Erased: Missing Women, Murdered Wives by Marilee Strong Page A

settled on the Chester
    Gillette case as the raw material from which he would carve out his
    fictionalized story, he had his own recollections of the crime and
    the trial as newspapers in New York had reported it at the time. But
    he relied primarily on clippings from just one newspaper, the New
    York World , where Dreiser had briefly worked many years earlier.
    The World was one of the original ‘‘yellow journalism’’ newspapers,
    which had, for example, run stories stating how and when Chester
    Gillette had completely confessed his crime after his conviction— a
    confession the paper’s ‘‘journalists’’ completely made up.
    Armed with his clippings and a brief trip to the scene of the crime,
    Dreiser plowed onward to produce one of the longest novels ever
    published in America, two fat volumes when it first came out in 1925.
    Because almost nothing had been written about Chester Gillette’s
    younger years, Dreiser filled the first half of the book with details
    from his own rigidly conservative upbringing in a first-generation
    German American household in Indiana, which included what for
    Dreiser were the intolerable strictures of a Catholic school education.
    He overlaid his experiences onto the framework of Chester’s roughly
    parallel childhood and developed a growing empathy for him, feeling
    as though he had a deep understanding of the forces that were
    pushing and pulling young Gillette.
    This artistic merging of elements from Dreiser’s own childhood
    and formative youth with Chester’s life and his very real act of murder

    6 0

E R A S E D
    coalesced into one of the great American novels—but one that iden-tified the ‘‘tragedy’’ as the inevitable collision of economic and social
    forces, which Dreiser believed drove all human events. In his view,
    Chester Gillette was not a cold and calculating killer but the piteous
    victim of a battle far beyond his control, in which the unfortunate
    death of a woman and her baby was really just collateral damage.
    The actual tragedy of An American Tragedy is that the premeditated
    murder of a pregnant woman—whom Gillette viewed as standing
    in the way of the life he wanted and believed he deserved— comes
    across more as an act of nature or fate than a consciously planned
    erasure. Dreiser, trapped by his own constructs and his identification
    with his protagonist, could not see the killing for what it really was:
    a man’s attempt to erase a ‘‘mistake,’’ the baby he created and the
    woman he saw as dragging him down.
    Literary critic Mary Gordon, herself an accomplished novelist,
    explains in her book Good Boys and Dead Girls that ‘‘Dreiser wants
    us to believe that Clyde didn’t mean to kill Roberta [the names
    given to Chester and Grace in the novel]. . . . He only meant to
    push her away [so] that he could get on with life,’’ unencumbered
    by the pregnancy he didn’t want. But, as Gordon points out, ‘‘the
    problem is that Dreiser has just spent a hundred pages showing Clyde
    plotting the perfect murder. Clyde goes to his death believing himself
    innocent, and we are sympathetic to him because in the context of
    the corruption around him everywhere, he is the most pure.’’ In the
    end, when Clyde is executed just as the real-life Chester was, ‘‘we
    mourn his death as we don’t mourn Roberta’s. She was the heavy,
    dull, clinging object.’’
    Dreiser himself later reflected on the novel and the real-life murder
    by saying that he had been noticing since the early 1890s, when he first
    began working as a newspaper reporter, a pattern of ‘‘a certain type
    of crime in the United States. It seemed to spring from the fact that
    almost every young person was possessed of an ingrown ambition
    to be somebody financially and socially. In short, the general mood
    of America was directed toward escape from any form of poverty.
    . . . Fortune-hunting became a disease.’’ Dreiser believed that it was
    a craven grasping