Susan Lenox by David Graham Phillips

First published: Originally serialized in Hurst’s Magazine, beginning June 1915; complete novel published in 1917

Type of plot: Social realism

Time of work: 1879-1903

Locale: Southeastern Indiana; Louisville, Kentucky; Cincinnati, Ohio; New York City; London; and Paris

Principal Characters:

• Susan Lenox, a young woman born out of wedlock
• Fanny Warham, and
• George Warham, Susan’s aunt and uncle
• Ruth Warham, the Warham’s daughter
• Sam Wright, Susan’s first boyfriend
• Jeb Ferguson, the brutish sharecropper Susan is forced to marry
• Robert Burlingham, a showboat operator
• Roderick Spenser, a newspaper reporter and aspiring playwright
• Freddie Palmer, a pimp
• George Brent, a wealthy playwright

The Novel

Originally published in two volumes, Susan Lenox: Her Fall and Rise is the story of a young woman who struggles against hypocritical double standards, lapses into prostitution, and eventually finds her way back into respectable society. The story begins in Sutherland, a fictitious southeastern Indiana town along the Ohio River modeled after Phillips’s hometown, Madison, Indiana. Susan Lenox’s unmarried mother dies during childbirth without divulging her lover’s identity. The lifeless baby does not respond to conventional methods of resuscitation, so the doctor holds her ankles and swings her around, forcing life into her tiny body. The infant’s scream is the first of many times when Susan will boldly declare her existence.

Susan’s aunt and uncle rear her alongside their own daughter, Ruth, two years older than Susan. Although Susan receives every advantage—clothes, education, refined upbringing—neither her adoptive family nor the townspeople forget her origins. No family wants their son to marry or even associate with Susan. Sam Wright shows interest in her when she is seventeen and even professes his love in order to gain her favor and steal a kiss. Naïve, Susan believes they will be married. The Warhams forbid the relationship because they want the young man for Ruth. One day Sam leads Susan into a cemetery, embraces her, and kisses her passionately. Someone sees them, and rumors spread until everyone believes that Susan has “fallen” like her mother. Not understanding the mechanics of sex, Susan acts guilty, assuming the kiss was the great sin about which the villagers are whispering.

To prevent Susan’s reputation from contaminating their own daughter, the Warhams plan to send Susan away. Not wanting to leave Sam, Susan runs away to Cincinnati, hoping he will follow. Susan reaches the city safely, but the Warhams coerce Sam to reveal her whereabouts. Within a day, George Warham and Sam’s father bring Susan back to Indiana, but not to stay in Sutherland. Believing his family too good for the girl, Mr. Wright refuses Warham’s request that Sam marry Susan. Fearing his ward’s indiscretion will result in an unwanted pregnancy, Warham makes hasty arrangements to wed Susan to a brutish young sharecropper, Jeb Ferguson. Trapped without means of support, she cannot object. On their wedding night, Ferguson forcibly takes Susan’s virginity, horrifically exposing her to the realities of sex. When her husband falls asleep, the young bride flees.

Escaping towards the Ohio River, Susan meets Roderick Spenser, the son of an affluent northern Kentucky family. After loaning her enough money to get to Cincinnati, where he works as a newspaper reporter, Spenser promises to help Susan find work, but he sends her on ahead to avoid any impropriety. Realizing his family would disown him if they discovered his association with Susan, Spenser does not look for her when he returns to Cincinnati.

Susan reaches the river without incident and waits at an inn for a boat to take her upriver. After someone steals her money, Susan cannot pay her lodging bill, and she turns to a new acquaintance for help. Robert Burlingham, an older showboat operator dining at the inn, offers to let Susan sing in his show. Flattered, she joins his troupe. After teaching Susan the facts of life, one actress warns her, “don’t drink” and “don’t sell your body to get a living, unless you’ve got to.”

When the showboat sinks while docked in Louisville, fatherly Burlingham takes Susan to Cincinnati to seek work. Burlingham falls ill, and Susan sacrifices all to pay his hospital bill, but he dies anyway. Alone and penniless again, Susan abandons herself to a shadowy existence. She sings at a German beer garden, then moves to the poorest side of town, where she shares a tenement with a friend and works in a factory for less than subsistence wages. Disease, poverty, and frequent arsons plague the area. Eventually, the two girls became homeless. Starving, they head downtown to trade their bodies for food. After a week, Susan has a new wardrobe and one hundred dollars cash.

Less than a year has passed since Susan fled Sutherland. Finally able to repay her debt to Spenser, she tracks him down. They begin spending time together, and Susan becomes his mistress. Now understanding that a man of Spenser’s class could not marry her, Susan does not suggest legitimizing their relationship. Tired of newspaper reporting, Spenser decides they should move to New York City, where he can pursue his real calling—writing plays.

The couple circulates freely in New York’s artist community. Spenser, though, cannot sell his plays, and he grows despondent, drinks, and cavorts with other women. Jealous that Susan might seek similar diversions, he keeps her isolated until they eventually part ways. Susan seeks legitimate work and even obtains a high-paying job as a fur model, but when forced to “entertain” clients, she quits. Susan holds many jobs, but never for long, and keeps moving from tenement to tenement as her money runs out. Between jobs, she sells herself for food and rent money. For a while, she is exploited by Freddie Palmer, a politically ambitious young pimp, who constantly threatens to have Susan arrested if she does not prostitute herself and give him her earnings. Eventually, Susan finds the strength to escape.

Susan then encounters Spenser, drunk almost beyond recognition and very sick. While nursing him, Susan meets George Brent, a wealthy playwright who offers her a deal: He will provide Spenser with theater opportunities and pay Susan an allowance if she will become his pupil and learn to be a professional actress. The egotistical writer seeks to mold her into the perfect actress for his plays. When Brent unexpectedly goes to Europe, Susan refuses to continue accepting his money and seeks other employment. Desperate, she visits her old neighborhood and is immediately arrested by a policeman working for Palmer. The pimp gives Susan an ultimatum: She must either agree to be his wife or remain in jail. Susan agrees to accompany Freddie to Europe, where they can anonymously enter polite society. Dining at a posh restaurant before leaving New York, they meet Brent, who questions Susan’s happiness and learns of their impending trip.

Brent follows the couple to Europe and befriends them. Freddie eagerly accepts this opportunity to enter elite society. Brent, however, has other motives and gradually convinces Susan to pursue her acting career in London. Freddie grows increasingly jealous as Susan begins falling in love with Brent. When Brent is called back to New York for a month, Freddie goes with him. After spending only six nights in New York, Freddie returns to Susan alone. A few days later, she learns that Brent has been murdered. Suspecting Freddie has arranged the crime, Susan confronts him. Heartbroken about Brent’s death, Susan fears being on the streets again, but then learns Brent has left her his entire estate. Finally, Susan is free to live her own life without depending on others for money or respectability.

By preventing Susan from participating in proper society, the citizens of Sutherland ironically start her on a path that eventually fulfills their prophecy—that she will follow in her mother’s footsteps. In fact, Susan goes farther than her mother, who had merely loved a man too much to reveal his identity to those who wanted to condemn him.

The Characters

Susan Lenox is a unique character among literature about fallen women. She is forced to sell herself, but she has the physical, moral, and intellectual strength to fight for survival. While most of his contemporaries kept their fallen women down, Phillips allowed Susan to rise back into respectable society. Her character is fully developed, perhaps too fully. Readers see every thought as she contemplates her actions. The novel’s other characters, however, fall more into types—the spoiled boy toying with Susan, the bighearted swindler who befriends her, the roguish, discontented failure, and the generous benefactor who transforms Susan into a lady.

Critical Context

Susan Lenox deserves reading mainly for its unique vision of prostitution through a female character’s perspective. With its descriptions of Cincinnati sweatshops and vermin-infested tenements, the first half of the novel resembles the naturalistic fiction of Dreiser and Norris. However, in the second volume, plot is overshadowed by repeated attacks on double standards, poor housing, worker exploitation, and corrupt government. Like Upton Sinclair, Phillips used his fiction to expose injustice and was consequently labeled a “muckraker.”

Exaggerated fiction of the time such as Reginald Wright Kauffman’s The House of Bondage (1910) espoused the “white slave” myth, the idea that innocent young girls were trapped into prostitution and held against their will by evil pimps and madams. Phillips shows an entirely different view: Susan takes her first downward step because her family and neighbors expect it of her. Later instances of her prostitution are triggered by corrupt employers, poverty, and hunger, and even by altruism when she prostitutes herself to provide for sick friends. For Susan, prostitution is a last resort, into which society periodically forces her. While most “fallen woman” literature shows the heroine falling deeper and deeper into vice and degradation, Susan Lenox sells herself when necessary but rises, takes control of her life, and even prospers enough to live among New York’s elite.

During his lifetime, Phillips was more widely read and respected than Theodore Dreiser, yet today his works are all but ignored. Of his more than twenty novels, only Susan Lenox receives much attention. After seven years of writing and revising what he considered his masterpiece, Phillips was ready to publish it when he met an untimely death, assassinated by a crazed reader that believed Phillips had slandered his sister in an earlier novel. Since Susan Lenox was published posthumously, Phillips did not have editorial control over the final work, and many revisions softened its content. Still, the work addresses difficult issues.

Bibliography

Filler, Louis. Voice of the Democracy: A Critical Biography of David Graham Phillips, Journalist, Novelist, Progressive. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1978. Urges readers to consider Susan Lenox s merits as well as its flaws and excesses.

Marcosson, Isaac F. David Graham Phillips and His Times. New York: Dodd, Mead, 1932. Discusses how Phillips’s experiences in Indiana and Ohio influenced Susan Lenox.

Ravitz, Abe C. David Graham Phillips. New York: Twayne, 1966. Biography and criticism. Discussion of Susan Lenox addresses important themes but oversimplifies the work in terms of other “fallen woman” novels.

Wilson, Christopher P. The Labor of Words: Literary Professionalism in the Progressive Era. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1985. Discusses relationships between journalism, naturalistic fiction, and political muckraking, with a chapter on Phillips.