370 Dreiser, Theodore
commodities, which were becoming more and more
available for those with the means to afford them
in postbellum American society—a society that was
increasingly self-indulgent and narcissistic.
Without an education, Clyde’s prospects are
limited; nevertheless, he resolves to make his way
by dint of an amiable personality and good looks,
and he advances from being an assistant soda jerk to
becoming a bellboy at the Green-Davidson, a land-
mark hotel in Kansas City. However, his ambition is
tainted as it leads him to conceal his actual earnings
from his needy family, including his pregnant and
unmarried sister, Esta, so that he can engage in self-
indulgent spending sprees: buying expensive clothes,
carousing with his friends, visiting a prostitute, and
courting the vapid and self-absorbed Hortense
Briggs. The first book of the novel ends climactically
with a hit-and-run accident, which results in a fatal-
ity. This exciting episode establishes the utter inad-
equacy of Clyde’s ability to cope when confronted
with obstacles to his overambitious goals.
Clyde’s ambition is intensified and focused in the
society of Lycurgus, New York, where he is given a
supervisory position at his uncle’s collar manufac-
turing plant. His uncle is a “King Croesus” whose
lifestyle Clyde aspires to. But Clyde’s ambition is
thwarted as his wealthy relatives, ashamed of his
plebeian background and lack of education, distance
themselves from him socially. Even more galling to
Clyde’s self-esteem and sense of enterprise is the
disdain his look-alike cousin, the smug and conde-
scending Gilbert Griffiths shows him.
Clyde’s experiences with women during his ado-
lescent years mirror a troubled, psychopathic person-
ality that distorts reality as well as augurs the causes
and consequences of his subsequent relationships
with Roberta, a pretty working girl at his uncle’s
factory, and the exceedingly beautiful debutante and
socialite Sondra Finchley. To satisfy his ambition
and overcome his profound sense of alienation,
Clyde resorts to using women as the most effica-
cious and expedient way to achieve his personal
needs and social aspirations; therefore, he all but
coerces the sincere Roberta, who loves him, into a
more intimate relationship than she, on account of
her moral upbringing, can feel comfortable with or
society condone—this, even while he fawns on the
vain beauty Sondra, who also finds him attractive.
At the risk of being exposed by Roberta, whom
he has impregnated and, thereby, ostracized by the
polite society to which he has finally gained access
because of Sondra’s sponsorship, Clyde resolves to
act. He then resorts to desperate measures in an
attempt to achieve his ambitions.
The third and final book of the novel, insofar
as the ambition theme is concerned, deals with the
district attorney Orville Mason’s dogged pursuit and
prosecution of Clyde for Roberta’s murder. Mason
is motivated, at least in part, by political consider-
ations. Dreiser’s portrayal of the pugnacious Mason,
while fair and nuanced, is, when all is said and done,
that of an arch opportunist and, in that respect at
least, not altogether unlike Clyde.
Jerome L. WyanttHe american dream in An American
Tragedy
For Theodore Dreiser, the American dream was,
except for a fortunate few, a chimera, an Eldorado
to be quested after, a grail to seek and covet but
never to grasp. Ignoring the law of the land there-
fore becomes for Clyde Griffiths, Dreiser’s hapless
hero in An American Tragedy, the only viable way of
achieving the dream, and in that quest, murder will
be countenanced and justified. Achieving the dream
by whatever means becomes paramount for Clyde; it
is his only guiding principle.
There can be little doubt that Dreiser himself is
the prototype for his protagonist, Clyde Griffiths.
The son of immigrant parents, his father a religious
fanatic who lacked a scintilla of backbone, and bereft
of practicality, the young Dreiser felt alienated from
the American dream, a mythical construct built
on the premise that the United States is “a land of
plenty, of opportunity and of destiny.” Implicit in
this formulation is the belief that with the exercise
of talent and industry, one can amass fabulous wealth
and live virtually as a king or potentate, surfeited in
material possessions. While exceptional life stories
of business tycoons like Andrew Carnegie and John
D. Rockefeller gave credence to the myth, Dreiser’s
fiction gives the lie to such grandiose expectations as
far as the masses are concerned. However hard they