William Dean Howells: The Indelible Stain

Abstract

WV ILLIAM Dean Howells, our traditional prissy novelist, of course a leading member of the generation renowned for its denial of sex. In his opinion, however, nothing valid was denied and everything relevant was affirmed by writers who disregarded the passions of love. Only so did they truly represent the tone of American life. experience of passion, he said, does not come within the scheme of American fiction which honest only when it concerns chaste love. This the view for which has been famous and it has been so persuasive that nearly everyone has taken him at his word-as if a word has face value alone. The American girl a familiar figure in fiction, Henry Steele Commager remarks, but everyone believes that Howells created her.1 cliche has been given official sanction by Howard Mumford Jones, who tells us that is generally unsurpassed among American novelists in portraying the jeune fille of his period.2 It is, however, a fact of criticism that these young women invariably have a dual effect. author of the first critical biography of observed that they are somehow mysterious, indefinable: a typical heroine has no master but she appears, for all that, in a condition of subservience.3 Another writer noted that her illogicality mystifies and sometimes inspirits the men under her influence.4 Indeed, Howells' heroines have never provided unqualified delight and the reason that created very few feminine characters whose charm or beauty or virtue was not somehow vitiated. In his major work, a heroine paraded before us as the most wonder-