An American Tragedy, or the Promise of American Life

YOUNG WOMEN IN DREISER'S AnAmerican Tragedy (1925) talk baby talk to the objects of their desire; that's what alerts us to the connection between Sondra Finchley's desire for Clyde Griffiths-Sondra so glad Clydie here, she tells him'-and Hortense Briggs's desire for the in the window of Rubenstein's fur store-Oh, if I could only have 'oo (103), Hortense says to the coat. Whether the girls understand themselves or the objects as infantilized by their desires is unclear; Clyde calls Sondra his darling baby girl (446), but what Sondra likes about Clyde is how dependent he is upon (363)-which one is the baby? Things are a little more straightforward between Hortense and the but only, perhaps, because what the has to offer Hortense is so much more obvious than what Clyde has to offer Sondra. The is the darlingest because it is the classiest (103); where Clyde represents for Sondra a problem analogous, as we will see, to the psychological one of dependency, the represents to Hortense an unambiguously upward transformation of her social state (102). The has (105), and Hortense imagines that, wearing it, she will begin to belong to the class it has. It may, however, be a bit premature to describe this transformation and Hortense's desires for it as unambiguous, for the coat's class is not itself an unambiguous phenomenon. Actually, this is a coat, Mr. Rubenstein tells Hortense, It's copied from one of the smartest coats that was in New York last summer.... You won't find no like this coat (105). The is special both because it's unique (there is none like it in Kansas City) and because it's not unique (there is at least one just like it in New York), and it's the simultaneity of these facts that gives it class. Hortense wants the both because it has been fashioned in such an individual way and because, individually fashioned, it looks just like the equally individual coats of a lot of classy ladies in New York. Wearing it, she will belong at the same time to the class of the other women wearing it and to no class at all. From at least one perspective-that of contemporary American historiography-this position is best understood as a contradictory one. Recent studies of class formation in the United States have, for example, achieved a certain degree

Aesthetics · Art · Environmental ethics · Genealogy · Literature · Political science · American Constitutional Law and Politics · American Political and Social Dynamics · History · Management Theory and Practice · Philosophy · Political and Economic history of UK and US · Psychoanalysis, Philosophy, and Politics · Scientific Innovation and Industrial Efficiency

• Selling Your Self in the United States

  Open Access•Ilana Gershon•PoLAR Political and Legal…•2014

  Incluir item

• Types of One

  Ruth Leys•Representations•1991

  Incluir item

• True clinical fictions

  Open Access•Lisa Herschbach•Culture Medicine and Psychiatry•1995

  Incluir item

• "It's a Great Country, Ma'" - Blind Leads and Shifting Ground

  Peter Messent•Canadian Review of American Studies•1996

  Incluir item

• The politics of participation

  Open Access•FRANS LUNDGREN•The British Journal for the…•2013

  Incluir item

• Not Quite Hope and Other Political Emotions in the Gilded Age

  Nathan Wolff•Not Quite Hope and Other…•2019

  Incluir item

• The Hypothesis of Middle-Class Formation in Nineteenth-Century America

  Stuart M Blumin, Stuart Μ Blumin•The American Historical Review•1985

  Incluir item

• The Americans

  Open Access•Lawrence H Fuchs, Lawrence Fuchs•Political Science Quarterly•1974

  Incluir item