New Woman as Agent of Evolutionary Change in Theodore Dreiser’s Hey Rub-a-Dub-Dub: A Book of the Mystery and Terror and Wonder of Life and A Gallery of Women

Abstract

This study examines Theodore Dreiser’s unique concept of evolutionary change as expounded in his 1920 collection of philosophical essays entitled Hey Rub-A-Dub-Dub: A Book of the Mystery and Wonder and Terror of Life. Written and published after a period of intensive study in scientific philosophy and occult phenomena, this study uses the collection’s theoretical framework as a lens to explicate Dreiser’s rarely discussed 1929 semi-fictional collection of biographical sketches, A Gallery of Women, and the important role of the New Woman as an agent of evolutionary change in his fiction. Contemporaneously, prevailing scientific and evolutionary ideas in the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-centuries prompted feminists to renegotiate traditionalist assumptions about gender on the basis of rational thought. This project demonstrates how Dreiser’s philosophy and fiction contribute to the renegotiation of gender roles. Analyzing the ideas that influenced Dreiser’s philosophy including those of Charles Darwin, Hebert Spencer, Jacques Loeb, and occult theorist Charles Fort, this project traces the development of Dreiser’s naturalist and mystic philosophy through letters, biographical accounts and selections of his fiction, including Sister Carrie, Jennie Gerhardt, The Financier, An American Tragedy, and Gallery. This project demonstrates how American history as well as Dreiser’s Gallery firmly establish the New Woman as an agent of evolutionary change through the disruption of traditional gender roles.