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The short fiction Howells writes in the opening years of the twentieth century—collected primarily in A Pair of Patient Lovers (1901), Questionable Shapes (1903), Between the Dark and the Daylight (1907), and The Daughter of the Storage (1916)—deserves a much closer look than it has been given, particularly as those stories provide surprises and challenges to our canonical construction of “The Dean,” as well as the taxonomy of the realism he endorsed.
This project began, in fact, with the very same focus that it is working against. As I prepared to look at Howells’s more canonical work within the context of nineteenth-century America’s multifaceted obsession with memory and memorial practices, I stumbled upon his 1906 short story “A Sleep and a Forgetting,” a tale that has as its central focus a young American girl suffering from amnesia after witnessing the death of her mother in an accident. Intrigued that Howells had chosen to write directly about the very subject matter that turn-of-the-century America was manifesting, I read further into the collection in which this story was published—Between the Dark and the Daylight—and other works of short fiction Howells wrote in his later years. Focused on the supernatural, ghosts, visions, the psychic, dream transference, and amnesia, these neglected stories were shocking not only for their seemingly incongruent subject matter compared to standard introductions of Howells and American realism, but also for their direct engagement with the politics of memory.
The late short fiction, perhaps more than the canonical work I intended to explore, highlights Howells’s ambivalent reactions to what Richard Terdiman has called the “memory crisis” of the long nineteenth century: the fixation with the significance and uses of memory in an era in which—characterized by feelings of fragmentation, isolation, and dislocation that followed the rapid cultural changes—there was “a sense that that the past evades our memory, that recollection has ceased to integrate with consciousness” (4). The discursive practices of postbellum America, along with other Western nations, are marked by historical and mnemonic anxiety; their cultural productions revealing great effort to maintain a foothold on its perceived, nostalgic collective identity as time seemed to be accelerating;