Literature Connects: Penelope and Bromfield as Kindred Spirits in The Rise of Silas Lapham

W. D. Howells’ The Rise of Silas Lapham (1885) is primarily the story of the rise and fall of a successful businessman who tries to get himself and his family into fashionable Boston society represented by the Coreys. However, in spite of the social class boundaries separating the Laphams and the Coreys, two members of each family seem strikingly similar, even though each represents a different gender—Penelope Lapham and Bromfield Corey. What they share is mainly an interest in literature which enables them to develop a critical point of view of their environment. Furthermore, the novel relates these qualities to the two characters’ straightforward sense of humor as well as a detached observation of reality, which make Penelope and Bromfield different from the other more pragmatic Laphams and Coreys. Yet, in spite of being rather passive, both Penelope and Bromfield find themselves longing for heroic deeds similar to those they have read about. While this attitude to life creates more difficulties for Penelope, a young single girl from a nouveau riche background, than for Bromfield, an aging upper class aesthete, I argue that the two characters emerge as kindred spirits by means of their shared investment in literary culture.

From the beginning of the novel, the Laphams are characterized as good-hearted and honest people; however, they strikingly lack the manners of the refined Coreys. Silas is a good family man as well as a considerate employer. In the opening chapter, as he is interviewed by the journalist Bartley Hubbard, the narrator mentions that “Lapham’s burly simplicity peculiarly amused”¹ his interviewer. Similarly, Persis Lapham is a responsible mother who was once a schoolteacher. Nevertheless, she also shares her husband’s lack of taste as she spends on “rich and rather ugly clothes.” They were both happy in their old house, decorating it with “the costliest and most abominable frescoes” (25), until they discovered that the location in the South End was not fashionable enough. In fact, Silas had bought the house “very cheap of a terrified gentleman who discovered too late that the South End was not the thing” (24). Thus, Silas decides to build a new mansion, planning on furnishing it fashionably. It is only the architect that manages to moderate Lapham’s obsession with new things, assuring him that “really beautiful things can’t go out” (42). As Richard Brodhead notes, in the postbellum nineteenth century, middle class culture has shifted “from the highly disciplined self-denials of the work ethic to the now tolerated (even mandated) indulgences of an emerging ethic of consumption.”² In fact, even Bromfield Corey says the Laphams “must spend” (139), to illustrate his earlier metaphor that “money is the romance, the poetry of our age” (64); however, he does not realize they will spend without any sense of taste.

Corey’s metaphor suggests the importance the upper classes ascribe to literature. In their point of view, the lack of the awareness of culture goes with the lack of reading experience. Thus when Tom Corey tries to convince his father that the Laphams are “not unintelligent” but “shrewd and sensible,” Mr. Corey only retorts: “But that is not saying that they are civilized. All civilization comes through literature now, especially in our country. A Greek got his civilization by talking and looking, and in some measure a Parisian may still do it. But we, who live remote from history and monuments, we must read or we must barbarize” (118). Bromfield Corey, an aristocrat and a would-be painter, considers literature a refining element of the people of his kind. Similarly, at the dinner party, Charles Bellingham suggests the centrality of reading to his life, if only to amuse his friends: “The past of one’s experience doesn’t differ a great deal from the past of one’s knowledge. It isn’t much more probable; it’s really a great deal less vivid than some scenes in a novel that one read when a boy” (200).

This point of view is contrasted with the role literature plays for the Laphams...