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

the pervasive sentiment of what Pierre Nora defines as “an increasingly rapid slippage of the present into a historical past that is gone for good, a general perception that anything and everything may disappear” (7). The transformations in turn-of-the-century America that contribute to the nation’s memory crisis are manifold, and I will develop them, along with Howells’s response to (and participation in shaping) those changes, throughout this study. They include rapid urbanization; the arrival of millions of non-English-speaking immigrants; the influx of freed slaves northward and the reinvention of Black identity during Reconstruction; the introduction of the “New Woman” and an emergent feminist movement; erratic bursts of economic prosperity and depression; breathtaking technological advancement; more powerful, centralized forms of industrial capitalism; westward expansion; an increasingly homogenous national culture; newer, faster means of communications and transportation; and scientific and psychological innovation. These developments not only changed the physical, exterior landscape of America, but also altered the interior landscape of its citizens, their consciousness, and memories. That is, despite the optimistic promises modernity offered, there existed simultaneously a nostalgic sense of loss, alienation, and discontinuity. Whirlwind change forever destroyed the patterns and pace of everyday life, leaving the sense that any linear inheritance of the past was severely weakened, if not broken beyond repair.

Howells’s work reflects this Janus-faced cultural ambiguity toward collective and individual memory. On the one hand, as a staunch advocate of American egalitarian practices, he often lamented the ever-increasing corruption of fundamental ideals of equality and a shared sense of duty as the nineteenth century turned into the twentieth. At the same time, though, he saw how nationalism, when appealed to through the haze of nostalgic idealism, could become a pernicious force or an insular retreat for those refusing to address important social and economic changes that needed attention.