Theodore Dreiser's An American Tragedy (book)

• Modern Library Top 100
• Time Magazine's All-Time 100 Novels

Warning: Don’t read this essay on Dreiser’s novel unless you’ve read it or are braced for spoilers.

For a discussion of the movie adaptations, go here. I do discuss them a little more below.

Summary + Discussion / Analysis

The novel is rather expository and breaks other "laws" of the modern novel, yet still tells a good story, which makes one wonder how many literary laws are necessary. For example, it's told in an omniscient view, where occasionally the narrator tells us how we should feel although, usually, it remains in the head of one character for each section. Clyde is the most common head we're in, though.

It opens with a critique of Clyde's family poverty in the mission and never brought up in the ways of the world, so they'd know how to fend for themselves. Although it shows the family meaning well, the narrator clearly finds mission work foolish and naive.

Clyde and his older sister see it that way, too. The sister escapes first although, later, we find out that she doesn't end up married as she'd planned--just pregnant. This has some interesting parallels: presumably this girlfriend he himself will think about murdering, and a story he heard at the hotel where he works as a bellhop about a man who takes a bride to the hotel with all their things, enjoys the luxurious life at the hotel for a few days, and takes off with his poor bride-to-be stuck with the bill, unable to pay. He thought that story was funny until it happened to his sister.

But before he knows of his sister's fate, he starts to climb out of the family by getting a job at a soda fountain and later gets a job as a bellhop at a fancy hotel where he gets huge tips, more money than he'd ever expected. He falls for a girl, Hortense, who doesn't love him but the money he's willing to spend on her and eggs him on only to get him to buy her stuff. She keeps escalating the scale of the gifts until she spies a fancy coat she wants, worth the average schmoe's two months of salary.

Meanwhile, Clyde's mother realizes Clyde's nice clothes means he has access to money, so she approaches him similar amounts of money. She's very secretive and finally he learns (by tailing her) that the money is for his single sister who is in the family way. So Clyde put in a vice between his mother's (and sister's) demand for money and Hortense's. Does he give for love (a hopeless cause, we readers know from the beginning)? Hortense shows just enough interest to get Clyde's hopes up so he'll invest in her.

Only when the coat is nearly paid for, does he figure out that she would never love him. She dances with a new guy, Spenser, showing him more adoration than she'd ever shown Clyde although she pretends he's imagining it.

The group head home a little late and egg Spenser to hurry faster in the car, so they can make it to work on time (except Clyde? though he clearly wants to make it to work on time), but he gets in an accident that kills a child and everyone flees the cops.

Clyde leaves town and migrates to different cities, different jobs until he meets and old comrade who gets him another bellhop job where he meets his uncle Griffith who offers Clyde a job at the factory. Mr. Griffith's son is jealous and bitter about Clyde's trying to ride on their coat-tails. However, Mr. Griffith feels responsible since his father left Clyde's father out of the will and wants to help.

In this new town, as a Griffith, Clyde realizes both the son's animosity yet the different treatment that others afford him as if he were royalty, and he's unsure who should consort with, who to shun. Others are trying to ride his coattails, thinking he will soon rise up through the ranks.

Clyde starts off in the shrinking room (ha, ha) of the collar factory. Soon enough, though, it irritates Mr. Griffith, Sr., that someone who looks like his son and who shares his last name is working at the bottom of the factory. So he forces his son to promote him. The son is irked, hoping to keep Clyde forever in that position and is forced to find the only position of authority Clyde is able to take is with a bunch of women whom he is not supposed to grow attached to any. He vows to maintain a Christian attitude and manages to put forward an aloof attitude but finds himself attracted to three of the women. When Roberta is hired, all of the women are jealous because they can tell he prefers her.

Roberta knows, too, and sees this stratified class system, where those in authority are not to fraternize with the employees, as a way to keep people in their class.

Clyde, meanwhile, is trapped. He cannot socialize with people below the Griffith family, but no one in the Griffith family's class will socialize with him and the matron of the family makes it clear he is from the lower class, which shoos the fleeting interest some of the high society women had.

About the one-third mark, I lose my sympathy for Clyde (except now and then when the rich look down on him as suitable material for social purposes). Even though he knows he has in no interest in marrying her if he can marry someone richer, he pressures her into intimacy, which she regrets as soon as Clyde finds a rich woman who's interested (interested at first only because she sees it as a way to irritate Clyde's cousin and because at first she thinks Clyde has money since he represents his father as running a hotel in Denver).

When Roberta learns she's pregnant, the novel presents a search for abortion--interestingly without mentioning "abortion." The movies don't discuss this at all. Since Clyde has been forced to associate with no one, he has no one to ask about abortions, so he goes around to various pharmacies asking coyly for a worker at work who's gotten himself in trouble (since he looks like his cousin, he doesn't want to create a scandal -- for himself or the Griffiths). When he succeeds in procuring a medicine, it doesn't work, so he goes to the pharmacist who is scandalized at the mention of abortion. He will have nothing to do with it though he mentions a doctor he's heard who has done such in the past. Clyde forces Roberta to go by herself to see about the abortion, and the doctor is scandalized.

Roberta tries to get Clyde to marry her quietly since she’s tried everything, saying he can divorce her later, but secretly hopes he will fall in love with her and stay married. But Clyde fears that would end his relationship and his position in high society.

About the half-way point, I was tired of Clyde and his voice telling him what to do wrong (is that his justification or the narrator’s—suggesting insanity?). He’s more guilty in the novel than in either movie (I preferred the level of guilt in A Place in the Sun). At the end of Book 2, I was considering quitting because it just sounded like a long trail and trial of misery, but I’m glad I stuck it out.

Up until the three-quarters mark, I couldn’t figure out what the heck was the American tragedy here. And then boom it hit me like an avalanche: 

1. Roberta cannot rise up and be respectable in society unless she marries Clyde, who doesn’t want to marry her. 
2. Clyde cannot rise up and be respectable in society if he marries Roberta. He is willing to help financially but not marry since he loves someone else (who loves him). 
3. Clyde’s downfall proves that the poor shouldn’t try to rise above their station. 
4. The District Attorney is willing to falsify evidence (the hairs), distort truth (eyewitness) in order (in part) to get win the case and get reelected—not to mention his certainty (feigned?) of what happened. The District Attorney, while lying in order to kill Clyde, tongue-lashes Clyde for his lying and killing Roberta. Like Clyde, he probably feels his lies justified. 
5. The defense attorney is willing to falsify evidence and testimony in order to get at the truth. 
6. Both attorneys package emotional content that Clyde must agree to in order to answer the question. 
7. Clyde does not always say what would best convince the jury of his innocence because he knows that his true love will be reading the press of his trial. 
8. We disapprove of Clyde, yet he is not actually guilty of murder (manslaughter? conspiracy? probably), but society--represented by the man in audience who stands up to shout that Clyde should be killed and be done with it--so disapproves of Clyde’s behavior that they want him killed, even though he didn’t actually do it. 
9. Clyde’s friends’ lax morals are possibly to blame in part for their influence. 
10. According to the author (well, the unnamed narrator), the poor pious are also guilty of not properly educating kids in the ways of the world although I’m not sure the argument is fully developed. I wonder if he wrote the tirade as a reminder to fill this in, later (although it does show minor hypocrisy in hiding Estella, which seems deceptive in the name of keeping the scandal quiet). 
11. If Clyde weren’t born into poverty, he might have lived if he’d had an appeal. 
12. When Clyde needs money to appeal, the side of the family with money abandon him to protect their name. 
13. When Clyde’s mother asks to speak to churches to get money to appeal, Christians do not come to the aid of their sister in the faith. They refuse to listen to what she has to say. They make judgments without evidence. 
14. Clyde’s mother won’t go to Catholics to ask for money (although they are not of the faith). 
15. She does appeal to some Jews who allow the use of their theater for Mrs. Griffith to ask for money. But those who do come to hear are only interested for the notoriety, not in helping as was shown by their rapidly evaporating interest.  
16. The pastor, Rev. MacMillan, to whom Clyde confesses everything, does not believe in capital punishment and is confused by the story—whether Clyde is guilty—but due to Clyde’s guilt in the faith, decides Clyde is guilty, so he says nothing when the governor asks if the reverend knows anything that might keep Clyde from the electric chair.
17. We, dear readers, even today, even with complete knowledge, are a part of the tragedy, despite knowing Clyde is technically not guilty of the crime: Some will still wish Clyde dead (some Conservatives, some Liberals—for different reasons). Some will see him part of the privileged Patriarchy while others will see him preying on the innocent weaker sex.
18.  + 19 + 20?) Some might want to add that illegal abortion and a lack female independence are also tragedies. Maybe the latter although it isn’t well “documented,” but maybe a second reading would prove me wrong. I do think the former is so evasive and portrayed so negatively that I don’t think it intends for readers to see that as one of the tragedies, but maybe from our society’s perspective in part, it is. On the other hand, maybe the whole search for abortion represents the lack of a viable societal solution, indicating that that too is part of the American tragedy. It may depend on the reader’s perspective. The third possible tragedy that is wholly dependent on one’s perspective is capital punishment.

Is that the complete list of American tragedies? Probably not, but it’s a start. If you are convinced of Clyde’s guilt and death, then there is no tragedy and the book title is woefully hyperbolic, leaving the book pointless waste. People die in books all the time. There’s no need to call this a tragedy or even a particularly American one.

Reverend MacMillan, I suspect, is a stand-in for the author—a way to hash out discrepancies and uncertainties—yet remains in uncertainty even while he condemns the man. Theodore Dreiser is thorough in his treatment. He even gives Clyde’s mother a chance to redeem herself by being a little more liberal with her grandchild.

After reading, I was pondering—much as I loved the structure and tortured drama and thematic genius, which makes glad I read it—how little do I want to reread the book. I cared for the first third and then I realized belatedly that I came to care for Clyde again after he’s sentenced to death. Part of the reason is his fear of death and his having to hear his future death as his inmates die, one by one. A larger part is his moral struggle of whether he truly is guilty, and his eventual confession to the Reverend about what actually happened, and his conversion yet painful doubt up to the end: Is his faith good enough to let him into heaven? (I don’t know if that would resonate as strongly with non-Christians, but maybe they can guess.) But perhaps the lion share of my empathy comes from his mother who, penniless, does all that she can to save her son and it’s not enough. Oh, I love that lady. My heart breaks for her. She is jealous, too, of how her son confesses to the reverend but not to her. Reading it at the time, I thought, put her mind at ease and tell her. But maybe it would have merely haunted her as it had him—one of the few decisions Clyde makes that I agreed with.

The novel merits reading--rather delicious ironies and difficult situations. I'm not sure about the movies. They seem to miss the gist. They could have hit the tragedies harder (maybe they did, and I need to re-watch them).

Yes, the novel has more time to expand than the movies, but we get to empathize with Clyde, we get to watch as he tries to make something out of himself despite the initial poverty, how people become snobbish as soon as they think they are something, stingy if they think one cause is better than another. Clearly, Clyde is chasing the American dream and headed for a tragedy.

Hopefully, I haven’t been too cursory and made it seem like Clyde's the same as in the movies. He truly means well and tries to do the right things (well, for the first third of the novel or so)—the best he knows how. Even, fleeing the accident, which he regrets, he doesn't see how he could have done it differently since it may have gotten him trouble for things he didn't do.

The novel could maybe work as a period-piece miniseries. I don’t see how it could be modernized. It is also wonderful to understand what people at that time saw as their drive to accomplish, to wear, to be, to do. It captures—as far as I can tell—the spirit of its time.

This is the best book I’ve read in a while, so let's leave it in the canon.