An American Tragedy

Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1925

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Study Guide

Before You Read Beta

Summary

Background

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Part 1, Chapters 1-10

Part 1, Chapters 11-19

Part 2, Chapters 1-22

Part 2, Chapters 23-47

Part 3, Chapters 1-16

Part 3, Chapter 17-Epilogue

Character Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Background

Historical Context: Wealth and Poverty During the Roaring Twenties

The novel is was written and implicitly set during the 1920s, a period when many working-class American people lived below the poverty line, and wealth and income disparities were growing, due in part to factory industrialization (often associated with those of so-called “new money”) and generational wealth (associated with those of so-called “old money”). A burgeoning mass media helped to circulate the leisurely lifestyles of the rich and famous, while mass production and easy credit terms made it easier to obtain consumer goods and aspire to emulate these lifestyles. Clyde Griffiths’s quest for The American Dream comes during a time when leisure and conspicuous consumption are status markers.

Clyde learns his first lessons about wealth and looking wealthy at the Green-Davidson, the hotel in Kansas City where he works as a bellhop. He watches upwardly mobile members of the middle class consume copious amounts of alcohol and wear clothing that reflects their disposable income. Clyde purchases clothes on credit, and Hortense wants a fur coat on credit; both characters want to give the appearance of wealth. The bellhops’ final spree is driven in part by a desire to emulate the conspicuous consumption of the hotel guests. They rely on the ultimate status marker of the period—a luxury car—for their spree. When they kill the little girl and crash the car, Clyde and the bellhops are back to casual labor and abject poverty because they lack the financial resources to recover.

Clyde doesn’t truly realize the gulf that he has to bridge between looking wealthy and being wealthy until he lands at the Union League Club, where the members are so wealthy that they can afford to keep out the rest of the world. Using generational wealth, Samuel has built a little empire with the collar factory and lives in a home that Clyde sees as “starkly severe, placid, reserved, beautiful” (131). Samuel is prosperous enough and confident enough in his wealth that he doesn’t need to advertise his wealth. The younger children of the wealthy manufacturers of Lycurgus have other ideas. Bella, Bertine, Sondra, and their male equivalents are never seen at work. They spend their time on leisure pursuits like day trips by car, boating, and horseback riding. This leisure and all the equipment required for it are status markers that Clyde, who works right until the trip to the lake, Big Bittern, can’t afford.

Literary Context: American Realism and Naturalism

Realism consolidated as a literary movement in the mid-1800s when artists rejected the sentimentality of literature of the period and the expectation that works should be morally edifying. Realists in Europe and in the United States wanted to take a more objective approach that would attempt to represent life as it really is. Naturalists held that the real life of the individual is the result of larger forces such as geography, belief, class, and biology. Theodore Dreiser’s novel is a Realist piece of fiction that relies on Naturalistic representation to show how Clyde Griffiths ends up dying in the electric chair. This ending reflects Theodore Dreiser’s commitment to representing the reality of religion, the legal system, and sex in the United States of the 20th century.

Thematically, An American Tragedy is a study of how Clyde’s seemingly individual choices are constrained by class, his engagements with the criminal justice system, and religion. Dreiser chooses to set the novel in booming cities, Kansas City and Chicago, where the working class and people with disposable income rub elbows. Dreiser also includes small-town United States, where more conservative ideas about class and gender limit Clyde’s social outlets and the opportunities available to Roberta.

The conflicts in the novel grow out larger forces that are beyond the control of individual characters. Clyde’s internal conflicts are a mixture of mutually exclusive ideas about hard work and the importance of leisure as a mark of wealth. Clyde has these internal struggles because he has bought into a powerful myth that is foundational to culture in the United States: The American Dream.

Realism and Naturalism are also at work in the subject matter. The novel was “banned in Boston, MA (1927) and burned by the Nazis in Germany (1933) because it ‘deals with low love affairs’” (“Top 10 Most Challenged Books and Frequently Challenged Books Archive.” American Library Association). If the frank discussion of sex and abortion weren’t enough to outrage moral conservatives, Dreiser ripped the main narrative of the novel from headlines on the trial of Chester Gillette, a man who was sentenced to death in 1908 for drowning his girlfriend after starting an affair with another woman.

Legal Context: Reproductive Care

Lack of access to contraception, information about sexual health, and abortion are larger forces that constrains Clyde and Roberta’s choices. Dreiser writes that at “no time, owing to the inexperience of Clyde, as well as Roberta, had there been any adequate understanding or use of more than the simplest, and for the most part unsatisfactory, contraceptive devices” (160). Because of Clyde’s “ignorance, youth, poverty and fear, […] [t]echnically he did not even know the meaning of the word ‘midwife,’ or the nature of the services performed by her” (167). These services would have included reproductive care.

Class inequality during this period exacerbated differences in access to reproductive care. These inequalities were so great that sex educator Margaret Sanger founded the precursor to Planned Parenthood in the early 1920s after seeing working-class and immigrant women’s need for what she called birth control to limit family size, an important element of class mobility. She also challenged federal obscenity laws that criminalized literature about sexual health and the possession or sale of contraception or abortifacients (medication that induces abortion). Sanger has since been criticized for racist ideas about reproduction, but her insights about reproductive care and class have endured. Clyde and Roberta’s failure to use reliable contraception and Clyde’s fruitless, furtive search for abortifacients occur in this context. Clyde’s first violation of the legal order isn’t murdering Roberta. It is buying the pills for her.

Having become pregnant, Roberta isn’t able to secure an abortion, and this is down to both class and gender inequality, and the legal context of the time. Dr. Glenn is willing in some instances to perform abortions for “young girls of good family” (174) but not for unmarried, working-class Roberta. His response conveys sexist and classist ideas about what Roberta deserves, but his point that “a physician may not interfere in a case of this kind unless he is willing to spend ten years in prison” (170) is factual. Read with the legal context in mind, the novel is an explicit text about the consequences of making reproductive care illegal.