The Whole(y) Family: Economies of Kinship in the Progressive Era

In his chapter of the collaboratively written novel The Whole Family (1908), Henry James writes that "one has only to look at any human thing very straight . . . to see it shine out in as many aspects as the hues of the prism; or place itself, in other words, in relations that positively stop nowhere" (167). The comment, typically Jamesian in evoking the multiplicity and complexity of social ties, also conflates human beings and things. His metaphor of the prism suggests that social relations are always refracted by and understood through inanimate objects, and his troping of sociability in terms of visual "shine" rather than tactile feelings or emotions implies that the aura of the commodity may have much to do with the form and experience of human interconnections in modernity. James's remark captures the problems of both the cooperative venture that was The Whole Family and the state of American kinship in the Progressive Era: viewing the family in much less "straight" terms than he pretends to, he gestures toward a set of possible liaisons extending laterally, "positively stop[ping] nowhere."¹ And The Whole Family even makes literal this "shininess" that either threatens or promises to engender such a complicated sociability: the family at the center of the novel owns a silverplate factory, which turns out to have serious implications for the question of how marital relations in particular can be limited. June Howard has recently situated the novel in terms of the family business of Harper & Brothers publishing house, but there is another "family business" lurking in the novel, one whose past includes much more literal investments in the business of family.² The silverplate factory grounds The Whole Family in a historically specific legacy of competition between intensive and extensive families—that of monogamous versus plural marriage in the Oneida Community.

The Whole Family consists of 12 chapters published serially in Harper's Bazar, each written by an author affiliated with Harper & Brothers.³ William Dean Howells conceived of the project as a portrait of an American family of "middling circumstances, of average culture and experiences," whose typicality and peccadilloes would be charmingly explored in a plot narrated by each family member in turn, as they discussed the upcoming nuptials of one of the daughters ("Letter to Elizabeth Jordan" 225). Elizabeth Jordan, the editor of Harper's Bazar, excitedly took on the challenge, and Howells kicked off the series with a first chapter. As might be expected from an author whose most famous works centered on bourgeois married couples, Howells begins with the paterfamilias: "The Father" introduces Cyrus Talbert, a businessman living in upstate New York, who is dismayed to learn that his daughter Peggy has affianced herself to a college classmate whom he has not met. The chapter depicts Talbert through the typical Howellsian strategy of an onlooker who narrates—neighbor Ned Temple, the new owner of the town newspaper. Temple explicitly links the Talbert father with the state, noting that Talbert is "a despot, perhaps, but he was Blackstone's ideal of the head of a state, a good despot" (12). Although Talbert's authority is clearly on the wane, Temple's offhand remark alerts us to one context for The Whole Family: the fact that the federal government had recently intervened upon the marriage tie whose regulation was constitutionally remanded to the individual states. It had done so in at least two ways: in 1890, the Mormons were forced to renounce polygamy as a condition for Utah's entrance into statehood (Grossberg 123), and in 1907, the year that The Whole Family began serialization in Harper's Bazar, Congress declared for the first time that women who married foreigners must follow the national allegiances of their husbands (Cott 143). More broadly, the years between 1887 and 1906 saw a steep rise in the degree to which state legislatures took control over the formation of families, tightening laws...