The Trouble with Dreiser: Harper and the Editing of Jennie Gerhar ...

Dreiser scholars are fortunate that he rarely destroyed any of his drafts, and therefore it is fairly easy to reconstruct the evolution of Jennie Gerhardt from its earliest versions (Pizer, “Text” 42). There are three extant pre-Harper manuscripts of Jennie Gerhardt available to scholars for use as copy-texts. The first is the ur-manuscript, which is the novel in its earliest form—thirty chapters (Riggio, “Dreiser's Song” 23). ⁴ The second is what is commonly referred to as the “Fair Copy” document. This is the completed text Dreiser sent to the typist to produce the manuscript eventually sent to Harper for publication: “in its early chapters it incorporates parts of the ur-manuscript and the typescripts of 1901–1902; the bulk of its text, however, is inscribed in black-ink holograph” (West, “Historical” 486). The third text is the Barrett typescript, a carbon-copy of the manuscript sent to Harper for publication (486–487). ⁵ Although any one of these documents could have served as copy-text, West chose the Barrett typescript document for the restored text because it best reflects the author's language before the intrusion of outside editorial forces. The copy-text was then compared to the first edition published by Harper in 1911. The comparison reveals that some time during the publication process 16,000 words were cut, thousands more than were cut in Dreiser's earlier novel, Sister Carrie, first published and then suppressed by Doubleday Page in 1900. Unfortunately, we do not know who made these changes because the plates and proofs are no longer extant. However, we can decipher from letters and other outside documents that Dreiser was not happy with these changes and wanted a great deal of material put back into the novel.

West's method in establishing the ideal text was to examine the changes made to the copy-text in the context of what he believed was Dreiser's “active” intention. In discussing the composition of the restored text, West states that he relied on the sense of “intention” as first defined by Tanselle. West states that “active intention is the author's intention to be seen or understood as acting in a particular way” (487). It is different from programmatic intention, which is the author's “general plan” to “create something,” and final intention, which is the author's “intention to make something happen” (487). For the textual scholar and for West, active intention is most important, because, as Tanselle explains, it