An American Tragedy (Theodore Dreiser)

The fact that the novel 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. An American Tragedy was part of what Frederick Lewis Allen describes as the mid-twenties "revolt of the highbrows" against a "middle class majority [that had] turned from persecuting political radicals [during the early-twenties Big Red Scare] to regulating personal conduct" (Allen 189) by way of assorted community-based moral crusades throughout the country. Indeed, An American Tragedy can be seen partly as an attack on a tradition of self-conscious, self-satisfied moralism that was meant to define core American mainstream values during the 1920s.

Eby develops the view that An American Tragedy is a critique of misplaced materialist values. These were articulated systematically in the social science commentary of Dreiser's 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

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des compares An American Tragedy to Wilson's Merton of the Movies, which both appeared in the 1920s, in this regard. He explains what he refers to as the "modern subject" (385-6) of literary fiction as mass American culture. Essentially, the culture is deceptive and manipulative inasmuch as it fosters difficulties for the very American masses who look to it for clues and strategies for gaining entry into bourgeois comfort. The problems arise because there is a gap between the seductive power of the lineaments of comfort in popular culture and the sharply unequal access to enjoying them. The experience of social inequality, whether economic, racial, or educational, is decisive and all too real for most people, and Rhodes's view is that An American Tragedy helped form a prototypical literary treatment of this fundamental fact. Rhodes's (389ff) focus on class is especially important. He asserts that Dreiser saw working-class Americans as being especially susceptible to the seductive images and icons of the American dream, and especially ill-equipped to cope with the results of acquisition or attempts to integrate into the higher classes. By Rhodes's analysis (399), the social and personal problems that result from working-class effor
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Approximate Word count = 2373
Approximate Pages = 9 (250 words per page)

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