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The pioneering work of scholars like June Howard, Amy Kaplan, and Walter Benn Michaels, among others, challenges many of the left-leaning memories of the Parringtons and Kazins by persuasively arguing that previous constructions of Howells overlook how he and other realists are not simply responding to social conditions, but are actively shaping them. This innovative critical work tends to position Howells and his realism not as boldly challenging the social and economic status quo, but as actually reinforcing late nineteenth-century racism, sexism, and class hierarchies. That is, as a major figure of the traditional canon, Howells has become the site of numerous attempts to argue that his political conservatism was disguised by earlier twentieth-century critics in order to promote a “liberal consensus” that excluded the darker reality of American politics.
Indeed, these approaches have gone from being a challenge to an older critical establishment to being the reigning orthodoxy of the moment. Elsa Nettles, for example, argues how Howells’s use of language reveals his affiliation with the upper classes, despite his professed belief in equality, while Alfred Habegger claims that realists like Howells and James attempted to impose masculine codes on what was, essentially, a popular women’s literary genre. In a recent argument asserting Howells subtle, perhaps unrecognized racism, Henry Wonham asserts that “Howellsian realism institutes permanent and inflexible ethnic and cultural categories as a strategy for imagining a homogeneous social order” (49), while Stephen Knadler argues “Howells tried to preserve the Anglo-American genealogy of our national literature despite increasing ethnic diversity” (22). Likewise, Elizabeth Ammons claims that Howells’s notion of realism is “grounded…in white, middle-class ideas about what is ordinary, common, and representative in the lives of actual men and women in the United States” (103). She implies that writers and cultural arbiters like Howells stand on the way of a representative, multicultural American literary canon composed of “a truly heterogeneous set of writers, works, and life conditions” in order to “arrive at a new conceptualization of American realism as a multiple rather than a unitary phenomenon” (103).