than considered, and it comes from his own past “experience, disappoint-
ments, and hardships” (374, 375). Clyde’s response to Roberta shows that
he’s a natural at sympathy. He projects himself outward to create fellow
feeling and connection with other people.
The problem is that Clyde doesn’t want to live sympathetically. His emotive sympathy is characteristically “of brief duration” (375), and directing
it toward Roberta serves to draw him further into a relationship that he
wants to end. For Clyde, who wants romance without any sort of renunci-
ation, this impulse to generate sentiment has mixed consequences. It draws
women to him (Roberta is attracted “intensely” by this side of Clyde [375],
and Sondra similarly finds his emotional openness appealing), but it also
renders him generally incapable of the decisiveness that would allow him
not only to break up with Roberta, but also to compete aggressively in the
business world his desires lead him towards. Clyde excels at giving sympa-
thy (and receiving it: even on death row, he feels a “lonely dependence” on
his mother and others [821]), but his reflexive sympathy is an inappropriate
response in the market-driven, self-interested world in which he chooses to
compete. Clyde thus stands as a transitional figure, socialized in the old ways but hungry for the new ones.
Clyde fails at both softness and hardness because he oscillates between one
and the other, with the excluded side always sabotaging the one in power.
His dealings with Roberta, which “mingle[] sympathy and opposition” are
a case in point (382). “Why should he care?” thinks Clyde. “He had never
told her he would marry her.” This position is at least plausible, but Clyde
can’t maintain it. When he tries, he feels that “he was a sly and shameless
and cruel person who had taken undue advantage of a girl” (383). But he
can’t maintain this softer position either. In the end, “He could not quite
achieve a discreditable thing . . . without a measure of regret and shame”
(385), and his decision to commit murder is never free of sympathy for his
intended victim.
Clyde does not decide to kill Roberta so much as edge toward the idea,
approaching and retreating from it. As he equivocates, he flashes back and
forth between plotting and “remorse and pity” (451). Even when self-interest
finally wins and Clyde resolves to commit the crime, Dreiser dramatizes his
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mind as a battlefield upon which “a small and routed army [takes] flight
before a major one” (482), an image that maintains a sense of Clyde’s in-
ner division. On the lake at the moment of truth, Clyde inwardly compares
Sondra’s generosity to Roberta’s “asking all,” and he feels a “dark and bitter
resentment” that fuels his accidental blow (492). When Clyde later stands
trial for the consequences of that blow and must explain that it was an
accident, he again fails to organize himself. At the crucial moment of his
testimony when he has to project singleminded innocence, he remains inco-
herently divided, tortured by thoughts of the extent of his guilt. His testi-
mony fails utterly to convince because “in his heart and mind was the crying
knowledge that he had . . . plotted” Roberta’s death (727).
Clyde can’t play a self-renouncing, sympathetic character on the witness
stand because he’s too aware of his own selfishness to pull it off – but con-
versely, he fails as a selfish character precisely because his sympathy for
Roberta weakens him. His feelings of guilt prevent him from generating sym-
pathy on the witness stand and make him doubt whether he deserves any,
but he nonetheless makes and retains sympathetic ties through his ordeal:
with his fellow prisoners, with the Reverend McMillan, and above all with
his mother, who reenters his life after his arrest. Too self-absorbed to carry
through a life of emotional sympathy for others (despite his demonstrated
talent at it), Clyde is also too needy of sympathy and emotional connection
to succeed as either a businessman or a murderer.
The sources of Clyde’s failure stand out most clearly when we look at his
criminal ineptitude. As the prosecutors at his trial show in detail, Clyde the
criminal makes one blunder after another. Not only does he leave his initials
behind wherever he stays with Roberta on the way to Big Bittern lake, he
also hides his camera tripod nearby after he flees. Upon his capture he tells
lies that are easily disproved in court later – at the cost of whatever shreds
of credibility he might have had as a witness. But no mistake weighs more
heavily than Clyde’s decision to save Roberta’s letters to him in a trunk at
his rooming house. Confiscated by the police, these incriminating documents
deliver a decisive blow to Clyde’s chances when the Attorney General reads
them aloud at the trial. Their wrought sadness reduces both the prosecutor
and most of his courtroom audience to tears.24 Even an inexperienced crim-
inal would see the folly attached to keeping the letters (not only Roberta’s,
but also Sondra’s – and even his mother’s earlier correspondence when he
was living under an assumed name while on the run from the Kansas City
auto accident). “If only he had destroyed them!” Clyde thinks to himself
(586). So why didn’t he? Because of a “desire to keep things [that displayed]
a kindness, a tenderness towards him” (600). For sympathy’s sake, in other
words. Clyde needs tangible evidence that he’s connected to other people
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who care about him. His failure as a murderer literally follows from his
wish for sympathetic ties.
In the end, Clyde simply lacks the emotional equipment to be a hard-
boiled murderer. He’s too sensitive to the feelings of others to be able to kill for personal gain, and too acquisitive and class-conscious to live happily as
a home-centered, religious, humbly self-sacrificing wage-earner. Clyde is too
sentimental to act selfishly, and too hard-boiled to act unselfishly.
This amounts to his failure to be a man in the world. Clyde’s struggle
for a balance between sentimental selflessness and rational self-interest is
not only a struggle between old and new, but also one between male- and
female-gendered attitudes. Clyde may be usefully understood in terms of
a nineteenth-century opposition between the masculine standards of the
“Christian Gentleman” (values an American boy would learn primarily from
his mother) and the “Masculine Achiever” (instruction at which fell mainly
to the boy’s father). Masculine achievement, says historian E. Anthony
Rotundo, meant “aggressive action” and economic self-advancement. It also
meant the “restraint of tender or ‘sentimental’ feeling.”25 The problem for
Clyde was that the ideal of the Christian Gentleman came under siege at the
end of the nineteenth century, with new masculine paragons like Theodore
Roosevelt excoriating “feminized” men as threats to American civilization.
In the previous century, sympathy was seen as humanizing men as well as
women, and Clyde’s tenderness would have been held up as a virtue. But
by the twentieth century, such traits in men had become cultural anath-
ema. Male aggression was celebrated, and gender roles – the behaviors that
classified men as men and women as women – became severely proscribed.
Psychologist G. Stanley Hall declared in 1908 that “a teenage boy who is a
perfect gentleman has something the matter with him.”26
Because his father is an ineffectual missionary lacking in “force,” Clyde
never gets the paternal instruction in worldly striving to balance the “ethic
of compassion” his mother so strenuously imparts.27 “The sensitive, retiring
boy,” one writer advised in 1912, “needs encouragement to stand his ground
and fight.”28 In contrast to his cousin Gilbert – a comparison Dreiser encour-
ages by giving the two men a strong physical resemblance – Clyde lacks a
strong paternal role model. While Samuel Griffiths impresses his son Gilbert
with his power and fairminded decisiveness (“his father was a man, really,”
he marvels [616]), Clyde’s father Asa “never understood” him (782). Gilbert
dominates Clyde with the “command and authority” he learned from his fa-
ther (223). Clyde, like his father, is consistently figured as “soft” and “easy”
(221, 226, 305).
Dreiser renders Clyde again and again in feminine terms. For example,
Clyde, who is attracted to Sondra’s independence and “daring” (721), courts
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her by displaying a “submissiveness, that of the slave for the master.” Though
she likes this treatment, Sondra also resents it because “she preferred to be
mastered rather than to master” (380). The conventionality of these images –
aggressive male meant to pursue passive female – registers some funda-
mental changes in American masculinity that took hold during the fin-de-
siècle period. Cultural historian Michael Kimmel describes the replacement
of “manhood” (an inner quality) by “masculinity” – a set of traits relent-
lessly opposed to the feminine which had to be “constantly demonstrated.”29
The result was what historian Peter N. Stearns calls “the fragility of early