Point of View in Howells's: The Landlord at Lion's Head

Abstract

THE LANDLORD AT LION S HEAD, one of William Dean Howells's lesser-known but better novels, opens with a depiction of Lion's Head Mountain that foreshadows the novelist's manipulation of point of view in his novel. In viewing the mountain, one grows aware of an ambiguous quality about it: If you looked at the mountain from the west, the line of the summit wandering and uncertain, like that of most mountain-tops; but, seen from the east, the mass of granite showing above the dense forests of the lower slopes had the form of a sleeping lion.' What one sees is apparently determined by one's point of view. lion's body, seen from the east, is only vaguely discernible; but its head is boldly sculptured against the sky in a likeness that could not be more perfect if it had been a definite intention of art. Often hidden by clouds in winter, Lion's Head in summer was a part of the landscape, as imperative and importunate as the Great Stone Face itself (p. 3). Howells here is almost certainly alluding to Hawthorne's story The Great Stone Face. mountain in that story comes to stand for an image of the divine. In Howells's novel the mountain is that which is given, the world as fact, standing imperatively over against us and importuning us to make something of it. What the people in Howells's novel do make of the mountain and, by analogy, of its hero, Jeff Durgin, is what Howells's novel is about. Edwin H. Cady observes: The problem of the novel is to see what it will mean that Jeff becomes the landlord at Lion's Head.2 Reading the novel as a Howellsian research into the Pligaht of