Genius · Theodore Dreiser

044 - Book 2 - Struggle - Chapter 15

·24 min·2 clips

The narrator distinguishes between transient 'fevers of desire' and Shakespeare's 'marriage of true minds,' which has little sex in it.

Eugene begins in enchantment. He treats every new affection as if it were the whole of happiness, though the pattern should have taught him something by now. Beauty knocks his judgment sideways. A forehead, a lock of hair, a cheek, and petal-like lips stop being features and become private magic. Frida fills the room in his mind. Blackwood is still lovely, but Angela has changed what he can see. He does not hate her, which almost makes it worse. Her nearness starts to feel like pursuit, and her claim on his company tightens around his imagination. Pity turns sour. He wants freedom without hurting anyone, release without paying for it, and desire with no one standing in the doorway asking for an answer. Frida becomes the elsewhere he can stare at. He remembers sunlight, roadsides, boats, lake water, her first entrance into his studio, and her later appearance at Sylvia's. Ordinary life seems spoiled. The old domestic world cannot hold him because every familiar place now points back to the gap between duty and appetite. The passage keeps its eye on him. He is not a clean villain. He is more slippery than that, a man whose self-pity makes betrayal feel almost like suffering. Angela laughs at his superstition, but Eugene keeps reaching for signs. The black dog's howl before a sick man's house seems proved by the death notice. Reason starts losing the argument. Love, guilt, and omen crowd into a mind already eager to treat feeling as fate.

As heard by us

A sharp study of desire, self-deception, and the omens Eugene cannot stop reading into.

Eugene's latest fixation on Frida makes desire look less like romance than a habit of chasing one face after another for happiness that never lasts.

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Why you'd press play

You want infatuation to feel possessive and just slightly haunted.

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