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

the introduction of commemorative holidays such as Memorial Day and Independence Day;⁶ the shift in the study of history from the “gentleman’s Parlor” to the university;⁷ and the publication of over one hundred utopian novels, a telling sign that Americans were not altogether comfortable with the direction of the present and looking for imaginative possibilities for the future.⁸ In addition, xenophobia and racism become more pronounced, especially in the cities where thousands of new immigrants and southern Blacks are struggling with their own need to reconcile the past with their new American present. At the same time, the government begins aggressive imperial campaigns in Cuba and the Philippines, in part to reclaim the nation’s teleological confidence. All of these cultural phenomena have memory as a shared focus: as Linda Hutcheon puts it, “If the present is considered irredeemable, you can look either back or forward. The nostalgic and utopian impulses share a common rejection of the here and now” (“Irony, Nostalgia, and the Postmodern”). In Howells’s America, there is a sustained desire to construct a past amidst what appeared to be chaos.⁹

At its core, Howells’s call for a new approach to literature is also part of the mnemonic stockpile. That is, his call for realism as a model for a national literature is another manifestation of—and reaction to—America’s memory crisis. His work engages the politics of memory and serves what he sees as a corrective to remind Americans of their common, democratic roots. Realism, as he defines it, censures the forces of material culture that he believed were employing romantic—by which he meant outdated, undemocratic, and idealist—sensibilities to mediate and manipulate individual and collective memory. From the very beginning of his career, Howells demonstrates an intimate concern with the shaping of America’s mnemonic landscape and those cultural sites where collective memory and national identity were being contested, constructed, destroyed, and modified. His late writing, so explicitly focused on the issues of remembering and forgetting, allows us a view from which to look back and see how Howells developed his engagement in the theory and practice of defining “America,” concentrated especially in how the impulse to create a national memory legitimates discursive systems by which subjective ideologies become increasingly legitimated as objective collective identity.