PARTISAN. R.EVIEW
explain this passion for spying? The
voyeur
is invariably lurking in the
exhibitionist, according
to
Freud. In the first big "discovery" scene it was
Cowperwood himself who was discovered by the father, and not to any–
one's deep distress except the father's. In the second scene it is Cow–
perwood who puts a man on the trail of a young mistress, gets the key
to the apartment and, after listening outside the door, triumphantly
bursts in upon them. There are so many instances of detection in the
trilogy that one forgets the precise intrigue that occasioned them; in
addition, there are innumerable acts of sublimated exhibitionism, as
when Cowperwood blithely buys a lover for his wife or advises a mistress
for the husband of the woman with whom he is having an affair. Some–
how he manages to be at every bedside.
However, it is the combination of neurotic display and a suggestion
of incest that most appeals to the hero and these compulsions dominate
the love affairs in
The Stoic.
Here Cowperwood has an affair with a
twenty-year-old grandniece who thinks, "Frank Cowperwood, her grand–
uncle, really her own flesh and blood, and her lover!"
The most significant affair and the one about which Dreiser is most
sentimental is the affair with Berenice Fleming, started in
The Titan
and
continued in
The Stoic.
Cowperwood falls in love with the photograph of
a twelve-year-old girl which he sees in a bawdy house operated by the
girl's mother. The girl is Berenice; Cowperwood "befriends" the family
and finally wins the daughter; in London, Berenice while posing as his
ward
becomes his mistress; she is hardly twenty, and Cowperwood is
sixty. Here is his ideal at last. In the light of all this it is perhaps natural
that Cowperwood, seeking the actual fulfillment of obsessive relation–
ships, is one of the most indifferent fathers in fiction. He has a daughter
and a son, but they are given to the first wife and hardly mentioned
again. Perhaps it is just as well the daughter does not reappear.
There is a great deal of true pathos in
The Stoic,
not so much if
read as a single novel, but if considered along with the earlier volumes.
At his death Cowperwood's affairs are hopelessly mixed up and he does
not succeed in leaving a large fortune or in giving his art collection
(that baggage of every fictional capitalist and more than ever uncon–
vincing in the case of Cowperwood) to the public. None of the memorials
he had planned survive; however, the one thing that does survive him
is Berenice and she builds a hospital in his name. The conclusion of
the book is hard to interpret. After her father-lover's death, Berenice
goes to India and the last pages of Dreiser's writing career are largely
devoted to quotations from Hindu philosophy, which may mean that
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