372 Dreiser, Theodore
dreams and hopes. More so than Hardy, though,
Dreiser, taking his cues from the philosopher Her-
bert Spencer, emphasized genetics and heredity,
together with family and social environment, as
influencing character and, therefore, as determiners
of an individual’s fate. According to Spencer, traits
of character were inherited; consequently, “Char-
acter determined fate and a bad fate meant a bad
character.” Clyde Griffiths is one of Dreiser’s most
fated characters. The reader of An American Tragedy
attributes many of the determining and sometimes
conflictive elements in him to genetics and heredity,
as represented in Clyde by his improvident, feckless
father and rigidly religious mother.
In Dreiser’s fiction in general and in An Ameri-
can Tragedy in particular, there is less emphasis on
the role of chance in an objective world and more
on combinations of genetic and hormonal elements
and their myriad interactions in the psychic life
of the inner man. Clyde’s grandiose aspirations to
achieve a gentrified status, comparable to his uncle’s,
are squarely at odds with his concomitant cravings
for instant sexual gratification from the girls and
women with whom he comes in contact and, espe-
cially with the collar factory sirens whom he super-
vises at work: “His was a disposition easily and often
intensely inflamed by the chemistry of sex and the
formula of beauty. He could not easily withstand the
appeal, let alone the call of sex.” Herbert Spencer,
upon whom Dreiser depended for the philosophical
underpinnings of his fiction, believed that desires
were what drove human beings to move forward.
As Spencer did, Dreiser dismissed free will, argu-
ing that one’s fate was determined by the alignment
of certain inner chemical reactions with others expe-
rienced as a result of his or her environment. Clyde’s
Achilles’ heel is his sexual voracity. His repression
of his libido in his quest for superior social station
results in his being so sexually famished by the time
he meets the pert Roberta Alden that he finds this
plain country girl irresistible: “Day after day and
because so much alone and, furthermore, because
of so strong a chemic or temperamental pull... ,
he could no longer keep his eyes off her or she hers
from him.”
As the first part of the novel depicting Clyde’s
childhood and adolescence makes clear, the social
environment of big-city life—fast-paced, teeming
with strangers, and rife with competition—adversely
impacts Clyde and his direction in life. He adapts,
perforce, in order to survive (and thrive) in a Dar-
winian universe in which he feels alien, largely
owing to his parents’ abjuration of its commodity-
based, laissez-faire system. At first, he seems natu-
rally ambitious and without guile, but he becomes
increasingly opportunistic. At the Green-Davidson
Hotel, he learns from peers how to manipulate oth-
ers for his own personal aggrandizement, and he
adopts the pack psychology of the group of pleasure-
seeking youths with whom he works: He parties
with sexually permissive young women, and he
has his first-ever sexual experience with a seasoned
prostitute. Clearly, he sees women only as objects of
self-gratification and not as bona fide human beings
with dreams and aspirations.
If one does not see others as being of equal value,
it is difficult, if not impossible, to have empathy for
them, and Clyde’s lack of empathy is conspicuous
throughout. He conceals the amount of his wages
from his mother, who is hard-pressed to make ends
meet, and he ignores the plight of his pregnant sis-
ter, Esta, choosing instead to purchase an expensive
coat for the minx Hortense Briggs, with whom he
is infatuated.
Confronted with a crisis, Clyde lacks respon-
sibility. He cannot feel responsibility for others
because he lacks any sense of personal identification
with them. In the climactic car accident episode at
the end of book 1, Dreiser focuses more on the pan-
icked reactions of the other occupants of the car to
take the spotlight off Clyde, who is less responsive
to the effects of the crash than his friend Ratterer.
Clyde’s response is more akin to that of Hortense
Briggs, who is concerned only with the desecra-
tion of her vaunted beauty. Clyde is self-consumed:
“Think of what would happen to him if he were
caught.” This episode nicely foreshadows Clyde’s
more culpable (because it was more planned) reac-
tion after Roberta falls out of the boat and drowns
in Big Bittern Lake at the end of book 2.
Over all these tragic characters looms a dark
cloud of destiny. There is the gathering sense for
the reader that, no matter what the protagonists do,
their fate is sealed. They are caught in a predica-