Clyde’s constant lies and cover-ups stem from his deep-seated feeling of inadequacy, of being a “nobody” (II, 194), but with a strong desire to “rise up and be somebody” (II, 175). The central drama of the novel emerges from this double image, this struggle between his sense of inadequacy (shame) and his desire to break out of this image. Roberta’s pregnancy brings this struggle to a peak. Feeling trapped by her predicament (and thus the “dark” chance of becoming a father as hapless as his own), Clyde fears that marriage to Roberta “would spell complete ruin for him” (II, 425). He yearns for the alternative, marriage to Sondra, which would mean the realization of his “splendid dreams” (II, 16), an escape from his own shame-based image, really an abdication of it, for he significantly rewrites his past to measure up to her and her friends’ social and economic standards.
To Clyde, murdering or not murdering Roberta is the choice between a life of shame (married to a “nobody”—“For after all, who was she? A factory girl!” [I: 309]) and a life of nonshame (prid) — with Sondra. His own “evil voice” articulates this dilemma: “But she will not let you go or go her way unless you accompany her. And if you go yours, it will be without Sondra and all that she represents, as well as … your standing with your uncle, his friends, their cars, the dances, visits to the lodges on the lakes. And what then? A small job! Small pay! Another such period of wandering as followed that accident at Kansas City. Never another chance like this anywhere. Do you prefer that?”
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(II, 50). This voice, threatening him with shame, offers him the option of a life of pride. All these elements — guilt, shame, and pride — war within him.
Clyde’s suffering is further intensified by the sudden emergence of another more punitive father figure who replaces Asa, who has become virtually wordless and is “not expected to live” (III, 360), for he cannot withstand the public disgrace of Clyde’s conviction for murder.31 At this juncture Orville W. Mason, a father in his own right and the district attorney of the county, steps in as the most dramatically cast, shaming “father” in the novel. Permanently disfigured by a fall when he was an adolescent, Mason is ‘‘exceedingly sensitive to the fact of his facial handicap” (III, 92). He has a “psychic sex scar,” Dreiser tells us, which resulted in “youthful sexual deprivations” (III, 108), for his acute sense of self-shame made it difficult for him to function sexually.
And as is typical in a shaming “family,” shame begets shame: Shamed literally by the nose on his face, Mason becomes the shaming father to the “son” who breaks rules which he, the father, never got a chance to break. Because of his “youthful … deprivations,” Mason immediately and intensely identifies with Roberta, the victim. She comes from a family “which on sight struck him as having perhaps like himself endured the whips, the scorns and contumelies of life” (III, 98). His identification with the victim exacerbates his rage against Clyde, the assumed aggressor: “He conceived an enormous personal hate for the man. The wretched rich! The idle rich! … If he could but catch him” (III, 104).
And catch him he does. Armed with his shame-filled rage and the injunctions of the law, Mason, the hunter, is in hot pursuit. He eyes Clyde “as one might an unheard-of and yet desperate animal” (III, 148). And Clyde with his “frozen-faced terror” (III, 150) becomes the “harried animal, deftly pursued by hunter and hound” (II, 429). In one of the most humiliating scenes in the novel, Mason toys with Clyde, threatening to publicly expose him by taking him back to face his well-connected friends if he does not confess.
But the hot pursuit began long before Mason: It started with Clyde’s grandfather who shamed his son, Asa, who then maintained the family shame by filling his children with impossible injunctions. Overwhelmed by desire, Clyde’s struggle had always been between guilt and shame. A clue to guilt is the way it is phrased as “things” that are “bothering” the person. With Clyde, once he becomes involved with Sondra, he is perpetually “bothered” by the problem of Roberta and her pregnancy. Before that infamous scene on Big
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Bittern in which Roberta is drowned, a bitter battle rages within Clyde between his destructive aggression (“to kill her” [II,50]) and his guilt about the prospect of murder (“not … to kill her” [II, 50]).
Ultimately Clyde is unable to commit the act impelled by his own aggression. According to Lewis, it is common for ‘‘experiences of guilt and shame … to fuse with each other, especially when feelings are acute. And indeed Clyde’s feelings at that moment of death are at their most acute.”32 The novel, however, closes with resolution: Clyde is found “guilty” and executed. In Clyde’s character, guilt appears ultimately to be a more potent force than shame. Clyde punishes himself. He leaves such an obvious trail of incriminating evidence that he does not need an external avenging father. He has internalized his own father and then destroyed him, when he kills not only his “wife” “in his heart” (II, 25), but also his child and himself. He is destroyed ultimately for an act that he did not commit but which he had intended. The Bible preaches that sin “in [the] heart” (Matthew 12:31) is the same as committing the act. Ironically but with the logic of a fierce poetic justice, Clyde is destroyed by standards as unremitting and otherworldly as his father’s.
Given the fate of such a shame-filled son, how did Dreiser escape such a curse himself? That is, why was he not a permanent victim of the shame instilled by his own father? Why was he not always crippled or at least deeply inhibited by his family’s shame? In his fictions Jennie Gerhardt and An American Tragedy, Dreiser shows what can happen to shame-filled children of a shaming father. In his nonfictions, he shows the struggles against that “dragon” that beset him. But one other trait of his shame-filled characters is their inarticulateness. Shame psychologists suggest that one of the earmarks of shame is wordlessness, the inability or unwillingness to come forth, to unburden oneself of that which needs to be healed.33 One of the remedies is expression, articulation of underlying feelings that are most secret and most concealed. One of the unique features of family systems therapy is that people bring in various members of their families who then talk. Dreiser creates families in which he is the only one who talks. In portraying shame, voluminous Dreiser may well have exorcised much of his own.
Notes
1. I want to express special gratitude to Florian Stuber for his careful reading of this essay. His many suggestions for editorial changes
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were particularly helpful. I am also indebted to Albert Ashforth and Madelyn Larsen for their many thoughtful comments.
2. The University of Pennsylvania edition of Jennie Gerhardt, with its restoration of some 16,000 words cut by the Harper and Brothers editors in 1911, provides much material that amplifies on the theme of shame, the subject of this essay. See Theodore Dreiser, Jennie Gerhardt, The University of Pennsylvania Dreiser Edition, ed. James L. W. West III (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1992). All subsequent references in my text (JG) are to this edition.
3. My focus is on shame in men, and, thus, in this regard, it is a gender study. Usually when we think of gender studies, however, we think of feminist or women’s studies. And many feminist scholars have argued against the necessity of men’s studies at all because they think so much of the curriculum already fulfills that function. But I disagree. I believe to understand women’s and men’s issues and the degree to which we can find commonalities and differences between them, a male gender perspective can be elucidating, especially when a psychonalytic approach is taken. However psychoanalytic criticism is not free from controversy either and this presents a dilemma. In this essay, I will make distinctions between the “psyche” and the “analysis” camps of psychoanalysis.
For an excellent discussion of the current status of gender studies, including men’s studies, see Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, ‘‘Gender Criticism,” in Redrawing the Boundaries, ed. by Stephen Greenblatt and Giles Gunn (New York: Modern Language Association, 1992), pp. 271–302.
4. Theodore Dreiser, An American Tragedy (New York: Boni and Liveright, 1925), I, 7; emphasis added. All subsequent references in my text (AAT) are to this edition.
5. This word “mortification” is one of the many such words regarding shame restored in the University of Pennsylvania Press edition of Jennie Gerhardt.
6. There have been a number of excellent biographical/critical studies that have called attention to Dreiser’s early traumatic sense of shame. Particularly see Volume One of Richard Lingeman’s recent critically acclaimed biography, Theodore Dreiser: At the Gates of the City, 1871–1907 (New York: Putnam’s Sons, 1986). In Chapter 3, “The Damndest Family,” and Chapter 4, “Her Wandering Boy,” Lingeman traces Dreiser’s enduring sense of shame to his impoverished childhood in Terre Haute and, especially, in Sullivan, Indiana, where he lived on the “wrong side of the tracks” with his scandal-ridden family. Among others, also see William Swanberg’s Dreiser (New York: