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

Generally speaking, this critical trend has positioned Howells as a powerful cultural authority who was either deceptive of his real goals—willfully hypocritical or simply ignorant of the actual political scene in which he was working—or a reactionary victim of historical situations. What these otherwise insightful arguments for revising realist goals and practices or broadening the canon of what we call realism forget is that Howells was perhaps the most powerful “multicultural” critic writing at the time. Charges of timidity, frailty, and complicity may perhaps seem warranted by today’s standards, but we should not be allowed to forget that Howells was a staunch critic of what he saw as class warfare being waged by the economic and cultural elite, as well as a tireless advocate of the literature being produced by women and racial and ethnic minorities in order to prevent any singular, idealist narratives from obfuscating what he called “the free play of our democracy.” That is, while realism can be seen as part of what Eric Sundquist calls “the rising spectator culture of newspapers, magazines, advertising, [and] photography” that stressed the standardization and equivalence of American life by mapping and marketing “America’s psychological space” (“Realism” 503), Howells simultaneously challenged attempts at constructing a collective, national homogeneity by highlighting authors far removed from his position of power as a White, urban, Anglo, male magazine editor and critic. He disparaged others who would invoke tradition and authority to impose false memories and customs on a heterogeneous American population. At the same time, however, he was also critical of his own ideals. Taking the short fiction seriously reveals Howells’s infamous humility and, perhaps, prompts contemporary readers and critics to exercise some of their own when making definitive claims about an author with as far-ranging a canon as Howells or constructing their particular versions of literary history.

To be sure, this study of Howells’s involvement in the critique and construction of American collective memory is undeniably influenced by the New Historicist methodology. However, I intend to complicate some of these accepted views by, perhaps, trying to have it both ways: to show respect for the author and to demonstrate sensitivity to authorial choices within determinable cultural contexts.