazonry of the night, and notable for its rich oriental appearance” (p. 345), and her first minor success comes as she plays “one of a group of oriental beauties who … were paraded by the vizier before the new potentate as the treasures of his harem” (p. 386) in a comic opera called “The Wives of Abdul.” As her popularity increases, there are stage-door genii to offer her whatever she wants: “I could give you every luxury. There isn't anything you could ask for that you couldn't have … I love you and wish to gratify your every desire,” and her $150 a week seems to be “a door to an Aladdin's cave” (pp. 410, 411).

⁶ Pp. 451–452. Hurstwood is “shut out from Chicago— from his easy, comfortable state” (p. 250) by having stolen money from Fitzgerald and Moy's; and no longer “subject to the illusions and burning desires of youth” (pp. 265–266), he is unable to conceive of himself as re-entering the gaudy chamber, which seems to him to be “a city with a wall about it. Men were posted at the gates. You could not get in. Those inside did not care to come out to see who you were. They were so merry inside there that all those outside were forgotten, and he was on the outside” (p. 297). His attempts to escape from the turbulent sea are mockeries. First he seeks refuge as a chairwarmer, “shielding himself from cold and the weariness of the streets in a hotel lobby” (p. 331); next he tries to escape into an illusion of activity, as in his rocking-chair he “buried himself in his papers… . What Lethean waters were these floods of telegraphed intelligence!” (p. 311); then there is the poker room where “visions of a big stake floated before him” before he loses half his money and walks out into the “chill, bare streets” (pp. 330, 332).

⁷ In addition to passages already cited, allusions to water, the sea, tides, storms, ships, and harbors may be found on pp. 9, 73, 74, 76, 110, 111, 145, 169, 188, 190, 193, 198, 206, 211, 213, 231, 252, 254, 255, 263, 273, 308, 314, 333, 356, 363, 380, 395, 402, 430, and 438. Additional allusions to chambers, caves, the theater, magic, and The Arabian Nights may be found on pp. 7, 9, 12, 14, 16, 17, 18, 22, 24, 26, 28, 30, 39, 41, 46, 52, 59, 65, 69, 72, 74, 76, 95, 102, 127, 140, 148, 162, 170, 200, 223, 225, 228, 255, 280, 281, 284, 287, 288, 289, 290, 294, 312, 314, 334, 397, 407, and 445. Carrie's preoccupationwith clothes, which Matthiessen sees as representing her “craving for pleasure” (p. 70) and the “expression of ‘pecuniary culture’ ” (p. 83), may also be seen as coverings from the weather, and thus allied to the “chamber” imagery. Allusions to clothing in the novel may be found on pp. 6, 7, 22, 23, 33, 39, 42, 48, S3, 58, 60, 61, 65, 72, 94, 251, 270, 278, 280, 285, 321, 343, and 394.

⁸ The Financier (New York, 1912; revised, 1927); The Titan (New York, 1914). Further references to The Financier and The Titan are made to these editions and will be incorporated into the text, with the titles indicated by “F” or “X.” Although Dreiser revised The Financier extensively, the revisions of the imagery studied here were insignificant, and the greater accessibility of the revised edition argues for its use in this study.

Any extended consideration of Jennie Gerhardl (New York, 1911) must be omitted here. Written between Sister Carrie and The Financier, its major imagery is, as we might expect, divided equally between the sea and the animal world. For references to water, the sea, storms, and ships in that novel, see pp. 16, 17, 18, 90, 95, 99, 172, 177, 239, 274, 299, 364, 373, 398, 403, 417, and 419. For references to the animal world, see pp. 10, 35, 88, 100, 126, 130, 131, 133, 189, 190, 201, 203, 219, 223, 236, 238, 239, 277, 286, 295, 327, 370, 378, 404, 414, and 415.

⁹ See, for example, Harlan Hatcher, Creating the Modern American Novel (New York, 1935), p. 50; Kenneth S. Lynn, The Dream of Success (Boston, 1955), p. 52; and Charles C. Walcutt, American Literary Naturalism, A Divided Stream (Minneapolis, Minn., 1956), p. 204.

¹⁰ References to these animals, as well as to animal life in general, may be found in F, pp. 2, 3, 5, 9, 17, 21, 34, 41, 42, 43, 69, 89, 101, 108, 123, 124, 125, 127, 128, 137, 140, 141, 150,154,164,185,189,198,199, 200, 202, 203, 205, 211, 214, 215, 220, 229, 244, 251, 253, 254, 255, 270, 298, 323, 327, 328, 332, 338, 350, 357, 359, 364, 376, 380, 393,431,436, 439,441, 444, 464, 468, 471, 473, 485, 489, 493, 495, 501, and 502; and in r, pp. 7, 10, 19, 23, 24, 28, 30, 32,45, 46, 47, 51, 60, 66, 67, 68, 70, 77, 83, 85, 101, 108, 109, 113, 114, 116, 120, 127, 128, 138, 139, 144, 145, 147, 148, 149, 150,152, 155, 156, 157, 160, 162, 164, 167, 187, 188, 203, 206, 220, 221, 222, 230, 239, 248, 253, 262, 286, 303, 304, 316, 326, 331, 332, 338, 343, 351, 352, 355, 356, 357, 358, 361, 366, 374,375, 386, 389, 393, 394, 396, 398,406,408,410, 414, 419, 421, 432, 436,437, 441, 458,473, 479, 482, 489, 494, 501, 503, 508, 513, 514, 515, 516, 521, 532, 533, 534, 535, 539, 542, 544, and 550.

¹¹ F, p. 202. Cf. “Might as well be tried for stealing a sheep as a lamb” (F, p. 339); “There is more than one way to kill a cat” (T, p. 303); “They're all as crooked as eels' teeth” (T, p. 47); and “… jumping around like a cat in a bag” (T, p. 331).

¹² T, p. 10. In Philadelphia, “the city treasury and the city treasurer were like a honey-laden hive and a queen bee around which the drones—the politicians—swarmed in the hope of profit,” and rival financiers have a regard for each other “as sincere as that of one tiger for another” (F, pp. 150, 185).

¹³ Cowperwood fancies himself to be quite a gay dog, and after several episodes of “puppy love” (F, p. 21), he meets Aileen Butler and thinks “some lucky young dog [will] marry her pretty soon” (F, p. 89). He pursues her much as he has followed his first business venture, like a “young hound on the scent of game” (F, p. 17); to Aileen, one of his most attractive features is his eyes, “as fine as those of a Newfoundland or a Collie and as innocent and winsome” (T, p. 7). These comparisons and others add an ironic force to the melodramatic cliches with which Aileen's father denounces him (“dirty dog”) and which Aileen herself hurls at him again and again as their marriage crumbles: “You dog! you brute!” (T, pp. 145 ff.).

¹⁴ F, p. 438. Besides the storms of financial difficulty which Cowperwood constantly arouses and the “storm of words” which his schemes sometimes raise in the newspapers (T, pp. 255, 526), there are the tempests which his many love affairs engender. Aileen Butler's father is aroused to the pitch of a storm by Cowperwood's making her his mistress (F, p. 319); so is her brother Callum later (F, p. 477); meanwhile the first Mrs. Cowperwood's soul “rages” like a “tempest” (F, p. 406). Later, Cowperwood's involvement with Rita Sohlberg, although it fails to precipitate the “storm of public rage” which Cowperwood fears (T, p. 151), leads to “storms of disaster” (T, p. 160) in his union with Aileen, leading particularly to her “emotional storm” when she discovers that Cowperwood has had other mistresses than Mrs. Sohlberg (T, pp. 247, 248), as well as to “a storm of protest” in the home of Caroline Hand, one of the mistresses (T, p. 265).

¹⁵ The exterior of his office in Philadelphia is “early Florentine in its decorations” with a door panel featuring “a hand … holding aloft a flaming brand … formerly … a moneychanger's sign used in old Venice”; and inside the gas lights are “modeled after the early Roman flame-brackets” (F, pp. 104, 105). He fills his house with bronzes of the Italian Renaissance and bits of Venetian glass (F, p. 453). For Aileen, then his mistress, he builds a secret meeting place which is “a veritable treasure-trove” (F, p. 161), and later a mansion in Chicago, the “Florence of the West” (T, p. 6), where the dining room is “rich with a Pompeian scheme of color” and “aglow with a wealth of glass” (T, p. 71), and the gallery contains Pinturicchio's portrait of Caesar Borgia, in whose career Cowperwood has recently begun to take an interest, befitting his reputation among his associates who think of him as “devil or prince, or both” (T, p. 164) and “a prince of politicians” (T, p. 220). Yet when Cowperwood, like Hurst-wood, finds that it is easier to build his reputation in Chicago than in New York, where in spite of his wealth and power “he was not yet looked upon as a money prince,” he decides that what he needs to fulfill his conception of himself is a new mansion built to imitate “the Italian palaces of medieval or Renaissance origin which he had seen abroad” and “a union, morganatic or otherwise, with some one who would be worthy to share his throne” (T, pp. 438–439). When the house is completed, a newspaper account of its exaggerates only a little the surroundings of this self-made Borgia: “his court of orchids, his sunrise room, the baths of pink and blue alabaster, the finishings of marble and intaglio. Here Cowperwood was represented as seated on a swinging divan, his various books, art treasures, and comforts piled about him. The idea was vaguely suggested that in his sybaritic hours odalesques [sic] danced before him and unnamable indulgences and excesses were perpetrated” (T, pp. 541–542).

The “ideal … a wraith, a mist, a perfume in the wind, a dream of fair water” (T, p. 201) for which Cowperwood searches is symbolized by the fountains which he installs in each of his houses, culminating in the “sunrise room” where “in a perpetual atmosphere of sunrise were … racks for exotic birds, a trellis of vines, stone benches, a central pool of glistening water, and an echo of music” (T, p. 440).

¹⁶ Theodore Dreiser, An American Tragedy (2 vols.; New York, 1925), II, 274. Further references to An American Tragedy are made to this edition, and will be incorporated into the text. Matthiessen, pp. 194 and 200, briefly treats the Arabian Nights theme in the novel. Dreiser's acquaintance with The Arabian Nights probably dates from his early childhood, but it was continued in the theaters and music halls of Chicago; see Robert H. Elias, Theodore Dreiser: Apostle of Nature (New York, 1949), p. 25. His interest in Eastern legend is to be seen not only in the frequent use of Oriental imagery in his major novels but also in his unfortunate excursions into such pseudo-Oriental tales as “Khat” and “The Prince Who Was a Thief” in Chains (New York, 1927).

¹⁷ i, 48, 175, 265, 331, 341, 376; II, 42, 48, 49, 56, 65, 118, 233, 274, 381. References to Clyde's dreams are found in I, 33, 84, 116, 136, 138, 175, 192, 228, 230, 309, 427, 428; ii, 5, 16, 27, 31, 50, 133, 221, 229, 383, 385, 392, 405.

¹⁸ i 26. A similar Alnashar dream is stimulated by Sondra Finchley: “Sondra, Twelfth Lake, society, wealth, her love and beauty. He grew not a little wild in thinking of it all. Once he and she were married, what could Sondra's relatives do? What, but acquiesce and take them into the glorious bosom of their resplendent home … he to no doubt eventually take some place in connection with the Finchley Electric Sweeper Company. And then would he not be … joint heir with Stuart to all the Finchley means” (ii, 8).

¹⁹ Theodore Dreiser, The Bulwark (New York, 1946), p. 9. Further references will be incorporated into the text.

²⁰ Dreiser worked on the novel which became The Bulwark at various times from 1912 until his death in 1945, and the middle portion of the completed novel was “largely a merging of three early, pie-American Tragedy typescripts” (Gerhard Friedrich, “A Major Influence on Theodore Dreiser's The Bulwark,” American Literature, xxix, May 1957, 189). It is therefore understandable that the incidents and imagery of the middle portion of the novel should recall those of the earlier books, and that the first and the last chapters should contain the bulk of the references to benign animals and to Lever Creek.

²¹ Friedrich, op. cit., and Gerhard Friedrich, “Theodore Dreiser's Debt to Woolman's Journal,” American Quarterly, vii (Winter 1955), 385–392.