Youth, Class, and Consumerism in Dreiser's An American Tragedy

Sergei Eisenstein, the Russian film-maker, called An American Tragedy “ as broad and shoreless as the Hudson … as immense as life itself.” It allowed, he wrote, “ almost any point of view of itself.” This rare quality of multi-faceted massiveness has fathered a large number of critical studies, which all vary in their reading of the text and the significance they attribute to Dreiser's protagonist, Clyde Griffiths. For Irving Howe, Clyde represents “ the passivity, rootlessness and self-alienation of urban man,” while for F. O. Matthiessen, he is “ a victim of the contemporary American dream.” Richard Lehan views him deterministically as “ a young man … caught in and finally destroyed by the crush of conflicting forces,” while Ellen Moers generalizes him into “ the Everyman of desire.” These interpretations acknowledge Clyde's representative stature, but make only imprecise gestures towards its origins. The vagueness they suffer from has its root in an individualist emphasis upon the character and fate of the protagonist and a corresponding lack of specificity in describing the social framework with which that character interacts. Eisenstein regarded Clyde's crime as “ the sum total of those social relations, the influence of which he was subjected to at every stage of his unfolding biography and character.” An analysis of these “ social relations,” particularly as elaborated in the closely integrated themes of youth, class, and consumerism, is a prerequisite to a more exact identification of Clyde's social representativeness.