"Clyde Griffiths -- An American Weenie --Review of 'An American Tragedy' (1925) by Theodore Dreiser"
"Clyde Griffiths -- An American Weenie --
A Retro Review
of
An American Tragedy
(c) 1925
by
Theodore Dreiser"
(c) 2013
by
Jordan S. Bassior
Introduction: Since this isn't speculative fiction, the whole review is going here rather than on Fantastic Worlds. But do read Fantastic Worlds anyway, it's always fun!
Setting: The American Midwest and Upstate New York State sometime in the early to mid 1920's. The world-building is really excellent: the fictional town of Lycurgus feels very real. Dreiser was good at this sort of thing, a skill he shared with Sinclair Lewis. Both of them could have been great science-fiction writers, which is a high compliment for a mainstream writer, coming from me.
Style: Lushly descriptive and emotional, especially in the character interactions. Dreiser, as in many of his books, comes as close to writing softcore romance-porn as he could get away with in his day. (Indeed, one of his books, Genius (1915) was banned for this very reason). I’m a sucker for that sort of thing, being lushly emotional myself .
Characterization: Excellent, in part because of the aforementioned lush description. Every named character who gets even a few lines on-scene seems completely real, and individual. The only character I truly despised is that of the protagonist, Clyde Griffith, who is a weenie.
Synopsis: Clyde Griffiths comes from a family of itinerant charismatic preachers, but he rebels against this poor and little-respected way of life as soon as he's old enough to find employment.. At 16 he's working as a bellboy, and he makes friends and even finds some romance with Hortense Briggs, a shallow shopgirl. However, his presence in a stolen (well, borrowed) car which accidentally kills a young girl leads him to change his name and flee to other cities, where he ekes out a precarious existence working at marginal jobs.
Now around age 20, he sees an opportunity. His uncle Samuel Griffiths, living in Lycurgus NY, is a wealthy man who owns factories. Resuming his original name (since he's no longer being sought for his rather trivial role in the original crime), Clyde travels to Lycurgus and meets his uncle Samuel for the first time. He also meets some of his other family and their friends -- and is especially taken with a rich young woman, Sondra Finchley, who he wants but realizes is way out of his league at present.
Samuel hires Clyde to work in his factory: at first as an ordinary laborer, but then he is promoted to a position in lower management, with an implicit promise of better to come if he does well. There, Clyde meets and falls in love with one of his employees, Roberta Alden, a sweet and innocent farmer's daughter. Over some months, Roberta secretly becomes his lover: they have to keep it secret, because their love affair is very much against the factory's rules.
But Clyde has not forgotten Sondra Finchley, and as he becomes better-known he begins running around with her and her set. Sondra's wealth, beauty and class utterly-intoxicate him, and Sondra begins to fall for Clyde as well. In a few months, Clyde and Sondra are in love, and starting to seriously consider an elopement. Clyde tells Roberta nothing of this, though he becomes more distant and begins avoiding her off-work. Though he never breaks up with Roberta, she realizes that she has lost his love.
Unfortunately, before this happens, Clyde gets Roberta pregnant. With their limited money and lack of connections, they can't find a competent doctor who is willing to do an abortion. Clyde strings Roberta along, promising to marry her and stay with her at least for a short while to save her reputation, but he has no intent of actually doing this, because it would ruin his chances with Sondra.
Hearing of a boating accident, Clyde becomes obsessed by the idea that if Roberta would only die his troubles would be other. He conceives a desperate and evil plan: to lure Roberta out onto a lonely wilderness lake in a canoe under the pretense of a wedding trip, and then overturn the canoe. Since he is an excellent swimmer and she can't swim at all, this should work.
However, when push (literally) comes to shove, Clyde finds himself unable to do the deed. At this point his expression grows strange, Roberta reaches for him in alarm, and he pushes her away -- in the process hitting her on the head and capsizing the boat. She begins drowning, and Clyde decides not to save her as her death would consummate his original plan. Roberta drowns.
Clyde swims to the shore, walks ten miles to the nearest transportation, and goes home, pretending that he was never there.
This works about as well as one would expect. Roberta's corpse is quickly found, the authorities ask questions about whom she was last seen with, and soon realize that Clyde probably killed her. The most damning clues, of course, are the combination of the marks on her head and the fact that Clyde behaved evasively both before and after the drowning: he repeatedly used (two different!) aliases, and an innocent man would have been concerned with getting help rather than fleeing the scene.
Within a matter of days Clyde is arrested (at Sondra's party!) and sent up on trial for murder. His uncle Samuel pays for an expert legal defense, conditional on Clyde actually being innocent (Samuel is himself not sure what has actually happened, and does not want to shield a murderer from justice). The lawyers defend Clyde on the grounds that he is morally and mentally weak: essentially, too much of a coward to intentionally plot out such a thing but also too much of a coward to behave responsibly once it happened anyway.
This defense fails: Clyde is convicted and sentenced to death, and in the trial enough evidence comes out to make it obvious to Samuel that his nephew really did commit murder. Samuel refuses to fund an appeal. Clyde's own mother travels east and takes up a collection at a series of lectures, managing to raise over half the monies the lawyers wanted to carry out an appeal: the lawyers take pity on her and agree to let her owe them the remaining funds in a full awareness of the fact that they may never actually get paid all they are owed.
Sondra, whose parents have managed to avoid her exposure in this save as the mysterious "Miss X" who provided Clyde a motive for the killing, writes Clyde an anonymous letter regretting all that has happened and wishing that things had turned out differently so that they could have wound up together. She plainly still loves Clyde, but not enough to go public and destroy her reputation.
The appeal fails; the Governor refuses a petition for pardon. Clyde is executed in the electric chair, He dies at age 23, to the end making only a partial repetence, and never fully grasping the full monstrosity of his crime.
Analysis:
One of the main points of the novel, so I am told and so I can believe, given Dreiser's fascination with the notion of social predestination and the inevitable destruction of anyone atttempting to defy social conventions, is that Clyde Griffiths is the helpless pawn of forces beyond his control. The only problem is that Dreiser had to illustrate this in a long, detailed and realistic novel that shows that this was very much not the case: if this was his thesis he thoroughly undercut it with his own evidence.
Clyde Griffiths murdered, and was executed for his crime, because he was a giant weenie.
First of all, the question of murder. Did Clyde Griffiths intentionally murder Roberta Alden?
Yes! He deliberately brought a woman whom he knew could not swim onto a canoe in a lonely wilderness lake with the intention of drowning her. His courage failed at the sticking-point, so he did not complete the act the way he originally intended, but when chance (aided, note by his idiotic flailing-about in a small boat) resulted in the boat capsizing and the poor swimmer dazed and floundering, he refused to stir a muscle to save her from his own stupid and amoral actions. Clyde's only possible defense, of confusion and fear for his own life (rescuing a drowning person is somewhat dangerous, though he was bigger and stronger than her, and an expert swimmer) makes me think that it would still be better to convict him, so that any genes underlying Clyde's idiotic amoral cowardice would be purged from the racial pool.
In any case, after the fact he did not attempt to get help, despite the fact that he couldn't be sure she was actually dead (people who appear to drown sometimes are able to grab hold of objects with a last desperate burst of strength and survive). He did not do so because to do so would be to admit to the world that he was with Roberta (to his embarrassment with Sondra) and that he had left her drowning and made no attempt to save her (which means that he must be either a murderer or an arrant coward, given his demonstrably intimate relationship with her). In short, he destroyed her last chance at life out of pure selfishness, after being the one to endanger her life in the first place.
Secondly, Clyde's conduct toward both Roberta and Sondra was despicable. Was he attracted to Sondra in the beginning but aware that he could not court her because they moved in two different worlds? Then he should have accepted that, and left Sondra's heart free.
The book doesn't have that much sympathy for Sondra, because she's exactly the sort of idle rich girl that all true Socialists must despise (while, historically, hoping to get donations or sexual favors from them), but Sondra actually impresses me as a fairly nice person. Yes, she's an air-head with very little concept of the harshness of reality outside her charmed circle of Bright Young Things (she doesn't even comprehend how responsible rich people, such as Samuel Griffiths and his son Gilbert, have to work hard to maintain their enterprises). But -- unlike Clyde -- she's not vicious. She drinks, smokes, dances, flirts, rides in fast cars and spends her time playing party games and sports, but at no time do we see her doing anything really bad. She's a bit catty to Gilbert (who, frankly, is a bit of a stuffy snob), but she never intentionally causes anyone any real harm (she didn't even know Roberta existed, let alone plot to kill her). She doesn't even sleep with Clyde: her faux-flapperdom doesn't extend to actual premarital sex.
It's very obvious that, by the point at which everything falls apart for Clyde, she's seriously thinking in terms of eloping with him, despite the fact that doing so would risk her family's love for and support for herself. She really loves Clyde -- to the extent that she's capable of it, and there's no reason to assume her heartless. She did not deserve to wind up loving someone who turns out to be an amoral cowardly killer, and my personal hope after reading the book was that she might find someone more worthy in the future.
As for Roberta, she deserved what happened to her even less. It's obvious from the book that she really loved Clyde, and indeed kept on loving him even after she realized that he had gotten her pregnant and fallen in love with someone else. What's more, she was a sweet and loving sort of person, whom if she had fallen for someone better would have made that man an excellent wife and life's companion, and their children an excellent mother. All she asked for at the end was for him to take a year or so out of his life to give their baby a name and support her while it was still a newborn: she was actually willing to let him go afterward, though it plainly would have torn her heart to pieces. She only threatened exposure for him when he refused to do even that minimum. Then, he not only killed her, but lured her to her doom with the cruelest of lies: he raised her hopes that he would stand by her when he never intended her anything but death. (Oh, and as my wife Rosanna points out, killed his own unborn child in the process, though to be fair both of them were originally willing to have an abortion when it seemed practical).
This gets into the third issue, which is Clyde's complete unwillingness to admit to himself that everything -- indeed, that anything -- that happened to him was his own fault. For the true essence of Clyde's weenieness is that he remains convinced, from first to last throughout the book, that he is very much put upon and everyone's just being mean to him and the world is very unfair to Clyde Griffiths, Moral Center of the Entire Universe.
To analyze what happens to him:
Clyde is raised by a loving family of sadly-deluded religious fanatics who (admittedly) stint his schooling in favor of dragging him to their street-preaching and from city to city, and he does suffer from this educational disadvantage throughout the book (for instance, at the factory the main reason why his uncle doesn't give him a clerical job from the start is that Clyde hasn't gone beyond grade school and hence must learn on the job administrative skills that most middle-class kids would have learned as a teenager). His family does not physically, sexually or verbally abuse him: it's obvious that they love him and care deeply for him, and when his life is in danger his mother travels across the country despite her limited means to actively campaign for his appeal. Clyde might have profitably reflected.that his upbringing could have been far, far worse.
Clyde turns out a big, strong, handsome and well-spoken youth whom most people instinctively like. Because of this he is able to get a job as a bellboy in a swank hotel -- a really good job for an undereducated teenager in the early 1920's. He makes friends, and more than one girl is interested in him. He chooses to pursue Hortense Briggs, despite the fact that she repeatedly demonstrates that she views him merely as a source of income and status. He then chooses to go out partying with his friends in a stolen car. When the car crashes, after they have accidentally killed a little girl and injuring him and his friends, he runs away rather than remaining to help his injured friends, or face the music. In fact, he runs away to another city, thus losing his good job and his local reputation.
(Ironically, it later turns out that even the driver of the car got off with a year in prison, and that the hotel wouldn't have fired Clyde if they'd known what had actually happened. Clyde was running away from very little danger, thus demonstrating his fundamental cowardice).
After living miserably for three years (thus perhaps punishing himself worse than the law punished the driver), Clyde decides to present himself to his rich uncle. Said rich uncle, despite the fact that Clyde has obviously come there with mercenary motives, gives him a decent job and fairly rapid promotion to a lower-executive position. Clyde is only around 20, uneducated and has never met them before: did he really expect to be made Vice-President of the whole operation merely because he showed up claiming kinship?
Clyde then makes some friends at his boarding-house. They feel honored to know a Griffiths. A slightly-sleazy girl starts to fall for him and they make out. Clyde whines about how low and common all the people he's meeting are and as soon as he gets the promotion moves to another boarding-house and stops knowing all his old friends (especially the girl). Then he whines about how he has no friends and especially no girlfriend.
Clyde's promotion means that he is supervising a room full of young women it is against the rules to date. Making no effort to know anyone else in town, he whines about his loneliness and falls for Roberta, in part because she's smarter, classier and more virtuous than the other girls. He wins her heart, deflowers her and they have a secret affair. He whines that he can't take her anywhere in public because she's working at the factory (though he doesn't actually do anything about this, such as try to get her a job somewhere else so that he can keep public company with her).
He whines that his rich relatives and their friends won't let him hang out with them. Then when they do start inviting him to their parties, he completely falls for Sondra and then whines that Roberta is now inconvenient to him and he shouldn't have to suffer having to decide between Sondra, who seems better but less attainable; and Roberta, who now seems common to him, in part because she is actually giving him her sexual favors. Oh, poor Clyde, torn between two beautiful women who both love you, but inconveniently not to the same exact degree! My heart goes out to you, you poor little baby!
When Roberta gets pregnant -- now how did that happen? -- Clyde treats this from beginning to (watery) end as if this was something she chose to do in order to inconvenience him. It never occurs to him that Roberta only got pregnant, because she had sex with him, which she only did because she loves him. Indeed, he doesn’t seem to grasp that a woman doesn’t have perfect voluntary control over such an event.
He clearly believes on some level that Roberta came into being just to keep him company when he was feeling lonely and have sex with him when he was feeling lustful, and that now that Sondra -- someone “better” -- is willing to keep him company when he’s feeling loney and (probably will eventually) be willing to have sex with him when he’ll feel lustful, she should recognize that she’s not wanted and just fade away into the nonexistence from which she emerged. This is a level of narcissicism on the order of an infant who hasn’t yet grasped object-permanence: it’s cute in a two-month old, repulsive in a twenty-one year old, and downright disgusting when we realize that he’s willing to make that “nonexistence” more than merely metaphor, if he thinks it need be!
What’s worse, after plotting to murder Roberta, he doesn’t even have the guts to follow through on his Evil Plan! Dreiser clearly means to show how someone technically innocent can be convicted of and executed for murder under our Wicked Capitalist Court System (unlike the superior Socialist one in which he simply would have been tortured until he confessed, then taken out back and shot after a quick kangaroo-court trial, but I digress), but what he actually shows is what an utter coward is Clyde Griffiths.
When Clyde made the argument that he didn’t save Roberta from drowning not because he wanted her to drown (and in truth, this was the whole point of the exercise) but rather because he was afraid to try to save her - despite the fact that there was a perfectly good float (the capsized boat and its oars) no more than ten yards away - my thought was that he was arguing that he was an incredible coward. Yes, one can die doing this sort of thing, but Clyde was an excellent swimmer, and the drowning victim in question was his lover who was carrying his child! If that’s the case, I thought as I read this scene, how can he have gotten her with child? Because he clearly doesn’t have any balls …
Or, to put it in simpler terms, Clyde Griffiths is a weenie.
Uncontrollable Forces?
Now, the book is to some extent an Author Tract for (Dreiser’s interpretations of) Psychology and Socialism, and so Dreiser is trying to argue that the course of events leading up to Clyde’s murder of Roberta was the fault of social institutions over which Clyde had no control. Specifically, Clyde is brought up relatively poor (lower-middle-class, really, as his family rents business premises and never seems to be actually very hungry, and certainly tries to practice a conventional morality, even if they occasionally fail), and twice gets into trouble when he is exposed to higher social classes and the chance to join them.
I have a problem with this, because Dreiser fails to demonstrate his thesis even though it’s taking place within a fictional environment and plot over which he as author has complete control. Firstly, as I’ve demonstrated, Clyde Griffiths could have at repeated points in the plot made different choices which would have enabled him to avoid his doom. To be specific:
1. - He could have chosen to remain at the scene of the accident in Kansas City. Had this happened, he would have suffered at most a minor legal penalty and probably would have kept his job at the hotel. He then could have worked himself up in the hospitality trade. Perhaps eventually he might have crossed paths with his rich uncle, and from a better position in life than “fugitive.”
2. - He could have kept the friends he first made in Lycurgus, instead of ditching them when he got a promotion and they no longer seemed classy-enough for someone in management. He could have chosen whether or not to get seriously-involved with the sleazy girl. If less lonely, he would have been less-tempted when he surveyed his paradise of factory girls.
3. - He could have chosen not to become romantically-involved with Roberta while she was working in his uncle’s factory. This could have involved getting her another job so that he wasn’t in violation of any rules, or just not actively courting her. She probably would have been content to have another friend, the more so because she was attracted to him.
4. - Once he was actually courting Roberta, he could have refrained from full physical intercourse. If he hadn’t actually had sex with her, she wouldn’t have gotten pregnant. She also would have been more willing to accept losing him if he had fallen for Sondra anyway.
5. - He could have chosen not to hang out with Sondra and her friends, pleading poverty. He also could have chosen to hang out with them but not court Sondra. Courting Sondra was a very active process, and if he hadn’t done it she would still have liked him but not been thinking in terms of an affair or elopment.
6. - Once he was involved with Sondra and Roberta was pregnant, he could have manned-up and confessed to any one of three parties involved in the matter - Uncle Samuel, Sondra or Roberta - and accepted the consequences. He might have lost his job, lost Sondra, wound up marrying or losing Roberta - but none of this would have been as bad as committing the utterly-unprovoked murder of an innocent girl who had every right to his loyalty and support.
Who knows? One or more of the three parties might have forgiven him in whole or in part, and he might have come out of the situation well, and if none had he would have been sadder but wiser for the experience.
He didn’t do this, of course, because at no point throughout the book - not even while on Death Row - did he comprehend that he had really, truly done anything not merely stupid or mistaken or unlucky, but actually evil. (He was for instance very surprised when he realizee that most of the population from Roberta’s rural region hated him: at one point they very obviously want to lynch him!) Because of this, he never altered his course of action or understood that he deserved his own fate.
Psychology and Morality
As for psychological forces: yes, he wanted wealth, friendship, love and sex. We all want these things. But most of us understand that the force of our desire doesn’t magically turn other people into objects who must give us these things, and who have no right to continue to exist if this continued existence stands in the way of us getting what we want.
One could make an argument that Clyde Griffiths is at least a mild sociopath, but then he is hardly a normal man, just like everybody else. Indeed, in-story there is no sign that most or even many other people are like that: instead, they show repeated benevolence, generosity and tolerance toward Clyde Griffiths, turning on him only when he has revealed that he has absolutely no regard for the well-being of anyone but himself.
For instance, Uncle Samuel does not abandon Clyde when Clyde’s existence is inconvenient: instead, he pays for his defense. It is only when the evidence of the trial clearly demonstrates Clyde’s guilt that Samuel abandons him, and does so not out of embarrassment but out of an unwillingness to use his fortune to secure the acquittal of a guilty man.
What would Theodore Dreiser, Socialist, would have made of the story if he hadn’t been writing it himself, and if Samuel had used his fortune to secure Clyde’s release from prison? Would he praise Samuel’s loyalty to his nephew, or would he excoriate him as a cruel capitalist oppressor who misuses his wealth to allow his spoiled kin to heartlessly use, abandon and then murder a poor but honest working girl?
In fact, Samuel behaves honorably throughout the tale, and clearly does not deserve to be afflicted with Clyde Griffiths, Weenie.
Clyde is then at the mercy of the amoral mercenary lawyers who won’t be paid for the appeal, and are prepared to abandon the case. Oh wicked day, that people should be expected to receive pay for their labor, as long as they are not Anointed members of the Working Classes! Except that, in fact, they are willing to accept only partial payment from Clyde’s mother. And why? Because they like her and feel sorry for her.
The most amoral mercenary thing the lawyers do, really, is defend Clyde. But then that’s their job. And they start to have qualms about it when they realize that he probably really is guilty.
Mostly, the lawyers behave honorably as well.
Dreiser makes much of the fact that the prosecutor suffered a facial scar as a child and hence was socially-rejected by girls as a teenager (though as a man he’s in a happy, loving marriage blessed by children, and he is personally respected and well-liked), therefore fails to sympathize with Clyde’s situation and treats him vindictively. And the prosecutor does, in fact, do one illegal thing to frame him - though it turns out to be a drop in the ocean of actual evidence.
Well, that was dishonorable (though far less dishonorable than drowning one’s pregnant girlfriend).
But is Dreiser saying that, if the prosecutor had gotten more dates as a teenager, maybe even had sex at that time, he would have gone “Oh, well, that Roberta deserved it, not realizing that her only function in life was to get Clyde laid a bit and then gracefully disappear when he found a real woman like Sondra” …? That this would be the normal decent human response to such a scenario?
Really, the book seems to be making an argument that sexual repression by a hypocritical capitalist bourgeoisie society is really-responsible for the murder. Clyde Griffiths had no choice but to succumb to his urges for sex and Roberta and Sondra should have just succumbed as well and not expected anything by the way of love or loyalty in return. Then, Clyde could have gone “Gee, I’m horny,” to Roberta, she would have had sex with him easing his stress, and when Sondra wanted him around Sondra would have had sex with him also right away, and then Clyde could have told Roberta: “Hey, I’ve found someone better than you, get lost, and here’s $10 for the Abort-O-Mat.” End of problem, no murders.
Except of course that real human emotions don’t work like that, and in the society where it was considered ok to betray your beloved with such cool unconcern it would probably also be ok for said beloved’s friends and family to show up with shotguns to ease her stress by gunning you down in public. After all, morality is relative rather than absolute: if this applies to love, shouldn’t it apply to murder? Clyde certainly thinks so when it’s himself doing the murdering. Oh yes, and if Roberta’s family wasn’t expected to hate Clyde over this, then why would Clyde expect his family to love him enough to give him a job despite his evident lack of qualifications?
Again, this is narcissism: just as Clyde expects everyone else to give him their all (in Roberta’s case literally!) and demand nothing in return, Dreiser is implicitly arguing that everyone should give whomsoever he designates Mr. Protagonist everything and demand nothing in return. This is
“From each according to their means, to each according to their needs” expanded to encompass personal relationships, and in the process merely demonstrating its complete stupidity as a principle of social organization.
Socialist Alternatives?
If Dreiser is to accuse society, specifically capitalist society, of setting up situations like this, one might wonder how this all might have played out in a more socialist society. Imagine A Soviet Tragedy: young relative of the influential leader of the Lycurgigrad local of the Communist Partycomes to town, gets factory worker from a nearby village pregnant but would rather marry daughter of another high-ranking Party member.
I can see a much simpler solution. Klyde Asanov could denounce Roberta Aldenovna as a wrecker, saboteur and secret Trotskyite. The NKVD would move in and kill Roberta, taking her whole family off to a slave labor camp as crypto-kulaks. Then Klyde could marry Alexandra and they could live happily ever after - at least until someone denounced them.
Is this unfair? Things like this were exactly what was going on in the contemporary Soviet Union, and they would get worse in the next couple of decades. And somewhat less-murderous versions of the same situation, with the Party now as a stabler aristocracy, would continue even under Krushchev and his successors.
Dreiser might argue - if he had known just how bad the Soviet Union was in reality - that this was just a perversion of socialism, that under true socialism situations like this simply could not be. But it is difficult to imagine any society in which there is no difference in ability and hence influence, in which there is no loyalty of kinship and hence temptation to use this influence to aid the careers of underqualified kin, and in which there is no lust leading people to unwise sexual relationships, or resultant sexual jealousy resulting from competition over the same mates. Indeed, since both stupidity and sociopathy appear to be partially biological in nature, it is difficult to see how one could wholly avoid the existence of stupid sociopaths deciding to resolve love triangles by Murdering the Hypotenuse, which is essentially what Clyde does in An American Tragedy.
Actually, to the extent that capitalist societies are more prone than their absolutist, feudal or ancient predecessors to strains of class identity and violence resulting from foolishly-conceived ambition, it is not because class membership is static, it is because it is mobile in the modern world.
In a static society, Clyde and Samuel and Roberta and Sondra would have all been of the same class, and if they hadn’t been the issue of which one Clyde might marry would never have emerged - he would have had to marry the one who was of his class, whichever that was, and everyone would have understood this from the beginning. If Clyde was upper-class, Roberta would have understood from the beginning that she was only his mistress, not his prospective wife; if Clyde was lower-class, then Clyde would have understood from the beginning that he was in a flirtation, not a serious courtship. It is precisely because America has very fluid classes that Roberta could have assumed she had a chance with Clyde and Clyde assumed that he had a chance with Sondra: had Clyde not been of the Weenie class, in fact, either relationship might have succeeded. (Had he been Tenchi Muyo, both might have done so, but then Roberta would have had to have been a Space Pirate).
The argument that the American Dream is false: that poor boys like Clyde when we first meet him can never ascend to the upper classes, is demonstrably incorrect. It is demonstrably incorrect because lots of lower-middle-class boys born around 1900 were in fact in the middle, upper-middle, and even upper classes by 1950-1960 - and this despite the fact that the time here covered corresponds to the Great Depression and the Second World War!
To be fair, Theodore Dreiser couldn’t have known this when he was finishing An American Tragedy in 1925. But he could have reflected on the past - on the fact that a lot of lower and lower-middle class immigrants who came to America, or from the country to the cities in the last half of the 19th century were already enjoying better lives right now in the 1920’s.
He had an excuse for that, of course. He assumed that we were about to enter the Crisis of Capitalism in which all social mobility would vanish, monopoly would become total, and then the whole rotten system would vanish in the Glorious Socialist Revolution.
But the truth was simpler.
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels were also weenies, though admittedly smarter weenies than was Clyde Griffiths.
Capital, Punishment?
The book is also an argument against capital punishment, because it shows just how cruel it can be. Clyde has to wait over a year in prison while his appeal is being considered, associating with - well, murderers (though actually they’re fairly nice to him) - and in the end he is deliberately marched off to his death.
Despite the fact that (Dreiser probably believes that) Clyde did not actually commit first degree murder.
Now, first of all, I will argue that one major flaw with capital punishment, for anything, is that there’s no way to compensate the victim of such punishment if he turns out to have been innocent. (I’ll further state that one horrible thing about the justice system in every country in the world is that it does not fairly compensate the wrongly-convicted for their time and suffering). So certainly, we should never execute anyone of whose guilt we are not and cannot be exceedingly-certain.
Having said that, I’ll point out that Clyde was most definitely-guilty of some kind of wrongful killing. He put Roberta in a situation where she might drown with the intent of drowning her, and although he then failed to carry through his original plan, when he accidentally capsized the boat (while he was flailing about hysterically and dangerously for no good reason) he did absolutely nothing to save Roberta, or to get any help for her from someone else on the remote chance that she might still be floating with her face above water. He went “Oh good, better that she’s dead, I’ll go away and say I was never here,” and proceeded to do just that.
If that jury had access to a science-fictional chronoscope equipped with telepathic interface and they could have seen everything that Clyde did and heard everything that he thought, I think they might still have convicted him of first-degree murder, because when you set out to commit a felony, any deaths which result from one’s actions in the commission of this crime are considered murder in the first degree. This legal principle exists specifically to prevent “weenie defenses” (that’s not the technical term for it) such as the one Clyde’s lawyers (and Dreiser) were making for Clyde’s actions.
It is apparent from the story that Clyde committed conspiracy to commit first-degree murder, which is a felony. It is also apparent that the only reason why Roberta was in position to drown without assistance was because Clyde had carried out every part of that conspiracy save for the last step of actually knocking her into the water. And it is obvious from Clyde’s actions and thoughts that, when she got knocked into the water by accident, he regarded this not as a terrible result to be avoided by her rescue, but rather as a happy outcome to be taken advantage of by immediate flight.
Or, to put it another way, Clyde Griffiths was a weenie.
Should he have been executed? Frankly, when I was reading the trial scene, and the parts afterward where Clyde was whining about the terrible injustice of deliberately killing someone, after he had deliberately killed someone, I found myself thinking of alternatives to the electric chair. Most of them were either poetically-appropriate, such as execution by being forced to swim in a deep tank of fresh cold water until his strength gave out; funny, like tattooing “I AM A TOTAL WEENIE” on his forehead and forbidding him on pain of death by rabid hyena to ever remove it or even cover it with a hat; or gruesome, such as forcing him to go from wedding to wedding and recount his tragic tale in epic verse to all the wedding-parties. Alas, most of them were blatantly unconstitutional, so on reflection, either death or life without parole are better outcomes.
Conclusion:
This was an excellent and enjoyable book, especially because of its rich characterization, especially of all the other characters who were not Clyde Griffiths.
As for Clyde Griffiths ---
--- he was a weenie.
END.