A Hazard of New Fortunes and the Reproduction of Liberalism

A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES AND THE REPRODUCTION OF LIBERALISM Charles Harmon Loyola University-Chicago In his seventy-eighth year, William Dean Howells wrote Henry James, "I am a comparatively dead cult with my statues cut down and the grass growing over me in the pale moonlight."1 When he made that typically accurate, typically ironic self-appraisal, literary modernism was on the rise. Howells' image was in the process ofbeing simplified and solidified as the administrator of a genteel tradition he had felt ambivalent toward his whole life. Today the insights ofthe modern era are more open to question and the reputation ofthe notoriously equable realist has never been better. One reason Howells' fortunes have improved is because contemporary literary intellectuals, in comparison to those ofthe modernist era, have become less wary ofeveryday life. Mimicking Michel Foucault's eschewal of "masters" and "geniuses" in favor ofsolidly established non-geniuses (Ricardo rather than Smith, Bentham rather than Marx), some of today' s most influential critics enjoy analyzing figures whose achievements typify rather than transcend the conflicts of their particular historical moment. In the last several years, Howells has thus attracted readers who have for the most part purged themselves ofthe crypto-romantic resentments that blinded the modernists, and who have analyzed his status as the normative literary figure ofhis time with relative disinterestedness. Alfred Kazin remarked that Howells "considered it his function to mediate between moral man and immoral society."2 It is precisely that—Howells' significance as his culture's mediator—that so fascinates critics today. Yet to a great extent, Howells is still being brought to the docket for a crime he considered his primary virtue: liberalism. Many of Howells' current readers view him from perspectives that wistfully yearn toward stances of whole-souled radicalism. Such critics feel obliged to describe Howells' characteristic self-divisions and inconsistencies as if they were fatal flaws—as if they were qualities that finally justify his twentieth-century rank as a figure who can be pidgeonholed and dismissed by a few misquotations (such as his notorious "smiling aspects of life" remark). Indeed, a review ofthe current arguments shows that most of Howells' best readers have often been content to dwell upon the fact that liberal self-division is a hallmark of 1 84Charles Harmon Howells' writing. This self-division has been usually described in terms borrowed from the historian Warren Susman, who has posited that after the Civil War there was a large shift in the "modal types"3 for individual development in the United States. Economic prosperity and the rise of mass culture, Susman argues, caused the decline of a productivist, largely protestant, and hard-working "culture ofcharacter" and the growth ofa consumerist, manifestly secular, and pleasure-oriented "culture of personality."4 If the old culture of character valued consistency, moral centeredness, and expressing oneselfthrough work, the new culture ofpersonality valued (and still values) unpredictability, charismatic waywardness, and expressing oneselfthrough play. Susman's distinction has been directly echoed by such critics as Eric Sundquist and Richard Brodhead, among others. Sundquist has remarked that realists like Howells endlessly sought to capture in their fiction "the transformation of'father' and 'family' into 'boss' and 'corporation ,' "5 and Brodhead, writing abouti Modern Instance, remarks upon Howells' interest in "a new kind of personality, a character in which internalized cultural authority is strong enough still to impinge on self-esteem, but no longer strong enough to regulate behavior."6 Repeatedly the case has been made that Howells' engagement with the centrifugal forces ofthe new culture ofconsumption overwhelmed the repeated and often dogmatic assertions ofmore centripetal ethical norms with which he often ended his books. Speaking ofA Hazard ofNew Fortunes, Alfred Habbeger notes that the closure ofthe text—in which Basil March insists that Margaret Vance's religious ecstasy "must"7 contain the answer to the text's political riddles—does not, in fact, lay to rest questions regarding socialjustice that are raised during the course ofthe novel.8 Alan Trachtenberg has likewise argued that "in spite of himself, [Howells'] fictions of the real disclose the unresolved gaps and rifts within the traditional world view he wishes to maintain, to correct and discipline."9 Amy Kaplan...