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Anticipating Maurice Halbwachs and other theorists of collective memory, who understand that individual memory is unavoidably shaped by narrative reconstructions, Howells brings attention to the contexts in which events are remembered and questions the ability of ever achieving a stable, definitive notion of the past, free from subjective perspectives and desires. Likewise, if an individual’s past is bound up with aspects narrative, so too, then, is a group’s or nation’s. Thus, any attempt to achieve individual or collective self-realization is, as Eric Cheyfitz points out, equivalent to the process of storytelling itself, “a process that, if less formal or self-conscious than literary art, comes no less under the heading of what we traditionally call ‘fiction,’ that category which implies the art of fabrication, or narration” (44).
In subtly connecting the process of writing fiction to the mechanics of remembering and forgetting, one cannot help but notice how closely Howells’s ideas of memory as expressed in Years of My Youth correspond to those of Freud’s notion of “screen memory,” those recollections an individual conjures (or sometimes revises to the point of pure invention) in order to keep his or her more painful memories at a distance. Freud focuses mainly on childhood memories, questioning “whether we have any memories at all from our childhood,” and goes on to suggest that our memories are not our own, but artificially imposed upon us by those with the need to do so in the present:
Howells’s condemnation of the potential dangers of romantic fiction displays a similar understanding of Freudian screen memory. The resistance his short fictions demonstrates toward constructing static accounts of the past and of the self can be seen as attempts to preserve or to reawaken dormant forms of rebellion lying at the core of American culture.