Religion, Family, and National Belonging in W. D. Howells’ The Undiscovered Country

Perhaps no one in American literary history has been more identified with the American family than W. D. Howells, who followed the ups-and-downs of the autobiographical March family for his entire career. From his first March novel Their Wedding Journey (1872) to A Modern Instance (1882) to the collaborative serial novel that he fathered in 1907, The Whole Family, Howells’ oeuvre shows a preoccupation with family that ranges even into the 1880 novel The Undiscovered Country—a work that most critics would not see as dealing with family except in the loosest of ways. While critics have rightly drawn attention to Howells’ treatment of religion and science in The Undiscovered Country, they have overlooked the role of family in relation to the rivalry between the chapel and the laboratory. Howells and his contemporaries wrote during a time of nearly unprecedented intellectual upheaval due to the publication of Darwin’s The Origin of Species (1859) and The Descent of Man (1871), and they faced the task of adapting their traditional beliefs and personal sentiments to a brave new world of natural selection. Near the turn of the twentieth century, Charles Eliot Norton noted that although Darwin’s theory has “gained possession of the intellect of men, it has not yet possessed itself of their hearts or their imaginations. They admit its authority, but their sentiment is not yet as touched by the vast change consequent on it in the relation of man to the universe and in his conception of the universe itself.”¹ Norton could have been referring to Howells, whose novel The Undiscovered Country expresses an unwillingness to relinquish religious sensibility in favor of a strict Darwinian understanding of the world. Howells makes his case for religion largely by mounting an argument for its usefulness on personal and national levels. Responding to a deterministic narrative of human development and influenced by the elder Henry James, who published a series of articles in the Atlantic Monthly on the relations among religion, marriage, and the nation, Howells portrays religious sentiment as essential to fostering love relations, marriage, and social unity. He presents the family as the domain in which religion may survive alongside positivistic ways of knowing and making meaning of the world.

My argument traces the transformation of Edward Ford, Howells’ protagonist, from a rationalistic skeptic and bachelor to, in the words of George Bennett, a married man whose “scientific skepticism is leavened by a return of faith and an infusion of humility.”² As he falls in love with and eventually marries Egeria Boynton, daughter of the spiritualist Dr. Boynton, Ford increasingly detaches from the positivistic skepticism Howells sees tied to evolution and empiricism. Ford, while never becoming religious in a conventional sense, nevertheless comes to embrace the family as a sort of sacred institution that transcends the limits of determinism—as well as the boundaries that estrange one citizen from another. As he becomes increasingly preoccupied with family and the moral decisions it necessitates, the more strongly he attaches himself as kin to an American society in the flux of urbanization and industrialization. Howells, representing the capacity of family relations to assume religious dimensions and to offer entry into a sense of national fraternity, highlights the personal satisfactions and political uses of religious belief. Blurring the line between family values and religious sensibility while marking both as crucial to American identity, Howells reveals his own reluctance to abandon religion for rationalism alone.

For Howells’ artistic vision, the stakes of such reluctance are high. The fact that The Undiscovered Country shows Howells favoring a religious attitude that aids love, family cohesion, and national belonging presents an irony in Howells’ role in the development of American realism. As Donald Pizer and others have noted, Howellsian realism, in its emphasis on the observable commonplace, found its intellectual roots in a scientific approach to the world freshly codified by Darwinian biology. Given the importance of scientific rationalism to the development of a democratic literature that represented the lives of ordinary people, Howells’ advocacy of the role of religion in the maintenance of family...