SOURCE: "The Marriage Group," in Dreiser and His Fiction: A Twentieth-Century Quest, University of Pennsylvania Press, 1983, pp. 113-25.

In the following essay, Hussman illustrates how in his "marriage group" tales, which Hussman argues are the best of Dreiser's short stories, Dreiser explores his thematic struggle between self-interest and self-sacrifice.

In a series of short stories that first appeared in various magazines, Dreiser examined in detail the mostly harmful effects of marriage on both husbands and wives. Like Chaucer's "marriage group," the set of tales told by certain of the Canterbury pilgrims, Dreiser's stories focus on the need for balancing the interests of the parties to the marriage contract. For Dreiser, however, such balance is at best achieved only temporarily by two parties whose needs mesh at a given time. Since needs are constantly changing, the delicate balance cannot be sustained without the continual compromising of personal dreams and...