We Came Along with a Hammer

I think we’ve both firmly established how much of a dick George Amberson Minafer is, probably one of the most annoying petty tyrants in American literature. So is he a character or a caricature? If any character in this book should be a fully realized person, I should hope it would be the central figure, but I can’t quite figure out if Tarkington is being satirical in his descriptions of George or attempting to paint a very real picture of the ultimate spoiled brat.

The best evidence I have to support the theory that Tarkington is being completely satirical in his descriptions of George is the Hamlet bit. Oh dear Lord, the Hamlet bit. After G. Amb starts to crush his mother’s hopes and dreams of finally reuniting with her long-lost love, we’re treated to this description of his reaction to himself:

… A little while after she had gone, George rose and began solemnly to dress for dinner. At one stage of these conscientious proceedings he put on, temporarily, his long black velvet dressing-gown, and, happening to catch sight in his pier glass of the picturesque and mediaeval figure thus presented he paused to regard it; and something profoundly theatrical in his nature came to the surface.

His lips moved; he whispered, half-aloud, some famous fragments:

“ ‘Tis not alone my inky cloak, good mother,
Nor customary suits of solemn black….”

For, in truth, the mirrored princely image, with hair disheveled on the white brow, and the long tragic fall of black velvet from the shoulders, had brought about (in his thoughts, at least) some comparisons of his own times, so out of joint, with those of that other gentle prince and heir whose widowed mother was minded to marry again.

“But I have that within which passeth show;
These but the trappings and the suits of Woe.”

Not less like Hamlet did he feel and look as he sat gauntly at the dinner table with Fanny to partake of a meal throughout which neither spoke….

And I’ll spare you the rest. Now we’ve got a clue in here that Tarkington can’t possibly be serious with all this tripe—the parenthetical “in his thoughts, at least”—but other than that these seems like a straightforward allusion for the reader’s benefit. But I can’t imagine a reader’s response to this that takes it seriously; my personal experience of reading this passage may have involved actual eye-rolling.

This dovetails with diablevert’s questions about tragedy vs. pathos: can you have a tragic novel in which the main character is completely ridiculous, a caricature of a human being? I don’t think The Magnificent Ambersons is a comic novel. Tarkington’s descriptions of the landscape going to pot are too heartfelt and his many deathbed scenes are straightforward and serious. We have to conclude that Tarkington had one of two objectives in his mind: either to create a satire of the American upper class and the self-fulfilling prophecy of its hubris and decline or to make a tragic portrait of the fall of the glittering society in America under populist coarseness and industrialization. What he actually produced is a bizarre hybrid of the two.