SOURCE: Gammel, Irene. “Female Sexuality and the Naturalistic Crisis: ‘Emanuela’.” Sexualizing Power in Naturalism: Theodore Dreiser and Frederick Philip Grove, pp. 83-99. Calgary: University of Calgary Press, 1994.

In the following essay, Gammel examines the treatment of female sexuality in Theodore Dreiser's “Emanuela,” contending that in his work he “celebrates sexuality as the major driving force in life, holding it up as a force of progress endlessly engaged in battles against sexually repressive social conventions and institutions.”

Surrounded by an aura of what Dreiser often calls a “pagan” sensuality, many of his female characters paradoxically also exude a strange sense of sexual abstinence, almost chastity. Philip Fisher has commented on Carrie Meeber's absence of sexual desires and “the lack of erotic quality” in her love relationships, at the same time that she enacts desires and eros very successfully on the theater stage.¹ Leslie Fiedler, commenting on the chastity of...