Clean Hands and an Iron Face: Frontier Masculinity and Boston Manliness in The Rise of Silas Lapham

"Clean Hands and an Iron Face: Frontier Masculinity and Boston Manliness in The Rise of Silas Lapham" traces William Dean Howells's depiction of frontier, workplace, and drawing-room masculinities against the backdrop of a cultural conversation that framed masculinity in geographical, bodily, and social terms. Lavin argues that The Rise of Silas Lapham is deeply invested in questioning and reinventing the ideal man based on gentrified notions of morality and frontier toughness. At the center of this analysis is an appreciation for the narrative structure of the novel, for Howells first establishes central characters rooted firmly in competing paradigms of masculinity and then, across the rising action, climax, and resolution of the plot, reconciles those seemingly incompatible masculinities into a tentative but coherent identity.