Seduction and Betrayal (24 page)

Roberta, in Dreiser's
An American Tragedy
, is condemned to death for her ordinariness, her whining hopelessness, combined, of course, with pregnancy. Clyde Griffiths is scarcely more propitiously organized and endowed for life than Roberta and yet, in him, the vain, pleasure-loving sensuality that unhinges the fortunes of Hetty Sorrel has the character of social movement, economic hope. We can see that he and Roberta might have come together in loneliness and isolation, but we can also see that Clyde suddenly glimpsing the cars, “the gowns,” the parties of Lycurgus will almost immediately find Roberta downward, depressing, beseeching, threatening, and therefore intolerable.

Clyde has the susceptibility of his ignorance. He too is in many ways a trusting, yearning
girl
; he wants to put his fate in the hands of women he feels are superior to him, who own things, who live — as he sees it — with assurance and glitter and possibility. Earlier he is “seduced” by the Green-Davidson Hotel in Kansas City. It is like Hetty with her trinkets. “The wraps, furs, and other belongings in which they appeared, or which were often carried by these other boys and himself across the great lobby and into the cars or the dining rooms or the several elevators. And they were always of such gorgeous textures, as Clyde saw them. Such grandeur.”

And when Roberta is desperate, when she is most desolating to Clyde's wishes, it is just then that his shallow and passionate need for glamour, his hope for an easy sliding into prosperity, appear as a true possibility, a swooping stroke of luck. Of course, the reader knows more about Clyde than he can know; he is like Hetty — utterly, foolishly without reservations, without a saving reality. A more serious and thoughtful and genuine young man would have acknowledged the rebuffs, the petty snobbishness and corruption of the life he longed for. All Clyde can see in his pitifully longing dreams is that life seems to beckon, when it truly does not — and that Roberta is death, which she truly is. “For, as he now recalled, and with an enormous sense of depression, Roberta was thinking and at this very time, that soon now, and in the face of all Lycurgus had to offer him — Sondra — the coming spring and summer — the love and romance, gaiety, position, power — he was going to give all that up and go away with and marry her. Sneak away to some out-of-the-way place! Oh, how horrible! And with a child at his age!” Later in his reverie, he cries out, “The loss! The loss!”

The whole drive of the novel is to make us feel Clyde's loss, even though we know him born to be a loser. Still, Roberta is a heavy burden. He is young and his dream, if he is allowed to share in his uncle's prosperity, is to attain a corrupt, foolish, vain, and empty life. And yet the injustice is that he has no preparation even for that, no stamina or hardness; he has nothing except his own idle need for indulgence, fantasy, the trinkets of existence. What he needs he does not have: money, support of family, aggression, will. Nevertheless, Clyde is the center of feeling in the novel. We pity him and we pity Roberta and always we pity him more. By her death, Roberta is caught in the ultimate consequence of sex; but the electric chair for Clyde seems more horrible, a doom of many causes, the end of all the false promises of life. The deaths are not for love, but for sex — the annihilation at the end of the road when things go wrong and responsibility takes its toll.

For all Clyde's weakness and vanity, his impossible ignorance and unworthy folly, we agree that somehow Roberta is exacting too great a price. She asks his whole life, paltry and trashy as the life he wants may be. For her, what would have made it possible for us to accept her totally, not merely to pity her? Where does redemption for Roberta lie? In fortitude, austerity, silence, endurance. These acceptances for lowly girls are the only paths to moral dignity. The novel — deterministic, bourgeois in spirit for all of its questioning of the hard terms of life — always understands that the men must get on. Dimmesdale must preach and save souls; Clyde must get a job with his uncle and go with the crowd he ignobly admires; Arthur Donnithorne must take over his estates. To ask differently of them would violate the laws of social survival, would impose standards of revolutionary skepticism about the nature of all of society's arrangements.

The idea of sexual responsibility for the passions of youth cannot be understood as an ethical one. Clyde is twenty-one when he goes to the death chamber. Even allowing for the convention of outlandish youthfulness in the principal characters in literature we still cannot wish to decide fates because of fornication. Of course, it is not natural passion he is to pay for, but murder. Still, he was trapped by needs of the most ordinary sort, universal needs, universally satisfied without punishment.

Biology is destiny only for girls. Were everyone in the drama of biology more prudent and watchful of the social and financial outlines of his alliances these matters could be arranged, manipulated. But just as the illicit is the trembling attraction of the novel, so is the illicit between persons of different rank, different natures, a variation that stirs our sense of the dramatic instabilities and violations of love. We know that we are near our own time when a novel can concern itself, as
An American Tragedy
does, with two people, Clyde and Roberta, both deprived, stunted, pitiable. In spite of the equity of deprivation, it is Clyde's lack of resignation to a future darkened by Roberta's pregnancy that moves us, keeps our sense of the intolerable blackness of consequence alive. The mind protests for both of them. It is only that Roberta, trapped, miserable, imagines existence would be possible if only Clyde would take care of her, settle in for life. We cannot quite forgive her the simplicity.

The Kreutzer Sonata
, by Tolstoy, is a work of great peculiarity. It is not of the first interest imaginatively, and there is a dense, frantic distortion in this pedagogic monologue on sex and the ills of marriage. It is a tract, inchoate, and yet noble, impractical, original. There are moments of dramatic genius: a wracking vision of marriage as jealousy nourished, hatred voluptuously fed, rage taken for breakfast. The whole of a man's sexual life comes under Tolstoy's agitated scrutiny — from the arrogant encounters of youth to the fevered tournaments of conventional unions. Tolstoy sees the line of “immorality” beginning in the young man's first relations with prostitutes and girls toward whom he feels no obligation; from there all of the later life of the sexes is either grossly or subtly poisoned. Life among men and women is a debauch the young are led to accept, even to expect, by custom, example, social convenience.

The actions the nineteenth century gathered together under the name of “debauchery” are never, in fiction, made entirely clear, but it seems very likely that many of them are understood in our time as healthy exertions of vital being. Debauchery, of course, still exists in our minds as a designation of brutal excess and deviation, even if it cannot stand as the name of the experiences of the man in
The Kreutzer Sonata
. “I did not understand,” he says, “that debauchery does not consist simply in physical acts...real debauchery consists in freedom from the moral bonds toward a woman with whom one enters into carnal relations....”

No doubt it is spiritual vanity and overreaching to hope to enchain the baffling, exciting, fleeting movements of the senses. Every moment of the present is rushing into its fate as the past. To give the past preeminence, sanctity, supreme right, is insupportable, a mad dislocation in the economy of personal experience. Nevertheless, the past is not a blur of memory, but a forest in which all of the trees are human beings, rooted, breathing, sustaining the ax, or withering. To think of the past as a series of agreements with others that make an everlasting claim on us is unreal, and yet it is one of the most interesting questions ever asked about the subject matter of so much art: youthful love. It is a radical questioning of the way society understands the flow of life, the rules it has made for the human collisions that are, finally, our biographies. It is a question that goes beyond an answer.

Resurrection
is a much greater and more moving asking of the same question. The pure situation of this novel contains the essence of the theme of seduction and betrayal. Every balance is classical. A man, a nobleman, falls in love in youth with a serving girl on his aunt's estate. She is lovely and pure; he is generous, kind, better than most young men. The scene of their first coming together is tenderly ardent and promising. It is spiritually coherent, beautiful, merging like a mist with nature. When the night is over, a sweep of sadness causes the young nobleman to ask himself, “What is the meaning of it all? Is it a great joy or a great misfortune that has befallen me?” But then he remembers that everyone does it and he turns over and falls asleep.

Naturally the young man goes away, as he must, since all of his life is before him. It is a life at once free and fixed. Years and experience leave room for the accidental, the free flowing of existence; form and structure draw the prince inevitably into the anxious considerations of a man of his class. Shall he marry the shallow Princess Korchagina, whom he cannot even see without a feeling of impatience and weariness; shall he break off his affair with the wife of a friend; what to do about his estates?

For Maslova, the young girl, his first love, the seduction is a catastrophe. It is not a disillusion that will be washed away by time, but a tragic circumstance from which enormously varied lifelong sufferings begin to follow. She becomes pregnant, is turned out of the house; the child dies, and through poverty, ill-treatment, and despair Maslova finally becomes a prostitute and is accused of murdering an old client. The worst of her sense of abandonment comes when the prince does not even get off the train as it passes through the village some months after their affair, when she is already aware of her condition. Her horror is an intellectual crisis as much as a personal deprivation and pain. God and His laws are a deception. The prince who had treated her so heartlessly was the best person she knew; “all the rest were still worse.” It came to her, as the train pulled away, that everyone lived for himself alone and she began to accept an existence encircled by melancholy, redeemed by a willed anesthesia toward the past, enriched only by the communal traditions of prostitution.

The novel's moral judgments lie upon the soul of the prince. Maslova has remained alive somewhere in his consciousness, a dormant germ of remembered feeling and guilt. They meet again when the prince is called to jury duty and Maslova is in the dock, her fate at the end of the trail that began long ago in a beautiful scene, a snowy midnight Mass in the village. The prince is overcome by a violent turmoil that shakes his whole being; he is seized with the wish for a grand restitution, a sacrifice, a determination to share Maslova's degradation and suffering as a prisoner in Siberia. This cannot merely be a flight of fancy. To face the dragon of responsibility would engage his whole life, his estates, his money, his friends, his career. All of the arrangements and assumptions of society went into his seduction and abandonment of the poor orphan on his aunt's estate. His expiation cannot be selective. In the end, Maslova refuses his sacrifice and will not marry him. It is too late for them.

Tolstoy was in his seventies when he wrote
Resurrection
. The indulgences of his youth thus presented themselves to his imagination as moral and social delinquencies, rather than as mere instances of man's inevitable practice. For this reason and despite the marvelous truthfulness of a great deal of the novel, it relies upon the silky transcendences of persons in the grip of a spiritual idea, characters who must go from flaw to virtue under the rule of justice and ethical revelation. However, it is certainly never Maslova's suffering and resignation we question. It is only Prince Nekhlyudov's profound sense of obligation, his heeding the affliction of memory, the bite of the past, that strike one as abstract, programmatic, untrue to life.

The title of the novel is accurate — drastic breaks with the customs ruling men and women are to be understood as a “resurrection,” a surpassing. It is, after all, only an ideal, the dream of an old man in love with humility and longing to achieve a personal reformation upon which a reformation of society might begin. The novel was based on an incident that appeared in the press and stirred Tolstoy's thoughts and imagination. In spite of this, it is realistic only in the grand, elevated Russian novel sense, in that landscape where obsession and transfiguring guilt and expiation are real. No subsequent novel decided to gaze so directly into the abyss of sexual responsibility, to turn a limpid, childlike, old man's eye upon the chaos of youth, to undertake a day of judgment account.

Richardson's
Clarissa
is openly, and at great, fascinating length, about seduction. Naturally, only a person who thought of himself as a moralist could sit down to write volume after volume of consummation threatened and delayed, assault planned and outwitted. Richardson thought, or told himself that he thought, of his brilliant creation as a sort of encyclopedia of male guile and treachery, an elaborate, defensive karate, by which the menaced girls of the eighteenth century could learn to protect their virtue. The detail is intricate, the postponements and escapes are frenzied, the characters extraordinarily well matched in their odd strengths. All of the action is accomplished under the strict baton of sexual suspense.

Clarissa
is a disturbing mixture of wit and sentiment, of surface and disguise. A good deal of emotional anxiety accompanies the modern reader along the way here. The novel that caused all of England and Europe to cry — Rousseau yes, but Diderot! — and opened the seams of sensibility and romanticism, as if discovering new minerals in the soul, is harsh, ugly, and grotesque, concerned with a purely sexual conception of virtue and villainy, a conception heavily under our suspicion.