The Joys of the Elevated: William Dean Howells and the Urban Picturesque

Abstract

This article examines picturesque aesthetics in nineteenth-century American realism as an expression of unease about middle-class life and as a manifestation of liberal guilt. Previous scholarship on the picturesque in American literature sees it as the failure of middle-class writers to represent urban poverty. I demonstrate the historical association of the picturesque with the formation of the middle class and argue that, since the eighteenth century, picturesque aesthetics have played a significant role in discourse about class relations. Through a reading of William Dean Howells’s A Hazard of New Fortunes, I examine the picturesque as a means of addressing the ethical dilemmas of liberal humanists, whose compassion for the poor is undermined by a sense of its ineffectuality. Picturesque aesthetics are culturally significant today, suggesting a need to examine their social and ethical implications.