An American Tragedy 369against his evil plan is engendered not by a sense of
justice but by fury at her husband’s infidelity. Beryl
Stapleton’s small acts of unselfish heroism are com-
plicated by her complicity with her husband, thus
rendering her an unusual hero for the Victorian era.
In his depiction of Miss Stapleton and Sir
Henry, with their fears and complicated motivations,
Arthur Conan Doyle renders a modern depiction of
flawed heroism. While Sherlock Holmes may rarely
stray from the Victorian ideal of a confident, intel-
ligent, and firmly upper-class hero, Doyle’s minor
characters indicate that heroism may come in many
forms.
Kelly Connelly
DREISER, THEODORE An American
Tragedy (1925)
Theodore Dreiser’s sprawling best seller An Ameri-
can Tragedy is based on Chester Gillette’s 1906
murder of a poor, young, and unsophisticated fac-
tory girl at Big Moose Lake in the Adirondacks.
Popular almost immediately after publication, the
novel spawned an adaptation and, subsequently, the
1951 movie A Place in the Sun, starring Montgomery
Clift as George Eastman, Gillette’s fictional proxy
(named Clyde Griffiths in Dreiser’s novel), Shel-
ley Winters as the innocent Alice Tripp (Roberta
Alden), Elizabeth Taylor as the socialite Angela
Vickers (Sondra Finchley), and Raymond Burr as
an opportunistic prosecuting attorney. Both novel
and film have attained the status of classics in their
respective genres.
But the film’s purview is necessarily limited to
the latter half of the novel dealing with George’s
desperation when he learns of Alice’s unwanted
pregnancy, his attempts to court the irrepressibly
sensual Angela while placating the increasingly
petulant Alice, his maniacal plotting to dispatch her
at Big Bittern Lake, his subsequent flight to Angela
at a lake resort, his pursuit and apprehension on
the charge of murder, and his trial and execution.
What the film omits, except by extrapolation, are
the protagonist’s childhood, youth, and adolescence,
all of which help to explain, if not justify, how a
young man from a devout Christian family could
contemplate, much less execute, so heinous an act
as to bring about the death of a poor girl dependent
on him.
Dreiser (1871–1945) does not give this back-
ground short shrift but examines it in minute detail.
Book 1 and part of book 2 up to chapter 34 probe
and analyze the causes of Clyde Griffith’s aberrant
behavior. Dreiser uses corresponding episodes in
books 1 and 2 to drive home the reality of Clyde’s
neurosis and paranoia.
Examples of corresponding episodes are his
romantic attachments to the egocentric femme
fatales Hortense Briggs in book 1 and Sondra in
books 2 and 3 and his flight from responsibility and
justice after the fatal accident in book 1 and after
the death of Roberta in book 2. Among others, the
themes of ambition, the American dream, and
fate permeate this engrossing fiction.
Jerome L. WyantambitiOn in An American Tragedy
From the opening chapter of Theodore Dreiser’s
An American Tragedy, in which 12-year-old Clyde
Griffiths accompanies his evangelical parents and
siblings on one of their proselytizing missions, to
his arrest (book 3, chapter 8) for the murder of his
secret girlfriend, Clyde is driven by an inordinate
and misdirected ambition. While ambition is not in
itself a negative motivation when directed toward
such laudable ends as self-improvement or happi-
ness, it is morally corruptive when it leads one to
seek personal success and self-aggrandizement by
any means and at the expense of others. Regrettably,
the ambition that motivates Clyde is, almost from
the first, perverse and self-destructive. In his case,
ambition becomes allied to wickedness.
In Kansas City, even as a young boy and then
an adolescent, Clyde becomes disaffected from his
parents, who can barely provide for their family.
Because they are poor and shabbily dressed, he sees
them as “foolish and less than normal—cheap,” and
he regards their efforts at “praying their way out”
of their difficulties as ineffectual. Rather, Clyde’s
ambition is to be as successful as his uncle Samuel,
who owns a collar factory in upstate New York,
where he reputedly resides with his family in wealth,
opulence, and splendor. Accordingly, for Clyde, suc-
cess is centered on possessing and enjoying material