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영어

This paper examines Theodore Dreiser’s An American Tragedy(1925) on how the sociocultural code of dress addresses the price of upward mobility and symbolizes the firmly established stratification existing in an rapidly impersonalized, capitalistic society. Clyde Griffiths’s pursuance of materialistic wealth is represented by his desire for clothes, especially those worn by the upper class. The transition from the bellboy uniform, to the “high society” costumes, and to the prison uniform effectively conveys Dreiser’s view of pessimistic and materialistic determinism. Clyde pursues the illusion of gaining wealth and entry into the high class by wearing fancy dresses that cannot represent his true self. He turns Roberta into a victim of his ambition, and he himself dies, wearing a prison uniform, as a victim of deterministic social mechanism. The code of dress conveys Clyde Griffiths’s private and public spheres, which in this novel are each represented by his desire and society.