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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 16 January 2009
Sergei Eisenstein, the Russian film-maker, called An American Tragedy “ as broad and shoreless as the Hudson … as immense as life itself.” It allowed, he wrote, “ almost any point of view of itself.” This rare quality of multi-faceted massiveness has fathered a large number of critical studies, which all vary in their reading of the text and the significance they attribute to Dreiser's protagonist, Clyde Griffiths. For Irving Howe, Clyde represents “ the passivity, rootlessness and self-alienation of urban man,” while for F. O. Matthiessen, he is “ a victim of the contemporary American dream.” Richard Lehan views him deterministically as “ a young man … caught in and finally destroyed by the crush of conflicting forces,” while Ellen Moers generalizes him into “ the Everyman of desire.” These interpretations acknowledge Clyde's representative stature, but make only imprecise gestures towards its origins. The vagueness they suffer from has its root in an individualist emphasis upon the character and fate of the protagonist and a corresponding lack of specificity in describing the social framework with which that character interacts. Eisenstein regarded Clyde's crime as “ the sum total of those social relations, the influence of which he was subjected to at every stage of his unfolding biography and character.” An analysis of these “ social relations,” particularly as elaborated in the closely integrated themes of youth, class, and consumerism, is a prerequisite to a more exact identification of Clyde's social representativeness.
1 Eisenstein, Sergei, Film Form, ed. and tr. Leyda, Jay (London: Denis Dobson, 1951), p. 96Google Scholar. Eisenstein, during his stay in the United States, prepared a scenario of the novel for Paramount. It was turned down, unfortunately, because of the sharpness with which he brought out its social implications.
2 See in particular, Matthiessen, F. O., Theodore Dreiser (New York: Dell, 1951)Google Scholar; Lehan, Richard, Theodore Dreiser: His World and His Novels (Edwardsville: Southern Illinois Univ. Press, 1969)Google Scholar; Moers, Ellen, Two Dreisers (London: Thames and Hudson, 1970)Google Scholar; and Pizer, Donald, The Novels of Theodore Dreiser (Minneapolis: Minnesota Univ. Press, 1976)Google Scholar.
3 Howe, Irving, “ Afterword,” in Dreiser, Theodore, An American Tragedy (New York: New American Library, Signet Classic, 1964), p. 826Google Scholar; Matthiessen, p. 190; Lehan, p. 157; Moers, p. 228.
4 Eisenstein, p. 96.
5 Dreiser, Theodore, An American Tragedy (1925; rept. New York: New American Library, Signet Classic, 1964), p. 29Google Scholar. All subsequent page-references are to this edition.
6 His sensual appreciation of wealth is made apparent later, when his uncle's house evokes “ a mood of roses, perfumes, lights and music… beauty… ease ” (p. 188), and he characterizes his brief enjoyment of leisure-class life as “ leisure — warmth — color — ease — beauty — love ” (p. 445).
7 Robert, S. and Lynd, Helen M., Middletown (London: Constable, 1929), p. 134Google Scholar.
8 “ What is common to all other-directed people is that their contemporaries are the source of direction for the individual — either those known to him or those with whom he is indirectly acquainted, through friends and through the mass media.” Riesman, David, The Lonely Crowd, abridged edn. (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1961), p. 21Google Scholar. Riesman's typology has been criticized, particularly in Lipset, Seymour Martin and Lowenthal, Leo, eds., Culture and Social Character: The Work of David Riesman Reviewed (Glencoe, Ill.: The Free Press, 1961)Google Scholar, but his notion of other-direction seems remarkably apposite in the case of Clyde.
9 For a recent summary of the rise of consumerism in the 1920s and its associated ideological changes see Bell, Daniel, The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism (London: Heinemann, 1976), PP. 53–76Google Scholar.
10 See Fass, Paula S., The Damned and the Beautiful: American youth in the 1920s (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1977)Google Scholar, for a discussion of the importance of the youth culture in the 1920s and its main elements of peer-group conformity, consumerism and changing sexual mores: “ Fads and tastes developed within the peer society were beginning to unite youth through a network of wholesale consumption ” (p. 128).
11 Veblen, Thorstein, The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899; London: Unwin, 1970). p. 218Google Scholar.
12 Moers, p. 237.
13 Dreiser provides some indication that the young people in the novel look to the movies as sources of taste and judgment. At the Green-Davidson, Clyde compares Doyle to a “ movie actor ” (p. 50), and when he is confronted with the problem of Roberta's pregnancy, he thinks “ of some possible fake or mock marriage such as he had seen in some melodramatic movie ” (p. 423). Bella's standard for male attractiveness is “ the regular movie hero ” (p. 155), and Roberta looks forward to being married in a dress “ such as she had once seen in a movie ” (p. 431).
14 The full irony of his relation to his uncle becomes apparent during his trial, when the most effective plea for the defence to make — that of temporary insanity — is disallowed by Samuel Griffiths, on the grounds that it would constitute a slur on the family name (p. 607).
15 Repeatedly, Dreiser demonstrates the way in which a hierarchy of class and status circumscribes the possibilities for human relationships. The factory rule forbidding fraternization between managers and machine girls is the most explicit instance of this, while it is shown operating also in the lives of Roberta and Sondra. At Biltz and Trippetts Mills, Roberta realizes that her occupation defines her as a working-class girl, and that this definition denies her the possibility of meeting the type of man most suited to her temperament (p. 246). Sondra is similarly the victim of a class definition, for she is allowed to court only young men of wealth: “ For those local families of distinction were convinced that not only one's family but one's wealth was the be-all and end-all of every happy union meant to include social security ” (p. 362).
16 Veblen, p. 207.
17 “ As this upper leisure class sets the pace in all matters of decency, the result for the rest of society is also a gradual amelioration of the scheme of dress. As the community advances in wealth and culture, the ability to pay is put in evidence by means which require a progressively nicer discrimination in the beholder.” Ibid., p. 131.
18 Burrow, Trigant, “ Social Images versus Reality,” Journal of Abnormal Psychology and Social Psychology, 19 (1924), 230–35CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
19 Donald Pizer also makes this point, The Novels of Theodore Dreiser, p. 249.
20 See Lane, Lauriat Jr, “ The Double in An American Tragedy,” Modern Fiction Studies, 12 (1966), 213–20Google Scholar, for a discussion of the function of the physical similarity between Clyde and Gilbert.
21 Pizer, p. 218.
22 See Rostow, W. W., The Stages of Economic Growth, 2nd edn. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1971)Google Scholar, and also Oshima, H. T., “ Consumer Asset Formation and the Future of Capitalism,” Economic Journal, 71 (1961), 20–35CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
23 “ There is an extraordinary contradiction within the social structure itself. On the one hand, the business corporation wants an individual to work hard, pursue a career, accept delayed gratification…. And yet in its products and advertisements, the corporation promotes pleasure, instant joy, relaxing and letting go.” Bell, , Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism, p. 71Google Scholar.
24 “ The new capitalism was primarily responsible for transforming the society, and in the process undermined the Puritan temper, but it was never able to develop successfully a new ideology congruent with the change, and it used — and often was trapped by — the older language of the Protestant values.” Ibid., p. 78.