Literary naturalists, such as Theodore Dreiser, often depicted characters in urban, working-class settings. A scathing indictment of the American success myth, An American Tragedy describes two unequal Americas in unceasing struggle. The poor suffer, while the rich insist “how difficult it is to come into money,” when they have, in fact, benefited by exploiting “inferior” individuals.

Born poor in Terre Haute, Indiana, Dreiser’s youth provided him experience from which to draw his protagonist. In later life, he championed several left-leaning causes, scorning the hypocritical social system and its religious, moralistic explanations.

An American Tragedy is almost a carbon copy of the actual murder case of Chester Gillette and Grace Brown, a farmer’s daughter. Both worked at a factory in Cortland, New York, owned by Chester’s uncle. Grace’s pregnancy threatened their clandestine relationship. At Big Moose Lake, Herkimer County, Chester rented a boat and rowed Grace to a secluded location. Her body was found the next day in the lake; Chester was arrested nearby two days later. Chester sought to extricate himself from the relationship, insisting her death was an accident. Like Clyde Griffiths, Dreiser’s character, Chester was seeing other women besides Grace, whose identities were kept secret. In a sensational month-long trial, based entirely on circumstantial evidence, Chester was convicted.

In An American Tragedy’s 874 pages, the American Dream careens horribly out of control. Griffiths, a poor, weak-willed son of wandering Midwestern evangelists, nurses loftier dreams, especially after a bellhop job at a fancy hotel earns him money for the first time. Following an ill-fated escapade with his coworkers, typical of Jazz Age antics, he flees to Chicago. There he meets his rich uncle, who employs him in his collar factory in upstate New York.

Soon he falls in love with a pretty factory worker, Roberta Alden. She becomes pregnant and demands that he marry her. Meanwhile, Clyde has fallen for Sondra Finchley, a socialite who represents everything he craves. Clyde plans to drown Roberta on a boat trip, but his resolve diminishes. However, when she accidentally falls from the boat, he lets her drown. Convicted of murder, he dies by electrocution.

Dreiser analyzes each step leading to Clyde’s demise: merely a clueless creature in a cruel world where uncontrollable forces determine outcomes, he flounders. Ironically, people consider Clyde either privileged or poor according to how they perceive their own social positions. His lack of self-control nearly always skews these encounters to his detriment, leaving him powerless over his fate.

Horatio Alger’s popular but unrealistic rags-to-riches tales depicted cheerful penniless orphans, who, through “luck, pluck, and hard work,” prospered. As America industrialized and cities grew, society became increasingly stratified. Had he been Alger’s protagonist, Clyde would have gone from bellhop to hotel magnate.

Once at his uncle’s factory, Clyde is powerfully drawn to Roberta Alden. At first his idealized “dream,” she is physically attracted to him and to his “superior” position. Both have believed that poverty discourages obtaining an attractive lover. But pleasure will destroy their bond. As several scholars, Susan L. Mizruchi, for example, suggest, false values and illusion render them too much the realization of each other’s dream for their relationship to survive.

To Sondra, Clyde is a charming trifle because she can use him to goad his cousin, Gilbert, whose feelings toward Clyde are hostile. But society offers Clyde no honorable way out of his association with Roberta. A doctor uses moral arguments to refuse Roberta an abortion, although he has waived these scruples to “protect the reputations of wealthy girls.” As for the poor, he believes they deserve to suffer for their careless actions.

Sondra’s letters are affected; Roberta’s are sensitive, only later to be exploited as displays of pathos for the public, to indict another member of her class. Her reputation is not worth saving, for she succumbed to carnal desires. Sondra, later spared negative publicity in Clyde’s trial as “Miss X,” has the influence to “erase” any consequences of her actions; and Clyde, like an aborted fetus, can be expelled from her life.

Dreiser liberally uses foreshadowing. As Clyde’s sister Esta runs off with an actor, Roberta will later surrender to Clyde’s sexual demands. Clyde’s bellhop job at the Hotel Green-Davidson hints at the insignificant-but-opulent glamour of Lycurgus society. Again, he is on the outside looking in. Hobnobbing with the rich guests was forbidden, just as socializing with the factory girls would be forbidden.

Both affairs—with Hortense in Kansas City and with Sondra in Lycurgus—end sadly. For both, Clyde is willing to make the devil’s bargain. Although likely legally blameless, Clyde’s indiscretion of riding with his associates in the “borrowed car” dogs him to the end, whereas Clyde’s distorted perceptions cause him to simply ruminate about his guilt for deserting a drowning Roberta.

Visitors to his parents’ makeshift ministry find salvation themselves but do not save others. Clyde’s own trancelike mental state “saves” him but not Roberta. Alas, fundamentalist extremism provides no real survival tools in an indifferent world. On the battlefield of Clyde’s soul, “religion” picks a fight with his libido.

A corrupt legal system, determined less by facts than by perceptions, supports the prosecutor Mason. Resentful because of his identification with the lower class, he views Clyde as one of the idle rich. His prosecution becomes personal, justifying exploiting a jury predisposed towards family, church, and morality. Ironically, he thinks nothing of using Roberta’s painful epistles to advance his vendetta. Clyde never gets a fair trial.

Like Kansas City and Lycurgus, the prison houses a cross section of society—the prisoners represent a variety of ethnic types. A Catholic Italian gone mad, a Jew, a Chinese man, and a lawyer await execution. Fellow doomed prisoner Miller Nicholson, the (secular) lawyer, bequeaths Clyde two books, Robinson Crusoe and The Arabian Nights, but his absence leaves a void.

Clyde is both the lonely dreamer (like Crusoe) and the romantic. Like America, Clyde has roots in Puritanical fundamentalism but craves temporal happiness despite its spurious promise. For a time, Pastor McMillan’s prison visits provide Clyde with comfort and a sense of the divine. Still, by forsaking Clyde, the pastor believes he is saving his own soul.

Motifs figure prominently. Much about Sondra Finchley hints at electricity, which turns out to be Clyde’s final fate. “Indeed, his effect on her was electric—thrilling—arousing a sense of what it was to want and not to have—to wish not win and yet to feel… It tortured and flustered him” (242–243). Clyde even perceives her baby talk to have “an almost electric if sweetly tormenting effect.”

Even if no one died or suffered, and Sondra and Clyde married, tragedy would have followed as Clyde was only capable of desiring what was out of reach. In the end, Mrs. Griffiths gives young Russell (Esta’s son, who resembles Clyde) a dime for ice cream, determined that her grandson will not repeat his uncle’s fate. Would this small gesture extend him a chance at the American dream?

Sources

Dreiser, Theodore. An American Tragedy. Cambridge, Mass.: Robert Bentley, 1978.
Lydenberg, John, ed. and comp. Introduction to Dreiser: A Collection of Critical Essays, 2. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1971.
Mizruchi, Susan L. The Power of Historical Knowledge: Narrating the Past in Hawthorne, James, and Dreiser. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1988.
Davies, Jude. “Naturalism, 1893–1914.” The Literary Encyclopedia. Available online. URL: http://www.litencyc.com/php/stopics.php?rec=true&UID=764. Accessed May 21, 2005.
The Historical Society of the Courts of the State of New York. “The Murder Trial of Chester Gillette.” Available online. URL: https://history.nycourts.gov/love-triangles-death-and-doubt-people-v-gillette-and-an-american-tragedy/. Accessed May 21, 2025.

Categories: Literature, Novel Analysis

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