An American Tragedy Read Free

the family doctor to perform an abortion. Clyde, with his inexperience and lack of money, cannot avail himself of this escape route.
    Belknap’s partner, Jephson, drives home Dreiser’s moral of the powerful determining force of class. “After all, you didn’t make yourself,” he tells Clyde. And it is also Jephson who articulates Clyde’s helpless attraction to the unattainable. “A case of the Arabian Nights,” he tells him on the stand, using Dreiser’s recurrent Alladinish imagery to symbolize the dream of magically attained riches. When Clyde does not understand, Jephson explains: “A case of being bewitched, my poor boy—by beauty, love, wealth, by things that are we sometimes think we want very, very much and cannot ever have. . . .” Dreiser sympathizes with Clyde’s dream but pitilessly exposes it as a mirage. (“Mirage” was an early working title for the novel.)
    An American Tragedy is one of the greatest “social novels” produced in America, one that paints the fullest and deepest picture of American society. It is told without moralizing—though Dreiser regards religion as another mirage, which leads fanatic believers like Clyde’s parents into useless lives—yet it is a profoundly moral novel, harsh in its truth-telling, magnanimous in its sympathy for the failings and weakness of humankind. It is not an exculpation of Clyde’s crime but rather a profound meditation on the nature of guilt, viewed from all conceivable angles, psychological, legal, moral, social.
    It is also an psychologically acute (and gripping) murder story—on the high level of Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment or Norman Mailer’s The Executioner’s Song . Like those authors, Dreiser’s patient attentiveness to detail, and his philosophical vision, transmute a sordid, tawdry murder into a tragedy (he said it was an “honor” to tell the story of ordinary people like Clyde and Roberta). Dreiser draws us through an emotional wringer, leaving the reader exhausted yet purged.
    Dreiser, of course, makes the murder itself ambigous. Clyde backs out of his plan to kill Roberta at the last moment. He cannot snuff out this beautiful soul for the shimmering mirage of Sondra. And yet, and yet . . . Clyde, commanded by the voice of the “Efrit,” the genie that Dreiser creates to symbolize the darker side of his nature, swims away as Roberta flounders in her final throes. He is morally, if not legally, guilty. But aren’t there extenuating circumstances?
    Let the reader debate this point, as Dreiser does in the mind of the Reverend Duncan McMillan, the minister who counsels Clyde on death row and who ultimately betrays him to the governor. The latter is looking for a way to justify commuting the death sentence. McMillan is driven by his own religious beliefs to tell him that Clyde was guilty in his heart. The governor allows the execution to go forward. (It might be noted that for all Dreiser’s antipathy toward religion the two most devout believers—McMillan and Clyde’s mother—are among his most sympathetic characters.)
    A word about Dreiser’s style; it is slow, ponderous, almost archaic at times, sprinkled with solecisms. The first part of the novel, describing Clyde’s childhood and young manhood, would benefit from cutting. Dreiser will make a point and then repeat it twice over—often in the next sentences. But the novel gathers power like a thunder storm, and the reader is slowly sucked into the tale’s emotional vortex. Who can deny the symbolic power of the death scene—those ultimate moments in the rowboat on the lake “looking like a huge black pearl cast by some mighty hand,” as two small figures act out under a relentless sun a drama of fate and free will? And then the trial, with its ritualized jousts between attorneys but also its fresh analysis of Clyde’s guilt or innocence from the perspective of the law. And then the surreal scenes on death row as Clyde is caught up in the Kafkaesque