STUDIA UNIVERSITATIS BABEù-BOLYAI, PHILOLOGIA, LIII, 1, 2008
THEODORE DREISER, AN ANATOMIST OF THE
“AMERICAN DREAM”
MICHAELA RADU
ABSTRACT. The industrial revolution that took place at the end of the 19th century changed
America in remarkable ways. People left rural homes for opportunities in urban cities. With the
development of new machinery and equipment, the U.S. economy became more focused on factory
production; Americans did not have to chiefly rely on farming and agriculture to support their
families. At the same time, immigrants from all over the world crowded into tenements to take
advantage of new urban opportunities. In the end, the sweeping economic, social and political
changes that took place in post-war life allowed American Realism to prevail. The writing during
this period was also very regional. The industrial revolution called for standardization, mass
production of goods and streamlined channels of distribution. America was leaping into a new
modern age and people feared that local folkways and traditions would be soon forgotten.
Responding to these sentiments, realistic writers set their stories in specific American regions,
rushing to capture the “local colour” before it was lost. They drew upon the sometimes grim realities
of everyday life, showing the breakdown of traditional values and the growing plight of the new
urban poor. American realities built their plots and characters around people’s ordinary, everyday
lives. Additionally, their works contained regional dialects and extensive dialogue which connected
well with the public. As a result, readers were attracted to the realists because they saw their own
struggles in print. Conversely, the public had little patience for the slow paced narratives, allegory
and symbolism of the romantic writers. America was shifting into higher gear and readers wanted
writers who clearly communicated the complexities of their human experiences.
Dreiser’s principal concern was with the conflict between human needs and
the demands of society for material success:
A woman should some day write the complete philosophy of clothes. No matter how
young, it is one of the things she wholly comprehends. There is an indescribably faint
line in the matter of man’s apparel which somehow divides for her those who are worth
glancing at and those who are not. Once an individual has passed this faint line on the
way downward he will get no glance from her. There is another line at which the dress
of a man will cause her to study her own. (from Sister Carrie, 117).
The American Dream is known as the capacity of dreaming and imagining a
more fit life than the existing one. It is the romantic tendency of attributing life
possibilities that are not sustained by the material and spiritual basis rather perishable at
that time. Not finding around him all that he needs and wants, man has the right of
dreaming. And the fewer life offers him, the bigger his dreams are. And thus, a
discrepancy is created between illusion and reality, that brings a feeling of sadness and
dissatisfaction in man’s life. That process was characteristic of the twenties. As a
novelist Dreiser made his debut with Sister Carrie, a powerful account of a young
working girl’s rise to success and her slow decline.
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MICHAELA RADU
She was eighteen years of age, bright, timid and full of the illusions of ignorance and
youth. Whatever touch of regret at parting characterized her thoughts it was certainly not
for advantages now being given up. A gush of tears at her mother’s farewell kiss, a touch
in the throat when the cars clacked by the four mill where her father worked by the day, a
pathetic sigh as the familiar green environs of the village passed in review, and the
threads which bound her so lightly to girlhood and home were irretrievably broken. (49)
All the time Carrie had imagined an ideal world. She lived for that and fought
for it. When she finally reached the end, the society she entered proved to be different
from the one she had imagined. And thus Carrie came to express a whole tendency in
the American society known under the name of the American Dream.
The effort made to separate illusion from reality characterized almost all
American literature of the time.
Carrie did not have a right estimation of human and social values, she did not
know the men around her and neither did she know herself. She was an optimist, she
believed in life and wanted to achieve all her success. And finally she succeeded.
Hurstwood’s failure is not only the drama of a generation but of a whole
society that attained to a critical stage in its development. His vision was that of a
charming beauty.
Finally, the story of Clyde Griffiths pushed in his “struggle for living”
reveals that his dreams of being rich proved to be of no use as long as he did honest
work. That’s why Clyde Griffiths considers Roberta Alden an obstacle in his way
toward the upper class. But he never succeeds in life, maybe man is destined to live
his own life given by Nature.
Being condemned to an insecure existence, Dreiser’s characters dream of
stability, comfort and everything wealth can give in the world. Aladdin’s cavern
represents the symbol of their dream.
Carrie’s road follows an opposite direction to Hurstwood’s. He leaves the
security of life and led by the flux of Nature he loses his balance down to his
complete degeneration.
In the same way as in Sister Carrie, the human condition becomes
responsible for Jennie’s “falling down”. Carrie obtained, however, social success
but Jennie is defeated. She is self-giving not self-seeking as Carrie.
Chicago! For years the magic name had dimmed into Dreiser’s brain. This
Mecca of a young American with the doors closed must be the place where an
ambitious youth like himself might take his first steps on the road to fortune. The
American Dream had taken such strong possession of him that it came as a rude
shock to find no doors swinging open to welcome his presence.
More forcibly than ever before, Dreiser discovered “the luck of being born
rich….the insufferable difference between wealth and poverty”.
Clothes made the man, it seemed. With fashionable clothes one might
compensate for imperfections of the body or the personality, rendering them
incapable of doing social harm. He found no reason why a few yards of wool or
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THEODORE DREISER, AN ANATOMIST OF THE “AMERICAN DREAM”
silk should assume such importance. Yet it was so; and most Dreiser’s young
heroes possess an instinctive awareness of the value of clothes as a “status-symbol”
in an ironically American democracy.
In his travels Dreiser had augmented his well of memory with a store of
incidents and individuals that later might be tapped for fictional purposes. The
panorama of American life in highly formative era had passed before his eyes, some of
what he observed being new, some corroborative of impressions formed previously;
and he had stumbled onto at least one enduring and influential friendship.
Dreiser announced the world his finding that life at the bottom is a tragedy. Life
had much to do with “chemisms” and “magnetisms”; it was dominated by invincible
material forces and of these, the drives for power, money and sex were primary.
Man, standing in the eye of the storm, remained the puppet of these forces,
which through sheer accident, good luck or bad, cynically cast a few up and many
down, thus producing wild extremes of fortune. These things Dreiser knew from
observation. His first novel Sister Carrie would describe American values for what he
had found them to be – materialistic to the core. The money ideal would be exposed as
the great motivating purpose of life in the United States: one’s relative affluence at any
level of society determining the degree of creature comfort one might enjoy, the
measure of prestige one might own, the extent of social power one might command.
The microscopic quality of Sister Carrie anticipates the rest of Dreiser’s
novels. Three human lives are caught in the winds of chance and circumstance: one
tossed upward toward (but never reaching) fulfilment, another dragged downward to
ruin, a third swept along briskly but at a dead level. Of Dreiser’s principles, Carrie
Meeber begins as “a waif amid forces” and ends as Carrie Madenda, popular favourite
of the musical comedy stage; George Hurstwood we meet as the impeccably groomed
manager of a prosperous saloon but leave as a ragged penniless suicide. Charles
Drouet, the single minor character whose career the novel spans, begins and finishes as
a shallow but congenial salesman, a personality boy.
As a matter of fact, Dreiser does not comment on the ugliness of that
world. He only reveals it to us in an apparently careless gesture. He simply
recognizes its existence. His admiration for the rich is but a desperate attempt to
conciliate his own dream with the reality of the time.
But his attempt is made to fail and the writer lucidly realizes that the very
existence of the world of the rich itself stands against such a kind of conciliation.
An American Tragedy tells the story of a bellboy, Clyde Griffiths, indecisive
like Hamlet, who sets out to gain success and fame. After an automobile accident,
Clyde is employed by a distant relative, owner of a collar factory. He seduces Roberta
Alden, an employee at the factory, but falls in love with Sondra Finchley, a girl of the
local aristocracy. Roberta, now pregnant, demands that Clyde marry her. He takes
Roberta rowing on an isolating lake and in this dreamlike sequence “accidentally”
murders her. Clyde’s trial, conviction, and execution occupy the remainder of the book.
Dreiser points out that materialistic society is as much to blame as the murderer
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MICHAELA RADU
himself. Dreiser based his study on the actual case of Chester Gillette, who murdered
Grace Brown – he hit her with a tennis racket and pushed her overboard at Big Moose
Lake . Much of Dreiser’s works evolved from his own experiences of poverty.
Dreiser’s second novel is Jennie Gerhardt, is the story of a young woman, Jennie, who
is seduced by a senator. She bears a child out of wedlock but sacrifices her own
interests to avoid harming her lover’s career. Jennie’s lover Lester Kane is son of a
wealthy family. Jennie dreams about a better life but destiny is pitilessly.
Dreiser has been called “the Mount Everest of American fiction”, the
wheelhorse of American naturalism”. Like a sword of an illusionist which penetrates a
cabinet only at fixed points, he adheres to a pattern which leaves vital zones untouched.
Theodore Dreiser believed that the American Dream and the precepts that
safeguarded it put before Americans false goals which estranged them from Nature and
left them unfulfilled; the passion with which he wrote from that conviction dominated
all his work. ”Sister Carrie”, Jennie Gerhardt” and “An American Tragedy” are the
most representative novels of Dreiser and taken together they offer a complete image
of the American society of that time. Contributing even more grandly is the Dreiserian
view of human existence. The artist becomes, not a camera obscura, but an interpreter.
As a consequence, much effort has been expended on showing that Dreiser
was not really a complete mechanist or a determinist or a naturalist. But, if art is an
imitation of nature, Dreiser’s art is inseparable from his view of reality; and that
view while Dreiser was composing his work was markedly influenced by the “laws
of nature” which Herbert Spencer described in his “First Principles”.
Those who rejected Dreiser and who, therefore, could not understand him
were mistaken in not seeing that what Dreiser aimed at, through his novels was his
attempt to give us a true and convincing cross-section of the American society of
his time. An his attempt was successful. It was successful because reading his
novels one can get a complete image of what the American society represented.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
1. Anderson, Charles, R.: American Literary Masters, vol. II: Dreiser. Holt Rinehart
and Winston Inc., New York, 1965.
2. Westbrook, Max: The Modern American Novel. Random House, Inc. New York, 1966.
3. The Literature of an Expanding Nation: The Harper American Literature. Donald
McQuade, editor. New York: Harper & Row, 1987.
4. Theodore Dreiser: Sora Carrie, traducere Elena Tufeanu, Bucureúti. Condor
Hybris, 1992.
5. Theodore Dreiser: O tragedie americană, traducere Leon LeviĠchi úi Pericle
Martinescu, Chiúinău. AsociaĠia “Cartea”, 1994, vol.2.
6. Theodore Dreiser: Jennie Gerhardt. Dell Publishing Co. Inc. 750 Third Avenue,
New York 17, N.Y. 1963.
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