Schachterle, Lance

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Studies in English, New Series Volume 4 Article 38 1983 Westlake, Berkey, Winters, and West, eds.: Dreiser, Sister Carrie Lance Schachterle Worcester Polytechnic Institute Follow this and additional works at: https://egrove.olemiss.edu/studies_eng_new  Part of the American Literature Commons, and the English Language and Literature Commons Recommended Citation Schachterle, Lance (1983) "Westlake, Berkey, Winters, and West, eds.: Dreiser, Sister Carrie," Studies in English, New Series: Vol. 4 , Article 38. Available at: https://egrove.olemiss.edu/studies_eng_new/vol4/iss1/38 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the Studies in English at eGrove. It has been accepted for inclusion in Studies in English, New Series by an authorized editor of eGrove. For more information, please contact egrove@olemiss.edu. THEODORE DREISER. SISTER CARRIE [THE PENNSYLVANIA  EDITION]. GENERAL EDITOR: NEDA M. WESTLAKE; HISTORICAL EDITORS: JOHN C. BERKEY AND ALICE M. WINTERS; TEXTUAL EDITOR: JAMES L. W. WEST, III. PHILADELPHIA: THE UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYL- VANIA PRESS, 1981. 679 pp. CLOTH, $20.95. PAPER, $12.95. Perhaps no other first novel suffered the attentions of so many  collaborators, desired and otherwise, than did Theodore Dreiser’s Sister Carrie. The Historical Commentary of the new  Pennsylvania  Edition (P. E. hereafter) of the novel depicts the fledgling novelist’s willing dependence on his better-educated wife, Sara or “Jug,”  and on  his friend and literary mentor, Arthur Henry. The extant hand­written manuscript, now at the New York Public Library, discloses that Jug scrupulously read over her husband’s prose almost as he wrote it, not only repairing his lapses in orthography and grammar but effecting numerous slight “improvements” and muting sensual or profane references. Henry, a published novelist, skimmed through sections and urged larger-scale revisions affecting narrative flow. Henry arranged to have the thrice-revised holograph  (for Dreiser too  inscribed his own second thoughts on the manuscript) turned over to  agency typists, who added their own “improvements” as well as per- petrating the inevitable corruptions. The final typescript-revised further by Dreiser and his two helpers—met rejection nevertheless at Harper’s. To improve chances  at other houses, Dreiser asked Henry to  make a first pass through the  text, marking passages for excision; Dreiser subsequently adopted almost all of Henry’s suggestions, which deleted descriptive or intru-  sively philosophical passages as well as further subduing passages too sexually explicit. Thus pruned, the text went to Doubleday, Page,  whose reader accepted it only to have the senior partner attempt to renege after he found the book objectionable. Doubleday, Page finally brought out the book, but only after further changes were made, including a rewrite of the Montreal episode to stage a “marriage” ceremony before Carrie’s first night with Hurstwood.The editors of the P. E. thus confront a classic problem in textual editing: what to do with numerous revisions accepted but not initiated by an author whose motivation for changing his first intentions may  not always have been esthetic. Did Dreiser accept Jug’s and Henry’s |alterations because he believed together they were shaping a more marketable commodity, or did he wholeheartedly accept their revi- 1Schachterle: Westlake, Berkey, Winters, and West, eds.: Dreiser, Sister CarriePublished by eGrove, 1983227 REVIEWSsions as esthetically desirable? P. E. provides no definitive arguments  to settle this question, and in the absence of decisive evidence P. E.  follows the most conservative contemporary editorial process of fol­lowing the earliest extant form of Dreiser’s text, the  holograph before  any revisions—Dreiser’s or another’s—were made. Into this earliest  form are accepted all those revisions affecting meaning and style that  P. E. believes represent Dreiser’s considered esthetic judgment. But  from the resulting eclectic text are banished all subsequent changes, whether authorial or otherwise, that the editors believe were made in the interests of expediency, not art.P, E. thus accepts as emendations of Dreiser’s earliest recoverable  intentions only those variants, usually Jug’s or a typist’s, which put  Dreiser’s spelling or grammar into correct forms. The changes in style or meaning that Dreiser himself initiates (as  opposed  to following the  advice of others) are normally accepted if the editors believe the author succeeded in reformulating more skillfully his original inten­tions. This textual policy, the editors argue, presents the three princi ­pal characters, Carrie, Drouet, and Hurstwood, as more complexly motivated. And the refusal to accept the cuts marked by Henry and endorsed by Drieser leads to restoring about 36,000 words—70 pages in the P. E. text of nearly 500—of Dreiser’s original manuscript. These  restorations typically expand the character of Carrie, occasionally providing scenes which more transparently suggest underlying sex­ual drives. Also appearing for the first time are many more narratorial  comments that enforce the naturalistic philosophy of Dreiser or proffer “scientific” explanations for how the protagonists act. Modern readers may take such editorial comments as unwanted intrusions, but they do keep readers attentive to Dreiser’s view that the pursuit of  the ideal is frustrated by the tragic fragilities of the human animal.Although the editors recognize that no scholar can be certain about how to treat each and every revision of the manuscript, they do  make a convincing case for being sceptical about the reasons why Dreiser, in cutting, relied on the opinion of so  many others. Unlike the  argument for refusing to accept  the cuts in the manuscript, however,  P. E. offers no credible reasons for overturning Dreiser’s decision to  revise the original holograph ending before publication. Indeed, the only evidence provided by P. E. concerning Dreiser’s reason for not ending the book with Hurstwood’s suicide (the original manuscript  version followed in P. E.) is the author’s statement, seven years later,  that he found his first conception inadequate. Regretably, P. E, pres­2Studies in English, New Series, Vol. 4 [1983], Art. 38https://egrove.olemiss.edu/studies_eng_new/vol4/iss1/38REVIEWS 228ents no evidence that in revising the conclusion Dreiser was respond­ing to anything other than his own esthetic instincts. Twice in com­posing the story Dreiser had hit blocks that arrested the tale for  long  periods; his recorded satisfaction with revising the ending as first drafted seems of a piece with how he was able to overcome other temporary paralyses and proceed through to an appropriate closure. The manuscript conclusion depicts a much stronger interaction between Robert Ames and Carrie in the penultimate chapter, and concludes—perhaps as a foreboding to Ames’s fate if he succumbs to  Carrie—with Hurstwood’s despairing suicide. Dreiser’s revision of this initial conception is justifiable on two esthetic grounds: he had erred in making so much of Ames, a relative newcomer to the story, at  the end, and he had failed to put Carrie into the spotlight in the conclusion. His revised ending, always printed from 1900 on, shows less attraction between Ames and Carrie and adds a final vignette to the last chapter (already a collage of episodes), the famous scene of Carrie in her rocking chair dreaming of the unattainable. The P. E.  conclusion would be appropriate to a novel called Sister Carrie’ s Vic ­tims, but Dreiser’s revision is unassailable as the just conclusion to the book as titled.The editors of the P. E. text candidly admit that they do not  consider their version definitive, and point out they have provided a selective textual apparatus with which interested readers can assem ­ble other versions of the story. Valuable  to beginning students are the  historical notes, maps and pictures that help to document the density of Dreiser’s insistent references to real people and places. Unfortu ­nately, the typographers have set “jewelry” at 326.7 and “scarecely” at 331.16; neither is a form to be found in the OED, the standard by which Dreiser’s sometimes eccentric or archaic spellings have been judged. Apparently, like Carrie herself, the editors’ pursuit of the ideal has been frustrated by reality.Lance Schachterle Worcester Polytechnic Institute3Schachterle: Westlake, Berkey, Winters, and West, eds.: Dreiser, Sister CarriePublished by eGrove, 1983

Westlake, Berkey, Winters, and West, eds.: Dreiser, Sister Carrie

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Westlake, Berkey, Winters, and West, eds.: Dreiser, Sister Carrie

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