William Dean Howells and the American Memory Crisis By Lance Rub ...

While Howellsian realism is typically positioned as the legacy of Enlight-enment ideas concerning the autonomy, rationality, and positivism of individuals and their relationship to the past, his attention to subjects like amnesia, specters, and psychic mysteries registers an ontological and epistemological apprehension toward the individual and the collective body politic and suggests that the world is ultimately unknowable—or at the very least, they imply that order and coherence lie beyond one’s rational capacity. The scenarios constructed in the short fiction—and the breaking of a traditional linear paradigm to present them—expose the difficulty, if not inability, of relying on memory as a reliable record of the past, which also suggests the futility and subjectivity of official accounts of the past from which to build a collective, national identity.

In considering this claim, I am taking an approach from recent literary and cultural studies that explores memory and amnesia not exclusively from the individual psyche, but by realizing broader cultural applications—those like Homi Bhabha who see the anxiety associated with individual mnemonic disruption corresponding to questions of collective identity and “traumatic ambivalences of a personally, psychic history to the wider disjunctions of political existence” (10). Howells’s characters are not simply isolated cases of mnemonic disorder, nor are they to be solely understood as manifestations of Howells’s personal life, as others suggest. Rather, they register how the American self is experiencing radical uncertainty, especially in previously held conceptions of “normalized” frames used for constructing national identity. The fragmentation of his late characters and their search for some sort of authentic self amidst mnemonic uncertainties stand as metaphorical conditions for the nation, their individual distrust and erosion of memory linked to similar questions of American hegemony.

By not considering the short fiction while studying Howells, and focusing predominantly on the social novels of the 1880s and 1890s, we allow the dominant narrative of his realism and literary history to continue, one that positions it—correctly, in many respects—as obsessed with the objective and the commonplace so as to create a cohesive, unified culture that could bridge socioeconomic fractures and inequities in American society.