the government in charge of the social welfare once provided by families,
completing a transformation that began when the city became the economic
center of a newly industrialized United States.16
Clyde Griffiths embodies the division between nineteenth-century family-
and faith-based morality and the commercial acquisitiveness of America’s
new commercial, consumeristic age. In his creation of Clyde’s divided char-
acter, Dreiser suspends sentimental self-effacement opposite self-interested
murder, and their pairing lies at the center of a detailed commentary on the
industrialized mass culture that had gained ascendance in the United States
by the early twentieth century.
Key to this commentary is Dreiser’s work with sympathy as both a device
and an idea. Adam Smith describes sympathy as the effort to put yourself
in another person’s place – and he points out that the effort requires an act
of imagination. To sympathize, you literally imagine yourself as someone
else. This forms the basis of what Smith calls “fellow feeling.” A major
question debated by Smith and other moral philosophers of the eighteenth
century was whether fellow feeling was an adequate basis for social living.
English thinkers were skeptical about the possibility of sympathy to serve
as a foundation for wider social ties, but in the United States it was another
story.17 Sympathy provided the foundation for nineteenth-century American
sentimental fiction, which argued in effect that individual sympathy could
indeed form the basis for enduring, faith-based social connections among
groups of people. One might say that the project of American sentimental
fiction was to provide a sound communal basis for sympathy – and it did
this by locating sympathy as a domestic family virtue whose benefits ramify
outward to take in the larger community.
For Dreiser, the conflict between self-sacrifice and self-interest can lead to
crime. He explored the opposition between duty and desire throughout his
career, tracing it to different outcomes.18 His most in-depth look at it comes
in his second novel, Jennie Gerhardt (1911), which centers on a character whose self-sacrificing nature appears as an “anomaly” even in the author’s
eyes.19 But in his sketch, “A Doer of the Word,” Dreiser takes his experimen-
tation with selflessness to the outer limits. “Doer” profiles Charlie Potter, a completely selfless character. An “ordinary man” distinguished only by a
Christlike serenity, he is completely happy to give away everything he’s got.
So unconflicted that he seems incomplete, Charlie is a perfected version of
a character from a sentimental novel. But sentimental heroines usually have
to work hard to reach this state; Charlie displays no inner struggle, and so
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comes across more as a fantasy than a real person. In a world where “all the
misery is in the lack of sympathy one with another,” Charlie supplies what’s
missing: he is the implausible embodiment of pure sympathy.20
It’s likewise difficult to imagine pure self-interest, for it runs counter to
every assumption behind social living. Dreiser created avaricious characters
like the tycoon Frank Cowperwood (whose repeated motto is “I satisfy my-
self”) but even Cowperwood acknowledges his connection and responsibility
to other people. For Dreiser, pure self-interest is literally insane – like the unrestrained murderer Isadore in The Hand of the Potter, who must gratify his urges for young girls because he “can’t help it.”21 We can easily accept
characters like Isadore in today’s age of serial killer stories, but we can’t
imagine them as functioning members of society. Likewise, Charlie Potter
may be understood only as a kind of Mother Teresa figure – an impossibly
good man.
Dreiser published these drastic portraits of Charlie and Isadore in 1919,
as he was gearing up to write An American Tragedy.22 Together, they suggest that people live in between the extremes, struggling to reconcile self-interest and self-effacement. That struggle is the story of An American Tragedy, with Clyde as an everyman seeking a balance between them. But as the novel
shows, that balance is elusive in a country that was changing so fast, expos-
ing as never before the conflicts between religious morality and predatory
capitalism – conflicts more easily elided before the age of the factory and the industrial city. Suspended between old and new ways, Clyde swings back
and forth between them. This vacillation finally dooms him.
When we first meet Clyde, he’s already seesawing between self-interest
and obligation to others. The novel’s opening scene shows him performing
his family duty by standing on a Kansas City street singing hymns with
his parents, but he’s so obviously uncomfortable doing this that an observer
remarks that he “don’t wanta be here.”23 Dreiser gradually shows that Clyde
is deeply conscious of moral strictures, but as his visit to a bordello shows,
he’s also willing to overlook them in search of a good time. Afterwards,
though, he thinks of his parents’ opinions of such activity and decides that
it was “degrading and sinful” – but then again, also possessing a “pagan
beauty” pleasurable to recall (67). When Clyde later courts the greedy and
superficial Hortense Briggs, he knows that he’ll have to buy her favor. He
and Hortense share the understanding that if Clyde were to buy her the
fur jacket she covets, she would sleep with him by way of payment. Before
this can happen, Clyde and Hortense find themselves passengers in a fatal
auto accident that will force Clyde to flee town. But before he runs, Clyde
distinguishes himself. Staying at the scene of the crash to help his injured
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friends, he puts their welfare ahead of his own. He waits until the last possible instant to escape, and is almost caught by the police. Hortense, by contrast,
obsesses that her good looks may have been harmed and bolts immediately.
Clyde’s treatment of his sister Esta similarly illustrates his capacity for
fellow feeling, together with his ambivalence. When Esta is seduced and
abandoned by a “masher” (15) and left pregnant, Clyde visits her secretly.
But when his mother asks him for money to give to Esta, Clyde pleads poverty
because he wants to spend his savings on Hortense. Once committed, the
deception makes him feel “shameful” and “low, really mean” (120). Dreiser
takes pains to show that Clyde’s conscience troubles him, and even motivates
him – but it does so only erratically. Clyde emerges from Book One of the
novel as a decidedly imperfect, clearly superficial, but still basically decent member of an acquisitive society.
After a period of drifting following the auto accident, Clyde reappears in
Book Two as a more ambitious character, but also a more vulnerable one.
More easily tempted by material wealth, he is also more emotionally isolated.
Separated from his immediate family in Kansas City, Clyde attunes himself to
the spirit of the industrial age, when family-based sympathy no longer binds
people in place as it once did. That he works in a factory is significant: he
enters literally into the industrial workings of a new Griffiths family, trading in the uxorious, religious offshoot of the clan for the patriarchal, industrial branch headed by his father’s brother Samuel in Lycurgus, New York.
One might say that Clyde changes spheres here, from the domestic to the
economic. He leaves his parents’ religious, sympathetic home and hearth for
the commercial world of the factory, where every man is out for himself.
Following his desires, Clyde becomes a market-driven free agent – or more
accurately, an eager resident of a world which encourages him to become
one. He tries hard to meet the requirements of this world, but the Lycurgus
Griffiths family isolates him; Clyde goes from being a boy with a family he
wants to escape, to a young man who wants to be embraced by a new family
who won’t accept him. Perhaps not surprisingly, it is in this chilly social and family environment that Clyde – in his desperate effort to fit in – starts to
plot a murder for personal advancement.
Clyde’s motive for murder is nothing if not hard-boiled: he wants Roberta
out of the way for the sake of love and money offered by the glamorous
Sondra Finchley. But even before he impregnates Roberta, Clyde shows a
curious inability to cut her out of his life, even though his efforts at social climbing have already started to pay off. Clyde can’t seem to follow through
with any unkindness toward Roberta. When he behaves cruelly toward her,
he invariably doubles back to soothe her, with the result that she depends
on him more than before.
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When he comforts Roberta, Clyde shows a “strain of tenderness” that
comes from his softer side (374). Indeed, Dreiser describes his manner as
“tender and gentle as that of a mother with a baby” (374) – the archetypal
sentimental tie. Clyde keeps Roberta attached to him even though it doesn’t
serve his self-interest to do so. In fact, Roberta becomes distraught precisely because Clyde alternately soothes her and then treats her with disdain. Instead, Clyde’s “sympathy” (Dreiser uses the word often) is more reflexive