Literary Criticism of Dreiser's An American Tragedy

The purpose of this research is to examine the status and scope of scholarly literary criticism related to Theodore Dreiser, particularly the novel An American Tragedy. The plan of the research will be to set forth the historical and social context in which critical commentary relevant to the novel has significance, and then to describe and present an evaluation of the pattern of ideas that appears to have developed around An American Tragedy, both at the time of its initial publication and in the current period.

To say that An American Tragedy is a novel of early twentieth-century social criticism that can be connected in subject matter and pattern of ideas to the well-known fact of Dreiser's own connection with radical politics of the period is almost a commonplace, even though insight into the content of that connection has undoubtedly enriched modern reading of the novel (Shapiro passim; Warren passim). But the critical judgment of An American Tragedy as social criticism or even as psychological realism seems to belong to an exercise more appropriate to an earlier generation. More recent criticism has focused less on genre positioning than on the social context in which Dreiser's social critique might have emerged.

For example, the fact that the book appears to have been a popular commercial as well as critical success at the time of first publication may seem remarkable given the sundry cultural forces at work on the American landscape in 1925, when it was first written.

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a commentary on the way affluence is treated in American literature, an important feature of the argument is that vicarious aesthetic experience of affluence is the closest that most readers--even those who, like Clyde Griffiths, yearn to enter the world of the wealthy--come to forming a picture of what it is like to be rich, or more exactly what it is like to watch the rich behave either badly or with a presumption of privilege. Along the same lines, Eby develops the view that An American Tragedy may have owed something to the social science commentary of his exact contemporary Thorstein Veblen, whose dissection of American class inequalities entailed the idea that the leisured, society class functioned as models against whom those not of but aspiring to that class would inevitably compare themselves and whom the lower classes would seek to copy in regard to values, tastes, ambitions, and so on. Undoubtedly Dreiser was aware of Veblen's work. In Eby's reading of An American Tragedy, a profoundly powerful social and economic psychology is at work in which Clyde Griffiths so ineluctably aspired to the milieu of Sondra Finchley that he would extend himself as far as murdering Roberta Alden, thus dissociating himself from his lower-c

Category: Literature - L