not only by sexual appetite and sexual carelessness, but also by his parents’
religious abstemiousness. The only other true believers, the Aldens and the
Reverend McMillan, are blasted by the events of the story. Dreiser especially
wants us to understand that McMillan’s faith is shaken. His doubts turn him
“gray and weary [and] weak” after Clyde dies (852); Dreiser even has him
commit suicide in an earlier draft of the novel.39
Tracking Dreiser’s use of yielding is therefore to track the central concerns
of An American Tragedy: the changing definitions of manhood and wom-
anhood, the origins of sentimental virtue and sentimental power – and the
world of “force” and competition that has supplanted them. Dreiser weaves
a three-way thematic web: sexual seduction is tied to murder, murder to
religion, and religion to seduction – all through the language and action of
“yielding.” By juxtaposing the three, Dreiser suggests that they all answer
to the conventions of a sentimental masterplot that is inadequate in the new
world it’s set in. As the new hard-boiled writers might say, yielding is for
saps.
An American Tragedy was published in December, 1925 to glowing reviews and vibrant sales. Even at a pricy five dollars, the novel became a bestseller
and a literary event. The book appeared at a time when hard-boiled fic-
tion was taking shape in pulp magazines like Black Mask before its literary emergence at the end of the decade in the novels of Dashiell Hammett
and his contemporaries. It is not known whether Dreiser read Hammett,
Carroll John Daly, James M. Cain, and the other pioneers of the new genre,
but it seems likely that they noticed Dreiser’s much-feted masterpiece. An
American Tragedy may not be a hard-boiled novel, but the debate it de-
picts between self-interest and selflessness is the same one that animates this new American literature of crime. The origins of a fictional murderer named
Clyde Griffiths are also those of an American genre whose legacy persists to
this day.
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l e o n a r d c as s u to
An American Tragedy thus stands as a gateway book pointing the way
to the hard-boiled – but more important, it shows the unlikely sentimental
sources of the hard-boiled attitude. And perhaps most important of all, the
novel illustrates the social changes that sparked the shift from one to the
other. Both sentimental and hard-boiled fiction elaborated on the division
between home and the marketplace in the United States; both cast themselves
as critical reflections on these spheres. In An American Tragedy, Dreiser shows these two literatures to be inextricably intertwined. He uses Clyde
Griffiths to illustrate how American aspirations – both domestic and eco-
nomic, both sentimental and hard-boiled – combine to produce American
criminal behavior. Dreiser stands transfixed by the fatal struggle to form
relational ties. His stories pay tribute to this idealistic impulse as they also acknowledge the forces of the new world that grind it down. This conflict
plays out across a century of American crime stories, and it’s still going
strong.
N O T E S
1 Richard Lingeman, Theodore Dreiser: An American Journey 1908–1945 (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1990), pp. 255–256. The friendship between Mencken
and Dreiser was not in good shape at this point – it had broken down before
1920 and was not fully mended until 1934 – but cordial relations usually prevailed between them.
2 Ellen Moers, Two Dreisers (New York: Viking Press, 1969), p. viii.
3 See, for example, Sandy Petrey, “The Language of Realism, the Language of False Consciousness: A Reading of Sister Carrie,” Novel 10.2 (1977): 101–113.
4 Theodore Dreiser, Free and Other Stories (1918; reprinted in New York: Modern Library, 1971), p. 84. “Nigger Jeff” was originally published in Ainslee’s magazine in 1901.
5 Franklin Booth, quoted by Dorothy Dudley, Forgotten Frontiers: Dreiser and the Land of the Free (1932; reprinted in New York: AMS Press, 1970), p. 409.
6 Theodore Dreiser, The Financier (1912, 1927; reprinted in New York: Signet Classics, 1967), p. 7; Dawn (1931; reprinted in New York: Fawcett World Library, 1965), p. 12; Jennie Gerhardt (1911), ed. James L. W. West III (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1992), p. 194.
7 See Karen Halttunen, Murder Most Foul: The Killer and the American Gothic Imagination (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998).
8 For some specific examples of these changes, see the introduction to this volume.
9 See, for example, Nancy Cott, The Bonds of Womanhood: Women’s Sphere in New England, 1780–1835 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977). For a male perspective on these changes, see E. Anthony Rotundo, American Manhood: Transformations in Masculinity from the Revolution to the Modern Era (New York: Basic Books, 1993), pp. 22–30; Michael Kimmel, Manhood in America: A Cultural
History (New York: Free Press, 1996), chapter 2. Recent scholarship (such as the special issue of American Literature [70.3 (September, 1998), ed. Cathy Davidson]
210
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entitled No More Separate Spheres! ) has exposed some of the limitations of the metaphor of separate spheres, but these salutary developments should not lead
us to underestimate the ideological power of the idea. Antebellum American so-
ciety turns out to have been less “separate” than scholars have thought, and early twentieth-century American society even less so – but the changes in American
masculinity that I will examine later in this essay nevertheless draw their assumptions from the model of separate spheres.
10 Joanne Dobson, “Reclaiming Sentimental Literature,” American Literature 69.2
(June, 1997): 266, 267. The sentimental heroine, says Nina Baym, must accept,
“as one’s basic relation to another, obligation rather than exploitation, doing another good rather than doing him in” ( Woman’s Fiction [2nd edn., Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1993], p. 49).
11 The phrase “semi-welfare state” was coined by Michael Katz. See In the Shadow of the Poorhouse: A Social History of Welfare in America (New York: Basic Books, 1986).
12 Jacqueline Shaw Lowell, Public Relief and Private Charity (1884), qtd in Katz, Poorhouse, p. 71. See also Schwartz, Fighting Poverty With Virtue: Moral Reform and America’s Urban Poor, 1825–2000 (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2000).
13 See Michael Katz, “The Urban ‘Underclass’ as a Metaphor of Social Transformation,” introduction to Michael Katz, ed., The “Underclass” Debate: Views From History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), p. 7.
14 In Buck v. Bell, a notorious 1927 legal case with clear relevance to the plot of An American Tragedy, the United States Supreme Court upheld the enforced steril-ization of Carrie Buck on the grounds that she was, in the words of Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, “a feeble-minded white woman . . . [who] is the daughter of
a feeble-minded mother, and the mother of an illegitimate feeble-minded child.”
“Three generations of imbeciles,” Holmes declared, “are enough.” But later in-
vestigators have found that Buck was not mentally disabled at all: rather, she was poor, pregnant, and unmarried – like Dreiser’s Roberta Alden – and her daughter proved to possess at least average intelligence. Buck’s unfortunate fate gives some idea of what Roberta (and in a different way, Clyde) were up against in Dreiser’s story. For a summary of the cruelties of this case that have been discovered since it was decided, see Stephen Jay Gould, “Carrie Buck’s Daughter.” The Flamingo’s Smile: Reflections in Natural History (New York: W. W. Norton and Co., 1985), quotations at pp. 311, 310.
15 Victorian morals shaped a set of confining expectations of the poor which Dreiser reproduces in An American Tragedy. The Griffiths factory in Lycurgus will hire no “bachelor girls” (247), for example.
16 The federal government, President Roosevelt announced in 1934, had to replace the “interdependence of members of families upon each other and of the families within a small community upon each other,” because the conditions no longer
existed that had made this family-based organization possible. The government
therefore had a “plain duty to provide for that security upon which welfare
depends” (quoted in David Kennedy, Freedom From Fear: The American People
in Depression and War [New York: Oxford University Press, 1999], pp. 245, 246). Dreiser describes Clyde in An American Tragedy as lacking “social security”
(329). Though he refers here to Clyde’s shaky position in Lycurgus high society, 211
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the coincidental phrasing is worth remarking upon. Social Security became law
in 1935; An American Tragedy illustrates the lives and fears of the poor before the government stepped in to provide what the family once did.
17 Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759). Other English theorists on the subject during this period include David Hume and Francis Hutchinson.
See John Mullan, Sentiment and Sociability: The Language of Feeling in the
Eighteenth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988).
18 See Lawrence Hussman, Dreiser and his Fiction: A Twentieth-Century Quest (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1980).
19 Dreiser, Jennie Gerhardt, p. 16.
20 Theodore Dreiser, Twelve Men, ed. Robert Coltrane (1919; reprinted by University of Pennsylvania Press, 1998), p. 54.