An American Tragedy - SPOILED but not Rotten

Oh how different are the writing styles of Forster and Dreiser (and Woolf too for that matter, but that will be saved for another blog). Some will prefer Dreiser to Forster, but I belong to the other camp, preferring Forster's direct, poetic, and insightful prose to Dreisers cumbersome and unedited prose.

Both these stories, Passage to India and An American Tragedy, do not end where I expect them do. I expect Passage to end shortly after the trial and Tragedy to end shortly after Clyde is caught. The dramatic impulse does not dictate that we follow Clyde all the way to the moment of his execution, but it is important to Dreiser to take us there. It was Forster's determination to include the entire final section that led Ann to draw her brilliant reading about what is actually at the heart of Forster's novel, the friendship of Aziz and Fielding. Here the American tragedy is not simply Roberta's murder. The novel is about two murders: Roberta's and Clyde's, and for Dreiser, Clyde's murder seems every bit as tragic and pointless as Roberta's.

The thing that strikes me about the third book of the novel is Clyde's inability to feel fully guilty for murdering Roberta. He's not a sociopath insofar as he knows that what he did was not good, I believe. There's much made, as Ann notes, about whether or not Clyde actually killed Roberta or if in the end it was an accident, but again I agree with Ann and that Clyde is clearly responsible for Roberta's death. So why does Clyde want to split hairs here, and to the point that he cannot make any such confession of his guilt even to McMillan and God? Because, I propose, for Clyde, his actions were not wrong. The personal beliefs born in Clyde is that the search of material goods and ease are a reasonable and necessary quest. Roberta was going to ruin that irreparably. What is immoral then? Getting rid of an obstacle to pursue what he must pursue or accepting defeat and living a miserable life. Clyde does not deal with a moral vs. immoral decision, but with two moral decisions.

This books seems to me to be a response to Horatio Alger novels, in which our plucky young hero rises up from obscurity due to hard work and moral righteousness. Clyde never stands a chance to truly rise. He makes a million bad decisions and suffers from them, but if he were born privileged like Gilbert or Belknap, his decisions would have been in no way disastrous. Belknap faced the same problem, but his rich father bailed him out. If Gilbert reached the same point that Clyde did and got someone pregnant, Dad would be there. Hell, even Dr. Glenn performed abortions for the rich and privileged but not for the poor. And let's say Gilbert murdered Roberta for the same reason Clyde did, the entire legal force of the Griffiths would have been there to aid him.

Please forgive the rambling nature of this post.

If Clyde's murder is a parallel with Roberta's, and if Roberta was murdered because she stood in Clyde's way, then why was Clyde murdered? What was Clyde pregnant with and how did his pregnancy (metaphorically speaking, of course) threaten to derail the social world in which he lived? I think that is the central question of the novel.

How do morality and social progress/personal improvement meet and shape each other? Another central question.

This novel is widely considered a piece of Realism in which environment, not nature determine the course of events and character. Here, Clyde's desires and concerns are innate, not created by culture. So much so that he is constantly searching for understanding, understanding that his mother and society at large cannot have for him. He is something like Frankenstein's monster not knowing why he has been made so monstrous. How can others behave so well? How can they avoid the troubles he does? What Clyde never connects, because no one admits, Clyde's desires are not monstrous, but human, or rather "American." Others have the same problems, but they are either comfortably stuck in their caste or they are privileged enough to avoid the ramifications.

To murder Clyde, society addresses nothing, examines itself and its structure not at all. The deathhouse sequence continually refers to the mechanical nature of things here. Everything is ritualized and automatic and meaningless. The only examination expected is to be made by the prisoners trying to come to peace with the end of their life. Our social structure need examine nothing and can move on, leaving Clyde and his trial to be what it always was: entertainment for the masses, a reality TV show before TV, a Jerry Springer circus of pain and outrage.

And though I feel all that intellectually, I can't say I had much sympathy for Clyde, myself. He was a whiny prick. I have no idea what that says about me.