An American Tragedy

Clyde Griffiths, the main character in Theodore Dreiser's novel An American Tragedy, is a self-centered young man whose relations with women are such that he could be classified as a sexist. He seems to seek and love women, but in fact he only uses them for his own ambitions and desires and has little sense of them as individuals or human beings. They are instead projections of his own self-centered view of the world. This attitude on his part begins in his childhood and continues to his death. He murders one woman, but even she is not killed as a human being but as an obstacle to be removed, something standing in the way of what he wants. He objectifies women, but in truth he objectifies the world at large as well, for he sees everything in terms of how it will gain him an advantage or prevent him form gaining an advantage.

The attitude is evident in his relations with his sister, and a small incident in his childhood suggests how he views women. He finds his sister Esta in his secret room. She is pregnant and abandoned, a foreshadowing of the situation he will cause later with Roberta. His response now is the same as he will show later--he thinks of himself and takes a selfish attitude toward the problems of his sister. He reacts only when she refers to their poor mother, the one woman who does engender his sympathies, but even this becomes a new excuse to turn this experience into a case of self-pity.

This mixture of self-pity and the tendency to objectify th

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om the police when he is discovered. Clyde associates his flight with an attempt to escape poverty and to flee toward success and money, and he comes to associate money with women. Hortense actually approved of this point of view, and the blond in the hotel was an example of one of the ways Clyde fantasized about how a woman would save him. When he ends up in Lycurgus, he finds himself in a class-conscious town where Roberta represents the working class and Sondra the upper and wealthier class. Clyde has a sense of superiority to others in the factory because he is a Griffiths, even though he is a poor relation and is not accepted by the family in any case because of an unfortunate resemblance to the vain Gilbert. Clyde's sense of superiority is fed by the women who defer to him because of his position, because he is a Griffiths, and probably because of the attitude he projects. In some ways, Clyde is a victim of the class consciousness of the town and of his own self-centeredness, which causes him to see the world as a reflection of himself. When Sondra uses him to annoy Gilbert, Clyde finds himself suddenly popular with the upper class. He sees this as his due, as something that comes to him because of his superiority.

Category: Literature - A