The article examines how Theodore Dreiser’s An American Tragedy (1925) represents social status as the operative mechanism behind the failure of the American Dream. Criticism has read the novel either as a demonstration of naturalist determinism or as a moral indictment of materialism, and both readings tend to treat class as a background condition rather than as a working system with its own signs, thresholds and sanctions. Using a close reading of the complete 1925 text together with recent scholarship on Dreiser’s style, social vision, legal imagination and gender politics, the study analyses status through four categories: status as a legible surface of dress, money and speech; institutions that admit the aspirant to proximity while withholding belonging; rules that convert private desire into legal jeopardy; and the trial as a public ritual in which class is finally confirmed. The tragedy is called American because the Dream distributes aspiration universally while distributing opportunity by class, and because the novel locates responsibility in that distribution rather than in the individual alone.

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