Dreiser's Experiment with Tragic Drama

Abstract

tated tragic vision, then, is a bizarre and fascinating reflection of both the pressures molding his thinking and the philosophy of what constituted tragedy which he wished to press on his society. Dreiser wrote few plays, but those he did publish reveal him experimenting in a literary form as yet mostly ignored within the study of his complete works. At their worst, his plays are garishly extreme social comments. At their best, they are serious attempts to express the grotesqueries (some of the short plays smack heavily of the contemporary Italian Grottesco movement) of a repressed psyche operating in a modern universe, mixing styles of scientistic naturalism, expressionism, abstraction, and allegorism.' All of the plays still command a kind of literarily prurient interest in their sensual extremism of style, plotting, and characterization. More importantly, excepting O'Neill, Dreiser was the first major writer to attempt naturalistic tragedy in America, and he carried the Darwinian and scientific rationales of naturalism further than O'Neill or any other American playwright. In The Hand of the Potter' particularly, he emphasized the pathetic irresponsibility of man (rather flauntingly choosing a sexual pervert as his tragic hero) according to the psychological, biological, and chemic facts of his imperfection. There should be little question that The Hand of the Potter is a wretched play, although Dreiser and some of his associates thought well of it in its time. Dreiser grandly intended it as an emancipation of the public from the tragedy of its unenlightened puritanism, and it did have some undeniable controversial appeal. Possibly its subject matter would still be taboo for many producers today. Behind the play, however, was the more dramatic turmoil of Dreiser's personal and professional conflict with the censorship attacks of 1917, when