Howells Untethered: The Dean and "Diversity"

Abstract

Long neglected as one whose beautiful time, borrow Henry James's famous phrase, would never come, William Dean has re-emerged as a major author. Now that social and political issues provide foreground of literary study, dean of American realism has become a crucial, even defining, figure in many recent academic studies. As Howells' unlikely renaissance proves, history affords its denizens many twists of fate and irony. Where Frank Norris, Sinclair Lewis, and H. L. Mencken dismissed as a timid apologist for genteel values, recent critics have also questioned Howells' willingness meet life head on - though no one today would dare employ term womanish dismiss a male author. Alan Trachtenberg says that Howells takes his place among legions of nervous intellectuals seeking a role for themselves and a sense of control in what [Howells] names at turn of century deeply incorporated civilization. Walter Benn Michaels insists that goal of Howells' realism was to minimize excess, and grants what his study will grant no other American writer: a fear of capitalism. Finally, Amy Kaplan dismisses A Hazard of New Fortune's realism by noting that it reconciles social diversity within an overarching community, assimilates disparate facts a common sense morality, and frames a plenitude of details within a coherent form.(1) The (current) last words on William Dean Howells: genteel white male, scared white male, dead white male. Perhaps. This essay does not exactly seek overturn what has so obviously become Howells' fate - how could it? Indeed, my reading of takes for granted that is epitome of genteel white male and seeks use that image complicate our understanding of him by looking closely at a handful of scenes from his most ambitious novel, A Hazard of New Fortunes (1890). The multiple pressures of massive immigration, industrialization, rise of urban areas, and final transformation of American society from an agrarian economy into a free market oriented corporate capitalism all found their way into Howells' remarkably dense novel.(2) From a contemporary perspective, and Kaplan's speaks this, most relevant feature of book is Howells' attempt portray what was increasingly becoming an openly multicultural society. In fact, A Hazard of New Fortunes was among first works in our canonical literature portray hazard - and excitement - of living within a culturally diverse society.(3) Critics have missed how this Dean of American Realism, this representative American writer, comes question what it means be identified as representatively American. Moreover, in character of Basil March, presented first socio-cultural deconstruction of that notorious American phenomenon that is so often deconstructed today: bland, liberal, white male. Though no one my knowledge has ever read novel from this perspective, there are historical reasons for doing so; namely, there is Howells' protest of execution of so called Haymarket Square anarchists.(4) One of most infamous miscarriages of justice in American history, one wishes that one could say that affair divided nation. Instead, Haymarket riot touched off our most virulent outbreak of xenophobia prior World War One. Every convicted anarchist except one was from Europe, and execution served as an excuse for uneasy Americans purge their anxiety over rising tide of foreign immigration and labor reform, two obviously connected movements. Haymarket's historian, Paul Avrich, notes that riot triggered the first great American inquisition since Salem witch trials. The Louisville Courier Journal spoke for most when it declared that blatant cattle be immediately strung up.(5) Of prominent American literary figures, William Dean was only one speak out against wrongful execution of these men. …