New money/old money romance with unrealistic realismWilliam Dean Howells (1837-1920) was once nicknamed “the Dean of American Letters,” but despite his esteemed reputation his novels don’t seem to be widely read these days. The Rise of Silas Lapham, published in 1885, is likely his best known work. It was originally published in serialized form in The Century Magazine. Howells is considered by many literary critics to be the father of American literary realism, and many of the writers he favored in that genre would go on to become more recognizable names than himself, among them Stephen Crane, Frank Norris, and Hamlin Garland. During his lifetime, romantically inclined writers would criticize Howells for his concentration on the more mundane details of life. For readers of today who enjoy realist and naturalist literature, however, The Rise of Silas Lapham really isn’t realistic enough, and feels a bit too tethered to the sentimental conventions of an earlier age.
Silas Lapham grew up on a farm in Vermont. His family lived a modest rural lifestyle until one day his father discovers a mother lode of ore on the family land. This ore is high in peroxide of iron, a key ingredient in the making of mineral paint. After his father’s death, Silas Lapham establishes a mine and develops a successful paint business that makes him a millionaire. Despite its emphasis in the novel’s title, the trajectory of this “Rise” is mostly summarized in the book’s first chapter.
As the novel opens, Lapham now runs his paint empire from an office in Boston, where he lives with his wife and two grown daughters. The Lapham family lives a comfortably upper-class life, but Lapham still very much has the manners and personality of a no-nonsense Vermont farm boy. He couldn’t care less about fitting in to Boston society until he considers the prospects of his daughters and their finding a suitable match. When Tom Corey, the son of a blue-blooded old-money family of Boston aristocrats, shows an interest in one of Lapham’s daughters and in his paint business, Lapham and his family take the leap into society, trying to live up to the snooty Coreys, who look down on the Laphams as if they were hopeless hillbillies.
The romance that ensues between young Mr. Corey and Miss Lapham reads like something out of an old Victorian novel. As in any romance, an obstacle must be put in the way of the lovers’ happiness, and the one that Howells employs here is a bit ridiculous, a mole hill that’s made into a mountain. Another plot thread concerns Lapham’s business. Earlier in his career, Lapham bought out his business partner in a way that Mrs. Lapham considers unethical, and she insists that her husband atone for it. This dilemma also seems overblown because the business decision that Mrs. Lapham finds so egregious really doesn’t seem that bad. Her meddling leads to financial trouble for the paint business and the family. Unfortunately, Howells does not write about business with the perspicacity of Frank Norris and Theodore Dreiser. Whereas either of those realist writers would have outlined the problem in minute detail, making the reader fell involved, Howells settles for vague references to “troubles” and “ruin.”
The Rise of Silas Lapham feels pretty contrived and formulaic compared to the groundbreaking works of realism written by Norris, Crane, and other of Howells’s protégés. The one commendable aspect of this work is that Howells doesn’t settle for an easy conclusion that panders to a popular audience. In that sense, this novel is a move forward from much of earlier romantic fiction, but the story here is still too firmly rooted in Victorian conventions to feel authentic.
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A Utopian visits America |
| William Dean Howells |
A Traveler from Altruria, a novel by William Dean Howells, was first serialized in the pages of the literary magazine The Cosmopolitan before being published in book form in 1894. Howells, who was nicknamed “The Dean of American Letters,” was America’s most highly regarded realist novelist in the late 19th century. A Traveler from Altruria is considered a utopian novel, but it inverts the usual narrative formula of that genre. Instead of following a protagonist who travels to a utopian society, here the Utopian comes to visit America, where he expresses amazement and disbelief at our archaic way of life.
The narrator of the story is Mr. Twelvemough, a popular author who writes trashier novels than those of Howells. Twelvemough lives in an unnamed city on the Eastern Seaboard (likely Boston), but at the time of the novel he is vacationing in the country, amid the mountains and farms of New Hampshire. A friend of Twelvemough’s convinces him to act as host to a foreign visitor, Mr. Homos, who hails from the exotic land of Alturia. Altruria is a southern continent, roughly the size of Australia, that has somehow managed to remain undiscovered by the rest of the world until only a few years ago. The name Altruria is derived from “altruism,” which sums up the Altrurian worldview. Their civilization has developed to a state where the inhabitants no longer work for personal gain but for the good of all.
Immediately after their meeting, Homos becomes a source of embarrassment to Twelvemough when he insists on helping porters carry baggage and waitresses serve meals. Twelvemough can’t make his guest understand that a gentleman doesn’t demean himself with manual labor. America tends to think of itself as an egalitarian nation when compared to Britain and other European nations. Compared to Altruria, however, which recognizes no class distinctions whatsoever, America seems positively feudalistic. In Altruria, there are no rich or poor. The economy is socialistic and communal. Everyone does a few hours of manual labor each day. Altruria has no money, for none is needed. Everyone is provided with what they need, and no one takes more than they need. It is therefore very difficult for Homos to understand the way American society revolves around money and competition, resulting in vast income disparity and class inequality.
Howells, a Christian socialist, makes some good points in this book, but the way he makes them leaves something to be desired. The novel is essentially a series of lengthy conversations that frequently grow tedious as they follow an established formula: An American makes a statement related to money or class. Homos becomes visibly disturbed. Twelvemough asks him what’s wrong. Homos expresses disbelief at our barbaric customs. Twelvemough expresses annoyance at his disbelief. And repeat. Howells has to go through all these steps every time he wants to make a point. For variety, he shakes up the participants by putting Homos in a room full of high-society capitalists or struggling farmers. There is an element of humor to Homos’s fish-out-of-water experiences, but sometimes it’s hard to tell who Howells is making fun of, the Americans or the Altrurian. The upper-class Americans make such absurd statements that it’s hard to take them seriously, and Altruria is such an unrealistic utopia it sometimes borders on the ridiculous. There is some stimulating food for thought here, but it would have been more exciting if Howells had taken the reader to Altruria instead of merely acquainting us with that mysterious nation’s stuffy representative.
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