GARY STEPHENS
83
now are the concerns central to Dreiser's work. While Jephson's action
mirrors the novelist's, Clyde's story embodies the yearning and bitterness of
the novelist. When Clyde is electrocuted, he is not clearly repentant. More
than anything else he is bitter at his inability to express himself, to clarify
his frustration . He still feels entitled to that dream of life embodied in
Sondra Finchley, while he is offered only death in Christ in its place.
Indeed, it was rage at his inability to articulate his understanding that led
him finally to hit Roberta Alden, the girl he made pregnant. And though it
may be incautious to say so, Clyde's rage over the inability
to
clarify and
communicate seems to partake of a novelist's rage at the difficulty of
communicating. Accordingly, aware ofDreiser's empathy with Clyde, who
feels unfair deprivation, unjust guilt, and an almost animal love of life, we
can understand Dreiser's stimulus to create this monstrous melodrama.
The basic outline of Clyde's story is derived from the old religious tract
depicting the fate of the good boy who leaves home and religion for the lure
of the wide, bright world, meets evil women, seeks easy money, and falls.
The particular shape of his dream, the fair rich Sondra who gives him all he
wants and tells him that he deserves her and the lovely life she ptomises, is
also a melodramatic item drawn from novel and society page. The ideal
shape of all the characters' conceptions of themselves come from what we
would now call the "media" -newspapers, religious pamphlets, sentimen–
tal novels. And Dreiser sees that for all the delusion involved in these shared
melodramatic visions Clyde sees something real that he, Dreiser, wants as
well. If Clyde's dream is deadly, if Sondra gives way to the electric chair,
that is because the dream was too simple and incomplete. For Dreiser knows
that there is something lovely and attractive there: he himself has felt it .
Thus he magnifies and qualifies the melodramatic plot paradigm in order to
see, to analyze, what is really there . His version attacks minutely and slowly
the inadequate imaginative shapes of reality which occupy the minds of
character and reader and replaces them with all of the texture of life he can
amass.
But unlike Howells,Dreiser does not force his material to conform to a
fixed
id~a.
The fundamental quality and power of Dreiser's fiction lies in its
openness to human experience. His explanations of cause and effect are
patently incomplete, unable
to
contain the mass of phenomena he has
chosen to include. The total effect of the work indicates that the writer's
understanding of the story is never adequate. He seems humble in the face
of the mass of his material, stares fascinated at the complication, the myriad
shapes and textures, the possibilities for organization and the variety of
explanations possible for what is organized. And his vision, though built
around a great emphasis in which all smaller plots are subverted to pointless
