An American Tragedy (Criticism)

Criticism

Candyce Norvell

Norvell is an independent writer who specializes in literature. In this essay, Norvell argues that Dreiser's own life is perhaps the strongest argument against his worldview as expressed in his novel.

The worldview that Dreiser sets forth in An American Tragedy is the deterministic view that a person's fate is sealed from birth, determined by his or her particular heredity and environment in tandem with the animal instincts that affect all humans. This philosophical and literary view is based on the observation of Charles Darwin and other scientists that only those animals that are born with attributes that make them well-suited to their environment are able to survive and thrive. This idea is often referred to as "the survival of the fittest."

Hence, Clyde Griffiths and Roberta Alden are destined to fail in their attempts to better themselves economically and socially. Born poor and powerless, they will die that way, and they can do nothing to change this. In fact, it is their efforts to improve their circumstances that bring about their deaths. It is as if nature punishes them for trying to subvert that natural order.

This worldview was not one that Dreiser merely explored in the novel; it pervades his work, and it was the driving force in his personal philosophy and political views.

Because the world is vast and highly diverse, it is not surprising that people hold wildly divergent ideas about it. Arguments can be made for and against any number of conflicting worldviews because examples can be found to support virtually any generalization one cares to make. One can offer convincing arguments against the worldview expressed in An American Tragedy. Nor does this completely invalidate the deterministic view. What is surprising, though, is that one rather powerful argument against the novel's worldview is the life of its author. Dreiser's own life is a clear contradiction of the explanation of human life and society offered in the book.

Like Dreiser's other novels, An American Tragedy contains many autobiographical elements. Dreiser, like Clyde, grew up poor. If anything, his circumstances were even more dire than those of his fictional counterpart. His family was not only poverty-stricken, it was combative and unstable. The household splintered, regrouped, careened from one place to another. Although religion played a role, as it does in Clyde's family, in Dreiser's family that role was no more predictable or dependable than anything else in the child's world. There was no emotional or moral center.

Dreiser modeled Clyde's parents partly on his own. His father was disabled and inept; his mother played the martyr. The episode in which Clyde's sister Esta is seduced, impregnated, and abandoned by an actor mirrors a similar event in the life of one of Dreiser's sisters. Like Clyde's family, Dreiser's family spawned multiple scandals.

Clearly, Dreiser's heredity — one of the three legs on which his theory of determinism stands — did not mark him for success in the competitive, fast-changing, industrialized society into which he was born. He did not even get a solid education, partly because of his family's instability and partly because of his own unwillingness or inability to profit from formal education. So far, Dreiser looks very much like Clyde Griffiths, the character he invented to show the futility of efforts at economic and social self-improvement.

The similarities do not end in family background or childhood. Like Clyde, Dreiser had a strong sex drive and lacked an equally strong moral orientation that might have controlled it. Dreiser was unfaithful not only to his wife but to his mistresses. In a dozen different ways, Dreiser flouted social convention and generally accepted ethics. He plagiarized the work of fellow writers (poetry and journalism, not fiction). He aligned himself with communism, a political system that the vast majority of Americans condemned. By behavior as well as by birth, then, Dreiser seemed destined for failure. Indeed, for lesser offenses than his own, he punishes his characters in An American Tragedy because that is what his worldview predicts: Those who break the law of the jungle, whether the jungle is a jungle or a small town in New York or American society at large, pay the price. Clyde's relationship with Roberta makes them both lawbreakers, as he is her superior at the factory. Clyde is even more drastically out of line in his relationship with Sondra, by far his social and economic better. These missteps lead to bigger missteps with increasingly greater consequences. Clyde and Roberta are out of their depth (the latter in a literal as well as figurative sense). They lack the inborn wit and self-control to manipulate events to their benefit, and the results are disastrous.

Not so in real life. While Dreiser's worldview predicts that the author should come to as bad an end as does the character with whom he shares so much, that is not at all what happened. In spite of Dreiser's lack of formal education or credentials, he was able to build a successful career as a journalist. Rather than being denied opportunity because he was poor and uneducated, rather than being punished severely for his moral misdeeds, Dreiser found editors who were willing to hire him based solely on his ability to write articles that readers liked. Neither nature nor human prejudice leapt up to foil him. When he decided to write fiction, publishers were willing to read and publish his work. Eventually, Dreiser became wealthy by doing what he liked to do and by writing what he wanted to write. An American Tragedy was turned into a successful Broadway play, and Dreiser got what was at the time a fortune for the film rights to the book. His fellow writers, many of them higher born and better educated, not only welcomed him into their midst but praised his work effusively.

Where, in this real-life story, is the hopelessness and futility, the inexorable working out of cruel forces of determinism, found in the fictional one? Dreiser's life is an embarrassment to his worldview.

The next question, then, is why did Dreiser hold, and promote in his writing, a worldview that so baldly contradicted his own experience of the world? Many scholars have answered that all the success and money that eventually came to Dreiser failed to erase his bitter memories of childhood poverty, instability, and humiliation. Perhaps he repeatedly recreated them in his fiction as a way of making the world acknowledge his own earlier suffering. Perhaps he was more altruistic than self-centered and wrote this way to call attention to the similar suffering of others. In any case, by his very success, he did not help his cause of convincing others that human beings are pawns to nature and the merciless law of the jungle. In the long run, life and the American society that he indicts in An American Tragedy were both kind to Dreiser. He rose from beginnings that were shabby both materially and intellectually to become one of the most acclaimed writers of his generation. He lived well, and when he died, in Hollywood, the epitome of all that glitters, he was buried among other celebrities in Forest Lawn cemetery. He could hardly have been more successful.

There was one thing — one fact in Dreiser's life that casts a slight shadow over his gleaming achievements. He was denied first the Pulitzer Prize and later the Nobel, in spite of the fact that many of his influential contemporaries thought he deserved one or both. Interestingly, the man who in his fiction portrayed the futility of trying to change fate campaigned for the prizes, especially the Nobel. His personal correspondence provides a record of his unsuccessful attempts to gain the Nobel Prize, and these efforts provide, in a limited sense, a parallel to Clyde's desperate efforts to win the similarly unattainable Sondra Finchley.

Dreiser did not get everything he wanted, and quite possibly he did not get everything he deserved. To acknowledge that he was denied one success in a life studded with successes is hardly to capitulate to his view that fate is merciless and immutable. In the world as it really is, against all odds and his own mindset, Theodore Dreiser got money, fame, and the respect of his peers. In the fictional world Dreiser created, Clyde Griffiths got the electric chair. Given that the real man and the fictional man started so similarly but ended so differently, nature and society have cause to complain that they have been slandered in An American Tragedy. Surely, things are not all that bad.

In a 1993 Atlantic article, Michael Lydon describes Dreiser as "the great gawk of American literature the poor-born, ill-educated German-American Hoosier from Terre Haute, an oaf with mud on his shoes who invaded the drawing rooms of the genteel " According to Dreiser's world-view, he should never have gotten in.

Source: Candyce Norvell, Critical Essay on An American Tragedy, in Novels for Students, The Gale Group, 2003.

What Do I Read Next?

• Murder in the Adirondacks (1986), by Craig Brandon, is a nonfiction account of the murder around which Dreiser built his novel. Brandon includes more than one hundred photographs in his detailed account.
• Although Dreiser is best known as a novelist, he also wrote short fiction. Editor Howard Fast collected some of Dreiser's best short works in The Best Short Stories of Theodore Dreiser (1989).
• Dreiser also wrote two volumes of autobiography, A Book about Myself (1922, published in 1931 as Newspaper Days) and Dawn (1931). These books detail the early experiences that shaped Dreiser's fiction and his view of life.
• Dreiser's niece, psychologist Vera Dreiser, wrote My Uncle Theodore (1976) with Brett Howard. For her biography, Vera Dreiser had access to family sources.
• Jack London is another American naturalist writer, and his short novel The Call of the Wild (1903) is widely acclaimed as an important text of the movement. Its wilderness setting makes it a stark contrast to An American Tragedy, demonstrating how the same ideas of determinism and survival of the fittest play out in a very different environment.
• The Red Badge of Courage (1895), by Stephen Crane, is still another important example of American naturalism. It relates the battlefield experiences of a young Civil War soldier.