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173 seven Gifts and Markets Grotesque Economic Confusions in William Dean Howells’s Portrayal of the “Incorporation of America” Mrs. Lapham came to [the Coreys’] help, with her skill as a nurse, and with the abundance of her own and her daughter’s wardrobe, and a profuse, single-hearted kindness. When a doctor could be got at, he said that but for Mrs. Lapham’s timely care, the lady would hardly have lived. He was a very effusive little Frenchman, and fancied that he was saying something very pleasant to everyone. —The Rise of Silas Lapham (Howells [1885] 1971, 25) At present business is the only human solidarity; we are all bound together with that chain, whatever interests, tastes, and principles separate us. —“The Man of Letters”(Howells 1902b, 4) When William Dean Howells asserted in his 1893 essay “The Man of Letters as a Man of Business” that “at present business is the only human solidarity” (1902b, 4), he spoke not only about the economic developments of America but more broadly about the “incorporation of America,” as Alan Trachtenberg called it almost a century later.By “incorporation,”Trachtenberg explains, “I mean not only the expansion of an industrialist order across the continent, not only tightening systems of transport and communication, the spread of a market economy into all regions of what Robert Wiebe has called a ‘distended society,’but also and even predominantly,the remaking of cultural perceptions this process entailed”(1982,3).Howells,as Trachtenberg,was interested in depicting how this new business culture of America pervaded human relations to such a degree that, as he claims, it became the only solidarity. As a realist, Howells set out to describe this “huckstering civilization” without romanticization or sentimentalism (Howells 1902b, 3). In his 1885 novel The 174 Fading Gifts and Rising Profits Rise of Silas Lapham, Howells takes the businessman Lapham and his attempts at business incorporation, stock speculation, and class mobility as his subject to explore how the “incorporation of America” resulted in the “remaking of cultural perceptions.” “The Rise of Silas Lapham,” writes Wayne Westbrook, “published at the height of America’s industrial expansion, pictures an era and personifies a type. The Era is the Gilded Age. The type is the American businessman”(1980, 59). But as much as Howells wants to depict an era and a type, the novel, as Westbrook and many other critics have pointed out, ends up in paradoxical complexities and with an apparently anticapitalist core.“Silas retains the innocence of the Garden of rural America,” Westbrook notes (60). And Walter Benn Michaels concludes that “nothing is more remarkable in The Rise of Silas Lapham than the identification of realism with a morality and an economy that are themselves represented in principle as anti-capitalist” (1987,38).In more general terms,as well,the novel is running up against itself. While on the surface, it appears to be particularly sensible, proposing as its plot resolution an “economy of pain”that should make everything right,in the end it belies that formulaic solution.John Crowley talks about “a fundamental incoherence both formal and thematic” and the “trailing off ” of the novel’s business and romance plots “into similar inconclusion”(2010,165–66).Geordie Hamilton, on the other hand, explores how the novel needs to be read and reread through multiple narrative perspectives.“Howells deliberately complicates the issue,”she writes,“and makes it impossible for the reader to embrace a single character or class as the definitive representative of an absolute moral standard” (2009, 18).1 These complications in Howells’s novel have much to do with his entirely overlooked and yet astonishingly central focus on the gift. Howells, like Susan Warner or Herman Melville,must think about the gift when he thinks about the market,and yet,the gift also brings his writings and his characters to the brink of language and reason.This collision between the market and the gift lies at the core of the “grotesque economic confusions”that account for the inconclusiveness and the deconstructive moves in Howells’s writing.While The Rise of Silas Lapham has often, and rightly, been read as portraying an emerging capitalist business culture after the Civil War, it has remained virtually unnoticed, and certainly unexamined,by critics that the novel’s plot is set in motion by a small but essential moment in the second chapter in which Mrs.Lapham saves Mrs. Corey’s life while they are vacationing in the Canadian “wilderness.”2 This...

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