Hortense Briggs

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Hortense Briggs is a character in the novel An American Tragedy, by Theodore Dreiser. The hero, Clyde Griffiths, falls in love with her in Kansas City, where he has been lucky enough to secure a position as a bellboy at a fashionable hotel.

Hortense is a shallow flirt with little interest in Clyde, except for the things he can buy her on his comparatively lavish income from tips. In order to keep up the stream of presents that maintain her pretense of affection, Clyde neglects the real needs of his poor family, particularly his faithful mother and sister Esta, the latter having been seduced, impregnated and abandoned by a faithless lover. Hortense's manipulative, materialistic behavior is partly perceived by Clyde, despite all his attempts at denial, and it causes him considerable pain throughout the relationship, which in the end is never consummated.

These themes are eventually revealed as significant foreshadowings of Clyde's later career. He in his turn seduces and impregnates Roberta Alden, a poor factory girl who works under his supervision. At the same time, he becomes involved in a desperate pursuit of wealthy socialite Sondra Finchley, who somewhat thoughtlessly encourages him and gives him money. Clyde essentially treats Roberta as his sister had been treated. Clyde sporadically recognizes some of this and is accordingly disturbed, but his character is revealed as too weak to change, even when these patterns are leading on to his own destruction.

As in all of Dreiser's work, few relationships in An American Tragedy remain untouched by the corrupting influences of money, power, self-interest, and social class. Although Hortense Briggs appears only in the first section of the novel, and she is not drawn to a high level of novelistic characterization, her example sets the pattern for the rest of the book.