Dreiser’s picnic is hellish. It’s an expression of his dark view of humanity, like Zola’s proposition that when people succumb to the “fatalities of their flesh,” they are, and a sordid picnic is the “cataclysmic” center of An American Tragedy. Once started, the picnic is a nightmare as Clyde Griffiths contemplates the murder of his lover Roberta Alden, who is two months pregnant.
The grim plan is to picnic on a lake and drown Roberta, who cannot swim. As the plan unfolds, Clyde and Roberts buy lunch on a perfect day in July and rent a rowboat. The scenery enthralls Roberta, but Clyde is too preoccupied to notice. Roberta cheerfully sings, “Oh, the sun shines bright on my old Kentucky home,” but Clyde’s mind whirls with thoughts of Fate, Destruction, Death, and the murdering Roberta.
Clyde rows aimlessly while Roberta looks for a perfect picnic landing. When she asks, “Have you any spot in mind, dear, where we could stop and eat?” He does so to soothe her. They spread sandwiches on some newspaper, but what they eat is not disclosed. It’s Roberta’s last meal.
On the lake again, Clyde tries to muster the savagery necessary to smash Roberta with his camera and hurl her from the boat. At last, sensing his agitation, Roberta reaches out to comfort him, but as she does so, he mechanically flings the camera at her, with “so much vehemence as not only to strike her lips and nose and chin with it but to throw her back sidewise toward the left wale which caused the boat to careen to the very water’s edge.” When the boat capsizes, he swims to shore, listening to her cries as she drowns. “And there is your own hat upon the water–as you wished,” he thinks. “And upon the boat, clinging to that rowlock a veil belonging to her. Leave it. Will it not show that this was an accident?” And apart from that, nothing–a few ripples–the peace and solemnity of this wondrous scene.”
The picnic is over, but the nightmare continues. As Clyde swims ashore, the cry of the unseen bird reverberates in his mind, a “weird, contemptuous, mocking, lonely bird. Kit, kit, kit, Ca-a-a-ah! Kit, kit, kit, Ca-a-a-ah! Kit, kit, kit, Ca-a-a-ah!”
Featured Image: Roberta Alden (Sylvia Sidney) realizes that Claude Griffiths (Phillips Holmes) will murder her. Joseph Von Sternberg. An American Tragedy (1931). The screenplay by Samuel Hoffenstein is based on Dreiser’s novel (1925).
See Theodore Dreiser. An American Tragedy (1925). New York: The Library of America, 2003; Emile Zola. Thérèse Raquin. 1867. Paris: Librairie Internationale, 1867; Emile Zola. Therese Raquin, a Drama in Four Acts. Translated by Alexander Teixeira de Mattos. London: 1891; Shelley Fisher Fishkin. From Fact to Fiction: Journalism & Imaginative Writing in America. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003. There is no mention of Zola in Fishkin’s nuanced analysis of Dreiser’s reworking of the actual murder trial.