Through “the rose window of the west”: Nostalgia, Gothicism, and the Imaginary in Theodore Dreiser’s A Hoosier Holiday

Abstract

Through “the rose window of the west”Nostalgia, Gothicism, and the Imaginary in Theodore Dreiser’s A Hoosier Holiday Donna Packer-Kinlaw (bio) In August 1915, Theodore Dreiser traveled with fellow Hoosier, Franklin Booth, from New York to Indiana. For Dreiser, the journey was long overdue. In a February 1916 letter to H. L. Mencken, Dreiser confesses that this was something “which I have been wanting to do for years—a sort of native heath, back home—here I once spent my boyhoods happy days stunt, only in this case I have used it as a means of sizing up the middle west and interpreting American character as well as tossing in a little personal history” (Dreiser-Mencken Letters 218–19). The resulting text, A Hoosier Holiday, conveys Dreiser’s assessment of America at a time of dramatic cultural change and narrates a psychological journey through time and space, and even into memory. It is that bit of “personal history” and the emotional impact of that experience that is at issue in this essay, for A Hoosier Holiday provides a unique opportunity to examine the nostalgic motives for Dreiser’s return to his boyhood home as well as the psychological pain that resulted from reentering that lost world of his youth. The pilgrimage back to Indiana and his travel narrative were always personal. Dreiser had been absent from his native state for twenty-six years and had not seen Terre Haute, the city where he was born, since he was seven years old. It was a long-awaited return, and, in A Hoosier Holiday, he confesses that “it had been one of my dearly cherished ideas that some day, when I had the time and the money to spare, I was going to pay a return visit to Indiana” (15). Eager to reclaim his “boyhood mood,” Dreiser sought to resituate himself in the memories and physical spaces of his past (330). However, instead of taking him back to a place of comfort and easy reminiscing, his uncanny journey exposes the difficulty of bridging the gap between memory and lived experience and indicates the complexity [End Page 25] of nostalgia and the hazards that it poses to one’s sense of self. As Dreiser struggled to negotiate twentieth-century scenes with his nineteenth-century memories, he battled feelings of deracination and loss. Ultimately, the return shattered his sentimental illusions of recapturing his boyhood mood and left him in a space of psychological homelessness. Scholarship on A Hoosier Holiday has primarily emphasized Dreiser’s observations from the road and his engagement with the nation’s infrastructure as well as its social and physical landscapes. Andrew Gross and Gary Totten have offered analyses of Dreiser’s views on democracy, consumer culture, and the visual elements of road travel, but their discussions largely overlook the psychological reasons for or the emotional impacts of Dreiser’s return to Indiana and the personal landmarks of his youth.1 Andrew Vogel rightly posits that “Dreiser assiduously aimed to track and record how the journey was impacting him psychologically” (147), but his focus on “the significance of automobile travel at a decisive historical moment” (146) also glosses over Dreiser’s engagement with the sites of his personal past. James E. Dobson has offered the most comprehensive discussion of the psychological effects of Dreiser’s return to date. Referring to the trip as “a homecoming journey” taken “to rediscover his origins and to measure the temporal distance between past and present,” Dobson draws much-needed attention to both the motives for and the consequences of Dreiser’s return (64). Dobson is also the first to consider the role of nostalgia in the journey, but as one small part of a much broader discussion of Dreiser’s concerns with temporality and modernity, that discussion is rather limited. My essay builds on the work of these scholars, for they all acknowledge Dreiser’s nostalgia, but, in the end, they essentially bypass it as they turn to Dreiser’s uneasy relationship with modernity. It is time to shift gears and thoroughly analyze Dreiser’s nostalgic tendencies, to comprehend how nostalgia distorted Dreiser’s memories and even served as a means of repressing...