Dreiser’s Supernatural Naturalism 59
seen” (pp. 331 ff.). Nevertheless, for all his interest in the
“chemism” of life processes, Theodore Dreiser evidences no
awareness of the Submicroscopic genetic mechanisms that
may account at once for likenesses and dissimilarities within
families, and he is almost as surprised as a midwife at the
distance offspring sometimes overleap their ancestral stock.
Minka Nowak, who calls herself Antoinette, ‘Lad blossomed
forth into something exceptional, as American children of
foreign parents are wont to do.”
“I don’t know how it is,” she said, quite solemnly. “I have
a brother who is quite as American as I am. We don’t either
of us look like our father or mother.”
(The Titan, pp. 129, 131)
Like his predecessors of the nineteenth century in natural-
istic fiction, Theodore Dreiser has a much clearer under-
standing of the effects of environment, which can be more
or less directly observed and experienced, than of heredity
upon human personality. He is pre-eminently the novelist
of city life. His characters do not merely work out their
destinies in cities; they are largely the creatures of those
cities: New York, Philadelphia, above all the Chicago of
Dreiser’s own formative years.
The city has its cunning wiles, no less than the infinitely
smaller and more human tempter. There are large forces
which allure with all the soulfulness of expression possible
in the most cultured human. The gleam of a thousand lights
is often as effective as the persuasive light in a wooing and
fascinating eye. (Sister Carrie, p. 2)
Claudia Carlstadt... was ... as ruthless and unconsciously
cruel as only the avaricious and unthinking type—unthink-
ing in the larger philosophic meaning of the word—can be.
To grasp the reason for her being, one would have had to
see the spiritless South Halstead Street world from which she
had sprung—one of those neighborhoods of old, cracked,
and battered houses where slatterns trudge to and fro with
beer-cans and shutters swing on broken hinges.
(The Titan, p. 332)