According to pioneer shame psychoanalyst Helen Block Lewis, shame and guilt coexist as internalized mechanisms. Shame with
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its focus on the evaluation of the self can be contrasted with guilt, in which the self is not the central object of negative evaluation, but rather its central focus is the thing done or undone.26 In other words, shame is about an individual’s feelings of inadequacy. Guilt is about the deed done, the forbidden pleasure taken or at least wanted. Shame results from an inability to comply with the internalized rules, regulations, and standards (mirrored from the father in Dreiser’s case). And guilt in Dreiser’s case, from his hating his father and having murderous feelings toward him, and from his overwhelming sexual desires. Just as this tension between aggression and deep mortification is a strong dynamic in Dreiser’s psyche, so it is in the lives of his most compellingly drawn characters, significantly placed in families with all the trappings of shame.
Through this lens, it is possible to view Jennie Gerhardt and An American Tragedy as classic studies of multigenerational family shame. Both Asa Griffiths in An American Tragedy and Old Gerhardt in Jennie Gerhardt are prototypes of Dreiser’s own father. As the narrator in Jennie Gerhardt repeatedly tells us, Old Gerhardt has no sense of how the world is organized (a sine qua non in the Dreiser corpus). With him, “religion was a consuming thing” (117). He sought perfection in this world, always trying to be so “honest and upright … that the Lord would have no excuse for ruling him out. He trembled not only for himself but for his wife and children. Would he not some day be held responsible for them? Would not his own laxity and lack of system in inculcating the laws of eternal life to them end in his and their damnation? He pictured to himself the torments of hell, and wondered how it would be with him and his in the final hour” (52–3).
Such deep torment, such self-lacerating questions about damnation, leads the father to even greater sternness. His children were punished with ostracism and expulsion, when they did not comply with his rules. They and their mother responded with greater secrecy and concealment of deeds they knew would provoke his disapproval. According to shame psychologists, the cardinal rule of the shame-bound family is control, to be in control of all behavior and interaction. All of the other rules (perfectionism, blame, denial, secrecy) flow from it and support it. This control is rigidly held by one or more family members over the others in tyrannical fashion. The shame generated by Old Gerhardt seems to operate on all the younger members of his family, who begin to feel they individually inherited some kind of curse27 and have anxiety and fears. Ultimately the family disbands and those who can, take flight, having no further contact with the other members.
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In many ways, the story of Jennie Gerhardt is recapitulated in An American Tragedy: Again, we see a cursed family with a father who lives by otherworldly standards and shame bound children who perpetuate the shame. Like William Gerhardt, Asa Griffiths is a prototype of Dreiser’s own father. At the novel’s opening, Asa, the “confused brother of the Door of Hope” (I, 158), is presented as a “most unimportant-looking person’’ (I, 3), a “figure [who] bespoke more of failure than anything else” (I, 3), who nonetheless not only tries to live by celestial standards and to impose them on his immediate family, but who also insists on “evangelizing the world” (I, 11).
In fact, An American Tragedy can be seen as a study of four generations of familial shame, beginning with Asa’s father (and Clyde’s grandfather), Joseph Griffiths, down to little Russell, who, on the closing page of this circular novel, looks and acts ominously like Clyde. We are told on page 177 of volume one of the Boni and Liveright edition that Joseph Griffiths had a “prejudice” against his youngest son, Asa, and had “harried” (178) him from his home without his share of the family inheritance. Through this shame-inducing process of expulsion and disinheritance, we see set in motion a possible source of the shame that is passed down from generation to generation — from Joseph to Asa, from Asa to his son, Clyde, and from Clyde’s family to Clyde’s clone, Russell, the illegitimate son of Esta, whom Clyde’s family adopted after fictionalizing him as an orphan. Russell shows all the markings of being another Clyde and following in his shame-filled steps. He is indoctrinated into the same “fundamental verities” (III, 213) that had so tormented Clyde in his own childhood. In that famous final scene Russell refuses to go home but asks for money to buy an ice cream cone instead, signaling his own craving for this world’s carnal pleasures.
The focus of the family shame, however, is on Clyde, a classic case. For shame is a sense of having failed to live tip to one’s own projected image of success, which for Clyde is to dress correctly, talk correctly, know the right people, and maintain the image other people respect. Not only does he ultimately fail to do all this, but his disgrace becomes a matter of public record. The newspapers day in and day out expose the embarrassing details of his familial and social background and the scandal of his criminal record.
The family shame is passed down to Clyde and his siblings through Asa and his wife,28 who unrealistically require that the children live by “the straight and narrow” (II, 168).29 Thus shame is perpetuated, for the material values by which the children live
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lead them to hunger for pleasures that are forbidden. Asa and his wife heighten their children’s feelings of inadequacy by exposing them to street meetings where the father is jeered at (“Here comes old Praise-the-Lord Griffiths”) and Clyde is taunted (“Hey, you’re the fellow whose sister plays the organ. Is there anything else she can play?” [I, 6]).
But Clyde yearns to be another kind of son, pride filled, like Gilbert Griffiths, his cousin, to whom he bears such an uncanny resemblance that Gilbert’s own mother is “startled” (II, 221). Clyde ruminates: “How wonderful it must be to be a son, who, without having to earn all this, could still be so much, take oneself so seriously, exercise so much command and control” (II, 223).
Interestingly, this prideful side of Gilbert is all that we see of him. Shame psychologists Merle Fossum and Marilyn Mason define pride as the obverse of shame. They maintain that “pride is related to a fantasy of oneself rather than to one’s actual behavior.’’ Whereas shame is the inner experience of being looked down upon by the social group, “pride is maintaining the fantasy, the delusion of grandeur, the fantasy of being the envy of other people.”30 And Gilbert in his prideful state is the opposite of the unassuming but seeking Clyde.
This excessively proud man is the other prototypical male in the Dreiser corpus. For example, in contrast to the ineffectual Asa Griffiths, his brother Samuel, Gilbert’s father, exudes such extreme pride. He is a patriarch, a remote grand organizer, totally in control, rich, masterful, judicious but unyielding. Aptly and repeatedly called the “governor” (II, 197, 215, 232) by his son, he is a “kind of Croesus” (I, 14). In characteristic fashion, Samuel Griffiths, the wise arbiter, when confronted with Clyde’s alleged crime, holds off judgment. We quickly hear the chorus of admiration for him from his attorney, his son, et al., who think: “The power of him! The decision of him! The fairness of him in such a deadly crisis!” (III, 178).
In the same way, Archibald Kane and his son, Lester, the key male in Jennie Gerhardt, are contrasted with the pathetic William Gerhardt. Archibald, the founder of a manufacturing company, is as wise and masterful as Samuel Griffiths, his son as distant and pride filled. These and other such characters make one think of so many other curiously egotistical males in Dreiser, the most extreme being Frank Algernon Cowperwood, the “I satisfy myself” superman of the Trilogy of Desire.
Helen Block Lewis describes the three aspects of the internal monitoring system as shame, guilt, and pride. In fictionalizing these concepts, Dreiser presents these interrelated aspects of the
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self largely as disengaged entities each epitomized by a particular person. He often characterizes someone as “shame-bound” or having a combination of “guilt” and ‘‘shame” in contrast to a brother or another family member who has the polar opposite, pride. Although Dreiser presents these different aspects dueling within a character as complex as Clyde, they are most often presented as separate dramatic renderings of mutually exclusive states of mind.
Despite his wishes to be the “son” of Samuel Griffiths, Clyde clearly is shaped in his own father’s likeness. Like his father who was “harried” from his home, Clyde is exiled early on, after the hit-and-run accident that kills a child. Born into the shame of his parents’ miserable makeshift life, Clyde is further reduced by his sister’s illegitimate child. His life becomes one of secrecy, concealment and lies: after running from the car accident, he hides the impermissible relationship with his employee, Roberta (which he regards as “a dark secret” [II, 308]), her pregnancy (to him an even darker secret), and his involvement in her “murder” (the most “horrible, destructive secret” [III, 137] of them all).