Amanda Jones had never had dreams of anything more exotic than the farm, the back forty, cows, and tending chickens. She was a good girl, a Presbyterian, a pretty milkmaid, and a dutiful daughter, and only through a lucky break and homegrown gumption did she cause a stir in the corridors of Washington.
Carrie Underwood - the Sister Carrie of Theodore Dreiser's novel of the same name - was a homespun girl with ambition, and she left her small rural community to find her fortune in Chicago. By chance, she was noticed by a traveling salesman - a man polished, charming, and with a way with women. He prided himself on his dapperness, his attentiveness, and his sincere love of women. He had had many lovers in his day all of whom he treated well but left when greener pastures appeared.
Charles Drouet approached the young Carrie and spoke to her about Chicago, the prairie, and the luminous life he led in the big city. Carrie, a simple farmgirl without pretense or worldliness is attracted to the man, his clothes, his manner, and his suave but respectful demeanor. She has been warned enough about the temptations of the big city but she had an innate sense of risk and reward, the calculus of life the poor folk of her town never had the opportunity to apply; and although she suspected Drouet of desirous intentions, she was willing to listen.
The story of Sister Carrie is one of sense, sensibility, confidence, and ambition - how a young innocent from the farm negotiates the demanding world of the city, its opportunists and those offering opportunity, calculates investment and return and goes on to become a theatrical star.
And so it was that Amanda met Isaiah Plummer at the farmers' market in Chillicothe - she there to sell fresh milk from the family's prize Guernseys and he with nothing to do but wander on a sunny May morning until lunchtime with colleagues from the Midlands Bank and Trust where he was a financial advisor recruited from Cleveland to provide high-priced advice on positioning and market share.
The same chemistry between the fictional Carrie and Drouet - pursuit and eager complicity - characterized the meeting of Plummer and Amanda. He lingered, she smiled. He offered, she accepted. Promises were made and kept and Amanda was soon companionable company to the well-to-do banker.
Dreiser was a Naturalist who believed in the ineluctability of human nature and the inescapability of environmental influences. Will and desire were simply catalysts, necessary to set off the chain reaction of cause and effect; and so the story of Sister Carrie is one as much of circumstance and variables as it is determination.
Amanda Jones was a simple girl of modest means but sharp intelligence and with a gift of innate savvy and moral diffidence. She like Carrie understood that right and wrong are conditional, that the balance between them tilts one way then the other, and the job of the individual for whom survival is paramount, is to figure out how to tip the scales to advantage.
Plummer was indeed a sexual opportunist and saw in the pretty Amanda a delectable prize, easy for the asking, and like the fictional Drouet was neither abusive or demanding. He was simply a man who loved women, who saw opportunity everywhere, and who had the confidence to act upon his instincts.
The relationship, however, was more than incidental; and the more time that Plummer spent with the young farm girl, the fonder of her he became. Would she consider coming to Cleveland? He would help her get settled, secure a position for her at the bank, and ease her way into life in the big city. There were no strings attached, just courtesy and good will.
She accepted without reservation, said goodbye to her family and friends, and - again like Carrie - headed off by train to the big city.
There is in some women an uncanny sense of purpose. If life was a matter of circumstance, innateness, and possibility, then all was largely determined. She liked Plummer well enough, and was savvy and morally diffident enough to accept the sexual part of the relationship without demurral or complaint. Moreover the relationship helped clarify and frame the very qualities that so attracted Plummer to her.
She saw the way men looked at her and noticed the deference paid to her by her female co-workers. She was irreducibly woman, and despite the cant and canon of those who insisted on 'the inner self', she knew that her femininity - her femaleness - was what would govern her and others.
It wasn't long before Cleveland, the bank, and Isaiah Plummer faded in interest and possibility. She had come into her own. In a short, compressed academic program both in-person and virtual, she had completed an undergraduate degree in economics and was on her way to an advanced degree. She had moved up in the bank and had become a loan officer and then financial advisor. Plummer had moved on, and there was nothing more holding her in place.
Once again, Naturalist circumstance - another chance meeting of an important Ohio politician, a member of the state legislature and slated for national office. His picture had often been in the paper, for he had announced his affiliation with Democratic Socialism - a philosophy which, based on the progressive principles of Lafollette, Gompers, and Brandeis but expanded to include the even more important tenets of diversity, equity, and inclusion and a determined policy to redistribute the unconscionable concentration of wealth in the country.
Blanton Pierce was a man on the way up, on no one's coattails, a political force in his own right and someone to be reckoned with. More importantly, he had his eye on Amanda Jones and was stricken with the same desire as Isaiah Plummer and more.
Men are inconsolable romantics, Amanda had learned, never happy with what they had, always assuming that the grass was always greener somewhere else and that the future held limitless opportunities of love and affection. The heroines of Shakespeare's Comedies - Rosalind, Viola, Portia, and others - all ran rings around their besotted suitors who fell over themselves in love.
And so it was with Blanton Pierce. Politicians whose bread and butter is chicanery - or at least deft marketing - were not supposed to have a soft, vulnerable, open side; and Pierce was an open book when it came to Amanda Jones. There was something irresistible about her - a combination of sweetness, physical beauty, and sexual allure that was as potent as any scented flower - and even an ambitious, decidedly morally diffident and fatefully ambitious politician like Pierce could not resist.
A woman like Amanda was not content to simply be a woman. She wanted to play the lyre until her victim was charmed, seduced, and hers. Her libretto was one of social justice, her score filled with socialist staccato and crescendo, her orchestration jubilant. He had found a soulmate, and she another stepping stone, another rung on the ladder.
When he moved his offices to Washington to prepare for a Congressional bid, he invited Amanda to join his team. He would see that she was settled comfortably, met the right people, and led a privileged life. He asked nothing from her but her consideration, affection, and perhaps later, love.
Sex has a way of addling the most principled men, and under the baton of Amanda Jones the symphony was re-written. Like Hedda Gabler, Henrik Ibsen's willful, Nietzschean character in the play of the same name, the only validation of life in a meaningless world is the expression of pure will; and the complete control of an other is its best moment.
Amanda, never forgetting her humble, American originalist upbringing, the value of hard work, enterprise, self-sustaining independence, patriotism, and family, felt that the canon of Blanton Pierce was nothing more than a febrile dream - fantastical lines from a political A Children's Garden of Verse, marvelously naive idolatry of an imagined past - and she would unravel, disassemble, and dismiss it in turn.
He couldn't wait to see her after a tiring day defending his increasingly weakened positions at progressive caucuses and gatherings. He stumbled up the stairs to her Dupont Circle townhouse, took her in his arms and said he loved her more than the world itself.
The bait had been taken, swallowed hook, line, and sinker; and all that was left was to reel him in. 'Tell e what to do', he implored, and she as comforting and consoling as ever, told him that he was a remarkable man, a champion, and a future President; but that he had to come to his senses, listen to reason, and come with her to the farm.
Of course it would be a confabulated fantasy of its own to assume that a girl like Amanda was the only reason that Pierce fell off the rails and was dismissed from consideration for high progressive office. It was not her native conservatism foundational values that did the trick, it was the sex.
As Nathan Zuckerman, friend of Coleman Silk in Phillip Roth's The Human Stain says when told of the older man's affair with a much younger woman, 'It's all about the sex, isn't it?', that was the inescapable conclusion regarding Pierce's fall from grace. Amanda's words had not pushed him over the edge, it was her marvelously adept, practiced, seduction - more enticing and irresistible than any beauty of a pasha's harem.
Amanda loved being a woman, heart, soul, and body. She was Cleopatra, Nefertiti, Venus de Milo, Artemis, one of many in the pantheon of strong women.
Blanton Pierce was never heard from again. His spirit had been broken, he was the embodiment of weltschmerz. He was a double victim - victim of the sodden, reproachable, fantastical propositions of socialism and of the indescribably potent will of a farmgirl.
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