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The Neuroticism of William Dean Howells
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 December 2020
Extract
Since the death of William Dean Howells in 1920 it has become a commonplace of criticism to remark that he failed to carry his theories of realism into an artistic practice adequate to all of the central facts in American life. He did not treat what William James called “the slaughter-houses and indecencies without end on which our life is founded” and which formed much of the content of the novels of such Howells proteges as Crane, Garland, and Norris. There can hardly be room to challenge this. Howells never truly faced the violent and sordid facets of reality. Mention and object to them as evil he could; leave the abstract and deal with them intimately, personally, objectively, or even imaginatively he could not. I should like here to suggest that the primary source of that inability was simply that life-long psychological difficulties left Howells with a neurotic condition which literally made it impossible for him to know and understand as realities the portions of pain and filth and terror in human living with which a major writer must be at least vicariously intimate. How much the production of the mass of autobiographical material which he produced during the latter decades of his life might represent an attempt to purge himself of the neurotic influences which seem to have haunted his mind throughout the peak years of his fecund artistic career I am not competent to say. But it seems clear that he shrank neurotically from the imaginative absorption of painful reality which truly searching American novels would have necessitated.
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- Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1946
References
1 The Varieties of Religious Experience (New York, 1902), p. 90.
2 A Boy's Town (New York, 1890), p. 7.
3 Years of My Youth (New York, 1916), p. 59.
4 Ibid., p. 35.
5 A Boy's Town, p. 18.
6 My Year in a Log Cabin (New York, 1893), pp. 54-56; cp. Years of My Youth, p. 61.
7 A Boy's Town, pp. 197-204, has an extended list of these.
8 See Years of My Youth, pp. 19, 60, and 80; My Literary Passions (New York, 1910), pp. 51-52; and My Year in a Log Cabin, p. 38.
9 A Boy's Town, p. 189.
10 Ibid., p. 171.
11 Ibid., p. 240.
12 Ibid., p. 182.
13 My Literary Passions (New York, 1910), p. 71.
14 The Life in Letters of William Dean Howells, ed. Mildred Howells (New York, 1928), has as frontispiece and as illustration facing volume I, p. 10, two very interesting and, I think, revealing pictures of Howells in youth.
15 My Literary Passions, p. 121; cf. p. 194 and Years of My Youth, p. 238.
16 Literary Friends and Acquaintance (New York, 1910), p. 66.
17 My Literary Passions, p. 131.
18 Ibid., p. 53.
19 See Years of my Youth, passim, and the early chapters of My Literary Passions.
20 My Literary Passions, p. 71.
21 Years of My Youth, p. 91.
22 Ibid., pp. 22, 91.
23 Years of My Youth, p. 92.
24 Ibid., p. 93.
25 Ibid., p. 91.
26 Ibid., p. 93.
27 Ibid., p. 93. Cp. My Literary Passions, pp. 114-115.
28 My Year in a Log Cabin, pp. 44-45.
29 My Literary Passions, p. 134.
30 Ibid., pp. 117, 122.
31 Ibid., pp. 135-136.
32 Years of My Youth, p. 93.
33 My Literary Passions, pp. 124-125.
34 Years of My Youth, p. 141.
35 Ibid., pp. 142-143.
36 My Literary Passions, pp. 132-133.
37 Ibid., pp. 134-135.
38 Letters, i, 14.
39 Years of My Youth, p. 230.
40 Letters, i, 22.
41 Ibid., i, 49.
42 Letters, i, 57.
43 Ibid., i, 68.
44 Years of My Youth, p. 94.
45 Letters, i, 89.
46 Letters, i, 175.
47 Ibid., i, 25.
48 Ibid., i, 288.
49 Impressions and Experiences (New York, 1896), p. 90.
50 Through the Eye of the Needle (New York, 1907), p. 168.
51 Howells's reform writings are excellently handled in W. F. Taylor's The Economic Novel in America (Chapel Hill, 1942), pp. 214-243.
52 Letters, ii, p. 1.
53 Literature and Life (New York, 1902), pp. 154-160.
54 Criticism and Fiction (New York, 1910), p. 244.
55 Ibid., p. 201.
56 Letters, ii, p. 35.
57 My Literary Passions, p. 246.
58 Criticism and Fiction, p. 238.
59 Imaginary Interviews, p. 165.