An American Tragedy by Theodore Dreiser is a profound exploration of the American Dream, revealing its darker side as it intertwines ambition with moral decay. Set in the early 20th century, the novel follows Clyde Griffiths, a young man from a poor background who is consumed by his desire for wealth and social status.
As Clyde’s pursuit of success leads him down a path of moral compromise and tragic consequences, Dreiser’s narrative critiques the American social structure and the myth of upward mobility. Through Clyde’s story, An American Tragedy exposes the nightmare lurking beneath the surface of the American Dream.
Table of Contents
Introduction
An American Tragedy is based on the actual case of Chester Gillette, who murdered his pregnant girlfriend Grace Brown at Big Moose Lake in the Adirondack Mountains in the summer of 1906. The protagonist of An American Tragedy, Clyde Griffiths, comes from a Midwestern town and a poor family of fundamental Christians, whom Clyde leaves at his first opportunity to pursue his dreams of a better life.
Clyde’s first taste of money leaves him hungering for more, and he sets out for larger cities and what he anticipates will be a life of success and pleasure. However, life does not turn out as he expects. The novel correlates Clyde’s pursuit of success with his moral downfall.
As the title states, the tragedy of Clyde’s life is representative of nationwide loss.
In its depiction of the day-to-day struggle of working-class Americans and the disparity between rich and poor, the novel attacks the early 20th-century American social structure and its 19th-century “rags to riches” mythology. Dreiser’s fatalistic views come into focus as he paints this picture of a young man as a victim of circumstance and a slave to the inevitable greed and selfishness nurtured by American capitalism. Clyde lives in a world ruled by opposing forces, and he is faced with the impossible task of reconciling wealth and poverty, greed and compassion, impulse and reason.
As the story progresses, Clyde loses more and more perspective. Finally, he must pay the price for his moral degradation.
Background
The story begins on the streets of Kansas City, moves to Chicago, and then shifts to Lycurgus, New York.
It is set in the early 20th century, a time when industrialism characterized American cities and when large factories and giant machinery formed the backdrop for the day-to-day grind of city workers. Dreiser’s descriptions of the city illustrate his belief that industrial cities offer allure and promise but invariably lead to disillusionment.
Throughout the novel, Dreiser places Clyde in settings that reveal a sharp contrast between the world of the rich and the world of the poor. Wherever Clyde travels, he feels out of place in his environment. First, Clyde is uncomfortable as a young boy travelling unwillingly with his family through the streets of Kansas City to bring the word of the Lord to the people. This Kansas City world is one Clyde considers beneath him, a world of hopeless poverty. Clyde’s drive towards fame and fortune emerges early on in the novel, as he moves into flashier and more artificial settings.
Once he is free from his parents’ influence, the flashy Green-Davidson Hotel, a place that hints of the superficial world looming before him as he travels to the big cities to make his fortune, quickly entrances him.
Themes and characters
Dreiser uses the tragic life of Clyde Griffiths to expose inequality and victimization.
Clyde is a weak-willed character, but he has an avid desire to achieve wealth and social position. He hungers for the American Dream, and he leaves his family at the first opportunity in order to achieve it. Clyde comes from a poor fundamentalist Christian family that finds comfort in God’s word, but Clyde seeks material rather than spiritual comfort. The novel follows Clyde from childhood to adulthood as he seeks to redefine his identity and find success.
As events unfold, his actions reveal that he will never be at peace with himself or achieve the happiness he desires.
Clyde is shallow, self-centred, without scope, and incapable of reason. Undoubtedly, he is heading for moral decline. He lacks compassion because his materialism clouds his vision. He fails to think logically because he falls victim to chance events that he considers to be opportunities for success. Clyde is an opportunist, but his desire for material wealth is, Dreiser suggests, instinctive; it is simply part of a pervasive social struggle for survival. Dreiser’s world is the ruthless, cut-throat capitalism that rewards the few by destroying countless others.
Unlike the American Dream, this economic and social system is unjust and unyielding. Dreiser’s characters enact this theme by falling into moral traps, by becoming victims who victimize and, ultimately, by becoming prey to an unjust system.
Clyde begins his moral decline at the age of 16 when he becomes intent on acquiring money and fine clothes to attract girls. He gets a job as a bellhop in a flashy Kansas City hotel and, with money in hand, gets a taste of the life he desires.
Then Clyde encounters a rich uncle and follows him to New York to work in his factory. Early incidents in the novel reveal Clyde’s lack of moral judgement and indicate that he will most likely continue to stray from his parents’ influence.
Temptation rules Clyde’s life, and accountability has no part in it. When his sister Esta gets pregnant, Clyde chooses to buy a fur coat for a woman he desires rather than use his money to help Esta. When Clyde and his friend accidentally hit and kill a young girl with their car, he chooses to run from the scene rather than face the consequences of his action.
Clyde’s actions become more and more irresponsible; finally, when his girlfriend Roberta gets pregnant, he begins a scheme to do away with her rather than give up his chance for upper-class acceptance through marriage to a rich woman.
Clyde fits in neither with the lower class nor with the upper class; he remains immobilized between two worlds. Caught in this alienated and frustrating place, Clyde is unable to act until Roberta’s pregnancy and her expectation of marriage force him to take steps. Desperation, fears of social failure and poverty, and the faint hope of alliance in marriage with a rich family all compel Clyde towards the seemingly expedient plot of arranging for a boating accident in which Roberta drowns.
Cornered, Clyde is unable to reason ethically or make moral choices.
Typical of Dreiser’s characters, Clyde is weak-willed and unable to rationalize and thus falls victim to random events and circumstances. The young girl’s death in the hit-and-run scene was not intentional but accidental, and Clyde’s failure to take responsibility for the act reveals Dreiser’s intention to show how, when Clyde is at risk, his first choice is personal survival. He did not mean to kill the girl; it simply happened.
Clyde does not question the morality of his decision to flee the scene, just as earlier he does not question his decision to buy a fur coat for Hortense Briggs when he should have used the money to help his sister.
Clyde has one mission, and making the moral choice in these situations would, he believes, be counterproductive to his goal.
The characters that populate Dreiser’s world are not all as egocentric as Clyde Griffiths.
They, in fact, represent the world as Dreiser sees it: a world of contrasts, where poverty is juxtaposed with wealth and where immorality is often necessary to achieve success and social position. Samuel Griffiths, Clyde’s wealthy uncle, stands in contrast to Clyde’s poor father, and it is no surprise that Clyde disregards the influence of his father to follow in his uncle’s footsteps. Instinctively, Clyde chooses wealth over poverty: he chooses his uncle over his father, Hortense over his sister Esta, and society girl Sondra Finchley over factory worker Roberta Alden.
Each time Clyde makes such a decision, the tragedy of his life becomes more inescapable. When he chooses Sondra over Roberta, he has clearly reached the point of no return. Consumed by greed and artifice, he has lost all perspective and can no longer distinguish between right and wrong.
Clyde feels trapped in a world of contrasts. He feels isolated from society, especially in Lycurgus, where he is unaccepted by the upper class because of his background and by the lower class because he works as a factory boss. Shortly after Clyde begins his affair with Roberta Alden, the factory girl who offers him sexual satisfaction, he longs for a relationship with Sondra Finchley, a young socialite who promises him social status.
The novel focuses on Clyde’s relationships with Roberta and Sondra for the remainder of the book, revealing Dreiser’s understanding of the essential entrapment that characterizes the human condition.
Interestingly, the vehicle of Clyde’s undoing is Roberta Alden, the factory girl who becomes his mistress. In light of Dreiser’s belief that man is ruled by impulse, Clyde pursues Roberta out of sexual instinct. Clyde’s decision to run from the car accident, and later to take Roberta as his mistress, appear unrelated. However, in the first instance Clyde is motivated by fear and the survival instinct, and in the second, he is motivated by sexual drive. S*ex and survival are natural impulses.
The impulse to survive overrules the fact that Clyde has killed someone and should be held responsible, just as his sexual drive towards Roberta overrules the fact that any involvement with a factory girl interferes with his calculations to acquire wealth and social position.
Dreiser embraced a social application of Darwin’s theory: namely, that people, like animals, compete for resources in an instinctive push to survive. Clyde Griffiths, in other words, takes action based on his struggle to survive and in direct response to what he considers to be a threat. Clyde feels threatened by the predicaments in which he finds himself and is afraid of what will become of him. When Roberta becomes pregnant, he plans to murder her out of desperation.
He thinks her death will release him from responsibility for her and the pregnancy, and allow him to move on to Sondra, who offers him a connection to the upper class and money.
There is no doubt that Clyde plans to murder Roberta, but whether he is responsible for her death is a subject of debate. At the scene of the boating accident, Clyde falls prey to temptation once again.
Unintentionally hitting her with the camera makes her death look like an accident and it is easy to let the “accident” take its course. Clyde’s decision not to rescue Roberta once she falls into the water is, in essence, a decision not to act. Clyde is tried, convicted, and sentenced to death in the electric chair. However, in having his protagonist receive this punishment, Dreiser suggests that Clyde is less to blame than the instinctual drives and social pressures that impinged upon him. Clyde Griffiths thought up a crime and then the event unfolded, shaped by timing and inaction.
Less the murderer and more the one who is murdered, Clyde is also depicted as a victim, one of both the American social system that corrupted him and the American judicial system that held him responsible for a death he did not directly cause.
Dreiser was clearly disillusioned with the American Dream, and his concern with the conflict between morality and the pursuit of success is especially evident in An American Tragedy. Both An American Tragedy and his first—and perhaps most controversial—novel, Sister Carrie, focus on people who feel driven to conform to social class pressures and forsake morality in order to get ahead in society. As two of Dreiser’s better-known works, An American Tragedy and Sister Carrie are noted for their social criticism. They present a bleak view of American industrialism, interpreting man’s drive for success as a ruthless struggle to survive.
Dreiser’s Darwinist views led him to believe that life is permeated by chance and that human beings go through life making a series of blind decisions.
The fatalistic view that humans have no control over their own lives lifts Dreiser’s story to the status of tragedy. An American Tragedy delivers its tragic message by presenting a world of social inequality and by introducing a cast of characters who fall victim to social injustice. To outsiders, the morality of Clyde Griffiths is clearly questionable, but in the world of the novel Clyde’s choices are predetermined. Clyde is depicted as a perpetrator of injustice as much as he is a victim of it. By implication, then, in Dreiser’s world, moral action is not possible: forces determine the chain of events, not human judgements about right and wrong.
Literary Style
The title of the novel reveals the author’s belief that the story is not a personal tragedy but a national one.
Dreiser presents a tragic view of America, and the tragedy of Clyde Griffiths is that he falls prey to what Dreiser considered the fallacy of the American Dream. The American economic system failed Clyde Griffiths; it promised him wealth and opportunity but offered him no possibility of achieving it. Dreiser delivers this message by reversing the plot structure of the typical 19th-century Horatio Alger stories of poor heroes who rise quickly to wealth.
In Dreiser’s novel, the poor cannot achieve happiness through wealth. At the same time, Clyde has no choice but to desire it.
Dreiser’s style can be described as progressive or developmental; that is, Clyde’s destruction results from a series of events that lead him further and further into moral decline. What turns the son of religious missionaries into a murderer? In Clyde’s case, it is simply a national obsession with materialism. This appetite forces him to want more and more, attempt to acquire more and more, and forsake his values in the process. The progression that characterizes Dreiser’s work reflects his belief in man’s instinctive nature.
Dreiser was highly influenced by the ideas of Herbert Spencer, a 19th-century sociologist and philosopher who advocated the theory of evolution and coined the phrase “survival of the fittest”, and whose sociological theories focused on the contrasts that man is presented by society. Dreiser employs Spencerian opposites throughout his novel; he puts Clyde in a position to choose between them. Each time Clyde comes to a turning point in his life, he is presented with a choice, for example, between bravery and cowardice, beauty and ugliness, the needs of others or self-interest.
The choices he makes at these turning points propel Clyde along a predetermined path.
Dreiser’s characters are shaped by their place in a materialist system. Sondra Finchley embodies the American Dream. She is alluring and represents vanity, wealth, and privilege. Roberta embodies both the desperation of the lower classes and the threatening potential hidden in the sex drive. Clyde is tempted by both women, but in different ways. Clyde embodies the attraction to contrary impulses typical of American society.
Clyde appears never to gain any true perception of self, but Dreiser tells Clyde’s story using different viewpoints to reveal how Clyde is perceived by others.
Since Dreiser believes that human beings are victims, these peripheral characters are subject to the same evils to which Clyde falls prey. They attack Clyde, but they themselves have no higher values. Sondra is vain and materialistic, and Roberta is self-serving. Both attempt to manipulate Clyde in order to survive.
Mason, the district attorney, attacks Clyde, but he is just as self-serving: Mason considers Clyde’s case as a means to advance his legal career.
The climax of the novel is the scene of Roberta Alden’s drowning. This is Clyde’s ultimate crime—the one from which he can never recover and the one that begs readers to interpret Clyde’s guilt or innocence. Although irony governs the novel, this scene is perhaps defined by irony more than any other.
What was presumed to be premeditated turns out to be an accident, and the only defence Clyde has to offer is the weakness of his own will.
Topics to discuss
Do you think Clyde truly loved Sondra Finchley? Do you think he was capable of love?
Ambition implies a strong sense of personal motivation. Do you consider Clyde to be ambitious? Why or why not?
Is Clyde in any way responsible for Roberta’s death?
Do you think that Clyde intentionally struck Roberta with the camera?
What is the significance of the man in the hat who appears near the end of the book?
What do we learn about Clyde when we read about how he handled his sister Esta’s unwanted pregnancy?
Viewing Clyde’s actions from a Spencerian standpoint, do you consider Clyde to be prey or predator?
Discuss the significance of the preacher who appears at the end of the novel.
Consider the Red Queen in Alice in Wonderland, the character who always keeps running, only to stay in the same place. There is a Red Queen theory of evolutionary biology that was named after the character in Lewis Carroll’s book. Consider Dreiser’s message in An American Tragedy. Based on what you understand his message to be, can you explain the Red Queen theory?
Consider Dreiser’s progressive plot structure. How does this help carry his themes and deliver his message?
Related works and adaptations
An American Tragedy was adapted as the film A Place in the Sun (1951), which, like Dreiser’s book, was based on the Chester Gillette 1906 murder case.
The film stars Montgomery Clift, Elizabeth Taylor, and Shelley Winters, and it presents the story of a poor boy who chases after riches, falls in love with a wealthy society girl, and contemplates killing his lower-class girlfriend in order to have the life he desires.
The Gillette murder trial was highly controversial because Gillette was sentenced to death based on circumstantial evidence. Legends and mysteries have continued to surround the case, which local people followed with cult-like interest. In Murder in the Adirondacks: An American Tragedy Revisited (1986), Craig Brandon presents evidence of the Gillette case and traces its history as an Adirondack legend. Brandon’s book may be of interest to readers of Dreiser’s An American Tragedy, and it should help shed light on the model Dreiser used in shaping Clyde Griffiths’s character.
Dreiser appreciated the work of Frank Norris. An American Tragedy has some points in common with Norris’s McTeague (1899), which too is based on a crime that occurred at the turn of the century. Other relevant books by Norris are The Octopus (1901) and The Pit (1903). Both detail the plight of wheat farmers and the state of the economy at the turn of the century.
In Tragic America (1931), a work of non-fiction, Dreiser discusses the American context in the early 20th century. This work clarifies many of the concepts apparent in Dreiser’s fiction, including his views on the economic system, employment, police power, church and wealth, crime, and government ownership.
About Theodore Dreiser
Theodore Dreiser, a prominent American author and journalist, was born on August 27, 1871, in the rural town of Terre Haute, Indiana.
He grew up in a family of Christian fundamentalists, an experience that shaped many themes in his writing. Dreiser modelled some of the characters in his novels on people he knew in his own life.
The title character of Sister Carrie (1900), for instance, resembled Dreiser’s sister Emma, and Clyde Griffiths of An American Tragedy largely resembled Dreiser himself. Dreiser attended Indiana University from 1889 to 1890 and then left formal education to enter the world of work.
He worked as a reporter for the Globe in Chicago and for the Globe-Democrat and Republic in St Louis, then as a freelance writer and editor. However, life was hard for Dreiser and he became disillusioned with the American Dream.
Dreiser’s works are considered classics of American Realism.
Dreiser confronted critics who considered his work immoral and depressing. Sister Carrie, his first novel, received negative criticism, but An American Tragedy enjoyed wider acceptance and is generally considered Dreiser’s most important work.
Dreiser also wrote travel books, autobiographies, short stories, poetry, and plays in addition to his journalistic articles and sketches. He was a finalist for the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1930, and he received the Award of Merit from the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1945, the year of his death.