Some Glittering Nondescript Vertebrate: The Provocative Style of Realism in Howells’ A Hazard of New Fortunes

Abstract

In his 1891 realist manifesto Criticism and Fiction, W. D. Howells pits his watchful eye against both the literary stylist, whose skills are “wasted in preening and prettifying,” and the hoodwinked reader, whose perceptual capacities are bedazzled and whose judgment is lulled by glamour or mystery.1 For Howells, realist perception is a quality for the writer and the reader alike to refine in order to escape the allure of artificial discourse, which rears its head in popular romance novels, imitations of past literary forms, prose that dwells on its own style rather than on truth, and advertisements that ignite desire. Criticism and Fiction thus promotes a two-pronged agenda, taking both writers and readers to task for succumbing too easily to the temptation to indulge in emotion, desire, and literary style when they ought to privilege the common stuff of real observation. Howells’ polemics stridently eschew both literature that enacts or induces misperceptions of reality and readers who embrace such literature. What emerges is a double definition of realism: it names observation as a mode of unmediated literary production, while it also identifies observation as a mode of reception that is mediated by the good judgment and common sense of the realist writer. Thus, even as realist representation implies a direct conduit from reality to text, effacing the mediating role of the writer in forming the text, realism as Howells would have it also constructs the selective intellectual frame that is necessary for its own apparently unmediated perception of the real. Critics have taken Howells to task on both accounts—for a naive faith in (or, alternately, for his anxious insistence on) the referentiality of his texts and, despite his avidly professed progressivism, for a transparent organizing