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

Despite this, or perhaps because of it, these stories have been, by and large, dismissed. The few who have recognized them generally display two reactions. The first is to disregard them as anecdotal or apocryphal, as somehow not part of the Howells canon. This dismissal has been perpetuated by Edwin Cady’s remark in The Realist at War, that although Howells “enjoyed” writing these late “psychic stories,” the titles he gave to the anthologies in which they were published in book form “[show] that he did not take them seriously” (243). John W. Crowley echoes Cady’s sentiment, noting that the title Between the Dark and the Daylight “alludes to the first line of Longfellow’s ‘The Children’s Hour,’ [and thus] suggests the light tone of all but one of the psychic tales in the book.” He adds that Howells “adopted a humorous, even mocking, tone toward his psychic material” (“Howells’ Questionable Shapes” 171).¹⁰

Those who do take the short fiction seriously tend to analyze it through a biographic and?/or psychological lens, focusing on Howells’s feelings of guilt and despondency over the death of his daughter Winifred in 1889, as well as his own sense of anachronism in the twentieth century. Winifred’s death is fittingly sited as a major turning point in Howells’s thinking, and the late short fiction’s preoccupation with the supernatural, psychic elements, and questions concerning immortality and memory are sited as responses to Winnie’s passing. Ruth Bardon believes that the late short stories “clearly arose from Howells’s search for emotional and spiritual relief ” after his daughter’s death (xvii). Sensing Howells’s feelings of guilt for not taking Winnie’s medical condition seriously, and a desire for some sort of closure, Crowley explains the “psychic” element of the stories as an attempt to “explore the mystical side of life and the conundrum of immortality.” The possibility that “no afterlife would exist to compensate Winifred for her suffering was an almost unbearable thought” (Mask 135–136). Winnie’s death haunted Howells, forcing him “to delve into his past through an intense introspection that Freud himself was performing during the same years” (Crowley, “Howells in the Eighties” 262).