The American Dream Examined in Literature

Background

It has been said that the United States is the only nation that prides itself on having a national dream and that gives its name to one. Initial dreams about America were imports from Europe, where Renaissance writers dreamed of a utopia in the New World. Perhaps, as some have insisted, there is no such thing as the American Dream, only a diversity of dreams about America and dreams in America. Whether one calls it extravagant expectation, faith in entrepreneurial success, or confidence in the American cornucopia, the American Dream is an inherent part of social, cultural, political, and literary America.

Perhaps the first and clearest verbalization of the American Dream, written long before the phrase was coined, is Thomas Jefferson’s statement from the Declaration of Independence: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.” This statement, and the American Dream itself, are highly romantic, implying belief in the goodness of nature and rejecting belief in human nature’s being tainted. Because of this seemingly anti-Calvinistic, even anti-Christian, strain, it has been argued that the American Dream is a product of the frontier and the West (or of Rousseauian romanticism) rather than of Puritan New England.

Some trace the American Dream to the early settlement of the country, often to 1630, the date of John Winthrop’s A Model of Christian Charity, best known for its description of the colony as “a City upon a Hill” with the eyes of all people upon it. Part of the American Dream is America being a shining example to the rest of the world. The American Dream, to the Puritans, was divine election, freedom to worship God as they chose, and the blessings of the sovereign God upon their errand into the wilderness.

The essence of the American Dream in the colonial period was “the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity,” a phrase from the Preamble to the US Constitution (1787). A Frenchman who became a naturalized American citizen, Michel-Guillaume-Jean de Crèvecœur offered a generally optimistic answer to the question “What is an American?” and first wrote of America as a melting pot in his Letters from an American Farmer (1782). In the nineteenth century, another Frenchman, Alexis de Tocqueville, wrote glowingly of American individualism and democracy in his two-volume De la démocratie en Amérique (1835, 1840; Democracy in America, 1835, 1840). Perhaps it was Benjamin Franklin who gave the definitive formulation of the American Dream in his Autobiography (begun in 1771, published in 1818). At least five characteristics of the American Dream have been noted in Franklin’s work: the rise from rags to riches through industry and thrift; the rise from insignificance to importance, from helplessness to power; a philosophy of individualism; the efficacy of free will and action; and a spirit of hope, even of optimism.

Manifestations of the American Dream in the works of many nineteenth century writers take the form of the primal myth of the American as Adam before the Fall, a theme discussed in a seminal study by R. W. B. Lewis entitled The American Adam: Innocence, Tragedy, and Tradition in the Nineteenth Century (1955). The Adamic myth became the driving force of much of the work of nineteenth century writers including James Fenimore Cooper, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and especially Walt Whitman. For example, in the poem “Pioneers! O Pioneers!” Whitman sings of the frontier spirit of the emerging U.S. democracy, urging “the tan-faced children,” “the youthful sinewy races,” to follow with pistols and sharp-edged axes and settle the new land. Similarly, in “Song of the Redwood-Tree,” a mighty dying tree willingly sacrifices itself to clear the ground “for broad humanity, the true America.” In “Mannahatta,” anticipating Carl Sandburg’s “Chicago,” Whitman expresses his deep affection for New York City, with its towering buildings, active harbors, and busy people. Aspiring to be a poet of progress and quest, Whitman identified himself with Columbus, addressing the explorer in “Passage to India” and affirming the explorer’s dream: “Ah Genoese thy dream! thy dream!/ Centuries after thou art laid in thy grave,/ The shore thou foundest verifies the dream.”

For other American writers, from the mid-nineteenth century onward, the shore and the disenchanting life thereon did not verify the dream. Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Edgar Allan Poe, Henry James, and Mark Twain probed the dark side of the dream. Twain, writing during the rise of nineteenth century finance capitalism and industrialism, became increasingly disillusioned with social corruption in the Gilded Age. In The Tragedy of Pudd’nhead Wilson (1894), he addresses the dehumanizing, brutal aspects of slavery, and in “The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg” he depicts the greed and self-serving hypocrisy of an allegedly honest and upright town. In his classic novel Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884), before Huck “lights out for the territory” to escape being civilized, he struggles with a corrupt world of frauds, desperadoes, and money-grubbing confidence men. Perhaps most disturbing of all is that Huck’s friend, Tom Sawyer, whom Huck admires, subjects Jim to numerous indignities to “rescue” him according to romantic books while knowing all along that he is a free man. Such preoccupation with Southern honor, carried further, leads to the cold-blooded murder of Boggs by Colonel Sherburn, the senseless feuding of the Shepherdsons and Grangerfords, and ultimately to the Civil War. It is significant that the wrecked boat on the Mississippi is the Walter Scott, named after the writer of romantic novels about chivalry and defense of honor. Twain’s comment elsewhere that Sir Walter Scott was the cause of the American Civil War was not completely facetious. Twin suggests that perhaps the American Dream is flawed at the core.

The Twentieth Century Nightmare

Twain set the tone for twentieth century versions of the American Dream, most of which have depicted the American Dream turned nightmare. Twain’s legacy is certainly discernible in such a writer as F. Scott Fitzgerald, whose short story “The Diamond as Big as the Ritz” is an attack on the American nightmare. The protagonist, Braddock Washington, a descendant of George Washington and of Lord Baltimore, has kept his colossal diamond mountain hidden from the world by manipulating and sacrificing innocent people who have stumbled upon it. Wealth and material possessions are shown as the constituents of the American Dream, a theme Fitzgerald further develops in The Great Gatsby (1925). In the novel, James Gatz of North Dakota has, five years before the story begins, lost the wealthy young woman he loves, Daisy, because he lacks wealth and social class. He changes his name to Jay Gatsby, amasses wealth by dealing with tycoons and gangsters, and buys a mansion across the bay from Daisy’s green-lighted dock. He is at “the service of a vast, vulgar, and meretricious beauty, as Fitzgerald sees the American Dream, a dream for which Gatsby loses his life. The novel ends with an elegy for the lapsed American Dream of innocent success. Nick Carraway, the narrator, contemplates the “fresh, green breast” of the New World that “flowered once for Dutch sailors’ eyes.”

In American fiction the dream has often been personified in the form of a beautiful young woman such as Fitzgerald’s Daisy. Realtor George F. Babbitt’s fairy girl in Sinclair Lewis’ Babbitt (1922) is beautiful but vacuous. Faye Greener in Nathanael West’s The Day of the Locust (1939) is another example. The nude dancer with a small American flag tattooed on her belly says to the black men in Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man (1952) what the American Dream has often said to minorities: “Look and long, but don’t dare to touch!” Later when the nameless protagonist gets a job at Liberty Paints on Long Island, American flags flutter in the breeze, the company’s logo is a screaming eagle, the Optic White paint is said to be “as white as George Washington’s Sunday-go-to-meetin’ wig,” and the motto is “If It’s Optic White, It’s the Right White.” The major lesson Invisible Man learns is that for all the patriotic fluff, the message is always the same: “Keep this nigger-boy running.”

Theodore Dreiser, John Dos Passos, Upton Sinclair, Thomas Wolfe, Henry Miller, William Faulkner, and John Steinbeck are other modern American novelists who wrote of the dream’s hollowness. When young Clyde Griffiths, in Dreiser’s An American Tragedy (1925), longs for the American Dream (money and the beauty it buys), seeking to escape from his family’s drab life, he kills and is destroyed, enacting what Dreiser considered a peculiarly American tragedy.

The tragedy of dreams deferred is treated as well in twentieth century American drama. Perhaps prototypical of the movement from idealist dream to realist nightmare is the career of Eugene O’Neill. Early plays, such as Bound East for Cardiff (1916) and The Moon of the Caribbees (1918), seem to affirm the dream, whereas most of the later work, such as The Hairy Ape (1922), Desire Under the Elms (1924), and Long Day’s Journey into Night (1956), reveal the nightmare side.

More recent playwrights such as Arthur Miller, Tennessee Williams, and Edward Albee have written of the dream’s falsity. At the end of Miller’s Death of a Salesman (1949), Willy Loman’s son, Biff, says of his father, “He had the wrong dreams. All, all, wrong.” Continuing the satire of American society, Edward Albee’s The American Dream (1961), a seriocomic play in the absurdist vein, attacks the substitution of artificial for real values in American society. Even more caustically satirical is Norman Mailer’s novel An American Dream (1965), which demonstrates the corruption of power and the power of the corrupt.

Modernist and postmodernist poets have also depicted “the lost America of love,” as Allen Ginsberg puts it in “A Supermarket in California.” Whitman’s “barbaric yawp” has become Ginsberg’s Howl (1956). Similarly, Louis Simpson has written in “Walt Whitman at Bear Mountain,” “Where are you, Walt?/ The Open Road goes to the used-car lot.” In Simpson’s poem “American Dreams,” people speak a language strange to the speaker and strange even to themselves. Perhaps language of the American Dream is becoming increasingly more alien to Americans themselves.

Arguments about the state of the American Dream in comtemporary literature vary from considering it present in all American literature, to considering it dead or replaced by dystopia. The American Dream still exists to some degree in immigrant novels, and those people's experiences moving to pursue the American Dream, and the ways in which it does or does not fail them. Some examples include Typical American by Gish Jen (1991), The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri, and Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.

Bibliography

Allen, Walter. The Urgent West: The American Dream and Modern Man. New York: E. P. Dutton, 1969. Traces the dream motif in American literature chronologically, concluding that the dream has become the property of the Western world.

Benne, Robert, and Philip Hefner. Defining America: A Christian Critique of the American Dream. Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1974. A thoughtful overview and assessment of the dream from a Christian perspective.

Bewley, Marius. “Scott Fitzgerald and the Collapse of the American Dream.” In The Eccentric Design: Form in the Classic American Novel. New York: Columbia University Press, 1963. A perceptive discussion of the jaundiced view of the American Dream.

Boorstin, Daniel J. The Image: Or, What Happened to the American Dream. New York: Atheneum, 1962. An illuminating sociological examination of how the American Dream has become a disenchanting illusion, the problem having arisen less from American weaknesses than from strengths such as wealth, optimism, and progress.

Carpenter, Frederick I. American Literature and the Dream. New York: Philosophical Library, 1955. An excellent beginning source, although dated. Presents an overview of major literature relating to the dream.

Ericson, Edward L. The American Dream Renewed: The Making of a World People. New York: Continuum, 1991. A sociological study of American pluralism, concluding that the dream never died but only needs to be renewed.

Long, Elizabeth. The American Dream and the Popular Novel. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1985. A helpful overview of the success theme in best-selling novels.

Madden, David, ed. American Dreams, American Nightmares. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1970. A collection of nineteen scholarly articles discussing individual authors, with a helpful introduction.