An American Tragedy

Theodore Dreiser represents the justice system as corrupt. The actions of the district attorney, Clyde’s defense lawyers, staff in the Cataraqui County office, and jurors violate the letter and spirit of the law, which holds that defendants should get a fair trial and that people responsible for carrying justice should be impartial.

As the district attorney, Orville Mason should be the embodiment of a fair justice system. Dreiser carefully sketches a character whose background and self-interest trump his duty to the law. Mason’s feelings about the case are complicated. He does feel moved by Titus Alden’s grief, but he also leaks details to the press to improve his chances for the judgeship, hides evidence, lies, and does all he can to spoil the juror pool. Dreiser utilizes contemporary Freudian psychoanalytical ideas to paint a psychological picture of a man whose self-consciousness about his looks and a need for approval are powerful motivations for his actions during the trial. The staff around him take their cue from Mason’s ethics. Fred Heit withholds Roberta’s letter to her mother because he wants to slow the case down long enough for Mason to milk the case for publicity; he knows he will likely keep his job as coroner if Mason gets elected. Burton Burleigh explicitly subverts justice by planting Roberta’s hair on the camera. Clyde is certainly guilty, but the actions of all members of the justice system prevent him from getting a fair trial.

Belknap and Jephson are tasked with defending Clyde, and they are no more committed to the truth than their adversaries. Belknap strongly suspects that Clyde is guilty but stands by when Jephson fabricates a plausible story for Clyde to tell on the stand. Dreiser describes Jephson as a man “with a mental and legal equipment which for shrewdness and self-interest was not unlike that of a lynx or a ferret” (261). The animal comparison reflects slyness and cunning. Belknap and Jephson show their shrewdness when they recover Clyde’s suit and have it dry-cleaned to provide better cover for Clyde’s story. The responsibility of both lawyers is to defend Clyde as best they can, but they assume that they need to bend the truth to do so.

The greatest tragedy of American justice in the novel is that politics, money, and self-interest inform who gets a fair trial and who does not. The whole calendar of the trial, and therefore the temporal structure of Part 3 of the novel, exists for the sake of supporting Mason’s run for the judgeship. The woman most involved with Clyde during the time when he plotted Roberta’s murder, Sondra, never has to testify because her family is rich and powerful; they have influence with the Republican Party, so Mason listens when they ask him to leave Sondra out of the case. Even the jury’s deliberations are spoiled by self-interest. The lone juror who holds out for acquittal caves when he realizes that his neighbors will punish him economically if he doesn’t agree that Clyde is guilty. The actions of the lawyers, district attorney, and jurors all suggest that there is no such thing as impartial justice in the United States.

Religion in the United States is another institution that fails people like Clyde. Almost every character in the novel experiences the negative impact of unexamined religious beliefs. They hamper most of the working-class characters in the novel. In the novel, narrow religious beliefs leads to incompetent parenting and poor decision-making. Asa and Elvira’s religion makes them negligent parents. They “had proved impractical in the matter of the future of their children” (4). They ignore the economic impact of their family wandering from mission to mission. Dreiser describes Asa as a man who is “the product of an environment and a religious theory, but with no guiding or mental insight of his own, yet sensitive and therefore highly emotional and without any practical sense whatsoever” (4). This establishes the repeated Naturalist idea throughout the novel that people are “the product of an environment.” Elvira has some strength of character, but her blind faith keeps her window on the world narrow, leaving her unable to prepare Esta and Clyde for life outside of the family.

The children of such parents in the novel aren’t canny enough to be successful. Esta’s faith makes her too naïve to understand that her lover means to exploit her. Roberta has the same problem, so both she and Esta fall pregnant when they and their lovers fail to use any form of birth control. If one is poor, the novel presents a cycle in which religion makes one poorer. This outcome runs counter to the promises of prosperity and redemption in the scriptures that the Griffithses post on their mission wall. Clyde’s experiences in the hotel quickly disabuse him of the notion that the wages of sin are death and suffering. People who violate the religious beliefs of his parents are presented as perfectly happy and beautiful.

Dreiser presents religion as an institution, which means that it reinforces certain norms, regulates individual choices, and is made up of powerful people and those governed by powerful people. Characters who don’t understand this lack efficacy. Elvira’s faith is rooted in her individual relationship with Christ and reading of the Bible—a less rigid form of faith that surges through the United States periodically. When she needs help for Clyde’s appeal, she doesn’t get it because she doesn’t understand how power works in institutional religion. The religious leaders whom she approaches find a woman street preacher to be an anarchic figure who violates gender norms and church hierarchy.

Elvira’s faith also constrains where she looks for help. She doesn’t talk to Catholics or people of different faiths because she doesn’t recognize them as members of her community. She does recognize Duncan McMillan as a peer but only because he, too, is interested in holding Roberta partially responsible for her own murder. McMillan’s faith and opposition to the death penalty aren’t enough to get him to speak up for Clyde in the end. His deep sadness and crisis of faith at the end of the novel is Dreiser’s parting shot at institutional religion.