The Stoic by Theodore Dreiser

First published: 1947

Type of work: Novel

Type of plot: Naturalism

Time of work: Early twentieth century

Locale: Chicago, New York, London, and Paris

Principal Characters:

• Frank A. Cowperwood, a financier
• Aileen Cowperwood, his second wife
• Berenice Fleming, his mistress
• Philip Henshaw, and
• Montague Greaves, English engineers
• Bruce Tollifer, a Southern artist
• Lord Stane, an English financier
• Lorna Maris, a dancer in Baltimore
• Marigold Brainerd, Tollifer’s friend
• Dr. Jefferson James, Cowperwood’s friend and doctor

The Story

Frank Cowperwood, nearing age sixty, had just lost his long struggle to gain a fifty-year franchise to control the transportation system in Chicago. In addition, he and Aileen, his second wife, had failed to achieve the social prominence to which they felt their wealth entitled them. At the time of Cowperwood’s defeat, Berenice Fleming, an attractive young woman whom he had loved for eight years, quite unexpectedly agreed to become his mistress. Berenice knew that Cowperwood intended to stay married to Aileen; Cowperwood agreed to continue to support Berenice and her mother.

Cowperwood, a vital man impatient for something to do, was interested in the proposition of two English engineers, Philip Henshaw and Montague Greaves. The proposition involved Cowperwood’s help in financing the construction of the London underground. Henshaw and Greaves were interested in the line that ran from Charing Cross to Hampstead (each of the lines was originally planned by different organizations). Cowperwood, hoping to coordinate the separate lines, planned to go to England, with Berenice, to organize the financing and attempt to gain the controlling interest in the project.

On his way to England, Cowperwood stopped in New York to see Aileen in the palatial mansion he had built for her. First, he invited her to go to Europe; then he decided that he needed to keep her occupied socially so that he would have time for Berenice, and so he found an improvident artist, Bruce Tollifer, whom he hired to pursue and amuse his wife. Tollifer was to receive two hundred dollars a week plus expenses and was to meet Aileen in London. Not knowing of the arrangement and thinking of Tollifer as a friend, Aileen felt that, by asking her to come to Europe, her husband was finally settling down to one woman. The party left for Europe.

In London, Cowperwood discovered that he also needed control of the Central Loop line in order to solidify his interests. He met Lord Stane, a British financier, who helped him in both his business dealings and personal arrangements. Berenice rented a country house from Lord Stane. In the meantime, Tollifer persuaded Aileen to take a trip to Paris with him. He tried to make her more attractive (once pretty, Aileen had become middle-aged and overweight) by renewing her interest in clothes and exercise.

While Tollifer and Aileen were in Paris, Cowperwood and Berenice were free to live at Berenice’s country house and tour the cathedral and university towns of England.

As Cowperwood’s business interests expanded, he found it necessary to return to the United States to find more capital. He took Aileen and left her in New York while he toured the country raising money. In Baltimore, a beautiful young dancer named Lorna Maris came to his hotel room claiming that she was a distant Cowperwood relation. Lorna and Cowperwood began an affair, and he stayed in the United States longer than he had planned. Aileen, hearing of the affair through a newspaper item, sent the clipping on to Berenice; she had discovered the affair between Berenice and her husband before leaving Europe. Berenice was furious when she heard that Cowperwood and Lorna were having an open affair. Although she and Lord Stane, beginning to spend a great deal of time together, were finding that they had much in common, Berenice decided to remain faithful to Cowperwood; she found his vitality irresistible. Cowperwood broke off the affair with Lorna, returned to England, and was reunited with Berenice.

Cowperwood’s trip was financially successful. Along with Lord Stane and several others, he now controlled the underground and the connected construction company. He had bought out Henshaw and Greaves. Aileen returned to Tollifer in Paris. However, while she had been in the United States, the artist had become friendly with Marigold Brainerd. At a party, Marigold, partly to protect her interest in Tollifer and partly because she was drunk, told Aileen that her husband had simply hired Tollifer to keep her occupied. Hurt and angry, Aileen returned to New York. Cowperwood, following her, announced that he planned to enlarge the New York house, fill it with more art treasures, and have it converted into a museum after they died. He wanted Aileen to supervise the new construction and to do it immediately, for after his death, much of his money was to go toward founding a hospital. He left Aileen in New York after promising to return as soon as he had completed his business in London.

Back in London, and ill, Cowperwood decided to hire a yacht and sail on a holiday to Norway with Berenice. Soon after he returned to work, constantly driving himself, he became ill once again, and the doctors told him he had Bright’s disease. He decided to erect a tomb for himself and to wind up his business affairs as quickly as possible. During a weekend at Lord Stane’s house, he suffered another attack and sent for his American physician and friend, Dr. Jefferson James. Dr. James took him on a boat trip to the Riviera, but once again the effect of the vacation was only temporary. Back at work in London, five months later, Cowperwood suffered another attack and decided to return to New York to see Aileen once more. Berenice was also to return to the United States and stay at the Waldorf-Astoria in order to be near him.

On the boat, Cowperwood suffered an even more serious attack and had to be carried off the boat on a stretcher. Because Aileen’s house, in the midst of renovation, had no room for him, he was taken to the Waldorf-Astoria. Aileen came to the hotel to find Berenice caring for him in his room; her bitterness had scarcely abated by the time of Cowperwood’s death a short time later. He was buried in the tomb he had built.

Although his financial position had seemed secure at his death, various lawsuits, deriving from some of his unsavory deals, plagued the estate. The lawsuits continued for five years, and Aileen, seeing Cowperwood’s money vanish, was forced to sell her mansion and abandon all her plans for the museum and the hospital. A year after the mansion was sold, Aileen died and was buried in the tomb beside her husband.

After Cowperwood died, Berenice, at loose ends, traveled around the world. In India, she became fascinated with Hindu philosophy and stayed there for five years, regretting her past and developing a greater sense of humanity. She had her own income that Cowperwood had left her. When she returned to America, she heard that the rest of his money had been lost. She then decided to use her income to found a hospital, and she hired Dr. Jefferson James as the director.

Berenice herself began to work at the hospital where she found enormous satisfaction in dealing with handicapped children. Recognizing her very limited function in human affairs, she realized that the power Cowperwood had sought had not brought him happiness, peace, fame, or enduring power. A person could, she now knew, express himself effectively only in limited ways, such as helping a few handicapped children in a small hospital.

Critical Evaluation:

THE STOIC, the third novel of the trilogy that includes THE FINANCIER and THE TITAN, completes the story of Frank Algernon Cowperwood. As in the other two novels, Cowperwood, a man of great force and vitality, is interested only in material things—making money, having attractive mistresses, and building monuments to perpetuate his name. Theodore Dreiser does not condemn this attitude morally, but he does point out that none of Cowperwood’s relationships is lasting, none of his projects achieves permanence. For all of his power and strength, he is simply another man whose best efforts are cut down by time and the forces around him. Ironically, his cherished dream of founding a hospital is realized through Berenice, his former mistress turned Eastern philosopher, after his death; but the money Cowperwood left for the project is dissipated in endless lawsuits as shady as the deals by which Cowperwood got the money in the first place. Man, even the ruthless man of business, cannot, in Dreiser’s world, impose his will on events for very long, and Cowperwood’s ultimate ineffectuality, the difference between his desires and his real accomplishments, gives him a certain amount of sympathy. Dreiser never quite finished THE STOIC; his wife wrote the final chapter, from his notes, before the novel was published posthumously in 1947. As a novel, it is not generally regarded as Dreiser’s best, for the details of finance overwhelm the concept of Cowperwood’s character, and the writing becomes more repetitious and uneven as it moves along. The nature of Dreiser’s concept of human experience also made the struggles of his characters more interesting to most readers than the inevitable long conclusions concerning the worthlessness of the struggle.

A study of Dreiser’s notes for THE STOIC makes it clear that in the beginning, Dreiser saw Cowperwood as glamorous, richly dressed, good-looking, and in many ways enviable. Cowperwood triumphs, for Dreiser and for himself, when he faces a meeting of bankers who think he is short of funds as a result of a crisis in Chicago. He has foreseen their doubts and counters with a promise that he can repay every loan he has received, but that if they insist upon it, he will “gut every bank from here to the river.” Cowperwood is in control.

Dreiser has built an indomitable figure for whom one must feel admiration, just as later one can only pity him. Cowperwood’s methods consist in skillful manipulation, the greater power conquering little men at every move. He does not know what it is to fail or be insecure. Even when Cowperwood faces his darkest hour and is sentenced to jail (THE FINANCIER), he remains self-confident and optimistic. He feels that greatness is “inherent in him.” Cowperwood reflects Dreiser’s belief that men are instruments of higher forces, no more and no less than their natures dictate. Dreiser took the life of an American financier and economic manipulator, Charles Tyson Yerkes, and, through his genius, transformed it into a complex and dazzling study of the natures of success and failure. Cowperwood’s successes are not always what he expects them to be, and his failures are integrally connected to his apparent successes. Although Dreiser’s craftsmanship is often faulty in this last volume of the trilogy, the very force of his vision and the intensity of his convictions sweep the reader along. THE STOIC is a weak novel that also happens to be an engrossing and great book.

Bibliography

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Gogol, Miriam, ed. Theodore Dreiser: Beyond Naturalism. New York: New York University Press, 1995.

Lingeman, Richard. Theodore Dreiser: At the Gates of the City, 1871-1907. New York: Putnam’s, 1986.

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Zayani, Mohamed. Reading the Symptom: Frank Norris, Theodore Dreiser, and the Dynamics of Capitalism. New York: Peter Lang, 1999.