The Chemisms of Desire

The Dissonance of the World

Dreiser’s naturalism is not simply a philosophical position but a personal confession: he has heard the dissonance of the world, and he will not pretend he has not. His characters are moved by forces they cannot understand — the “chemisms” of biological desire, the pressures of economic necessity, the accidents of circumstance — and their freedom is largely illusory. What they do is largely what their nature and their situation require them to do.

This is a bleak vision, and Dreiser does not soften it. But it is not entirely wrong. The doctrine of original sin agrees with Dreiser that human beings are not as free as they imagine, that they are moved by forces they do not choose, that their moral failures are not simply the product of bad choices made by free agents. Where Dreiser stops is where the gospel begins: with the God who can do what the human being cannot, who can free the captive and restore the image.

What An American Tragedy Reveals

Clyde Griffiths, the novel’s protagonist, is not evil; he is ambitious, weak, and in over his head. His murder of Roberta Alden — or his failure to save her when she drowns, which amounts to the same thing morally — is the product of a desire for social advancement that his society has cultivated in him and that he has no moral resources to resist.

The novel’s title is precise: this is an American tragedy, not merely a personal one. The forces that move Clyde are the forces of American culture: the worship of success, the cruelty of class, the absence of any framework for moral formation adequate to the desires the culture generates.

The Seed of the Woman

Genesis 3:15 describes a world in which the seed of the serpent operates through the very structure of fallen human desire — through the chemisms that Dreiser describes, through the ambitions and the weaknesses and the susceptibilities that the Fall has written into human nature. His fiction is the documentary record of this operation, rendered without false consolation.

What Dreiser cannot provide is what only the gospel can: the account of a God who is not indifferent to the dissonance Dreiser has heard, who entered it in the Incarnation, who bore its full weight in the Passion, and who promises its resolution in the resurrection. Dreiser heard the dissonance. The gospel promises the resolution. Both are necessary for an adequate account of the world.

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