Theodore Dreiser's An American Tragedy And The Female Influence

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Olivia Farina
Professor Mason
Introduction to Fiction
25 February 2018
Dreiser’s An American Tragedy and the Female Influence Theodore Dreiser is a female fanatic. Many of his novels focus on women in the 1900’s and their roles in society along with the taboos they hold and the morals they break. His obsession with the opposite sex and femininity stems from the women he was surrounded by while growing up as well as those he developed a romantic or sexual relationship with. Many of Dreiser’s sources of inspiration came from his own life, so it is no surprise that many of his female characters are based off of the important females in his life. The lives of these women and the way they interacted with Dreiser would lead him to create astounding …show more content…

This is due to the infatuation that Dreiser has for his sister. Lingeman states that Dreiser had thought “Syl[via] had bloomed into a beauty--the prettiest of his sisters” (44). It is this allure he feels for Sylvia that creates a pity for Esta’s situation in An American Tragedy. He describes Esta as “pleasing to look at and was growing more attractive hourly” (Dreiser 15). Dreiser displays this magnanimity due to Sylvia’s physical appearance and it helps develop Esta’s character as tragic. When Dreiser elaborates on Esta, he reveals how he felt about these wayward girls: “she was just a sensuous, weak girl who did not by any means know yet what she thought” (14). From his experiences with his sister he developed a realistic way to view girls led astray by men and have to deal with those consequences alone. Though he does not blame these women, like his sister and Esta, he blames their lack of maturity and intelligence that they could not gain from their …show more content…

His sister Sylvia, who he admired deeply, left a deep scratch into his love map that would forever create a sexual mystery towards women of a face paced lifestyle. His first wife Sara was a woman of Victorian morals who could not satisfy Dreiser’s sexual appetite, frustrating him into the arms of other women. His last companion in life was part of the fast paced Flapper lifestyle who enthralled him into a fast paced whirlwind romance at the end of his life. Theodore Dreiser’s female characters are so life-like and real because he has spent his life studying women due to his fantasies and romantic feelings towards the opposite sex. Taking the tragedies and joys of these women to create breathing characters furthered Dreiser’s writing to another level, turning fiction into something more. His sister’s, wife’s, and lover’s stories are taken by Theodore Dreiser and turned into something more in An American Tragedy; he gave them the ending he thought they

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