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Analysis. Dreiser goes into the minds of his characters at such great length that it is easy to see how Clyde digs himself into the hole he will shortly occupy
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Dreiser goes into the minds of his characters at such great length that it is easy to see how Clyde digs himself into the hole he will shortly occupy. He is a reflective man, not without some moral sense. Thanks to the upbringing he had from his parents, he does know right from wrong. He is also aware of certain responsibilities he has to Roberta, and he tries not to disappoint her. But the carrot dangling before him is just too enticing. He resorts to lying to Roberta, and lying is something for which he seems to have a ready facility. If the truth is inconvenient to him, he will alter it, as when he lies to Jill Trumbull and Sondra about his family background. He also has a capacity to lie to himself, to convince himself that his actions are fair and honorable (or at least justified) even when an objective observer might consider they are not.
Clyde is caught in what he knows is a tricky emotional situation but he does not have a clear plan of action. He is an interesting mixture of a personality that can be both active and passive. He tends to goes along with what comes up, knowing that his priority will always be the advancement of his social position and his cultivation of the friendship of Sondra Finchley. He has fallen entirely under her spell, and they are well matched in the sense that his capacity and need to adore a woman satisfies her vain need to be adored. Meanwhile, Roberta is fully aware of the precarious position she is in, having given herself, body and soul, to Clyde without any promise of marriage. Marriage is what she hopes for with him, but she knows it is not exactly a likely possibility, since she still thinks that he is well above her in the social scale. She is of course wrong in this. She and Clyde come from similarly poor backgrounds. The similarity between them is emphasized in the portrait of Roberta’s father Titus, who is presented as poor and as a failure in life, without the intellect, determination or imagination to improve his lot—very similar, in fact, to Asa Griffiths, Clyde’s father.
Analysis
Once again chance intervenes in the form of Roberta’s pregnancy, coming at exactly the time both she and Clyde are realizing that it would be better for both of them if they were to part. The entire episode reveals Clyde’s ignorance of such matters as pregnancy. He naively believes that the problem can be solved by purchasing some concoction from a drug store, and Roberta knows no better either. Dreiser himself, as the narrator, comments on this in chapter XXXV: “The truth was that in this crisis he was as interesting an illustration of the enormous handicaps imposed by ignorance, youth, poverty and fear as one could have found. Technically he did not even know the meaning of the word ‘midwife, ’ or the nature of the services performed by her.” Once again, the origins of Clyde’s difficulties are traced back to his early poverty and lack of education, as well as the fear engendered by the social censure of any woman who had a child born out of wedlock. Clyde realizes at this point just how dangerous the situation is becoming for him, but he still feels that he may be able to find a way out of it. One thing is certain: he will not give up his chance of winning Sondra Finchley, whatever happens, although at this point Sondra is still sitting on the fence with regard to him. She knows that she likes him, but she sees the problems inherent in getting too close. She still thinks she has a measure of control over the situation. It is Clyde who is the helpless one, and Roberta too.
Analysis
Events are now moving swiftly and Clyde must make a decision. He is caught between his moral obligation to Roberta, his fear that he will be publicly disgraced, and his fervent desire for Sondra. The knot that pulls at him is being tightened. Just as Roberta’s pregnancy reaches the point where it will start to become visible, Clyde is also on the brink of unprecedented success with Sondra. He believes that marriage to her is a definite possibility. In this situation, something has to give. It turns out to be Clyde’s moral bearings in life, as the next chapters will demonstrate.
In addition to what Dreiser has already suggested about the effects of heredity, poverty, and environment, and the workings of chance, in these chapters he also suggests the role of another factor: fate. When in chapter XL, Clyde has to stop at what turns out to be Roberta’s family home, Dreiser as the narrator comments, “some might think, [that] only an ironic and even malicious fate could have intended or permitted to come to pass.” The tragedy that makes up the novel is composed of all these elements working together.
Analysis Book 2, Chapters 42-47
The story moves relentlessly on to its climax. Clyde is helpless to resist the idea that took root in his mind. So intoxicated is her with his plans for marriage to Sondra, that he cannot think clearly. The narrator brings attention to his mental condition at the beginning of chapter XLV, when he says of Clyde, “the mind befuddled to the extent that for the time being, at least, unreason or disorder and mistaken or erroneous counsel would appear to hold against all else.” But ironically, despite all his careful planning (which will later turn out to be not so careful), Clyde’s plan succeeds only, as it were, by accident. At the crucial moment, he loses his nerve. He realizes that he cannot go through with it. Instead, an impulse comes to him simply to say to Roberta at that moment that he will never, under any circumstances, marry her, but he is so paralyzed that he cannot even speak. What follows, if it were not a tragedy, might be considered a comedy of errors. Clyde hits her accidentally with the camera (he had intended, in his planning, to give her a blow that would stun her); and the boat collapses accidentally. He has achieved his original aim in spite of his apparent inability to act. He fails to make any effort to save her, when she is in the water, but is Clyde in fact of guilty of murder? This is what the next book will set out to examine.
analysisBook 3, Chapters 1-6
Clyde reveals himself in these chapters to be a very bad plotter. He has left a trail of incriminating evidence that the authorities find almost immediately. Other than the fact that Roberta is indeed dead, as he wished her to be, every other aspect of his plan is totally inept. There seems to be no way in which he is going to be able to escape the reach of the law, and he is also unfortunate enough to attract the attention of a zealous and formidable district attorney. In accordance with his deterministic philosophy Dreiser explains the motivations of the district attorney, Orville Mason, in terms of his early experiences in life. He was raised in poverty and neglected, “causing him in his later and somewhat more successful years to look on those with whom life had dealt more kindly as too favorably treated” (chapter III). It is this that gives Mason his driving ambition. It is also Mason’s “youthful sexual deprivations” that has given him what Dreiser calls rather oddly a “psychic sex scar.” He means that Mason has a kind of repressed sexuality that leads him to a keen and perhaps unsavory interest in the sexual aspects of the case: the fact that Roberta was involved in an illicit affair and was pregnant. Mason will now become a dominating force in the novel, driven by political ambition and with an instinctive revulsion against the defendant.
Analysis
Clyde is caught like an animal in a trap, a trap that he has laid himself. With his rich friends at the lake he is assaulted by the “most frightful dreads and fears” (ch. VII), and his life takes on a schizophrenic quality. As he mingles with his friends at the lake, he is bitterly conscious of how different his spacious room is in the lodge to the smallness of his lodgings in Lycurgus. Everything he has ever wanted is now so close to him, and yet the knowledge that it could, and likely will, be suddenly taken from him drive him to torment. He is, as so often, in a dream-like state, but instead of dreaming, as he usually does, of social success and a happy, easy life, his dream now is “half delight and hope and the other half a cloud of shadow and terror” (ch. VII). There is a cruel irony in the fact that out on a launch in the lake, Burchard Taylor, the young man who is steering the boat, flings it around from side to side, trying to make Sondra lose her footing and making Jill Trumbull call out in anxiety, “What do you want to do, drown us all? ” It is as if everything that now happens is a reminder to Clyde of the danger and precariousness of his own position. He does not spare a thought for the dead Roberta, however.
In the remaining chapters of this section, the representatives of the law bear down upon him pitilessly. These are men who will not be denied their quarry, and there is barely the thrill of the chase, since Clyde is easily found and arrested. Under questioning he shows himself to be as inept in his own defense as he was in planning the murder, and the way Mason cross-examines him in chapter IX is a prefiguring of the way he will go after Clyde on the witness stand in the trial. It is ironic that Mason at first wonders if it will be difficult to get a conviction because he assumes Clyde is wealthy; he does not know that this “wealthy” man has just had to accept money from Sondra just so he can pay his way on their social outings. The fact that Burton Burleigh plants evidence against Clyde shows that the prosecution will do whatever it takes to get a conviction.
Analysis
The previous section showed the prosecutors going about building a case against Clyde. This section introduces the defense lawyers, both of whom are sympathetic to Clyde, although they realize that in order to have a chance in the trial they must construct what is in effect a tissue of lies about Clyde’s actions and his motivations. The defense lawyers thus show they are as capable of trickery, although of a different kind, than Burleigh is on the prosecution side. Clyde knows of course that he never had a change of heart about Roberta; the only thing that changed was that at the vital moment he lost his nerve for killing. But Clyde, who has always been unfree in the sense that he has been a slave to his desires, is now even less free than he has ever been in his life and he must do what his lawyers request of him.
The selection of Belknap for Clyde’s defense presents another irony in the tale. He has some understanding of Clyde because when he was young he was involved in a parallel situation. He was involved with two girls, one of whom became pregnant. Rather than marry the girl, Belknap had enlisted the aid of his father, and for a thousand dollars (a large sum in those days), his father had hired the services of a doctor who had performed an abortion on the girl. This had freed Belknap to marry the other girl and go on to lead a successful life. The fact that Belknap managed to escape from a situation so similar to the one that ensnared Clyde shows once more the difference between how the poor and the rich fare in American society. Had Clyde had the money and connections, he could have done the same as Belknap, and would have been free to perhaps marry Sondra, the girl of his dreams. Had Belknap not had the resources, he might have found himself in the same position as Clyde is now. Attorney and client may seem divided by a great gulf, but they have more in common than might at first appear. The difference between them is simply money, the ability to buy oneself out of trouble.
The actions of Samuel Griffiths show once again how Clyde is considered not really part of the family. He will be defended, but not to the hilt, especially not if Samuel’s own lawyers conclude that Clyde is likely guilty: “Not a dollar—not a penny—of my money will I devote to any one who could be guilty of such a crime, even if he is my nephew! ” Even in this dire situation, Samuel Griffiths, a decent, fair-minded man, does not lose sight of the value of money.
Once again, Clyde does himself no favors by failing to impress Catchuman, just as he had left Smillie convinced of his guilt. With that failure goes his chance of getting some really big-name lawyer to defend him. The lawyers he does get are clever and spirited enough, although their motivation, like that of Mason, is largely political. They are Democrats, and thus automatically opposed to the Republican Mason. Indeed, Belknap has in the past run against Mason for district attorney. It appears that the trial is not only going to be about Clyde’s guilt or innocence. It is also a duel between ambitious men on different sides of the political spectrum.
Analysis
In these long accounts of the trial, the case against Clyde is devastating, especially given the fact that all twelve jurors are convinced of his guilt even before the trial starts. Clyde, it turns out, is good at his own lies but not so good when it comes to presenting the lies that others (his defense lawyers) have constructed for him. He is nervous and unconvincing. This is in spite of the fact that Jephson ingeniously explains to him just before the trial starts that the lies are not really lies but “a dummy or a substitute for the real fact” (ch. XIX, p. 725). Jephson justifies the strategy by saying that since Clyde did not strike Roberta deliberately, he is not guilty, and that fact justifies altering some of the other facts because otherwise no one will believe him. He explains this to Clyde in a homey metaphor: it’s like buying potatoes with corn and beans even though you have money, because people think your money is not genuine.
Mason dismisses the notion of Clyde’s early deprivations, pointing out his connections with the wealthy Griffiths. He gets the details of the crime almost right, exposing Clyde’s series of lies (although he is wrong in claiming that Clyde beat Roberta to death before he put her in the lake). Mason explicitly denies the notion that a person like Clyde has no real control over his destiny. In Mason’s view, Clyde at every point was free to choose what he wanted to do. Mason’s presentation is very dramatic, pulling on the emotions of the jurors, damning Clyde at every turn.
Belknap, on the other hand, presents Clyde as a “victim of an internal conflict between two illicit moods” (ch. XXIII, p. 769), his involvement with Roberta that produced the pregnancy, and his being “ensnared” by “Miss X, ” which caused him to fear that he would lose her if she got to hear about his involvement with Roberta. The word “ensnared” is carefully chosen to develop the notion of Clyde as himself a victim. However, the case for the defense, although pursued with great spirit and ingenuity, seems to have little chance of success.
Throughout the trial, Clyde is a picture of misery. He is confused, frightened, feeling deserted by everyone, although on the advice of his lawyer, he tries to look confident and gentlemanly. This is just another instance of the duplicity that always seems to be present in Clyde’s life—being one way but pretending to be something else.
There is a moment of foreshadowing during Mason’s presentation of the case for the prosecution that gives a strong visual image of Clyde’s future fate. Since Roberta’s death he has been haunted by visions of the electric chair. When Mason says he can produce a witness to the crime, the effect on Clyde is remarkable. His hands grip the side of the chair, his head is jerked back as if he bas taken a great blow, his head droops and he looks as if he might fall into a coma—a gruesome foreshadowing of what will happen to his body in the electric chair.
Analysis
This section begins with the image of Orville Mason as “a restless harrier anxious to be off at the heels of its prey—of a foxhound within the last leap of its kill” (p. 807). Clyde is reduced to the status of an animal who is being hunted down, and his conviction is inevitable. The mood of the courtroom is well conveyed by the man who shouts out during Mason’s questioning of Clyde, “Why don’t they kill the God-damned bastard and be done with him? ” (ch. XXV, p. 828).
As Clyde goes to prison, his short life is beginning to round back upon itself. He started out in an impoverished mission house, without many of the things most people take for granted. For a while his world expanded—at the Green-Davidson Hotel, and then in Lycurgus—but now it has contracted to its smallest point ever, the dimensions of his cell in Auburn Prison. He who loved to dress as well as his budget allowed, knowing that clothes do much to much to define a person’s social status, is now humiliated by being dressed in prison garb no different from all the other condemned men. And as in Kansas City, his mother is now to play a role once more in his life. Mrs. Griffiths is presented here in a very positive light, doing everything she can to help her son. The real test for Clyde now is not whether he can live the life he dreams of, but whether he can come to terms with what he did and find some acceptance of his fate. Up to this point in his life he has been restless, on the move, filled with plans, but now he must learn to be more reflective, to salvage whatever he can from the wreckage of his life. Given what we know about Clyde—his weakness, his lack of inner resources—the prospects do not look good.
Analysis
Clyde does make a small amount of progress in prison, in the midst of his despair and desolation as he watches one man after another go to the execution chamber. He is more honest with McMillan than he had been with his mother or with his lawyers, but he still does not really know whether he should think of himself as guilty or innocent. He dies much as he has lived—unsure, confused. He tells his minister that he feels saved by his faith, and he writes a statement testifying to it, but the reality is rather different. He remains full of doubt, and a series of questions bedevils him about the faith that McMillan has urged him to adopt. Was he really saved? Could he rely on God? Was there really a life after death? He does not know the answers. All he knows is that he has been judged harshly by those whom, he feels, do not fully understand him. In one of his plaintive final thoughts one perhaps hears the voice of Theodore Dreiser, sensitive to the cruel fate of a young man whose path to the electric chair was marked out for him by the kind of society he was born into, and by the place he occupied in it: “How could they judge him, these people, all or any one of them, even his own mother, when they did not know what his own mental, physical and spiritual suffering had been? ” (ch. XXXIII, p. 917).
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