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  • Visualizing The Whole Family
  • Wesley Beal (bio)

We often take it as axiomatic that the American moderns were dismissive, even suspicious of the family. This is largely true of the bohemian and avant-garde communities, which found the family to be anathema to their projects—perceiving it as a bourgeois, Victorian relic to be discarded in the creation of the new. In keeping with this position, modernist studies often omits the family from the raft of contexts and social conditions—immigration, urbanization, the development of formal schools of creative production, and so on—by which we historicize the aesthetic experiments of the early 1900s. Social scientists, however, trace these same conditions alongside formative developments in the family, which shares many of the same underlying tensions, and which should be considered equally constructive of modernist experiments. Indeed, the family demonstrates the same dialectical tensions that typify the modern milieu, rendering the polarities of fragment and totality in terms of the struggle between the individual and the family as a whole—a tension peaking in the crisis of the family at the turn of the century.

This entanglement of family and modernism is best illustrated, surprisingly, in a project undertaken by one of the American proponents of literary realism, William Dean Howells. When Howells devised The Whole Family, the collaborative project that was serialized in Harper’s Bazar1 from 1907–1908 and published in 1908 as a complete work, he envisioned an unambitious piece of domestic fiction. It would feature, Howells wrote, a family “in middling circumstances, of average culture and experiences” and demonstrate a “feeling for the great American average” (Howard 14). To this end, he had two goals that he set out for himself and his eleven co-contributors: the stories, each centering on a different family member as protagonist, would uphold an ideal of familial unity in a time of increasing individualism, as well as investigate the then-topical controversy of coeducation. Or so Howells expected. Instead, what played out in the eleven stories that followed Howells’s inaugural piece rendered a bold, modern reorganization of family that appeared to border on cacophony, as the authors dispensed with any pretense of familial harmony and vied for control of the narrative and each other’s characters. The tensions between the authors manifested in contentious potshots in their published writing, and their private bickering was the stuff of gossip among New York literati (Howard 19–20, 102).

The importance of the Harper’s project derives not from its contributors, however, but from its formal rendering of modern family organization and social organization through a textual scheme demanding that we consider the narrative visually. The form is itself an allegory of family, and Howells’s bid for a harmonious unit signals a moment [End Page 45] of crisis in the institution. The shape of the text was unique in its time: Elizabeth Jordan, editor at Harper’s, coined the term “composite novel” to describe the project’s unique form (Howard 26–27). The novelty of The Whole Family’s form speaks directly to the concerns modern sociologists voiced when they described the family as fluctuating between “organization” and “disorganization”—keywords signaling a biological family’s harmonious or discordant qualities, in the parlance of Chicago School thinkers like Ernest Burgess, Harvey Locke, and Ernest Mowrer—and corresponds to the rise of anthropological studies of family and kinship at the turn of the century.

Aiming for a tidy “organization” of the family, Howells had anticipated that the stories would unfold more or less in the fashion of a family tree, beginning with the eldest and concluding with the youngest member of the Talbert family of Eastridge, New York. But in the reshuffling of Howells’s original outline, the text began to gesture toward new modes of family that would not be merely cacophonous and dysfunctional, nor even “disorganized” in the contemporary sense of the term, but would embrace a new model of organization that is less tree-like and more akin to a distributed network. The two models—the former made visible by Howells’s original table of contents, and the latter by data visualization techniques—mark the shift from realist coherence to...

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