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The Representation of Wilderness in Dreiser's an American Tragedy

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The Representation of Wilderness in Dreiser's an American Tragedy ROBERT M. MYERS Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/isle/article/20/2/377/688230 by guest on 29 September 2021 “A Purely Ideational Lake”: The Representation of Wilderness in Dreiser's An American Tragedy On July 11, 1906 Chester Gillette and Grace Brown rented a small boat from the Glennmore Hotel at Big Moose Lake in the Adirondacks. When they had not returned by the next morning, a search was initi- ated, and within a few hours, the overturned boat and Grace's body were found in a small bay of the lake. The subsequent police investiga- tion revealed that Grace was pregnant, and that she had been having a sexual relationship with Chester, her supervisor at the Cortland, New York, skirt factory at which they worked. Chester was arrested and eventually convicted of murder in a sensational case that drew widespread attention.1 One avid reader of the newspaper accounts of the trial was Theodore Dreiser, who saw the case as the ultimate version of the American-Dream-gone-wrong story that he had long been considering writing. Dreiser studied court records and newspaper accounts of the Gillette trial, and in July of 1923, he and his mistress, Helen Richardson Dreiser, drove to visit the sites associated with the murder.2 His 1925 novel, An American Tragedy, is an imaginative retell- ing of the murder at Big Moose Lake. While previous critics have thor- oughly explored Dreiser's use of his source material, there has been little discussion of the significance of the Adirondack setting.3 In their anthology Beyond Nature Writing (2001), Karla Armbruster and Kathleen R. Wallace argue that if ecocriticism is to avoid marginaliza- tion, critics need to go beyond an examination of traditional nature Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment 20.2 (Spring 2013) Advance Access publication May 17, 2013 doi:10.1093/isle/ist025 © The Author(s) 2013. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please email: [email protected] 378 ISLE writing in order to demonstrate “the field's true range and its power to illuminate an almost endless variety of texts” (3). They further urge ecocritics to draw from disciplines such as environmental history for “insights into the relationship between natural and cultural envi- ronments” (5). The representation of the Adirondack setting in An American Tragedy reveals much about the ways in which the concept of wilderness was being negotiated in the early twentieth century. Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/isle/article/20/2/377/688230 by guest on 29 September 2021 I The time between the Gillette case and the publication of Dreiser's novel was a period of profound change in the history of the Adirondacks. While recreational tourism in the area began in the 1840s, it was not until the turn of the century that the railroads had opened up areas such as the Fulton Chain of Lakes (the setting for the murder). Subsequently, a summer trip to the Adirondacks became fashionable, and by the mid-1920s, this tourism was peaking, as the wealthy flocked to the many resort hotels and great camps.4 During this same period, the legal struggle to protect the Adirondack wilderness that began in the 1870s culminated in the “forever wild” clause in the 1915 New York State Constitution. As a result of this legislation, the publicly owned parts of the Adirondacks would become a forest preserve, permanently protected from lumber- ing. As Philip Terrie argues, the impetus for this legislation was pri- marily a desire to protect the state's watersheds; indeed, the conservation agencies created to administer the Adirondack Forest Preserve resented the “forever wild” clause and hoped to revoke it and institute scientific forestry in its place. However, Terrie notes that after World War I, there was a growing recognition of the value of the aesthetic and recreational potential of the Adirondack wilderness (92–110). Although the “forever wild” clause banned the cutting of trees in the state-owned sections of the Forest Preserve, lumbering continued on private land throughout the Adirondacks. Jane Barlow points out that, beginning in 1903, nearly 2500 acres near Big Moose Lake were selectively lumbered; this operation finished only two months before Chester and Grace arrived. In 1914 a different company erected a sawmill on the shore of the lake and began extensive clear-cutting, including trees on the shoreline that had been spared in the earlier project (114–24). Whereas a pre-1914 advertising brochure for the Glennmore Hotel boasted that “no lumbering has ever been done on the sides of the mountains toward the lake,” the 1922 edition of that brochure offers guests the opportunity to see “the results of Representation of Wilderness in Dreiser's An American Tragedy 379 reforestation, as Hotel Glennmore was the first to start work of this kind on the west side of the Adirondacks.”5 Thus, despite the legal protections that had evolved, Big Moose Lake was hardly a virgin wil- derness at the time of the drowning, and even less so when Dreiser wrote his novel, which is clearly set in the 1920s. The protection of the Adirondacks was not achieved without signif- icant tensions between the Forest Commission and the approximately 16,000 people who were living in the park. Karl Jacoby argues that the Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/isle/article/20/2/377/688230 by guest on 29 September 2021 creation of the Adirondack Forest Preserve “established a viable new role for the state: active supervisor of the environment” (Crimes 17). The first step was surveying and mapping the park so that standar- dized practices could replace local laws and customs. To enforce the new game and timber laws, the state created a “forest police,” whose numbers grew steadily throughout the early twentieth century. One challenge faced by the Forest Commission was the presence of squat- ters on what was now state land. Jacoby points out that the fear of vio- lence from the squatters resulted in a policy of “benign neglect” until 1900 when the Forest Commission began forcibly evicting them. Other tensions were created by attempts to enforce the new timber and game laws. The locals also resented the rapid growth of private parks owned by the wealthy; by 1893 nearly a million acres of the best hunting and fishing land in the Adirondacks had been surveyed and marked with barbed-wire fences and “No Trespassing” signs. To insure that locals kept out, estate owners hired private security forces (Jacoby, Crimes 29–39, 50–66). Locals responded to the changed circumstances in various ways. Jacoby notes that there was an outbreak of vandalism and violence in the early years of the twentieth century as residents destroyed “No Trespassing” signs, cut fences surrounding private parks, and shot at security guards. Between 1899 and 1913 there were a series of forest fires caused by arson, which resulted in the burning of over a million acres. Locals ignored timber laws, and they poached game, including animals such as moose and elk that were being reintroduced by the Forest Commission. This resistance was met with increased methods of control and surveillance. Jacoby notes that additional foresters and private security guards were hired, “turning the Adirondacks of the early 1900s into a tense, armed camp” (Crimes 42). William Rockefeller installed floodlights around the perimeter of his private estate, and, to fight arson, the Forest Commission built a series of fire towers; by 1914, fifty-one of these “observation stations” had been erected (Jacoby, Crimes 72–77). Tensions exploded in 1903 when Orrando Dexter, a millionaire owner of a private park, who had angered locals by suing them for 380 ISLE trespassing, was fatally shot while driving on his estate. Pinkerton detectives were hired, and Dexter's father offered a $10,000 reward, but the murderer was never found.6 The response to the Dexter murder and other similar incidents reveals turn-of-the-century fears that the Adirondack wilderness could become a place where crimes could be committed outside the gaze of law. The Watertown Herald described the area where Dexter was murdered as “a lonely spot, and a place where a murderer could be secreted in the woods and not be Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/isle/article/20/2/377/688230 by guest on 29 September 2021 seen by anyone passing.”7 The solidarity of the locals increased the potential for concealment. The Forest Commission complained that locals “often profess to be unable to recognize their nearest neighbors while cutting State timber a few rods away. Every conceivable evasion is resorted to, and all local influences are brought to bear to screen offenders against the State from justice” (qtd. in Jacoby, “Class” 335). In 1904 a New York Times article noted the dangers faced by guards on William Rockefeller's private estate: “Several of these guards have been fired at recently while patrolling their lonely beats in the dense forest. ... As smokeless powder has been used in every case, all efforts to locate and capture these 'snipers’ have proved futile” (qtd. in Jacoby, “Class” 335). The Plattsburgh Sentinel warned that “if the murderer of Dexter went undiscovered and unpunished, it would tend to breed crimes of a similar nature against others of his class and a reign of terror throughout a wide territory.”8 II The ideological tensions that were erupting in the Adirondacks surface in Dreiser's novel as psychological conflicts. As Ellen Moers has discussed, Dreiser's view of human nature was shaped by both psychological and environmental determinism, but Sigmund Freud's theories had an especially powerful influence on the writer (240–70).
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