ambitious bellhop to come work at his collar plant in Lycurgus, New York.
Clyde is nearly faint with a sense of vague possibility. In a small upstate town dominated by a few families, even a poor relation of the powerful Griffiths
might stand a chance of social success through that family connection. But
Clyde’s ambition is constrained by the suspicious Gilbert, who places his
cousin at the figurative and literal bottom of the factory, in the shrinking
room. Clyde is forced to socialize, when he has any social life at all, with
coarse working-class girls who are nonetheless arousing. Clyde worries: is
this appropriate behavior for a Griffiths in Lycurgus? His hopes for social
ascent would be destroyed if he acquired a reputation for consorting with
trash. Status trumps sex in Clyde’s hierarchy of needs.
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Hope for ascent arises when Clyde is promoted to head of the stamping
department. This mid-level clerkship signifies a chance to move closer to full
acceptance, even a kind of equality with the Griffiths. But this requires the
disciplining of desire: he is forbidden from forming liaisons with the girls
he is supervising. Still one keeps catching his eye. She is Roberta Alden, at
twenty-three a little older than he, graceful and serious but not solemn, in
flight (like Clyde) from a disappointing home life. Soon they are spending all
their spare time together, in cheap summer resorts like the Starlight Pleasure
Park. (On the carousel they feel “a kind of ecstasy which was out of all
proportion to the fragile, gimcrack scene.”) Their first weeks of lovemaking
are full of “a wild, convulsive pleasure,” marred only by Roberta’s moral
worries ( American Tragedy, 288, 309).
Clyde’s concerns are less moral than social. Even during the early phases of
his affair with Roberta, he fears he might be chained forever to this “factory
girl.” Sondra Finchley, daughter of a Lycurgus textile magnate, appears to
offer a way out. At first she arouses in him only a sense of what it meant to
desire the unattainable – “to wish to win and yet to feel, almost agonizingly
that he was destined not even to win a glance from her.” When she begins
a progressively serious flirtation with him, he is ecstatic. At a dinner dance
sponsored by the local swells, “she slipped a white arm under Clyde’s, and
he felt as though he were slowly but surely being transported to paradise”
( American Tragedy, 312, 225, 334).
The gates of paradise are blocked by Roberta. Pregnant, she demands
marriage. Panicked, Clyde plots murder, staging a fake boating accident on
an Adirondack lake. Though he fails to carry out the plan, Roberta falls into
the lake and Clyde watches her drown, paralyzed by fear and indecision. It
looks like murder to the district attorney and ultimately to the jury, as Clyde’s clumsy attempts at concealment are brought to light. He is convicted and
electrocuted, despite his mother’s desperate campaign to win clemency for
him.
Clyde Griffiths is the culminating portrait in Dreiser’s gallery of desirous
protagonists. His restlessness is an understandable recoil from the cramped
life of his parents. His mother “would never understand his craving for
ease and luxury, for beauty, for love – his particular kind of love that went
with show, pleasure, wealth, position, his eager and immutable aspiration
and desires.” The jury and local townsfolk were even less able to grasp
his predicament. “How could they judge him,” Clyde asks himself, “when
they did not know what his own mental, physical, and spiritual suffering
had been?” ( American Tragedy, 835–836, 839). Here as elsewhere, Dreiser emphasizes the gulf between righteous villagers, resigned to their lot if not
content with it, and a young man who is neither resigned nor content. Clyde’s
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Dreiser and the history of American longing
fate is the fullest expression of the core cultural conflict in Dreiser’s narration of American history: between the custodians of moral stability and those who
would disrupt it with their insistent longings – for status, for luxury, and
for sex.
In Dreiser, the system of sexual propriety derives its power from a combi-
nation of caste prejudices and moral constraints. Jennie Gerhardt encounters
its monolithic force when Lester Kane’s sister discovers their unconventional
ménage, and the Kane family lowers the iron curtain of exclusion. “This fam-
ily was as aloof from her as if it lived on another planet,” Jennie marvels
( Jennie Gerhardt, 230). Unwed mothers, unfaithful spouses, unmarried co-habitants: all become anathema in the eyes of the surveillant moral police –
but only if they are caught. Avoiding exposure in the first place, keeping up
appearances, is the sole hope for offenders against the code. One slip and
you are ruined in this unforgiving social universe.
Sometimes the consequences, as in the fate of Hurstwood or of Jennie
Gerhardt, evoke sympathetic identification. And sometimes they approach
self-parody, as in the fate of Eugene Witla after his pursuit of the eighteen-
year-old Suzanne “Honeypot” Dale has been exposed to his employer. He is
fired, stripped of the things that have become the basis of his identity. “He
had lost this truly magnificent position, $25,000 a year. Where would he get
another like it? Who else – what other company could pay such a salary?
How could he maintain the Riverside drive apartment now, unless he married
Suzanne? How could he have his automobile – his valet?” ( “Genius” , 647).
The unintentional mock-heroism of this soliloquy reveals Dreiser’s tendency
to trivialize tragedy.
In An American Tragedy, the trivialization must have been at least partly deliberate. Dreiser seems to be saying: this is what happens to tragedy in a
country that exalts the pursuit of material happiness while denying to most
people the power of attaining it. From the outset, Clyde is pathetic rather
than tragic, but there is something like classical Nemesis in the swiftness
with which he is identified, tracked down, brought to trial, and convicted.
Everyone, it seems, has noticed the well-dressed, nervous young man and
marked his most insignificant doings – taking four or five resort brochures
from the lobby of the Lycurgus House hotel, or wearing a soft hat without a
lining. Dreiser knew the oppressive surveillance of small town snoops. When
that nosiness combines with populist moral indignation against a young man
who murders his pregnant girlfriend to pursue a debutante, Clyde is doomed.
Everyone is convinced of his guilt, but just to ensure justice, an assistant to the district attorney plants two of Roberta’s hairs in Clyde’s camera. En route to jail for the first time, he is denounced by small town slum girls and young
woodsmen. The district attorney, as he learns the details of the case, seethes
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at “the wretched rich! The idle rich!” And when Clyde finally comes to trial
in the Cataraqui County Courthouse, he is enveloped by an almost palpable
atmosphere of “public contempt and rage” ( American Tragedy, 543, 756).
The entire community is so aflame with unexamined righteousness that it is
impossible not to feel some sympathy with the cowering Clyde.
If there was anything especially American about his tragedy, it was the
conflict between the feeling of fluid possibilities for self-invention and the
ever-present Nemesis of respectability. The sense of possibility was palpa-
ble in Dreiser: he had long believed (at least ambivalently) in the promise
of American life. Lester Kane, Dreiser says, is a natural product of “that
pervading atmosphere of liberty in our national life which is productive of
almost unlimited freedom of thought and action.” This is not merely a priv-
ilege of the wealthy; Jennie’s brother Bass, though the son of a gloomy old
German, is “imbued with American color and energy” and becomes one of
the leading striplings of the town ( Jennie Gerhardt, 133, 10).
But in the end American color and energy create a modernized tyranny
of appearances. Bass himself has a “philosophy of life” based on the belief
that “to succeed one must do something – one must associate, or seem to as-
sociate, with those who were foremost in the world of appearances”( Jennie
Gerhardt, 10). A stiff social code remains in place, even in the supposedly liberated precincts of metropolitan society. Celebrity journalism could be
as sternly moralistic, as insistent on maintaining propriety, as any ministe-
rial zealot had been – albeit in a more sensational and sentimental idiom.
Jennie and Lester are undone by a supposedly sympathetic human interest
story about their forbidden romance; Clyde’s fate is sealed by newspapers
reporting Roberta’s death as the scandal du jour. The failure to keep up appearances still condemns the offender.
From Sister Carrie forward, surfaces reveal almost everything about
Dreiser’s characters. In their social universe, being “good-looking” is as im-
portant to upward mobility as being (outwardly) good. Unsuspected details –
a missing collar button, an unpolished shoe – can undo the ensemble. A