The title of Theodore Dreiser’s gripping story of the dark side of the American dream, “An American Tragedy,” tells us at once what is fundamentally wrong with the work and why it is such a worthy subject for the Happy Ending Project. Though readers might presume that we would retitle Dreiser’s book “An American Comedy,” the fact is that we are concerned with endings. We have no wish to bowdlerize an entire work of literature by substituting pie fights for duels and turning Banquo’s Ghost into “Banquo the Friendly Ghost.” Our purpose is to denature the lacrymose cumulative effect of the many intermittent minor tragedies and unfortunate events that are so characteristic of “serious” literature by providing a happy ending, not to eliminate these plot elements altogether. Thus, we call our version…
AN AMERICAN TRAGEDY NARROWLY AVERTED
Raised by poor and devoutly religious parents, who force him to participate in their street missionary work, the ambitious but naïve and immature Clyde is anxious to achieve better things. His troubles begin when he takes a job as a bellboy at a local hotel. The boys he meets are much more sophisticated than he, and they introduce Clyde to the world of alcohol and prostitution. Clyde enjoys his new lifestyle and does everything in his power to win the affections of the flirtatious Hortense Briggs. But Clyde’s life is forever changed when a stolen car he is traveling in with friends kills a young child.
Clyde flees Kansas City, and after a brief stay in Chicago, he reestablishes himself as a foreman at the collar factory of his wealthy long-lost uncle in Lycurgus, New York, who meets Clyde through a stroke of fortune. Though he does not fully adopt Clyde into the Lycurgus Griffiths family, he does his best to help Clyde and advances him to a position of relative importance within his collar factory.
Although Clyde vows not to consort with women in the way that caused his Kansas City downfall, he is swiftly attracted to Roberta Alden, a poor and very innocent farmgirl working under him — thus breaking the factory rules. While Clyde initially enjoys the secretive relationship and virtually coerces Roberta into sex, his ambition forces him to realize that he could never marry her. He dreams of the elegant Sondra Finchley, the daughter of a wealthy Lycurgus man and a family friend of his uncle’s. As developments between him and Sondra begin to look promising, Roberta discovers that she is pregnant.
Having unsuccessfully attempted to procure an abortion for Roberta, who expects him to marry her, Clyde procrastinates while his relationship with Sondra continues to mature. When he realizes that he has a genuine chance to marry Sondra and after Roberta pushes an ultimatum of marriage or revealing their relationship, Clyde hatches a plan to murder Roberta in a fashion that would seem accidental.
When he takes Roberta for a canoe ride on Big Bittern lake in upstate New York, Clyde rows into a remote portion of the lake. As he speaks to her regarding the end of their relationship Roberta moves towards him. Just as she does so, an elk-hunting party led by Clyde’s uncle arrives at the lakeside. Mistaking Roberta Alden’s now-hefty form for a rutting 12-pointer, Sondra Finchley takes aim and fires a double shotgun blast into the side of Alden’s face. Her entire head is removed from her shoulders and comes to rest on a twig-style lovers-bench on the opposite side of the lake.
The trail of circumstantial evidence prior to the trip is all but erased by the generous bribes the wealthy, senior Griffiths pays to smooth over any blame that might be ascribed to his daughter. A substantial sum is also paid to the Alden family, scrub farmers more than happy with such an exchange for their whiny and unattractive daughter. (It is well known that in the early part of the twentieth century, the prospects for a poor, unmarried, homely and pregnant woman were prison or prostitution and a sure recipe for unhappy tragedy). A fancy wedding follows and the few words Clyde utters in his toast on the dead Roberta stand out as one of the exemplars of pathos in modern literature. The story ends as the happy couple roar across Big Bittern Lake on a powerful 16-cylinder, mahogany Hacker-Craft.
THE END
