We use Optical Character Recognition (OCR) during our scanning and processing workflow to make the content of each page searchable. You can view the automatically generated text below as well as copy and paste individual pieces of text to quote in your own work.
Text recognition is never 100% accurate. Many parts of the scanned page may not be reflected in the OCR text output, including: images, page layout, certain fonts or handwriting.
CLOSE UP
117
Only in a few lines, however, is it indicated that the true aim of Clyde's trial and conviction has nothing to do with him. The aim is simply and solely to win the necessarv popularitv among the farming population (the work-girl, Roberta, was a farmer's daughter) for the prosecuting counsel, Mason, so that he may secure nomination as an elected judge.
The Defence take up a case which they know to be hopeless (" at the best — 10 years penal servitude ") merelv as part of the same political campaign.
Belonging to the opposite political camp (but not by any means to a different class) their primary aim is to do their utmost to damage the chances of the odious candidate for judicial office.
For both sides alike Clyde is simply a means to an end.
Clyde is a pawn in the hands of a blind destiny, but he also becomes a pawn in the hands of a by no means blind machinerv of bourgeois justice, a machinen' which is nothing else than an instrument for the political machinations of by no means blind political intriguers.
Thus the individual case of Clyde Griffiths is expanded and generalised into what is really a tragedv of America as a whole, into a characteristic storv of an American " voting man " of the beginning of the 20th century. ...
From the dramatic version all the elaborate complications of the judicial procedure are omitted and in their place appear the pre-electoral intrigues, visible behind the outward solemnity of the hall of justice, which is nothing else than the private arena of a pre-electoral contest.
But this radical treatment of the murder succeeds in deepening the tragedy of strong ideological emphasis tipon yet another passage and another figure.
The mother.
Clyde's mother is the head of a religious mission. An embodiment of blind fanatism. Of such absolute belief in an absurd religious dogmatism that her figure takes on a certain monumental quality, a halo of martyrdom, and wins our involuntary respect.
And this despite the fact that she is really the first concrete embodiment of the guilt of American society in relation to Clyde.
Her teaching and principles, her concentration on God and heavenly things instead of on the training of her son for work, were the first basic causes of the tragedy.
In Dreiser's story she fights to the last for her son's innocence. She works as legal reporter of a provincial newspaper in order to be able to be present at his trial. She, like the mothers and sisters of the black children from Scottsboro, tours America, giving lectures, in order to collect money with which to secure re-examination of Clyde's case in the Court of Appeal.
The mother acquires the definite sacrificial sublimity of a heroine. In Dreiser's storv this sublimity is capable of winning sympathy for her moral and religious doctrines.