The article is a Perspective, an interpretive essay rather than an empirical study, and the authors are explicit about its limits. A novel cannot provide population-level evidence, and Clyde Griffiths is a fictional character. What a narrative can do, they argue, is follow a single person across time and social settings in enough detail to make a process visible, a precondition for later asking how widely that process operates in real populations. With that caveat in place, the authors turn to the part of the novel they say scholarship has most neglected: Book One, the nineteen chapters set in Kansas City before Clyde ever reaches the factory town of Lycurgus.

The novel’s outline is well known. Clyde is the son of Asa and Elvira Griffiths, poor evangelical street preachers who drag their children into public singing and prayer for a small mission. He leaves school early, works in a drugstore and then as a bellboy in a luxury hotel, and eventually moves to New York to work in his wealthy uncle’s collar factory, where his involvement with two young women of very different social positions ends in a drowning, a trial and his execution. The story is based in part on a real murder case from 1906. Dreiser scholarship, the authors note, has mostly approached his fiction through naturalism, with the ideology of desire and Sister Carrie as the central concerns, while work on American fiction and achievement ideology has examined how novels embody mobility myths. What has received less attention is the temporally cumulative process by which a young person first learns which social identities seem desirable and which seem inadequate.

That process, in the authors’ reading, begins on the street outside the mission. Dreiser opens with Clyde at dusk, half-singing, not looking up, acutely aware of being watched. Onlookers remark on the preacher’s children; in an earlier neighborhood, other children mocked his father’s constant Praise the Lord. The boy experiences the family’s religious work as shabby and degrading, and the article stresses that this shame is socially situated: it requires a standard of comparison, which the novel supplies in the same scene, in the passing cars and the gay pairs of young people laughing their way toward leisure. Clyde does not yet desire the car itself, the authors argue; he desires to be one of the people who have it. Publicly displayed poverty, they write, carries an additional burden that private deprivation does not.

From there, the workplace becomes the main site of socialization. At the drugstore fountain, Clyde observes matinee girls discussing parties and shows and concludes that evening dress is the last word in all true distinction, inferring that without such outward signs no pretty girl would want anything to do with him. Consumption, in other words, becomes a condition of social membership. The Green-Davidson hotel marks the next stage: marble, an orchestra, a well-dressed crowd, condensed for Clyde into the realization that this was what it meant to be rich, that you did what you pleased and that others like him waited on you. The authors describe the hotel as an architecture of display that makes consumption legible to onlookers, with Clyde working to maintain the very display he is excluded from.

The decisive change, they argue, is Clyde’s reference group. His peers shift from the mission’s down-and-out labourers, loafers and drunkards to better-paid, socially confident bellboys who teach him the technicalities of the trade, how to get a tip and whom to pay off, along with broader social lessons. Ratterer, Hegglund and above all Doyle become role models, and Clyde dresses as close as he can to the style of his mentor, down to the brown suit, cap, socks and stickpin. The authors frame this as peer socialization based on taste rather than opinion, and as a modest accumulation of cultural capital unavailable within his family environment. Meanwhile the hotel keeps him in constant company of a class he cannot join, bringing in furs and drinks for parties of young people not much older than himself, dancing in rooms he is paid to enter and must leave.

Money follows, and with it a split life. Clyde’s tips soon outpace the earnings of other family members, and he immediately downplays them so that his responsibilities at home will not grow with his income. The article reads this concealment as protection of his emerging aspirations from family claims, and as the start of a pattern of dealing with two audiences. The pattern sharpens in his pursuit of Hortense Briggs, whom he desires partly as a status marker and who treats his interest partly as a transaction, insisting he buy her a fur coat. Dreiser notes that Clyde knows she is coarse yet pursues her anyway; the desire for the status of having such a partner, the authors write, has replaced any judgment of the girl herself.

The moral center of the reading is an episode the authors say makes their account non-deterministic. In a chilly mission hall, Elvira Griffiths asks Clyde for fifty dollars for her daughter Esta, who is pregnant, abandoned and needs a doctor. Clyde, having just promised Hortense the coat, has exactly fifty dollars in his pocket. He says he has none, gives her five, and writes to himself that he is low, really mean. The obvious sociological frame is Robert Merton’s classic disjunction between culturally prescribed goals and legitimate means, but the authors point out that the material means were available. What was blocked was the identity the money would let Clyde perform. The strain, they argue, runs not between means and goals but between two identities, one rooted in family duty and one in a new status identity, and Dreiser pointedly declines to supply the self-justifying rationalizations that moral disengagement would involve.

The same refusal of determinism appears at the end of Book One, when a stolen car tips over and a child is killed. The boys in the car share the same social world, yet respond differently: Ratterer gets out and drags the others free, Hegglund turns back to help, while Clyde assesses his own exposure, hesitates, and runs. Shared socialization, the authors conclude, creates possibilities but does not make decisions. A deterministic explanation would predict identical responses from boys with identical peer formation, and the text refuses that prediction. Structured agency is still agency, and moral responsibility within the fiction is not undermined by an account of how Clyde’s dilemmas became thinkable.

The article’s broader claim is that achievement ideologies are usually studied as objects of belief, whether people endorse them and with what consequences, when they should also be studied as things learned incrementally, in contexts that make certain lives visible, comparable and desirable. By the time a person is asked whether he believes in the American Dream, the authors write, much of the formative work has already occurred. Comparison rather than absolute position creates relative deprivation, and approaching a reference group without belonging to it is a known source of status anxiety. The authors connect this to contemporary research on young people constantly exposed to lifestyles they cannot afford, where visible consumption becomes a basis for social comparison and self-evaluation; the technologies of comparison have changed, but the underlying process, they argue, has not. Clyde’s parents, in their summary, gave him a moral vocabulary he could not use: the street with shame, employment with exposure, peers with models, and money with a means of partial imitation. The authors close by reiterating the limits of their method. A single novel cannot empirically establish a social mechanism, and Clyde’s fictional trajectory does not establish how aspiration develops in real populations. It can, however, render a process visible in sufficient detail to describe, and that description, they argue, is a necessary precondition for asking how the process is distributed beyond the page.

Subject of Research: A literary-sociological perspective on how family socialization, work, peers and consumer culture shape aspiration in Dreiser's An American Tragedy

Article Title: Growing into the American dream: childhood socialization and the formation of Clyde Griffiths in An American tragedy

Article References: Salimova, H., & Ochilov, U. (2026). Growing into the American dream: childhood socialization and the formation of Clyde Griffiths in An American tragedy. Frontiers in Sociology, 11, Article 1982929. https://doi.org/10.3389/fsoc.2026.1982929

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.3389/fsoc.2026.1982929

Keywords: American Dream, socialization, family sociology, Theodore Dreiser, An American Tragedy, aspiration, social class, consumer culture, reference groups, status identity, literary sociology, social comparison