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Volume 16, Number 3 (1992) reprinted by permission Legal Studies Forum DREISER'S SENSE OF "INJUSTICE" IN AN AMERICAN TRAGEDY RICHARD C. STERNE Simmons College in general, has been strongly influenced by Darwinism and, to a lesser extent, Marxism. An important concept for both social Darwinists and Marxists has been that of natural law, or laws, in the sense in which Darwin uses the term in Chapter Four, "Natural Selection; or the Survival of the Fittest," in The Origin of Species.1 He says that he means "by nature, only the aggregate action and product of many natural laws, and by laws the sequence of events as ascer- tained by us."' Completely in harmony with this descriptive notion of natural law is Oliver Wendell Holmes's definition, "for legal purposes," of "a right" - a definition whose cynicism, or realism, is that of much modern fiction that deals with the law: ... for legal purposes a right is only the hypostasis of a prophecy -The word "only" is worth noting in both Darwin's and Holmes's definition. The word is used, clearly, in order to contrast what each writer thinks of as a straightforward, descriptive way of discussing "nature," or "a right," with the specious prescriptiveness that had been attached to these terms before the enlightened nineteenth century. For the ethical "natural law" that Sophocles adumbrated in Antigone, that Aristotle pointed to in his Rhetoric, that Aquinas defined in Christian terms, and that having been secularized in the seventeenth century by thinkers like Grotius and Locke, had been transmuted into "natural rights" in the eighteenth century by Voltaire, Diderot, and others, had come to be widely regarded in Victoria's day as an antiquated pre- scientific concept.3 This does not mean, however, that Western authors of trial fiction who were influenced by Darwin or Marx dismissed the proposition that human beings needed laws, based on ethical concepts, to regulate their behavior. What these writers did, however, tend overwhelmingly to reject was the idea of "natural" ethical laws on which all men and women, in all times and places, could agree. An admirable character in Roger Martin du Gard's Darwinist "Dreyfus" novel, Jean Barois, refuses to be discouraged by the murky outcome of the Dreyfus affair. For he is convinced that "present conceptions of truth and justice will be superseded by superior ones."4 It is not clear that Martin du Gard subscribes to this vague faith that tomorrow will be better, but at least he permits it to be expressed in opposition to the bitter remark by one of the other characters, that Justice and Truth are "pompous words that mean noth. ing " (Martin du Gard, 273). Susan Glaspell says nothing at all about the future of justice in her implicitly Darwinist short story, "A Jury of Her Peers." But she invites us to infer that when society regularly permits women to sit on juries, the ends of justice will be better served than they are in the Midwestern community, circa 1917, of the story, that is dominated by men and their stolid ideas about "evidence" and "the law." Bertolt Brecht, a bit like Martin du Gard's optimist, postpones, but in Marxist terms, and to a specific historical moment, the advent of a truer justice than the one that has previously obtained. His Caucasian Chalk Circle contrasts with the chaotic injustice of medieval "Grusinia," satirically dramatized in the body of the play, the humane ultil- tarianism which, in a didactic preface set in the post-World War II Soviet :Union, resolves a dispute between two collective farms. Brecht's assumption, which is shared by Mr. Max, Bigger Thomas's lawyer in Richard Wright's Native Son, is that a Marxist revolution can ethically transform our institutions, including that of the trial or hearing. In short, much trial fiction influenced by Darwin or Marx attempts to replace a natural law based on a supposedly innate ethical sense in man, with the notion of an evolving or emergent ethical understanding. Dreiser's An American Tragedy, however, stands apart in its bleak Darwinism - its preoccu- pation with the struggle for existence and its evident lack of faith in "tomor- row" - from works like those I have mentioned. Dreiser, one of many children born to a poor immigrant couple, dis- covered the struggle for existence at an early age. He sometimes went to bed hungry, and with one of his brothers he picked up coal along the tracks of the Terre Haute and Evansville Railroad in order to help heat the family home.5 An ardent temperament, rebelling against his father's literal, superstitious Catholicism, led him on a quest for sexual pleasure and material success. His tendency to see life as governed by "forces," or by natural laws of the mechanis- tic kind, rather than by traditional ethical natural laws, was strengthened by both his journalistic experiences and his reading. Herbert Spencer, the popular social Darwinist philosopher, destroyed - Dreiser wrote in A Book About Myself - the last vestiges of his belief in immutable, supernaturally sanctioned moral laws. In the writings of the biologist Jacques Loeb, Dreiser found human behavior likened to the tropistic reactions of plants. From Freud, either in- directly or directly, he acquired a sense of the relationship between an adult's attitudes towards sex and the experiences he has had as a child.6 For the con- ventional morality consisting of fulminations against the indulgence of appetite, which is articulated in Dreiser's fiction by characters like the minister in Jennie Gerhardt and Clyde's parents in An American Tragedy, he had little respect. Yet, despite the generally mechanistic cast of his thought, he did evoke now and then in fiction written before An American Tragedy - Bob Ames's idealis- tic advice to Carrie in Sister Carrie constitutes one example - a moral sense based on "sympathy." Sympathy makes the Dreiser characters who possess it appealing, though not necessarily "fit" from a Darwinian point of view: Jennie Gerhardt, lovingly loyal to a man who has married a woman more socially polished than she, stays with him during his fatal illness, then envisages a bleak, lonely old age. Perhaps Dreiser was influenced up to a point by Spencer's observation that "sympathy is the root of both justice and beneficence." Implicit in this formulation is a fundamental precept of Judeo-Christian natural law - the golden rule, which is based on a capacity for sympathetic identification with one's fellows. Taken together with comments on the prospects for an "ad- vance" of the sentiment of justice during "peaceful phases" of history, Spencer's remark about sympathy makes him something of a moral optimist.7 Dreiser was not to adopt a comparable perspective until he arrived, in the 1930s and 1940s, at a kind of fusion of communism and Elias Hicks's Quakerism. Several years before beginning to work on An American Tragedy, he wrote in a newspa- per piece that there was really only the golden suggestion (not a golden rule) which softens lifeThe "first law," Dreiser said, (in so far as humanity is concerned) is self-preservation .... only theClyde Griffiths, the anti-hero of An American Tragedy, is plainly not one of the fit. He is neither resolute nor ruthless enough to seize what he wants in a sensate, materialistic society. At the same time, although capable of feeling sympathy for others who are in distress, he is so weakly guided by "the golden suggestion," so mastered by his dream of a glamorous, successful marriage, that he plans and causes the death of a woman without money whom he has made pregnant. Dreiser's account of his short life, with its climax in Roberta Alden's drowning and Clyde's trial for murder, emphasizes the hypocrisy of a society that lives chiefly by the law of the jungle, but that preaches morality and uses the legal system to punish those too weak or clumsy to conceal or explain away their particular "crimes." The final scenes in Clyde's life, involving his virtually filial relationship to the Reverend Duncan McMillan, indicate that Dreiser, despite the "hardness" of his Darwinism - in comparison to that of other writers of trial fiction - is in a sense haunted by the ghost of traditional, ethical natural law. But Dreiser is essentially faithful, in An American Tragedy, to his view that the law of the jungle prevails in human life; and therefore he cannot go beyond articulating compassion for his botched and bungled fellow creatures: he cannot really ex- press a sense of "injustice." Clyde Griffiths is haphazardly raised by parents who wander from city to city conducting an evangelical Protestant mission. He perceives, as a child that while his father and mother are constantly preaching "the love and mercy and care of God for him and for all,9 the family is always hard up, never well clothed. In Kansas City, where the Griffiths are living when the novel begins, Clyde's older sister, Esta, is seduced by a handsome actor's "chemic witchery" (21); she runs away with him to St. Louis where, instead of marrying her as he had promised, he deserts her. Although Clyde's parents conceal from him and his younger sister and brother the details of what has happened - including Esta's pregnancy - Clyde realizes that sex is involved, and he concludes that all this "religious emotion and talk ... hadn't saved Esta" (26). Fifteen years old, wanting to quit school and make his way in the glamorous world outside the drab mission, he finds a job at the Hotel Green-Davidson. Here his senses and imagination are stirred by glimpses of fashionably dressed, evidently suc- cessful and happy young men and women, and by the stories he hears of sexual adventures, some of them involving bellboys and women staying at the hotel. His own initiation, by a "Venus," (70) occurs in a brothel that Dreiser calls an "erotic temple," (~\71) and it actually seems to be the most sacred place in the coldly secular world of An American Tragedy. This experience leads Clyde to look for "a free pagan girl of his own" (70) on whom he can spend some of ihe money he is making at the hotel. He soon thinks he has found one, in Hortense Briggs, who will, however, behave as calculatingly towards him as the actor had done towards Esta. Clyde is completely confused when he finds that Esta has returned to Kansas City, and that his mother has secretly been visiting her - and thus deceiving him. Yet this deception, and Esta's confession to him of her own foolishness in getting into trouble, permit him to rationalize any misadventure that he imagines might come to Hortense through a liaison with him. Even though Clyde does not lack sympathy for his sister, the law of survival of the fittest is impressing itself strongly on his mind. Hortense, who is quite "fit," controls Clyde by hinting that she will be "nice" to him if he buys her a fur jacket she has seen in a store window. Com- pletely bewitched by her, he makes a down payment on the jacket, but an accident suddenly changes his life. An automobile in which he and Hortense are riding with hotel bellboys and their dates hits a little girl, then smashes into some paving stones. Hortense, concerned only that her beauty may have been marred by facial cuts runs home. Clyde, fearful of capture by the police, but somewhat less selfish (more "sympathetic") than she, helps to place the injured driver and an injured girl in more comfortable positions in the car, before running towards an open field, where he begins to crawl away to safety. After fleeing to St. Louis, he reads in a newspaper about the little girl's death and the hospitalization and arrest of the driver, who has charged the passengers with being as guilty as he, "since they had urged him to make speed at the time and against his will - a claim which was true enough, as Clyde knew" (161). Three years later, while living, in Chicago as "Harry Tenet," Clyde meets one of the other automobile passengers, Ratterer, who tells him that the driver hid been sentenced to a year in jail, "not so much for killing the little girl, but for taking the car" (which belonged to his father's wealthy employer), and "running it without a license and not stopping when signaled." (166) This subliminal message to Clyde about the relative importance in his society of property and human life is supplemented by a somewhat analogous message from his mother. Writing to "Harry Tenet" from Denver, where the family now lives, she urges Clyde to "cling to the teachings of our Savior," always remembering that "right is might"; but almost in the same breath she advises him to write to his "rich and successful" uncle in Lycurgus, New York, to ask for a job in his collar business (163-65). There is no indication that Clyde is troubled by this suggestion that he serve both God and Mammon. But his later inability, in his relationship with Roberta, to act in either a steadily compassionate or a singlemindedly ruthless way, seems due in part to his mother's unconsciously ambivalent teaching. At the Chicago Union League Club, where Ratterer has found him a bellboy job, and later noticed that the rich uncle is a guest, Clyde contrives to meet Samuel Griffiths. Somewhat remorseful because his ineffectual brother, Asa, had been all but disinherited by their father, Griffiths is impressed by Clyde's apparent intelligence and ambition, and writes to him soon after their meeting to offer him a job. Clyde accepts it. Walking about Lycurgus shortly after arriving there, he is struck by the contrast between a miserable slum, "the like of which . . . he had not seen outside of Chicago or Kansas City" (187), and the "arresting company of houses" on the same residential street. One of these homes, which he especially admires, has trees, walks, newly groomed if bloomless flower beds, a large garage at center of which was a boy holding a swan in his arms, and to the rightHe learns that this is Samuel Griffiths' house, and while he does not suspect that he himself will become the hunted stag rather than the possessor of a beautiful swan, his thoughts evince his "unfitness." For he fears intensely an investigation by his "uncle or his cousin or some friend or agent of theirs" of his past life: "The matter of that slain child in Kansas City! His parents, miserable makeshift life! Esta!" (189). The cousin he is thinking of is his uncle's son, Gilbert, whom he strongly resembles, and who as secretary of the Griffiths Collar and Shirt Company has coldly informed him that he will be starting in the "shrinking room" of the factory (182). A major motif in An American Tragedy is the characters' intense interest in their position on the social scale. Clyde, con- temptuously treated by Gilbert, feels inferior to him, and looks down in his turn on the collar factory employees - who respect and fear him simply because of his surname - and on the people he meets at his "commonplace" boarding house. Dreiser, whom H.L. Mencken described as "the Hindenburg of the novel"10 has none of Moliere's deftness; but he makes Clyde behave like a kind of small-time Tartuffe when, after Samuel Griffiths has ordered Gilbert to promote Clyde to a twenty-five dollar position as an assistant foreman, he begins to attend a Presbyterian Church to which the Griffiths occasionally go. People "know" each other, in the urban society Dreiser depicts, almost entirely in terms of their supposed status, as this is indicated by dress, speech, and the presence or absence of self-assurance. Clyde's rise in the factory hierar- chy, which enables him to buy new clothes and move to a better boarding :house, where his landlady offers a special rate because of his striking resemb- lance to his well-known cousin, makes him especially attractive to the female employees he now supervises. Sternly instructed though he has been by Gilbert not to associate personally with any of these women, he enjoys erotic fantasies in which his new status plays a key part. He muses about some of the employ- ees who are of a "pagan and pleasure-loving turn" (238) in a way that foreshad- ows his shallow relationship with Roberta: . . . it might be possible ... without detection ... for him to play withInstead of becoming a Don Juan, however, he finds himself especially drawn to a young woman who has been hired on a trial basis and whom Clyde, now elevated to stamping room supervisor, decides to retain in her job. It is notable that although Dreiser's description of Roberta Alden's background immediately recalls Clyde's to us - her parents are poor, her father is a "neb- ulous" blunderer (244), like Clyde's father - she thinks of him from the begin- ning as a glamorous Griffiths. The Clyde she falls in love with is largely a fiction created by her conventional, impressionable mind. And Clyde's strong feeling for her is inseparable from his conviction that he can dominate her, as he has not been able to dominate Hortense Briggs. Darwin's observations on sexual selection are pertinent to the genesis of this romance: Clyde's bright plumage, for Roberta, is his Griffiths name; Roberta's sexual appeal for Clyde is not only gracefulness and vulnerability, but her, obvious adulation of him. Corresponding in power to Roberta's illusion about Clyde is his fantasy about a young friend of one of the Griffiths daughters - Sondra Finchley. He has met her on the evening of the supper - the only invitation his uncle has extended to him - at the Griffiths' house. The vain, self-assured daughter of a newly rich industrialist, Sondra has had an "electric," tormenting effect on him. Clearly unattainable, as he imagines, she becomes a goddess of Beauty- and-Wealth in his mind. Clyde's essential passiveness and timidity, which prevent him from attempting to win Sondra, are evident even at the beginning of his acquaintance with Roberta. For it is she who initiates a conversation with him, at work. In spite of her initiative, however, their first meeting outside the factory is accidental - at a lake on a Sunday afternoon, while he is thinking of "that beautiful Sondra Finchley," and only then of the poor but attractive Roberta, "and the world which she as well as he was occupying here" (257). Once the fortuitous meeting occurs, Clyde's "chemisms" do send him in hot pursuit of Roberta, despite the Griffiths' ukase against fraternization with female workers. He becomes her initiator, teaching her - overcoming religious scruples like his own mother's - to dance, then persuading her to move from the house of one of her friends where her every move is watched, to a lodging with a separate entrance. There, by promising never to desert her, he overcomes her last hesitations. Dreiser effectively evokes the mixture of guilt feelings and erotic exhilaration in both Clyde and Roberta; and later, Clyde's cock-of-the-walk reflection that since she was "willing to sacrifice herself for him in this fashion, must there not be others" (300)? Dreiser repeatedly presents human behavior, not as relatively autono- mous, as writers in the ethical natural law tradition - like Dante, William Langland, Lope de Vega, Voltaire - had conceived it, but as determined by drives, or inhibitions, or environmental forces, or accidents. A chance evening meeting with Sondra shapes Clyde's life decisively. She mistakes him in the dark for Gilbert, whose indifference to her has wounded her vanity, and imme- diately she finds Clyde interesting. She relishes the thought of both striking back at Gil and exercising her sway over his cousin. Clyde, his confidence buoyed by sexual success with Roberta, and by a recent invitation from a factory official to join an important golf club, decides not to visit Roberta that evening. During the following months, he keeps breaking appointments with her in order to accept Sondra's social invitations. He is made keenly aware, however, that his relative poverty is a hard- ship among the sleek young beasts of Lycurgus. A wealthy girl tells him at a party that although some people think he is better looking than Gil, that won't help you much ... unless you have money - that is, if youThis lapidary truth is brought strongly home to him after Roberta finds herself pregnant. Clyde has been continuing the clandestine affair with her only because he cannot find a creditable way to end it. A fit Darwinian would contrive to desert the pregnant woman he no longer loves, and brazenly deny any charge that he was responsible for her condition. Clyde, however, sensitive as he is to "conventional or moral stimuli" (371), and pressed hard by the desperate Roberta to help her, obtains some pills - which do not work, then finds a doctor who, he has heard, might be willing to perform an abortion. In a pathetic scene, Roberta goes alone to Dr. Glenn's office, Clyde having insisted that his name "can't be pulled into this without trouble for both of us" (387). When she tells Glenn of her problem, he refuses on moral grounds to do what she asks, and tries to persuade her to discuss the predicament with her parents. But the heart of the matter is clearly her lack of the money that people "like even more than they do looks." For the doctor, in several cases in the past ten years where family and other neighbor-Dreiser observes sardonically, after Roberta has again visited Glenn and again been turned down, that the doctor gave no hint that he could be induced to act "as indeed he could act. It was against his prejudices and ethics" (410). Clyde keeps playing for time with the terrified Roberta, who grows increasingly insistent on marriage. Although he is unable to avoid comparing Roberta's situation to Esta's some years earlier, he still coolly asks himself who had come to Esta's rescue? And after all, if only he could extricate himself from this mess, and marry Sondra, he would be the equal, if not the superior, of Gilbert Griffiths himself and all thoseWhen Roberta is four months pregnant, he receives two letters - one a baby-talk invitation from "Sonda" to "Clydie-Mydie" (Hortense, also using baby-talk narcissistically, had addressed it to the fur jacket she coveted) to visit her at the Finchleys' summer place, where "we'd ride and drive and swim and dance" (433); the other from Roberta, who is anxiously waiting at her parents' home for him to take her on the wedding trip he has hinted at. Her predica- ment, which she has managed to hide from her family, causes Clyde "one of his old time twinges of remorse and pity" - he is able "to sympathize deeply, if gloomily" with her (434) - but the weight of her dependence on him makes him long to run away with and marry Sondra. At this point Clyde happens to read a newspaper report of an "Acciden- tal Double Tragedy" at a western Massachusetts lake. A rowboat that had been rented by a man and a girl had been found, upside-down, near the shore. The girl's body had eventually been discovered, but there was still no trace of the man's. Pondering the news item as he goes to bed that night, he was struck by the thought ... supposing that he and Roberta - no,Clyde's brief flirtation here -with the idea of dying along with Sondra ("Double Tragedy," the newspaper headline says) is consistent with his general passive- ness, and indicates - particularly when taken together with his complete bungling of the eventual murder plan - that his grasp of realities is much weaker than his fantasies. Although Clyde feels that even to think of such a solution as drowning Roberta is to commit "a horrible, terrible crime" (440), the dark thought returns after an excursion with Sondra and her friends to Big Bittern, a virtually uninhabited Adirondack region dotted with "lonesome lakes" (458). After Roberta writes again, threatening to let the world "know how you have treated me" (469), he telephones her to say he will take her away, vaguely mentioning a little trip, "somewhere before they got married or after" (470). Roberta's death comes about in a manner sufficiently different from what Clyde has envisioned, to make him (and many readers of the novel) uncertain about the extent of his guilt. Dreiser's depiction of the death scene on the lonely lake epitomizes that combination of chance, "chemisms," psycho- logical factors, and material circumstances that constitutes for him - in contrast to the relatively clear-cut tales that the prosecution and defense attorneys will tell in court - the human situation. The crucial events in the rowboat result from Clyde's sudden inability to do what he has planned: . . . turn swiftly and savagely to one side or the other - leap upInstead, he suffers a "sudden palsy of the will" (491). His tormented facial expression frightens Roberta, who cries out and, by crawling along the keel, attempts to approach him, since he seems about to fall either into the boat or into the water. As she draws near him, "seeking to take his hands in hers and the camera from him in order to put it into the boat," Clyde strikes out at her, "but not even then with any intention to do other than free himself of her - ... her presence forever - ...!" This description of his intention, and the passage that follows it, convey an impression of the event that differs, as we shall see, from the impression that Clyde himself gives to the Reverend Duncan McMillan later in the novel. (It will be, however, a crucial element of Clyde's lying courtroom testimony about what happened on the lake that he in no way injured Roberta who, he will say, precipitated the overturning of the boat by jumping up in excitement at his offer of marriage.) Dreiser, after telling us that Clyde's sole intention was to "free himself" from Roberta "forever," continues: Yet (the camera still unconsciously held tight) pushing at her with suchDreiser's language indicates that what has happened so far is an accident, for the boat's capsizing is due to Clyde's effort "to assist and recapture her and to apologize for the unintended blow." What happens next, however, is described in such a way that even in the heavily "determined" world of Drei- ser's novel it strikes us as moral wrongdoing on Clyde's part. Roberta, unable to swim, calls for help, but a "voice at his ear" tells him that an accident is saving him the labor of what he has sought. And then Clyde, the sound of Roberta'a cries still in his ears, that lastAmong Clyde's many blunders in planning Roberta's death was his failure to realize that she might leave incriminating evidence at the lakeside inn where they had registered. There, soon after her drowned body is recovered, a letter to her mother is found in her coat, saying, "We're up here and we're going to be married, but this is for your eyes alone" (499). The County Dis- trict Attorney, when shown this letter by the County Coroner - who men- tions other suspicious aspects of the event, one of which is that the man's body has not yet been found - agrees tacitly with his view that the case has good political potentialities. For the District Attorney, who hopes to win a judge- ship in a forthcoming election, stands to benefit among prospective voters from a timely, important criminal conviction. But as his attention focuses increasing- ly on Clyde - who will be arrested at Twelfth Lake, where Sondra and her friends are vacationing - he comes to have additional reasons for zealously prosecuting the case. "The son of a poor farmer's widow," District Attorney Mason had denied himself all pleasures in childhood in order to help his moth- er; and as an adult,, he looked upon those "with whom life had dealt more kindly as too favorably treated" (504). Clyde Griffiths, Mason soon learns he is far from wealthy, he loathes because of the latter's close association with the "wretched . . . indifferent" rich (516). And because Mason suffers from a "psychic sex scar" (504) as the result of a facial injury in adolescence, he envies and despises Clyde's evident popularity with women. Happily for Mason, another of Clyde's blunders has been to leave in a trunk in the Lycurgus room the final fifteen letters that Roberta had sent him, as well as many notes and invitations from Sondra, and letters from his mother that include two addressed to Harry Tenet, in Chicago. When newspaper editors from all over the United States ask Mason for more information about the case, and especially about the "beautiful wealthy girl with whom it was said this Griffiths was in love," the District Attorney, "over-awed by the wealth of the Finchleys and the Griffiths," simply replies that she is the daughter of a very wealthy manufacturer of Lycurgus, whose nameBut Mason does not hesitate to show reporters the bundle of letters from Roberta - for, as Dreiser mordantly observes, "who was there to protect her" (577). As far as Clyde's relationship to the Samuel Griffiths family is con- cerned, he suffers more than he benefits from it. On the one hand, pre-trial press reports emphasize his connections with the well-to-do: COLLAR MANUFACTURER OF LYCURGUS, NEW YORK." (622) with him, or makes any public statement about him. Samuel Griffiths is honest enough to ask himself whether his having ignored Clyde for eight months after putting him to work in the factory basement might have been "at least a contributing cause to all this horror" (586). And - though chiefly because some sort of a defense on the part of the Griffiths would . . . be expected by the public" - he does authorize the engagement and payment of competent lawyers to defend his nephew. Griffiths knew, however, of other criminal lawyers, "very distinguished" ones, who for a sufficient retainerv, ia change of venue, motions, appeals, etc.,But such a "hotly contested trial as this" would result in a great deal of publi- city, "and did Mr. Samuel Griffiths want that"(589)? Thus, Dreiser indicates that in this world where the unfit fall, Clyde is condemned to die because money is not available to him to hire the most "distinguished" lawyers - just as Roberta was condemned to continue her preg- nancy because neither she nor Clyde could afford to pay enough to buy an abortion. Neither the golden rule, the most compassionate commandment of the Judeo-Christian version of natural law (that universal law which Aristotle said was "binding on all men," and which "every one to some extent div- ines")," nor the "golden suggestion," competes effectively in An American Tragedy with hard Darwinian law. In Clyde's trial, the "truths" presented to the jury by lawyers for the prosecution and the defense differ - through deceptive and distorted presenta- tions of evidence, and through the suppression of some important details - from the truth that Dreiser, as omniscient narrator, has communicated to us. In effect, each side in the case creates its own art-work or fiction, in the hope that the jury will accept it as a conclusive marshalling of "the facts." The prosecution has a strong evidential case. The eagerness, however, of one of Mason's assistants to prevent Clyde from escaping "justice" has led him to practice what he considers an excusable deception. He has threaded a strand of Roberta's hair through the lens of the camera which had caused the bruises about her head. This maneuver - of which Mason himself is appar- ently unaware - is calculated to have a powerful effect in a courtroom where feeling against Clyde is already high. For the printing in newspapers, before the trial, of excerpts from Roberta's "more poetic and gloomy" letters has produced a wave of hatred for Clyde as well as a wave of pity for her - theThe smash hit of the trial is the dramatic, occasionally lachrymose reading by Mason - who has told local newspapermen how strongly he has been moved of her letters. Dreiser remarks that the moist eyes and the handkerchiefs and the coughs in the audienceAs for Sondra's letters to Clyde, Mason has considered them vital to his case until her father puts pressure on him through the chairman of the Repub- lican Party's state Central Committee, not in any way to use either the girl's name or her letters. Since Clyde himself does not want the name of his goddess to be mentioned in the trial, an agreement is reached to refer to her only as "Miss X." Thus a mysterious element is introduced into the courtroom, where it might have been in Clyde's interest for his attorneys to deal more openly with his obsession. Just as Sondra Finchley's well-connected father is able to force Mason to keep her name out of the trial, Samuel Griffiths can prevent Belknap and Jephson, the lawyers who have been retained for Clyde, from using as they had hoped to do the defense of insanity, or "brain storm": a temporary aberration due to love and an illusion of grandeur arousedThis argument, which at least has the merit of analyzing more accu- rately Clyde's mental condition when he planned the murder than does the defense finally settled upon, is vetoed by Griffiths both because it would re- quire perjured testimony that Clyde was of unsound mind, and because it would reflect on "the Griffiths' blood and brain" (607). Consequently, as a line of defense that Samuel Griffiths will pay for, Clyde's lawyers come up with the notion of a "change of heart." Neither believing the sincere account Clyde has given them of what happened in the boat, nor thinking that the jury will believe it, Jephson, the shrewder of his two attorneys, tells him that he must tell an effective lie in order to convince the jury of the essential truth of his "not guilty" plea. Clyde must say on the witness stand that when he went away with Roberta, he intended only to try to persuade her to free him because of his love for "Miss X"; that after spending two nights with Roberta during the trip he had a change of heart, became ashamed of himself, and decided to offer to marry her if she felt she could not let him go; that he actually made this offer in the boat, and that the acciden~ was precipitated by Roberta's jumping up in excitement, or gratitude, to co towards him. It is true that this ingenious piece of fiction does not account for Clyde's swimming fifty feet to shore, instead of thirty-five feet to rescue the drowning Roberta. Nor does it explain his having earlier buried a canera tripod which he took time to dig up while Roberta drowned. But it turns out, that with respect to his failure to help Roberta, the judge's charge to the jury appears to favor him: "If the jury finds that Roberta Alden accidentally or involuntarily fellFor that matter, the judge's only other reference in his charge to what hap- pened in the boat should have favored Clyde, had the jury known what Dreiser as narrator has said about Clyde's striking out at Roberta - "but not even then with any intention to do other than free himself of her - ... her presence forever ... !" For the judge's instruction with respect to the "fatal accident" is: ... if the jury finds that the defendant in any way, intentionally, thereWith the exception of one of its members, however, the all-male jury has been "convinced of Clyde's guilt before ever they sat down" (638-39) in the courtroom. Thus, when Clyde re-enacts, on Mason's orders during cross-exami- nation, the way he had pushed at Roberta with the camera, the jurors - recal- ling the testimony of five doctors that the injuries to Roberta showed she had at least been stunned - assume that,Clyde has deliberately been minimizing the force he had used. It is also significant, as far as the atmosphere in the courtroom is con- cerned that after Mason has forced Clyde to admit to having continued his sexual liaison with Roberta even after seeking "Miss X's" company, an irate 'woodsman cries out vengefully, "'Why don't they kill the God-damned bastard and be done with him?"' (721) During the jury's deliberations, one man - politically opposed to Mason (who has won his judgeship during the trial) - holds out against convicting Clyde, until he was threatened with exposure and the public rage and obloquy Ironically, after the failure of his phony "change of heart" defense leads to his being condemned to die, Clyde acts in such a way as to help bring about his own execution. Through his mother, who in a sad and grotesque turn of events has come east as a paid special newspaper correspondent - in order to earn money for an appeal of Clyde's case - he meets an evangelical lay preach- er, the Reverend Duncan McMillan. This high-minded though sexually "re- pressed and sublimated" man, "sorrowing with misery yearning toward an impossible justice," has been persuaded by Mrs. Griffiths that Clyde is about to be unjustly executed by the pitiful but none-the-less romantic and poetic letters of [Roberta]McMillan visits Clyde in jaill, quotes the Bible to him, and becomes his con- fidant. Although, the forceful, zealous McMillan is the type of person who would not have moved him at all earlier in his life, Clyde responds strongly to him in these new, desperate circumstances. Needing to confess, and to discover the extent of his actual guilt, he rejects as "shabby, false," the thought that while his appeal is pending it would be impolitic to go back on the lying testimony he had given in court. Pouring out his story to the minister, he admits that he had had no "change of heart." In the boat, just before Roberta rose to come to him, "there had been a complex, troubled state, bordering, as he now saw it, almost upon trance or palsy." Perhaps, he says, this was partly due to "the shame of so much cruelty" in connection with his plan to strike her. But at the same time) there was anger, too, - hate, maybe - because of her determination toHe goes on to tell McMillan that "perhaps" - for he is not sure even now - that anger had given the blow with the camera "its so destructive force! Despite his immediate qualification that "in rising he was seeking to save her," (793) the minister concludes from Clyde's further admission that he had not wanted to save Roberta from drowning, that "'in your heart was mur- der then.'" And Clyde reflectively replies, "'Yes, yes ... I have thought since It must have been that way."' (795). Consequently, when after the appeal of Clyde's conviction has been turned down, McMillan goes to plead for mercy with the New York State Governor, the minister says only that Clyde has "'come into a new understan- ding of life, duty, his obligations to man and God"' (802-03). And although McMillan asks - at least partly because he opposes capital punishment -- that the sentence be commuted to life imprisonment, the Governor refuses, having decided from something in McMillan's manner that he, like all others, appar-It is clear to the reader that McMillan has concluded - not in terms of the "law" as it was conveyed in the trial judge's charge to the jury, but in terms of morality - or ethical natural law - that Clyde was guilty of premeditated murder. His conclusion is understandable; but as far as the circumstances of Roberta's death are concerned, there is a detail that presents the reader with problem. For Clyde's account in his confession to McMillan of what happened in the boat differs subtly from Dreiser's "omniscient" account. Clyde says that there had been some anger "that had given the blow its so destructive force.* In the omniscient description, Clyde yielded - as Roberta attempted to ap- proach him - "to a tide of submerged hate, not only for himself, but Roberta . . . " but he feared "to act in any way." Then, as she drew near him, seeking to take his hand in hers and the camera from him in orderThe key difference between the two accounts is that Clyde's accentuates the possibility of a link between his anger and the blow's "destructive force," while the omniscient one emphasizes the absence of any intention on his part, in vehemently pushing the camera at Robert, "to do other than free himself of her." Why is Clyde harder on himself than the all-knowing narrator is? The answer, I believe, is that Clyde's moral impulse (or "superego" which has been weak during the long period of "pagan" rebellion against his parents' intense religious moralizing, becomes unusually strong when he is with McMillan, who while as forceful as his mother, is more sympathetic than either her or his father. It is not accurate to say, as one critic of An American Tragedy does, that at the last crucial moment Dreiser gives Clyde a hitherto undemon-For Clyde's moral sense has certainly been demonstrated earlier in the novel. just before Roberta told him of her pregnancy, he felt guilty over "his recent treatment of her," and Dreiser remarks: Being sensitive to conventional or moral stimuli as he still was, he highest ambitions were involved, without a measure of regret or at leastAnd while reading the letter from Roberta whose tone contrasts so strongly with that of the note he has just received from Sondra, Clyde "experienced one of his oldtime twinges of remorse and pity in regard to her": For after all, this was not her fault. She had so little to look forwardFurthermore, after Clyde has deserted the drowning Roberta, and swum to shore, he can not escape the thought of his moral responsibility: For had he not refused to go to her rescue, and when he might haveThe essential point about his moral sense is that it manifests itself only in reaction to particular situations. It is too weak to serve as a guide to the conduct of his life. His most powerful guides have been his "chemisms" and the values of a society that teaches him that "money makes the mare go." Only to McMillan does he attempt to tell the truth about what he did to Roberta, and how he had come to do it. But the hardness on himself of his confession - is it his mother's moral sense (rather than her tough practicality) within him that speaks of the force of the anger behind the blow? - militates against his last chance to survive. On direct examination during his trial, Clyde explains that the name "Tenet," beneath which he hid for a time, was that of a boy he once knew. When Jephson asks him if he hasn't thought that he might be doing an injustice in using that name "to cover the identity of a fellow who was running away," Clyde answers, "'No, sir, I thought there were lots of Tenets."' Obviously al- luding to Clyde's unintentional pun, Dreiser remarks that although an "indul- gent smile might have been expected at this point.... so antagonistic and bitter was the general public toward Clyde that such levity was out of the question in this courtroom" (674-75). So while Clyde, without intending to do so, points to the relativism that is one of the cultural implications of Darwinism, the audience at the trial enacts a ritual of condemnation of the man they have come to regard "absolutely" as a vicious criminal. There are indeed in the world Dreiser depicts, many opinions that are held to be true; and as Dreiser shows life in An American Tragedy, we do not determine as free agents, the tenets we live by; rather, those tenets are determined for us in ways we cannot adequately understand. For this reason, Dreiser's sense of "injustice" in An American Tragedy can only be a sense of the unfairness of life itself. For injustice is an ethical concept, and in order to discuss a character in ethical terms we must believe in his relative autonomy. The whole tendency, however, of this novel is to show how "forces" within and outside Clyde impel him to the actions he takes at Big Bittern and afterwards. Dreiser notes that the more sympathetic of his two lawyers, Belknap, had when young been caught between a pregnant girl with whom he had been amusing himself and a girl he wanted to marry. He had been extricated by his wealthy father's timely engagement of "the services of the family doctor" (592-93). In the world that Dreiser depicts, an adherence to either "conventional" morality or to a "golden suggestion" that derives from ethical natural law seems to subvert the individual's efforts to succeed, or some- times even to survive. Thrasymachus's cynical definition of justice in Plato's Republic must be amended a little in order to be fully pertinent to An American Tragedy: Justice is the interest of the stronger "organisms." |
