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

Daniel Borus speaks for this customary memory of Howellsian realism in his claim that it sought “to reforge bonds that national growth had rent…[I]t is unquestionably true that realists took to empirical observation with unprecedented enthusiasm because they felt that through such activities they could transcend the division and fragmentation that had accompanied capitalist development” (4). However, as Borus says of other assessments of realism, his take on Howells is “not so much false as incomplete”—it is accurate, but only to a point. While undeniably correct in recognizing Howells’s interest in the social function of American democracy, what Borus and others ignore is that Howells’s later work does not show an unquestioning desire to transcend division and fragmentation through a reliance on empiricism, but rather uses the supernatural and psychological to embrace contradiction and fragmentation—to resist the imposition of a dominant narrative of the past and to register his uncertainty about the constancy of the rational, autonomous individual. That is, while Borus insists that realism presents an objective history of the present so as to shape perceptions of the nation as a decidedly comprehensible and rational system, the short fiction proposes no such essentialized worldview. By continually featuring memories that are flawed, inaccurate, and unavoidably influenced by aesthetic, political, and other personal biases, Howells questions the ontology and epistemology of objective rationalism and posits individual and collective means of understanding as subjective, fragmentary, and contentious. However, rather than anxiously bemoan this inability to construct reliable narratives of the past upon which to forge common social bonds or to correct social ills, Howells’s late short fiction actually seems to revel in representing memory’s discontinuity, fragmentation, and uncertainly. Highlighting memory’s failure to create a totalizing, homogenous vision of the past, exposing how social institutions and practices create narratives of the past that shape or even replace personal memories, and even positing certain undesirable aspects of remembering as well as benefits of amnesia, Howells’s late work demonstrates a desire to resist the imposition of any singular metanarrative of national unity that anticipates a great deal of postmodern thinking.