Don't mistake me; we have here no maudlin tales
of seduced maidens. Seduction, in truth, is far from tragedy for either
Jennie or Carrie. The gain of each, until the actual event has been left
behind and obliterated by experiences more salient and poignant, is
greater than her loss, and that gain is to the soul as well as to the
creature. With the rise from want to security, from fear to ease, comes
an awakening of the finer perceptions, a widening of the sympathies, a
gradual unfolding of the delicate flower called personality, an
increased capacity for loving and living. But with all this, and as a
part of it, there comes, too, an increased capacity for suffering--and
so in the end, when love slips away and the empty years stretch before,
it is the awakened and supersentient woman that pays for the folly of
the groping, bewildered girl. The tragedy of Carrie and Jennie, in
brief, is not that they are degraded, but that they are lifted up, not
that they go to the gutter, but that they escape the gutter and glimpse
the stars.
But if the two stories are thus variations upon the same sombre theme,
if each starts from the same place and arrives at the same dark goal, if
each shows a woman heartened by the same hopes and tortured by the same
agonies, there is still a vast difference between them, and that
difference is the measure of the author's progress in his craft during
the eleven years between 1900 and 1911.
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