Howells Untethered: The Dean and "Diversity"
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Notes
1. See Alan Trachtenberg, The Incorporation of America (New York: Hill and Wang, 1982), p. 185. See also Amy Kaplan, The Social Construction of American Realism (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1988), p. 7. Michaels' discussion comes in the midst of his chapter on Dreiser, where he essentially argues that Dreiser, like the rest of us, so embodied capitalism that it makes little sense to think of Dreiser, or you or me, resisting it. Nevertheless, Michaels has to have a foil to establish his case, even though a foil would seem to contradict his argument, and that foil is Howells. See Walter Benn Michaels, The Gold Standard and the Logic of Naturalism (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1987), p. 38, and pp. 36-41. For traditional accounts of Howells, con and pro, see H. L. Mencken, "The Dean," Critical Essays on W. D. Howells, ed. Edwin H. Cady and Norma W. Cady (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1983), p. 259; Alfred Kazin, On Native Grounds (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1942), p. 10, and pp. 3-51. For biographies of Howells see Edwin Cady, The Road to Realism: The Early Years (Syracuse: Syracuse Univ. Press, 1956) and The Realist at War: The Mature Years (Syracuse: Syracuse Univ. Press, 1958). See also Kenneth Lynn, William Dean Howells: An American Life (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1971).
2. For discussions of this period, see Richard Hofstadter, The Age of Reform (New York: Vintage, 1955); Robert Wiebe, The Search for Order (New York: Hill and Wang, 1967); and Trachtenberg's The Incorporation of America. Wiebe mentions Howells once, noting that since Howells "excluded violence and casual brutality from his definition of realism because they were 'unnatural' and 'sensationalist,' he denied everyday life in the slums and shanty towns" (p. 9).
3. Obviously, there were other "multicultural" works before Howells. Two of the greatest novels in our literature, Moby Dick and Huckleberry Finn, are works whose moral force derives from their involvement with the consequences of denying the cultural diversity of American society. However, Howells' novel intrigues because its concern with the meaning of our cultural diversity, while present, is not so overt. Indeed, if one is not looking for it, one may miss it—as most of us have.
4. On May 4, 1886, a bomb exploded in Haymarket Square in Chicago and turned what virtually all accounts have described as a peaceful rally to promote the adoption of various labor reforms, including the eight hour working day, into an eighteen-month national riot. To this day no one knows who threw the bomb. About the only thing that can be said with certainty—and this was known at the time—is that the men convicted and executed for the crime did not do it. If the eight convicted anarchists were technically "innocent," they were actually tried and convicted for advocating labor reform and for being foreigners. See Paul Avrich, The Haymarket Tragedy (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1984), p. 215. Avrich's book is an excellent account of the entire affair, including Howells' involvement, as well as the surrounding historical and political context. For another in-depth look at Howells and Haymarket see Everett Carter, Howells and the Age of Realism (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1954).
5. Quoted in Carter, p. 181.
6. Lynn, p. 291.
7. Quoted in Avrich, p. 341.
8. William Dean Howells, "Bibliographical," A Hazard of New Fortunes (Indianapolis: Indiana Univ. Press, 1976), p. 505.
9. See Everett Carter, Introduction, A Hazard of New Fortunes, p. xxv.
10. William Dean Howells, A Hazard of New Fortunes, p. 451. All further parenthetical references are from this edition.
11. Quoted in Willaim Dean Howells, Selected Letters: 1882-1891, ed. Robert Leitz III (Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 1980), p. 298.
12. Lynn, p. 302.
13. Mencken, in Cady and Cady, p. 260.
14. William James, A Pluralistic Universe, in Writings: 1902-1910 (New York: The Library of America, 1987), p. 746.
15. See Eric Sundquist, "In the Country of the Blue," in American Realism, ed. Eric Sundquist (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1982), p. 16. Amy...
