The Editing of American Literature, 1890-1930 by Pizer Donald;

Author:Pizer, Donald;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: undefined
Publisher: Scarecrow Press
Published: 2012-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

To the careful reader of Dreiser, the brightness and “gaiety” of the scene, Carrie’s eyes and smile, and Drouet’s “warm” touch and praise of her beauty bespeak Carrie’s sexual tension and Drouet’s desire. The cut sentence is therefore not only superfluous but almost intrusive.

In brief, I do not find the “cleansed” Sister Carrie that much improved over the old retouched portrait. It is principally longer, more cumbersome, and more explicit, with some of its explicitness (as I noted earlier) running counter to Dreiser’s final sense of his characters’ natures.

But let us take the problem posed by the editing principles of the Pennsylvania edition one step further and accept for a moment both that there is justification for rejecting Henry and Dreiser’s revision and that the unrevised novel is indeed “better” in the sense of its greater sexual frankness and “bleaker” philosophy. Would we even in this instance have the right to substitute the Pennsylvania edition for the 1900 edition as our principal text of Sister Carrie? I believe that we would not. The editors of the Pennsylvania edition argue that the 1900 edition is tainted by the effect upon it of the taste of its day. They proposed to replace this version of the novel with one which can be said to reflect more fully, in its sexual explicitness and pessimism, the taste of our own day. But the Sister Carrie which I would prefer to read is the novel which emerged out of the personal tensions, conflicting motives, and cultural complexities of its moment. The 1900 Sister Carrie is a historical artifact as well as a work of art, an artifact in which the tensions, motives, and complexities which contributed to its revision are as much a condition of the historical reality of the work as its setting in turn-of-the-century Chicago and New York. To read the Pennsylvania Sister Carrie is to read a novel which, even if it were better as a work of art, lacks historical validity.

This is not to say that the Pennsylvania edition of Sister Carrie is of no value. It does make available to the scholar Dreiser’s original version of the novel, and it does contain in its apparatus a record of the changes made in that version. But given the basic unsoundness of the editorial principles adopted to produce its text and given as well the inapplicability of these principles to Dreiser, the Edition should not become a substitute for the 1900 Sister Carrie as the text of the novel we read and study as Dreiser’s first novel and as a landmark work in the history of American fiction.

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