The Neuroticism of William Dean Howells

Abstract

Since the death of William Dean Howells in 1920 it has become a commonplace of criticism to remark that he failed to carry his theories of realism into an artistic practice adequate to all of the central facts in American life. He did not treat what William James called “the slaughter-houses and indecencies without end on which our life is founded” and which formed much of the content of the novels of such Howells proteges as Crane, Garland, and Norris. There can hardly be room to challenge this. Howells never truly faced the violent and sordid facets of reality. Mention and object to them as evil he could; leave the abstract and deal with them intimately, personally, objectively, or even imaginatively he could not. I should like here to suggest that the primary source of that inability was simply that life-long psychological difficulties left Howells with a neurotic condition which literally made it impossible for him to know and understand as realities the portions of pain and filth and terror in human living with which a major writer must be at least vicariously intimate. How much the production of the mass of autobiographical material which he produced during the latter decades of his life might represent an attempt to purge himself of the neurotic influences which seem to have haunted his mind throughout the peak years of his fecund artistic career I am not competent to say. But it seems clear that he shrank neurotically from the imaginative absorption of painful reality which truly searching American novels would have necessitated.