Abstract
TI HAT WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS'S NOVELS OFTEN PRESENT underside of American life and of man's existence as well as its smiling is no longer a startling idea to readers of latest criticism. A recent book' by George C. Carrington, Jr., stresses terrors of mysterious, violent, alien, and often cruel world in which Howells's characters are caught and struggle. Carrington's thesis is that in Howells's the commonplace . . . is potent and sometimes threatening, . . . plentifully offset by violence, horror, 'blackness,' and other gothic traits admired by present-day critics.2 This somber vision is most easily discernible in of Howells's maturity; but to assert that Their Wedding Journey, his first attempt at a novel, can be classed among dark novels might be as jolting a statement as Lionel Trilling's description of Robert Frost as a terrifying poet was at its first pronouncement. This idyll of delightful honeymooners, Basil and Isabel March, whose journey takes them from Boston to Niagara, via New York, with return by way of Canada, has charmed readers since it began to appear in pages of Atlantic Monthly in I871. A-n excellent travelogue, it is full of sprightly good humor and whimsy, delicate irony, and bits of realistic observations and comments on American scene and human nature. These attractive features, however, have misled even those who recognize tragic awareness in of Howells's prime, for unanimously they discount or disclaim seriousness of this early work. Fryckstedt, for example, finds it devoid of tragic aspects of human life which Howells would deal with later. He states categorically:
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