SOURCE: "Don Juans and 'Dancing Dogs': A Note on Dreiser's A Gallery of Women," in Indian Journal of American Studies, Vol. 13, No. 2, July, 1983, pp. 147-55.

In the following essay, Vinoda suggests that Dreiser's portrayal of women in A Gallery of Women is far from being as woman-affirming as other critics have argued, presenting women primarily as physical objects and defining them mainly in terms of their relationships with men.

American society was not ready to receive Dreiser's Sister Carrie (1900) and Jennie Gerhardt (1911) when they appeared, since the portraits of women presented in them were far ahead of the times: the female protagonists in them were shown to adopt unconventional social means in their struggle for success and fulfilment. As F. O. Matthiessen has argued [in "A Picture of Conditions," Sister Carrie, 1970], contrary to the prevailing ideology concerning projection of women in fiction, Dreiser created characters who deserved punishment...