High Moral Values of The Heroine in Theodore Dreiser’s Novel “Jennie Gerhardt”

This piece explores the moral integrity and spiritual resilience of Jennie Gerhardt, the protagonist of Theodore Dreiser’s novel Jennie Gerhardt. The study approaches Jennie’s empathy, self-sacrifice, maternal devotion and moral endurance through the lenses of realism, naturalism and feminist literary criticism. Despite the social condemnation and economic hardship they suffer, Jennie manages to be both ethically strong-willed and emotionally sincere. According to this article, Dreiser secures a morally ascendant image of Jennie as the inwardly noble heroine who reveals the hypocrisy of early twentieth-century American society.