Strangely Re-Abolitionized: William Dean Howells and Racial Repersuasion

STEPHEN P. KNADLER Strangely Re-Abolitionized: William Dean Howells and Racial Repersuasion In A letter to his anti-slavery Republican father on the eve of the Civil War (November 6, 1859), William Dean Howells assigned himself a dual paternity: "If I were not your son, I would desire to be Old John Brown's—God Bless him!" (Life in Letters 26). Certainly this self-authotized fictive genealogy, later to be reprised in another arrogated adoption as a descendant of Brahmin Boston, poured forth Howells ' youthful enthusiasm for the Harper's Ferry hero. But, in his second novel, A Chance Acquaintance, 1872, he enacted an analogous ideological parenting for his North-border Daisy Miller, Kitty Ellison. Although by most accounts Kitty Ellison and Miles Arbuton in A Chance Acquaintance are abstractable types in the novel's dialectic of polarized values on the American scene—East and West, civilized restraint and upstart instinct (Bassett 322)—this melodramatic two-sided conflict is really a complicated triangular struggle between Arbuton and the allied sentiments of Kitty and her own surrogate pater familias, the abolitionist Uncle Jack. In his letter of "comprehensive character," Kitty's paternalistic guardian Uncle Jack (Dr. Ellison) extols to Kitty the superior cultural and moral virtues of Boston during the antebellum slavery crisis and views even present-day Boston, Howells tells us, as if it "was strangely re-abolitionized" (7). On one hand, Howells' eccentric neologism is clear: since Uncle Jack idolizes Boston's antislavery leaders as "grand historical figures" and presumes the inspired humanitarian period of abolition the "holier" scene of American liberty's "resurrecArizona Quarterly Volume 53, Number i, Spring 1997 Copyright © 1997 by Arizona Board of Regents ISSN 0004- 1610 Stephen P. Knadler tion" (8), he—out of genuine admiration—wants his niece to tour its memorials. However, Uncle Jack's wish to "abolitionize" America expresses more than an idiosyncratic vision: among prominent antislavery leaders such as William Lloyd Garrison and Charles Olcott, the struggle to manumit African Americans was finally less about economic and social equality among the races than the reformation (abolitionizing ) of white America's moral character (Mclnerney 98). Emerging at a time when American civilization struggled for its future amid the challenges of democracy, urbanism, industrialism, and immigration, literary realism functioned, as Amy Kaplan has argued, to "construct new forms of social cohesion" and order (25). In the late nineteenth-century world ofcompeting truth claims, however, Howells needed to recruit race philosophy (or abolitionism) as a value grounding family romance for the Boston establishment's provisional decisions and actions. The practitioners of white supremacy in nineteenthcentury America were not just, as Alexander Saxton has argued, Republican proponents of the American system who wanted to reserve egalitarianism for whites so as to co-opt class warfare (313); they were just as often members of New England's Standing Order who wanted to shore up their inherited privilege and cultural authority around racial divisions . Particularly among a coterie of Brahmin thinkers that included Oliver Wendell Holmes, Francis Parkman, and Louis Agassiz, race served as an ubiquitous imaginary and epistemological framework that they thought with and through and that obviated, they felt, the need for public debate, or even personal doubt, about the proper moral character and cultural ideals in a class-divided, ethnically diverse American society. During the Fugitive Slave Act crisis, for example, Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote to the Reverend James William Kimball that slavery would end less with the emancipation of African Americans than with the evolution ofwhite supremacy: "It is just exactly the advantage of our Christian civilization: that the birth is as it were, hereditary in the better races" (qtd. in Morse 144). In such an "abolitionist" climate —in which racial questions were linked with the rehabilitation of the Anglo-American character and conduct—Howells, I will argue, recouped race as a rhetoric of repersuasion, a way of linking personal myths or politically self-interested epistemologies to something larger without falling back upon what he saw as an untenable "Romantic" transcendentalism. William Dean Howells Too often, our understanding of American realism focuses on its relation to scientific developments and European currents ofthought, but as Alfred Habegger has argued, Darwinism, positivism, and photography...