Religion, Family, and National Belonging in W. D. Howells’ The Undiscovered Country

Abstract

Perhaps no one in American literary history has been more identified with the American family than W. D. Howells, who followed the ups-and-downs of the autobiographical March family for his entire career. From his first March novel Their Wedding Journey (1872) to A Modern Instance (1882) to the collaborative serial novel that he fathered in 1907, The Whole Family, Howells’ oeuvre shows a preoccupation with family that ranges even into the 1880 novel The Undiscovered Country—a work that most critics would not see as dealing with family except in the loosest of ways. While critics have rightly drawn attention to Howells’ treatment of religion and science in The Undiscovered Country, they have overlooked the role of family in relation to the rivalry between the chapel and the laboratory. Howells and his contemporaries wrote during a time of nearly unprecedented intellectual upheaval due to the publication of Darwin’s The Origin of Species (1859) and The Descent of Man (1871), and they faced the task of adapting their traditional beliefs and personal sentiments to a brave new world of natural selection. Near the turn of the twentieth century, Charles Eliot Norton noted that although Darwin’s theory has “gained possession of the intellect of men, it has not yet possessed itself of their hearts or their imaginations. They admit its authority, but their sentiment is not yet as touched by the vast change consequent on it in the relation of man to the universe and in his conception of the universe itself.”1 Norton could have been referring to Howells, whose novel The Undiscovered Country expresses an unwillingness to relinquish religious sensibility in favor of a strict Darwinian understanding of the world. Howells makes his case for religion largely by mounting an argument for its usefulness on personal and national levels. Responding