a n a m e r i c a n t r a g e d y
3 1 1
terparts in Lycurgus and Cortland, they are in no way free from the influence
of the American Dream. In fact, their poverty makes them more vulnera-
ble to this great fiction than the New York Gri‹thses or Gillettes, who at
least realize that their success depends on the existence of the poor. More-
over, Dreiser realized from the other cases he had studied, which had in-
volved rich murderers rather than poor ones, that the Dream hounded all
Americans into improving their status, no matter how high it already was.
Just as Roberta looks to Clyde to lift her up socially, Sondra looks to Gilbert
to improve her status, and he in turn resists it because the Gri‹ths Collar
Factory is superior in wealth and status to her family’s Finchley Electric
Sweeper Company.27 Dreiser, because of his own background, could draw
Roberta much better than Sondra. Not only could he not empathize with
rich people, but the depiction of Sondra was probably an extension of one
of the many mental sketches he made of the starlets competing with He-
len for movie stardom.
Dreiser followed his instincts and the script of the actual murder, but the
greatest pathos of the novel also came out of his past, for the protagonist
is in part Theodore Dreiser, the kid who grew up in Indiana and came east;
the youngster whose family knew Jimmie Bulger, who had gone to the gal-
lows at Sing Sing under the name of “Whitey Sullivan”; and the young man
in Chicago who stole twenty-five dollars for an overcoat. Any one of his
friends or brothers could have taken the tragic turn that Clyde follows—
Paul, Rome, even Al, who was out of contact with most family members
after 1906.28 As Dreiser wrote his novel, he was reminded of the potential
closeness at one time in his family life to Clyde’s fate. His sixty-one-year-
old sibling Emma, the prototype “sister” for Sister Carrie who had gone oª
with the thief Hopkins, now lived nearby in Greenwich Village in rather
depressed and depressing circumstances. Her daughter Gertrude, now a
woman in her early thirties, had been seriously ill for a time and was still
single. Both Mame and Sylvia had become pregnant out of wedlock. There
were any number of Robertas “trifling with fire and perhaps social disgrace”
in Dreiser’s foreground to both Sister Carrie and An American Tragedy. 29
Since the newspaper reports did not give him much information about
Gillette’s early background, Dreiser—as he had with Cowperwood—
turned to his own life to fill in the details. He relied upon the memory of
his own fanatically religious father, who like Asa Gri‹ths was otherwise
helpless to take care of his family. He placed the Gri‹ths family first in
Kansas City— one of the few major American metropolises Dreiser had
never visited, for the last impression he wanted to give in his novel based
a n a m e r i c a n t r a g e d y
3 1 2
so securely on fact was a definite sense of place. Clyde could and did come
from any place in America. “Dusk— of a summer night,” the now famous
opening reads. It is a dreamlike entry into a tragedy that was peculiarly
American. No one falls from a high place as in the classical definition of
tragedy; instead he falls from or out of a dream, the American one based
upon Benjamin Franklin’s rags-to-riches story in his Autobiography. In spite
of Emerson’s eªort to realign that dream with the higher reality of spiri-
tual fulfillment, it is no wonder that by the hedonistic 1920s not only
Dreiser but Fitzgerald inverted this dream into the tragedy that was too
often inevitable.
More specifically, Clyde Gri‹ths of Book I is also a clear reflection of
Theodore Dreiser in Dawn. Both are daydreamers who have “an abnormal
interest in girls” and at the same time are exceedingly shy with them. They
both have mothers who are stronger than the boys’ fathers. Indeed, Dreiser
introduces his obsession with mother love through phraseology reminis-
cent of Paul Dresser’s nostalgic songs. On the windows of the “Door of
Hope” that fronts the Gri‹thses’ mission in Kansas City, its congregants
are asked, “How Long Since You Wrote to Mother?” Esta’s running away
with a man and returning alone pregnant, as noted, found several exam-
ples in Dreiser’s family. In fact, Clyde’s insensitivity to his sister’s plight
reflects Dreiser’s own shame and attempts to distance himself from such
family crises. In both cases, these pregnancies threaten their dreams of suc-
cess and wealth. And Dreiser’s own insensitivity to the demands of the
women in his current life suggests Clyde’s stubborn resistance of Roberta
after he becomes involved with Sondra.
At the time he first undertook An American Tragedy, Dreiser was also
working on—indeed almost finishing—the fifteen sketches for A Gallery
of Women. 30 Here the female protagonist is not the dependent lover or long-
suªering mother, but the American woman of the early twentieth century
who dares to ignore the conventions of marriage and motherhood in order
to realize her personal or professional ambitions. Most fail because of their
defiant or proto-feminist lifestyles. He was then also corresponding with
Marion Bloom, another female aspirant in a male world who would, as al-
ready noted, appear in one of the Gallery sketches as a minor character. She
was now living in Washington and married to Lou Maritzer, who later aban-
doned her as abruptly as Hans Kubitz had deserted her sister Estelle.
Curiously, as Mencken became Estelle’s personal correspondent, Marion
tried to become Dreiser’s. Although he was not taken in by Marion’s chatty
letters, which exuded the same pagan sensuality that had once charmed
a n a m e r i c a n t r a g e d y
3 1 3
Mencken, he did visit her and Lou in the fall of 1923. Her flirtations may
have suggested the character of Hortense Briggs in Book I of the novel, the
“crude shop girl” who tries to seduce Clyde into buying her an expensive
coat. Her depiction—a near caricature of the femme fatale—is one of the
gems of character portraiture in the novel and also reflects the posing and
primping of Dreiser’s sisters. When Clyde as a bellhop at the Green-David-
son becomes intoxicated with Hortense and tells her that he could spend
more money on her than could another suitor, she “was not a little intrigued
by this cash oªer . . . and not a little set up in her mood by the fact that
she could thus inflame nearly all youths in this way. She was really a little
silly, very lightheaded . . . [and] infatuated by her own charms and looked
in every mirror.” In fact, Dreiser satirizes both Clyde and Hortense. Clyde
refuses to have a girlfriend who is not pretty, but for Hortense, “it was her
own appearance, not his, that interested her.”31
Clyde is Dreiser only up to a point, however. Then he is Rome or “Whitey
Sullivan,” fully swept away by the promised delights of a hedonistic world.
In 1920 Dreiser had tried to tell Sullivan’s (or Bulger’s) story in “Her Boy,” a
manuscript he never completed. As he relates near the beginning of Book II
of An American Tragedy, where the action shifts to New York, “Clyde had
a soul that was not destined to grow up. He lacked decidedly that mental
clarity and inner directing application that in so many permits them to sort
out from the facts and avenues of life the particular thing or things that
make for their direct advancement.”32 Like Carrie Meeber and George
Hurstwood, Clyde is helpless in the face of the possibility of sexual ecstasy
and the opulence it symbolizes. Other Dreiser protagonists like Frank Cow-
perwood, Eugene Witla, and even Jennie Gerhardt have something of a
mind of their own in spite of the dictates of their “chemism.”
Of course, Clyde is formally based on Chester Gillette, who Dreiser later
maintained was anything but antisocial in the murder of Grace Brown.
(Gillette allegedly confessed right before his execution.) If Gillette’s case
“proved anything,” Dreiser concluded, “it proved that he desired to reach
a social state in which no such evil thing as murder could possibly have
been contemplated. In short, as I said to myself at the time, it cannot be
true that this boy is unsocial in his mood or tendencies. It is just the re-
verse. He is pro-social. The fact that he aspired to a better social state with
this other girl proved, if anything, that he had no desire to go against the
organized standards of the society of his day.”33 In other words, the state
put Chester up to murder by first denying him birth control information
and then demanding, through the pressure of Grace’s threats to expose him