An American Tragedy by Theodore Dreiser (i can read book club .TXT) 📕
Description
Clyde Griffith’s parents are poor street-preachers, but Clyde doesn’t “believe,” and finds their work demeaning. At fifteen he gets a job and starts to ease out of their lives, eventually landing in some trouble that causes him to flee the town where they live. Two years later, Clyde meets his well-off uncle, who owns a large factory in upstate New York. Clyde talks his way into a job at the factory, and soon finds himself supervising a roomful of women. All alone, generally shunned by his uncle’s family, and starved for companionship, he breaks the factory’s rules and begins a relationship with a young woman who works for him. But Clyde has visions of marrying a high-society woman, and fortune smiles on him in the form of the daughter of one of his uncle’s neighbors. Soon Clyde finds himself in a love triangle of his own making, and one from which he seems incapable of extracting himself.
A newspaperman before he became a novelist, Theodore Dreiser collected crime stories for years of young men in relationships with young women of poorer means, where the young men found a richer, prettier girl who would go with him, and often took extreme measures to escape from the first girl. An American Tragedy, based on one of the most infamous of those real-life stories, is a study in lazy ambition, the very real class system in America, and how easy it is to drift into evil. It is populated with poor people who desire nothing more than to be rich, rich people whose only concern is to keep up with their neighbors and not be associated with the “wrong element,” and elements of both who care far more about appearances than reality. It offers further evidence that the world may be very different from 100 years ago, but the people in it are very much the same.
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- Author: Theodore Dreiser
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“Well, you don’t have to lie to me in order to go anywhere or see anybody without me in the future. I don’t want to go with you. And what’s more I don’t want to know where you go or who you go with. But I do wish you wouldn’t tell me one thing and then have George and Mary find out that it ain’t so, and that you’re just trying to slip away from me or that I’m lying to them in order to protect myself. I don’t want you to put me in that position.”
She was very hurt and sad and contentious and Roberta could see for herself that there was no way out of this trying situation other than to move. Grace was a leech—a hanger-on. She had no life of her own and could contrive none. As long as she was anywhere near her she would want to devote herself to her—to share her every thought and mood with her. And yet if she told her about Clyde she would be shocked and critical and would unquestionably eventually turn on her or even expose her. So she merely replied: “Oh, well, have it that way if you want to. I don’t care. I don’t propose to tell anything unless I choose to.”
And at once Grace conceived the notion that Roberta did not like her any more and would have nothing to do with her. She arose immediately and walked out of the room—her head very high and her spine very stiff. And Roberta, realizing that she had made an enemy of her, now wished that she was out of here. They were all too narrow here anyway. They would never understand or tolerate this clandestine relationship with Clyde—so necessary to him apparently, as he had explained—so troublesome and even disgraceful to her from one point of view, and yet so precious. She did love him, so very, very much. And she must now find some way to protect herself and him—move to another room.
But that in this instance required almost more courage and decision than she could muster. The anomalous and unprotected nature of a room where one was not known. The look of it. Subsequent explanation to her mother and sister maybe. Yet to remain here after this was all but impossible, too, for the attitude of Grace as well as the Newtons—particularly Mrs. Newton, Grace’s sister—was that of the early Puritans or Friends who had caught a “brother” or “sister” in a great sin. She was dancing—and secretly! There was the presence of that young man not quite adequately explained by her trip home, to say nothing of her presence at Starlight Park. Besides, in Roberta’s mind was the thought that under such definite espionage as must now follow, to say nothing of the unhappy and dictatorial attitude of Grace, she would have small chance to be with Clyde as much as she now most intensely desired. And accordingly, after two days of unhappy thought and then a conference with Clyde who was all for her immediate independence in a new room where she would not be known or spied upon, she proceeded to take an hour or two off; and having fixed upon the southeast section of the city as one most likely to be free from contact with either the Newtons or those whom thus far she had encountered at the Newtons’, she inquired there, and after little more than an hour’s search found one place which pleased her. This was in an old brick house in Elm Street occupied by an upholsterer and his wife and two daughters, one a local milliner and another still in school. The room offered was on the ground floor to the right of a small front porch and overlooking the street. A door off this same porch gave into a living room which separated this room from the other parts of the house and permitted ingress and egress without contact with any other portion of the house. And since she was still moved to meet Clyde clandestinely this as she now saw was important.
Besides, as she gathered from her one conversation with Mrs. Gilpin, the mother of this family, the character of this home was neither so strict nor inquisitive as that of the Newtons. Mrs. Gilpin was large, passive, cleanly, not so very alert and about fifty. She informed Roberta that as a rule she didn’t care to take boarders or roomers at all, since the family had sufficient means to go on. However, since the family scarcely ever used the front room, which was rather set off from the remainder of the house, and since her husband did not object, she had made up her mind to rent it. And again she preferred someone who worked like Roberta—a girl, not a man—and one who would be glad to have her breakfast and dinner along with her family. Since she asked no questions as to her family or connections, merely looking at her interestedly and seeming to be favorably impressed by her appearance, Roberta gathered that here were no such standards as prevailed at the Newtons.
And yet what qualms in connection with the thought of moving thus. For about this entire clandestine procedure there hung, as she saw it, a sense of something untoward and even sinful, and then on top of it all, quarreling and then breaking with Grace Marr, her one girl friend here thus far, and the Newtons on account of it, when, as she well knew, it was entirely due to Grace that she was here at all. Supposing her parents or her sister in Homer should hear about this through someone whom Grace knew and
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