The Novelist and the Mystic: Swedenborgian Horizons in the Realism of William Dean Howells

What happened to William Dean Howells in the spring of 1885? Shortly after moving into a new house in Boston’s Back Bay and while writing The Rise of Silas Lapham (1885), he apparently suffered an emotional or psychological breakdown that triggered seismic shifts in his politics, his literary criticism, and his art. Howells left no detailed account of this incident, and his contemporaneous letters do not explicitly mention it, but a decade or so later a friend reporting a recent conversation with Howells revealed that spring 1885 had been a time of crisis: “His affairs prospering, his work marching as well as heart could wish, suddenly and without apparent cause, the status seemed wholly wrong. His own expression in speaking with me about that time, was, ‘The bottom dropped out!’”¹ According to Edwin Cady, whose two-volume biography hinges on this very moment, Howells underwent “a decisive inner conflict which would bring about the last major change, the final act of growth in the development of his mind and personality.” Although providing a definitive diagnosis remains impossible, Cady suggests Howells likely experienced a specific spiritual crisis known as a Swedenborgian “vastation”: an episode of purgatorial anguish marked by powerful feelings of guilt and shame and a concomitant desire for purification.²

This essay revisits Cady’s hypothesis in order to explore the possibility that The Minister’s Charge (1886), Annie Kilburn (1888), and A Hazard of New Fortunes (1890), the realistic novels Howells wrote following his 1885 crisis, were shaped by a vastation experience as well as by a renewed engagement with the writing and thought of the eighteenth-century Christian mystic Emmanuel Swedenborg. Following a brief introduction, this essay first examines the shared affective state of Howells’ protagonists from Silas Lapham to Basil March, showing how Swedenborg’s theology, particularly his vastation doctrine, underwrites this commonality. I argue that this doctrine, particularly as interpreted in the mid-nineteenth century by Howells’ friend and prominent Swedenborgian, Henry James, Sr., not only describes a paradigmatic conversion experience but also articulates a mystical sociology that anticipates the historical emergence of a utopian fellowship of individuals knit together by divine love. Section two suggests that this mystical sociology forms an aesthetic horizon circumscribing Howells’ post-1885 realistic fiction. Within this horizon, social awareness owes more to mystical intuition than to any analysis of objective material conditions; abstract social forces emerge in spiritual terms; and intimations of divine order and the spiritual unity of humanity counterbalance perceptions of social chaos and atomization. Finally, the prospective social change depends not upon revolution or benign institutional reform, but upon an imminent revelation Howells projects beyond the temporality of his narrative universes, depicting beatific images that evoke Swedenborg’s angelic communities.

Contemporary critics typically agree with Cady that these three texts mark a major change in Howells’ career. For the first time, we find him deploying the realistic novel to address directly some of the Gilded Age’s more intractable social problems: immigration, urban poverty, class conflict, and labor strife. Ever since Amy Kaplan’s The Social Construction of American Realism (1988), Howells’ realism during these pivotal years has been read as a genre that indicates an urgent need to understand—and perhaps restrict—such problems, which rendered inherited epistemologies and ethical codes obsolete. Thus Wai-Chee Dimock argues that we best apprehend Howells’ realism as a response to the “expanded causal universe” of capitalist modernity and its destabilization of traditional notions of “human agency, social relations, and moral responsibility.”³ More recently, William Morgan has suggested that Howells dramatizes the divergence between “worn-out universal ideals” and “emergent social conditions.”⁴ These critics see the author adopting and adapting various residual and nascent discourses as he cobbles together an art form that could impose some moral and aesthetic order on chaotic late nineteenth-century American life. For Kaplan, Howells’ primary source in this endeavor was the language of social control that urban reformers like Josiah Strong and Jacob Riis pioneered. For Dimock, it was the rhetoric of contract law. For Morgan...