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Alfred Bendixen
After the Civil War, realism became the dominant literary movement in the United States. A nation torn apart by the most violent war in its history was now less interested in the abstractions central to the romantic imagination, which relied fundamentally on elaborate depictions of exceptional individuals in extraordinary situations, often seeking heroic validation in the wild extremes of nature or a symbolic landscape outside of time and space, and speaking an artificial literary language that frequently owed more to Shakespearean tragedy than to the words actually spoken by ordinary men and women. In contrast, realism values the ordinary, the common, and the everyday; it is naturally suspicious of all abstractions, particularly words like “honor” and “valor” that deny the realities of violence and death and that can be used to lure young people to die in battle. It finds enormous meaning in the details of daily life rendered in clear and precise language. In an 1874 essay, George Parsons Lathrop summed up the movement’s defining values:
Realism sets itself at work to consider characters and events which are apparently the most ordinary and uninteresting, in order to extract from these their full value and true meaning. It would apprehend in all particulars the connection between the familiar and the extraordinary, and the seen and unseen of human nature. Beneath the deceptive cloak of outwardly uneventful days, it detects and endeavors to trace the outlines of the spirits that are hidden there; to measure the changes in their growth, to watch the symptoms of moral decay or regeneration, to fathom their histories of passionate or intellectual problems. In short, realism reveals. Where we thought nothing worth of notice, it shows everything to be rife with significance.
(Lathrop 1874: 321–322)
In general, American literary realism replaces romanticism’s focus on poetic symbols requiring multiple interpretations with an emphasis on complex characterization and the creation of memorable characters. While the masterpieces of American romanticism are often named after their central symbol – The Scarlet Letter (1850), Moby‐Dick (1851), Walden (1854) – the titles of major American realistic novels usually direct our attention to their protagonists: Huckleberry Finn, Daisy Miller, Silas Lapham. The specific ways in which these individuals move through their worlds, the choices they make, and the consequences of their actions and their interactions with others form the center of the reader’s interest, establishing not only the plot structure but also the kinds of moral and social questions raised by the narrative.
If romanticism extolls an individual’s relationship to nature, sometimes fantasizing about the possibility of achieving oneness with “Nature” through a perception of higher realities, realism is more interested in social relationships, in the bonds individuals forge with each other and with larger communities. In exploring the nature of friendship, love, or marriage, realism enjoys depicting the intricate and sometimes difficult relationships that shape family life and exploring the choices that must be made. It tends to devote more attention to the very young and old than most other literary modes. The nineteenth century discovered the child as a subject of inquiry and literary treatment, but realism uncovered the reality of child abuse and childhood trauma, subjects that are especially important in major works by Mark Twain and Henry James. The fragile position of the elderly in a country that valued youthful energy also receives significant attention. With a few significant exceptions, American romanticism was largely a form for young men. It values inspiration, youthful rebellion, spontaneous apprehensions of higher realities, and tales of male initiation which may lead to transcendental truths or gothic tragedy. Women are often relegated to the roles of helpless victim, unattainable ideal, or treacherous demon. In contrast, realism values a painfully earned knowledge of a complex world, offers fully developed female characters, and depicts the gender dynamics that shape relationships. Marriage is more likely to serve as the starting point for an exploration of multifaceted emotional and psychological responses than as the marker of a happy ending. This knowledge of the world and of human behavior requires the experience that age brings, which may explain why the major writers of realism rarely did their best work until their forties and many continued to develop their craft beyond middle age.
Realism has been the mode most congenial to our major American women writers. Arguably the first great age of American literary feminism arrived in the 1890s, when Sarah Orne Jewett, Kate Chopin, Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman demonstrated the capacity of realistic fiction to express the aspirations and frustrations of women and established a solid foundation for the further development of feminist realism in the twentieth century that includes the work of Edith Wharton, Willa Cather, Mary Austin, Ellen Glasgow, Dawn Powell, Katherine Anne Porter, Pearl Buck, Carson McCullers, Shirley Jackson, and Marilynne Robinson. This feminist tradition can also be traced further back to the women writers who had inaugurated realism in the 1860s and 1870s as a significantly new and vital literary mode with fiction that engaged social issues through a profoundly detailed sense of place, including Rebecca Harding Davis, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps (Ward), Rose Terry Cooke, and Constance Fenimore Woolson.
Realism is essentially a social mode with a focus on complex characterization and an acute awareness of the meanings embedded in physical spaces and specific places. Its antebellum origins lie in regionalist writings designed to capture the peculiar properties of life in various parts of the United States, such as the tales of the southwestern humorists, particularly Thomas Bangs Thorpe, Augustus Baldwin Longstreet, George Washington Harris, and Johnson Jones Hooper, whose skill at rendering language and dialect as well as comic detail influenced many writers. After the civil war, the rise of local color literature contributed to the healing process that enabled separate states and regions to conceive of themselves as a single nation. Regionalism satisfied curiosity about the various parts of a rapidly growing nation while also providing largely affirmative portraits of its diverse citizenry. American realism emphasizes the specific qualities that distinguish certain regions, but individual differences are usually shown to mask a common humanity. In its depiction of both moments of comedy and tragic scenes of suffering, realism tends to emphasize compassion, thus enabling readers to move to a sympathetic embrace of people from other parts of the country. In the most acute example of this, the southern stories of Thomas Nelson Page are said to have made even noted abolitionists weep over the suffering of the defeated white South.
The meaning of place is also important to realism’s fascination with the act of travel and its development of the international novel, which usually focuses on Americans in Europe but sometimes depicts foreign visitors in the United States. The form invites the clashing of values, frequently between exemplars of American innocence and European experience, and sometimes between democratic ideals and aristocratic ambitions. The exploration of social hierarchies leads to significant questions about the role of class in a culture purportedly devoted to democratic equality. Both James and Twain build major fictions on traveling innocents who are simultaneously naive and resourceful as they move through landscapes marked by arbitrary social conventions and class boundaries. The sense of place in realism is fraught with political, social, and moral implications. The traveler’s intrusions into new sites and social situations set up dramatic confrontations revealing the underlying moral positions that define both the traveler and the places visited.
Physical space may suggest the entrapment of narrowly lived lives or the wide open spaces of possibilities, a device central to works of realism as different as Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885), Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper” (1892), James’s The Portrait of a Lady (1881), and Wharton’s The House of Mirth (1905), to name only a handful of the many prominent examples. Realism may contrast the redemptive values found in nature with the constricting social spaces that box in individuals. The structure of Twain’s masterpiece relies largely on the contrast between river and small town, between the liberating possibilities embodied in nature on the mighty Mississippi River and the petty, constricted lives of those occupying the shore. Gilman’s story presents a woman entrapped in a room that evokes the multiple constraints imposed on women. The heroine of James’s novel begins in the expansive space of an English lawn and ends up enclosed in the darkness of a loveless marriage in Italy. Wharton’s protagonist is doomed to move through a series of smaller and shabbier rooms instead of discovering the republic of the spirit that she desires. In general, the spaces that characters occupy define the possibilities open to them or the limitations imposed on them.
Realism is fond of social spaces. Its authors welcome the opportunity to explore the underlying implications of interactions that may occur in a kitchen or a dining room or a parlor. Ideally a shared meal – whether a private family dinner or a more elaborate formal dinner party – should be the occasion for substantial nourishment provided by both food and conversation, and that nourishment should be psychological, emotional, intellectual, spiritual as well as physical. Nevertheless, dinner scenes can also be shaped by arbitrary social hierarchies, gender dynamics, and personal ambitions; sometimes, the veneer of civilization may mask savage competition, conversation may become contention, and a shared meal becomes an opportunity to devour others. Like a battle scene in an epic, the dinner party may serve as the site in which the merit of a hero is tested. For example, in the most admired chapter in William Dean Howells’s fiction, the dinner scene in The Rise of Silas Lapham (1885), the central character fails to establish his place in the social milieu he wishes to enter. In his A Hazard of New Fortunes (1889), comments made at a dinner sow destructive discord between the guests that shapes the rest of the novel. Furthermore, dinner scenes are particularly important to the women masters of American realism who sometimes structure their novels partly on two or more dinner scenes. Kate Chopin’s The Awakening (1899), Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence (1920), and Willa Cather’s A Lost Lady (1923) all rely on contrasting dinner scenes to define the changes in their protagonists over the course of these novels. Underlying the presentation of these dinner scenes is the same critique of gendered roles that serves as the foundation for Judy Chicago’s installation artwork, her feminist masterpiece, The Dinner Party (1974–1979).
Although realism’s focus is generally on the here and now, regional fictions may look with nostalgia at a simpler past or indulge in pastoral fantasies about rural retreats untainted by the growing urban industrialism of late nineteenth‐century America. In this respect, the fascination with place actually reveals an uneasy confrontation with time, especially the dramatic changes and rapid transformations during the period following the Civil War. For some scholars, perhaps most notably Jay Martin (1967) and Amy Kaplan (1988), the realistic commitment to nailing down the specific details that constitute reality reflects a deeper need to hold on to a world that appears to be rapidly moving away or to recapture aspects of life that have already disappeared. Thus, realism is in some respects the literary mode most committed to recognizing and coping with the reality of a rapidly changing world, and with the multiple implications of change. The way the world has changed and is changing and will change is arguably the chief subject of several realists, particularly Howells.
In realism, language matters in new ways. Realism is the first literary movement to be deeply committed to capturing the ways in which human beings actually speak in specific situations and to rejecting the artificial literary language that marks many of the characters in Hawthorne, Poe, and Melville. In “Fenimore Cooper’s Literary Offenses,” Mark Twain emphasized issues of language throughout his list of 18 rules for writers, which include a requirement that “when the personages of a tale deal in conversation, the talk shall sound like human talk, and be talk such as human beings would be likely to talk in the given circumstances” (Twain 1992: 181). In realism, elaborate and overblown speech becomes a sign of pretense and a source of ridicule. Realism values what Howells called the “simple, natural, honest” values that are nowhere more important than in the presentation of speech and dialogue (Howells 1891: 12). Capturing the rhythms, tones, and nuances of spoken language becomes an ideal worthy of painstaking care. Thus, Huckleberry Finn opens with two introductory notes, one making fun of motive, moral, and plot, and the other explaining that the author has labored diligently to depict seven distinct regional dialects. Dialect became a major part of the literary arsenal of writers like George Washington Cable, Charles Chesnutt, Mary Noailles Murfree, James Whitcomb Riley, and Mary Wilkins Freeman. The fascination with rendering the speech of different regions, classes, and ethnicities led to a literature deeply concerned with the ways in which human beings communicate or fail to communicate. Ironically, the more a realist writer is devoted to capturing the specifics of language and nuances of speech, the more likely that writer is to have the failure of communication as a major theme, a trait apparent in Twain and Chesnutt. Moments of silence also assume new meaning. Silencing is most often a powerful form of repression, particularly when men silence women, but for some authors, most notably James and Wharton, moments of silence can assume deeper meaning, sometimes marking moments of revelation in which a speechless character understands the world, such as the brilliant chapter 43 of The Portrait of a Lady, in which Isabel Archer simply sits in a chair and thinks.
The attention to surface details and verisimilitude places reality in the here and now, the real world of human action and communication, and not in some abstract higher plane. For realists, truth is usually local and abstractions are dangerous. Realism tends to value clarity and precision above stylistic flamboyance, but the play of language can range from the broad comedy of Twain to the graceful irony of Wharton. Authors may also develop a different stylistic voice over time, a process best illustrated by tracing James’s movement from the relatively simple, clear, and precise prose of his early works to the remarkably intricate and complex forms of stream of consciousness in his late novels, or by comparing the two major versions of The Portrait of a Lady. Scholars still argue over whether to prefer the graceful clarity of the first version (1881) or the rich psychological density of the extensively revised version published in the New York Edition of James’s fiction (1908). In general, the shift toward greater psychological depth shapes realism’s development as it approaches and enters the twentieth century, but the mode has always been committed to uncovering the layers of meaning underlying surface details. The inner life of characters is a primary concern. Although physical violence is certainly a part of realistic fiction, particularly in Twain’s works, forms of emotional and psychological violence tend to dominate the form, particularly in the fiction of James and Wharton. The attempt to imitate the fluidity of life itself often leads to organic structures that might rely on a journey or a central conflict but tend to avoid forms of closure in which all fictional events are wrapped up in a marriage and an obligatory final chapter telling us what happened to the central characters. Many novels seem relatively open‐ended, and the characters’ lives do not really end on the final page. In fact, it is common for authors to create fictional worlds in which the same characters appear in multiple books.
The triumph of American realism was based on its flexibility and versatility. Realism is almost always engaged in exploring the individual in relationship to others and to a larger world, but the kinds of world building offered can vary enormously. A story might focus on social and economic justice or be more grounded in family and gender issues. Realism encompasses the picaresque comedy of Twain and the psychological grimness of James. Realists may focus on the plight of the Midwestern farmer, as in Hamlin Garland’s Main‐Travelled Roads (1891), or probe the moral and psychological dilemmas of a world in which organized religion no longer provides easy answers, as in Harold Frederic’s The Damnation of Theron Ware (1896). The power of a novel might appear in vivid depictions of warfare, as in the best work of John William De Forest, or in quiet scenes of domestic life as in the best work of Mary Wilkins Freeman and Sarah Orne Jewett. It might expose racial injustice as in Chesnutt’s fiction or defend a fallen South as in Thomas Nelson Page. The truths writers uncover about a specific place might be as various as the depictions of New Orleans we find in the fiction of George Washington Cable, Grace King, Kate Chopin, and Alice Dunbar‐Nelson. It might focus on the men of mining camps as Bret Harte and Jack London do, or illuminate the lives of women in a variety of settings, as Woolson, Wharton, and Cather do. As their understanding of reality grew and as the world changed, the major writers of realism often moved in new directions, particularly under the influence of naturalism’s sense of pessimistic determinism and an emerging modernism’s fascination with alienation and new forms of psychological inquiry. The nature of these changes and the vitality and variety of the forms of realism can best be understood through an exploration of the careers of Howells, who is arguably the founder of the American form of this literary mode; and Wharton, who best exemplifies the endurance and extension of realistic modes in the twentieth century.
William Dean Howells
No writer played a greater role in establishing realism as the predominant literary mode in the late nineteenth‐century United States than Howells, who championed the new form as an editor and reviewer, codified its basic principles as a theorist, and exemplified its values as an author. In many ways, the trajectory of his life represents the shifting patterns of authorship in the last half of the nineteenth century. Born in Ohio in 1837 and largely self‐educated in his father’s printing shop, Howells read voraciously and eventually taught himself Spanish, German, French, and Italian well enough to explore the literatures of these languages. He worked as a printer and journalist before launching his literary career with a volume of verse, Poems of Two Friends (1859), co‐authored with James J. Piatt; and a campaign biography of Abraham Lincoln that earned the young author a consulship in Venice during the Civil War. Howells’s years in Venice were instructive. He continued to read widely and discovered the plays of Carlo Goldoni, whose eighteenth‐century comic dramas of middle‐class life provided a model for a new variety of realism. He also discovered that publishers had little interest in his poetry but greeted his prose sketches of life in Italy with enthusiasm. He produced two very successful travel books, Venetian Life (1866) and Italian Journeys (1867), both distinguished by their vivid detail.
Upon his return home, the self‐educated man from Ohio conquered the New England literary scene. His writings on Italy and Italian literature won the respect of the Cambridge community, which led to Howells receiving an honorary degree from Harvard University, where he lectured for two years on modern Italian literature. In 1866, he became assistant editor of the Atlantic Monthly, the most prestigious literary magazine in the United States. In this position, which included primary responsibility for book reviews, he staked out a field for realistic fiction, encouraged numerous writers, and developed enduring friendships, most notably with James and Twain. He became editor‐in‐chief of the magazine in 1871, a position he held for 10 years, when he resigned to focus on his own writing. For the rest of his career, Howells was able to negotiate contracts with publishers that provided a regular salary as well as royalties. This meant financial security for himself and his family, but it also required him to work at a remarkably rapid pace, with some contracts calling for a novel each year. In fact, critics have suggested that some of his fiction might have been stronger if he had been able to compose more slowly. During his lifetime, he was routinely ranked as the most important American writer, but of his 35 novels only A Modern Instance, The Rise of Silas Lapham, and A Hazard of New Fortunes have earned a measure of enduring importance; and of his many short stories, his anti‐war story “Editha” is the only one still widely anthologized and studied.
Howells was a prolific author who worked successfully in multiple genres. Although he recognized that prose fiction was displacing poetry as the leading literary form, he never abandoned writing verse; and as a critic he was among the first to recognize the achievements of Paul Laurence Dunbar, Emily Dickinson, and Robert Frost. Like many other realists, Howells had a strong interest in dramatic form. Most of his 36 plays are one‐act farces that were popular with amateur theatricals and ultimately became a regular feature in the Christmas issues of Harper’s Magazine. Howells also wrote several more travel books, a campaign biography of Rutherford B. Hayes (1876), a number of memoirs providing charming recollections of his childhood and youth, and informative accounts of his relationships with books and writers. For scholars today, however, his most important non‐fictional works are his reviews of individual authors and the theoretical formulations that emerged from his engagement with literary texts. The essays he contributed to Harper’s Magazine for his monthly column “The Editor’s Study,” which ran from 1886 to 1892, were particularly significant. Criticism and Fiction (1891) collects many of his most influential essays and offers the closest thing realism has to a literary manifesto. In 1891 he moved to New York City, the nation’s publishing center. In 1900, he returned to producing a regular monthly column for Harper’s Magazine, “The Editor’s Easy Chair,” which lasted until the end of his life. As the most influential critic in the country, he played a significant role in establishing the literary careers of James, Twain, Bret Harte, Hamlin Garland, Sarah Orne Jewett, Charles Chesnutt, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Stephen Crane, and others.
Howells’s approach to realism was both cosmopolitan and highly nationalistic. He had an unusually broad appreciation of European literatures tempered with a focus on the qualities best suited to American values. Thus, he admired the artistry of French novelists but expressed reservations about both their deeply ingrained pessimism and their fascination with sexuality. Howells praised Italian, Spanish, and Scandinavian writers who embraced the new realism, and he revered the Russian novelists, especially Ivan Turgenev, Leo Tolstoy, and Fyodor Dostoevsky. He has frequently been lambasted for asserting, in his review of Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment, that
whoever struck a note so profoundly tragic in American fiction would do a false and mistaken thing – as false and as mistaken in its way as dealing in American fiction with certain nudities which the Latin peoples seem to find edifying. Whatever their deserts, very few American novelists have been led out to be shot, or finally exiled to the rigors of a winter at Duluth: one might make [the radical German‐American anarchist] Herr Most the hero of a labor‐question romance with perfect impunity; and in a land where journeymen carpenters and plumbers strike for four dollars a day the sum of hunger and cold is certainly very small, and the wrong from class to class is almost inappreciable. We invite our novelists, therefore to concern themselves with the more smiling aspects of life, which are the more American and to seek the universal in the individual rather than the social interests.
(Cady 1973: 94)
Howells is, of course, emphasizing that Crime and Punishment reflects the specific pains of its author’s life and that all fiction reflects the culture that produces it. In this respect, “smiling aspects” seems to capture the basic optimism that he found at the heart of the national culture in 1886. When revising this passage for the 1891 Criticism and Fiction, however, Howells added the phrase “though all of this is changing for the worse” to the list of American virtues and deleted the phrase “We invite […] to” from the next sentence, which changes “smiling aspects of life” into a description rather than a request (Howells 1891: 128). Nevertheless, the phrase has been used to disparage Howells in spite of the numerous times in which he acclaimed powerful works offering very unsmiling views of America, including Crane’s Maggie: A Girl of the Streets (1893) and the stories of Garland and Chesnutt.
In “Henry James, Jr.,” first published in the November 1882 issue of the Century, Howells praised James’s masterly creation of a new analytic fiction that dispensed with conventional fictional closure in favor of a deeper engagement with the issues and choices facing the protagonist. He declared that the new form of “character‐painting” in The Portrait of a Lady established a literary future that revealed the limitations of the major British novelists, including such eminent figures as Charles Dickens and William Makepeace Thackeray (Cady 1973: 70–71). Although he professed surprise at the bitter controversy these comments generated from Anglophiles, and at various points praised the works of George Eliot, Anthony Trollope, and Thomas Hardy, Howells was not afraid to make bold proclamations and consistently found European models of realism to be superior to contemporary British fiction. In Criticism and Fiction, he asserted, “Realism is nothing more and nothing less than the truthful treatment of material, and Jane Austen was the first and the last of the English novelists to treat material with entire truthfulness” (Howells 1891: 73). The phrase “truthful treatment of material,” as Howells uses it, means an exploration of the complexity of human experience through modes of presentation that reject literary artifice and sentimental melodrama in favor of a fidelity to details of lived human experience put forth with an artistry that ensures their full meaning will be clear to discerning readers.
For Howells, “the truthful treatment of material” encompasses a wide range of fictional possibilities. As a theorist he is less interested in promulgating rules than in liberating writers from stifling conventions and enabling them to see the world as it really is. The second chapter of Criticism and Fiction defines the issues with exceptional clarity: “The young writer who attempts to report the phrase and carriage of every‐day life, who tries to tell just how he has heard men talk and seen them look, is made to feel guilty of something low and unworthy by people who would like to have him show how Shakespeare’s men talked and looked, or Scott’s, or Thackeray’s, or Balzac’s, or Hawthorne’s, or Dickens’s; he is instructed to idealize his personages, that is, to take the life‐likeness out of them, and put the book‐likeness into them.” In contrast, Howells seeks a depiction of reality that is “simple, natural, and honest” (Howells 1891: 10–12).
This commitment to the “simple, natural, and honest” marks Howells’s own fiction. He tends to be fairly unadventurous in his use of point of view, rarely exploring the possibilities of first‐person narrative, but his best fiction effectively uses third‐person narration to counterpoint differing perspectives within a dramatic framework. Although his handling of dialect can be clumsy, he generally uses dialogue effectively, offering conversations that seem convincing as they define the social and moral conflicts at the heart of his stories. He has little interest in stylistic flourishes, but he offers clear, precise language sometimes tempered by moments of ironic reflection or wit. His plot structures usually manage to avoid the artificial or contrived and sometimes attempt to mirror the random fluidity and open‐endedness of life itself. Nevertheless, his three major novels culminate in dramatic moments – the trial scene of A Modern Instance, the burning of the house in The Rise of Silas Lapham, and the violent strike in A Hazard of New Fortunes. The choices that the central characters make before and during these culminating scenes ultimately define their position in Howells’s universe. Almost all of his major characters are outsiders trying to find a place in a social, economic, and moral order that differs significantly from the ones in which they grew up.
Howells learned how to become a novelist by writing travel books and finding ways to adapt his own experiences into interesting narrative forms. His first novel, Their Wedding Journey (1872), established Howells as a master of descriptive prose who could capture specific aspects of American experience and interweave a graceful sense of humor. The book, which drew heavily on the author’s summer travels with his own wife, introduces Basil and Isabel March, two fictional characters who would appear repeatedly in his works, sometimes in central roles and sometimes in relatively minor ones. Howells followed his auspicious start with a series of relatively short novels focusing on the clash of social values and the depiction of young American women faced with complex choices, including A Chance Acquaintance (1873), A Foregone Conclusion (1874), and The Lady of the Aroostook (1879), whose heroine meets two suitors while traveling in Europe, as does the title character of a bestseller published the same year, James’s Daisy Miller. The following decade saw the development of larger, more ambitious books, beginning with The Undiscovered Country (1880). In its dealing with spiritualism and use of an Amish village as a utopian spiritual retreat, that novel seems to be a rewriting of Hawthorne’s The Blithedale Romance (1852); but it also reveals a deepening interest in psychology and the consequences of an American psyche lacking spiritual grounding.
Howells’s fiction suggests that those without such a religious or spiritual foundation may become morally confused and unable to sustain meaningful relationships with others. The ramifications of a social world destitute of spiritual beliefs is the real subject of A Modern Instance (1882), the study of a failed marriage that ends in abandonment and divorce. It is easy to read the novel as a tract against divorce, a view supported by the statements of a character who seems to be a moral arbiter. It is, however, more precise to say that Howells saw divorce as an index of disturbing shifts in American culture, the increasing dissolution of individuals unprepared to make morally responsible decisions. Bartley Hubbard, the editor of a small‐town paper in Maine, is charming, ambitious, self‐centered, cynical, and devoid of moral scruples. He ends up fleeing town and eloping with Marcia Gaylord, the impulsive and jealous daughter of the town lawyer, who is an atheist. They move to Boston where Bartley establishes himself as a journalist, and the two start a family. Their initial success comes to a crashing end when Bartley’s moral shortcuts catch up with him. Complicating this story is the role of Ben Halleck, a crippled young man from a wealthy family who ends up falling in love with Marcia and becoming a minister. A happy ending eludes all the major characters, who react impulsively to events instead of developing a sense of agency. Bartley’s flight from responsibility and ultimate downfall foreshadow the naturalistic novels of Theodore Dreiser, but the portrayal of characters without moral compass who end up destroying themselves and others through thoughtlessness prefigures the fictional modernism of F. Scott Fitzgerald.
In contrast, the movement toward moral responsibility and meaningful agency shapes the development of The Rise of Silas Lapham (1885), the first of Howells’s fictional studies of the American businessman. Silas Lapham has built a successful business in Boston after discovering a paint mine on the family farm in Vermont. Proud of the quality of his product, he delights in advertising it by literally painting the landscape. Lapham can be coarse and crude, lacking in the graceful manners that mark higher social circles, but he is also fundamentally honest and decent. Unfortunately, he falls into the temptations basic to the American success story: the desire to move into the upper classes and own the big house in the best neighborhood. His real “rise” comes when the capitalist system threatens his livelihood by providing a competitor who can and will destroy him, and after his unfinished and uninsured house burns down. He rejects the chance to escape financial ruin by deceiving others, saving his integrity while losing his fortune. Set off against the Laphams are Bromwell Corey and his family, who represent a genteel Boston elegance that enjoys the trappings of wealth but scorns the world of business. Tom Corey’s desire to enter the Lapham business and marry one of his daughters suggests a possible future in which money and manners can prosper together. There is also a subplot in which the chosen daughter, Penelope, hesitates to marry Tom for fear of hurting her sister, who also loves him. Penelope agrees to marry Tom only after Rev. Sewell, a realist and the family’s counselor, observes that the young woman is acting like a heroine in a romantic novel and explains that such foolish sacrifices help no one. The Rise of Silas Lapham is the most optimistic of Howells’s major fiction, because it envisions a world in which class conflicts can be resolved and human beings can face difficulties by making mature ethical choices.
Howells went on to explore social conflict and moral choice in many more novels, but his most complex engagement with social issues appears in his longest and most ambitious novel, A Hazard of New Fortunes (1889). Basil March, who moves to New York City to assume the editorship of a new magazine, discovers a city of enormous vitality and economic disparity, and meets a large cast of characters who reflect the diversity of modern urban life. The cast includes Fulkerson, a clever man who conceives of the magazine and ways to promote it; Dryfoos, a natural‐gas millionaire from Indiana who owns the magazine; his son, Conrad, who wants to be a minister but accepts his father’s demand that he work on the business end of the new periodical; Lindau, a German‐born socialist who refuses to compromise his principles; Colonel Woodburn, a southerner who proposes to solve social problems by re‐instituting slavery; Angus Beaton, the shallow and self‐centered art director; Alma Leighton, who has come to New York to study art and help her mother manage a boarding house; and Margaret Vance, a wealthy woman with a social conscience. The various conflicts that ensue culminate in a violent strike that takes the lives of both Conrad and Lindau and ultimately persuades Dryfoos to let March and Fulkerson have the magazine. Howells paints a vibrant picture of a modern city filled with conflicting perspectives and values. He avoids promulgating any specific solutions other than having March affirm the possibility of a world in which people learn to accept and love each other. In many respects, March serves as the novel’s moral center; he is an observer who reflects middle‐class, democratic values coping with a world undergoing dramatic, sometimes frightening changes.
Throughout his later career, Howells produced a number of novels in which he tried to expand the possibilities of realism. The Shadow of a Dream (1890) is a remarkable psychological exploration of death and sexual desire. An Imperative Duty (1892) deals with racism and miscegenation. His clearest critique of social and economic injustice appears in his utopian novels, A Traveler from Altruria (1894) and Through the Eye of the Needle (1907), both of which imagine a society run by Christian, socialist, and democratic values. The Leatherwood God (1916) is a surprisingly bold confrontation with religious fanaticism. Nonetheless, by the time of his death in 1920, Howells had become the symbol of a bygone era who would be attacked as the representative of a timid, prudish Victorianism, notably and most unjustly by H.L. Mencken and Sinclair Lewis, himself a committed realist who was the first American to win the Nobel Prize in Literature.
Edith Wharton
If Howells represents the establishment of American literary realism in the nineteenth century, Wharton suggests the development and transformations of the movement in the twentieth century. Born to a wealthy New York family in 1862, she grew up in a privileged world that valued fashionable society more than an intellectual life. She read widely in several languages, traveled in Europe, and published a volume of poetry, Verses (1878), while she was still a teenager. At age 23, she married Teddy Wharton, an emotionally unstable older man who shared few of her interests. In 1891, she began publishing short stories in the leading periodicals, but her first book was The Decoration of Houses (1897), co‐written with the architect Ogden Codman, Jr. By 1905, she had published three collections of impressive short fiction, two novellas, a long novel set in eighteenth‐century Italy, and two books about Italy, based on her travels and love of art, architecture, and gardens. Her first bestseller, The House of Mirth, appeared in 1905, establishing her as a major new literary voice and setting the stage for a distinguished career that resulted in some of the finest American fiction in the first third of the twentieth century. Her personal life was a more complicated matter. Her marriage failed and formally ended in 1913, after the discovery of her husband’s infidelity and embezzlement of her money; she also had a passionate affair with the author and journalist Morton Fullerton that awakened her to the possibility of an erotic life with someone who shared her love of art and literature. In 1912, she moved to France, where she resided until her death in 1937. During World War I, she was a passionate defender of France and performed heroic work in the service of war relief. At one point, scholars valued only a few of her novels, portrayed her as an imitator of Henry James, and were generally dismissive of her work after 1920, but appreciation of the full range of her achievements has grown steadily since R.W.B. Lewis’s award‐winning biography in 1975. Wharton is now recognized as a major writer whose graceful prose and powerful fiction illuminate the lives, aspirations, and frustrations of Americans in the early decades of the twentieth century.
The House of Mirth best illustrates the ways in which Wharton brought realism into the new century and an emerging modernism. When given the opportunity to write a novel that would first be serialized in Scribner’s Magazine, she realized she needed to focus on the subject she knew best, New York’s fashionable society, and concluded that: “A frivolous society can acquire dramatic significance only through what its frivolity destroys. Its tragic implication lies in its power of debasing people and ideals” (Wharton 1934: 207). Her focus on Lily Bart’s loss of social and economic position combines a critique of a shallow, hypocritical, and sometimes vicious society with a portrayal of a protagonist who has just enough moral insight to be destroyed. If she had less moral conscience and less sensitivity, Lily could have maintained her place in the social order by luring a hapless wealthy man into marriage or stooping to the same level of deceit as her enemy, Bertha Dorset. If she were more perceptive or more idealistic, Lily might have avoided the traps into which she repeatedly falls or rejected fashionable society and embraced the freedom promised in the novel’s description of a republic of the spirit. Instead, she leads boring but wealthy men almost up to the point of marriage and then sabotages her own hopes. She gains power over her enemy but then refuses to use it to avoid hurting Lawrence Selden, the man who has aroused a moral sensitivity in her that proves her undoing.
Wharton often explicitly points to the limitations unjustly placed on women and dramatizes those limits through her selection of female characters, none of whom provide Lily with a role model but together suggest the range of unsatisfying choices open to women. Lily is not capable of being either the unscrupulous and manipulative Bertha Dorset or the unfashionable but charitable Gerty Farish. Furthermore, the men in the novel point to other problems. They are either ineffectual or predatory, and they treat her as a possession to be acquired. Selden, who plays the role of Lily’s failed rescuer, has both the remarkable ability to be in the wrong place at the wrong time and the capacity to stand in endless judgment of her. Wharton’s depiction of American women builds on the realistic portrayals found in James and Howells, but goes much further in explicitly voicing feminist issues and depicting the devastating effects of the process of commodification that marks gender roles. The House of Mirth may be the first American bestseller with a clearly feminist confrontation with a society whose gender practices debase both women and men.
The novel also may be the first modernist masterpiece based on a vivid depiction of the process of alienation. When Silas Lapham loses his fortune and place in Boston society, he is able to take some solace in the preservation of his moral integrity and retreat to the family farm. When Lily Bart loses her place in New York society, she loses everything, including her sense of selfhood. She cannot find meaning in nature, or religion, or work, or family, or love. She ends her life with a half‐accidental overdose that follows the moral bookkeeping in which she pays off her last debts and completes the process of alienation. Although Lily lapses into a final sleep‐like death, Wharton emerged from the novel as a professional author ready to take on the twentieth century. She remained a brilliant social satirist with a keenly ironic sensibility but expanded her fictional realm. In the novels that followed, Wharton delineated the ways in which modern life was increasingly impossible for decent men and women. Although she was not fond of the experiments that marked high modernism, her characters evince a very modernist failure to communicate and connect, betraying the same kind of stagnation, confusion, and alienation that we find in James Joyce’s Dubliners (1914), T.S. Eliot’s The Wasteland (1922), and Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby (1925). It is also easy to recognize the kinship between her male characters and the narrator of Eliot’s poem “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” (1915), all of them ineffectual men afraid of life and unable to articulate their basic desires. Thus, we now see Wharton not as an imitator of James, but as a skillful developer of an emerging modernism who moved realism forward into a new century and new engagement with the problems of modern life.
Wharton’s later novels attempt to expand her fictional range. She turned to social and economic themes with The Fruit of the Tree (1907), a novel about a New England mill owner and the two women he marries, but found more success with rural New England as a literary site in Ethan Frome (1911), in which the protagonist also defines his possibilities of happiness in terms of two apparently very different women. The tightly controlled narrative moves into the powerful depiction of Frome’s infatuation with Mattie Silver, his frustration with his wife, Zeena, his inability to articulate his needs and desires, and his ultimate plunge into the crippling despair of a failed suicide attempt. It is Wharton’s grimmest portrayal of a failed life. Her most Jamesean novel, The Reef (1912), deals with sexual intrigue and is again built on a man’s relationships with both a vibrant woman and the more conventional one that he marries. The Custom of the Country (1913) features the amoral Undine Sprague rising through society, triumphant and soulless, and going through various husbands along the way. Summer (1917) is Wharton’s most erotic text: the seduction and betrayal of Charity Royall moves her from passionate desire to helpless resignation into a loveless marriage with the older judge who has been her guardian. The Marne (1918) and A Son at the Front (1923) were attempts to capture in fiction aspects of World War I.
Wharton continued to be a productive writer in the 1920s and 1930s. In The Age of Innocence (1920), for which she became the first woman to win a Pulitzer Prize, she returned to the subject of New York Society and produced one of her finest novels. The narrative focuses on Newland Archer, a man with enough insight to see the frivolous limitations of fashionable society, but without the strength to become anything more than a dilettante. He ultimately chooses to remain true to his commitment to May Welland, an apparently innocent and bland woman who actually knows how to manipulate him, and give up any possibility of a relationship with the dynamic and exotic Ellen Olenska. Wharton took the full measure of the New York of her childhood, admiring some aspects of its ethical code but providing a devastatingly precise picture of its hypocrisy and capacity to stifle imaginative vitality. Archer is ultimately one of those figures in modern literature who looks back on his life and discovers that he has not really lived. Wharton returned to this social landscape in the four short novels that make up Old New York (1924), which include two masterpieces about women, sexuality, and sacrifice: The Old Maid and New Year’s Day. Her final novels have not received much acclaim from scholars, but some have emphasized her fascination with neglected children and incest in The Mother’s Recompense (1925) and The Children (1928), as well as her portrayal of a male artist and the woman who chooses to serve as his muse in Hudson River Bracketed (1929) and The Gods Arrive (1932). She also provided useful guides to her literary values in The Writing of Fiction (1925) and her autobiography, A Backward Glance (1934). Although her reputation rests on her novels, Wharton was also a superb creator of short fiction who produced some of the best ghost stories of her time as well as brilliant satires including the modern classic “Roman Fever” (1934). Today we no longer view her final years as a retreat from the demands of the twentieth century, but as part of a lifelong engagement with social, moral, and feminist issues that moved realism forward in a variety of intriguing and powerful ways.
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Further Reading
SEE ALSO: CHAPTER 20 (LOCAL COLOR AND THE RISE OF REGIONALISM); CHAPTER 23 (MARK TWAIN AND THE IDEA OF AMERICAN IDENTITY); CHAPTER 24 (HENRY JAMES AT HOME AND ABROAD); CHAPTER 25 (NATURALISM).