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Manners, Morals, and Mince Pie: Howells's America Revisited

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 July 2009

Joel Porte
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Extract

When lionel trilling delivered an important lecture on William Dean Howells more than thirty years ago at Harvard, he began with an anecdote that helps to move us directly into Howells country. Offering a course on American literature at Columbia College, Trilling “imagined that it might be useful to [his] students to have a notion of the cultural and social situation which Howells described,” and he therefore “spent a considerable time talking about [Howells's] books”; whereupon, Trilling reports, “I received the first anonymous letter I have ever had from a student-it warned me that the lapse of taste shown by my excessive interest in a dull writer was causing a scandal in the cafeterias.”

Type
Research Article
Information
Prospects , Volume 10 , October 1985 , pp. 443 - 460
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1985

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References

NOTES

1. Trilling, Lionel, The Opposing Self (New York: Viking Press, 1959), p. 78.Google Scholar

2. I am indebted to Daniel Aaron for bringing this review to my attention. See also his “Howells and Harvard,” Harvard Library Bulletin, 28, 4 (10 1980), 438–42.Google Scholar

3. The Bazar Book of Decorum. The Care of the Person, Manners, Etiquette and Ceremonials (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1870), p. 37.Google Scholar

4. Ibid., pp. 25, 128.

5. “Mark Twain: An Inquiry,” in Cady, Edwin H., ed., W. D. Howells as Critic (London and Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1973), p. 340.Google Scholar

6. For information about the synopsis I am indebted to Vanderbilt, Kermit, The Achievement of William Dean Howells (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1968).Google Scholar

7. Ibid., p. 135.

8. Habegger, Alfred comes close in his “Nineteenth-Century American Humor: Easygoing Males, Anxious Ladies, and Penelope Lapham,” PMLA, 91, 5 (10 1976), 884–99CrossRefGoogle Scholar: “Inevitably, American humor was masculine. Only by grasping that fact can we understand the significance of Penelope Lapham.… Penelope is a female humorist who marches to a different drum from that heard by the genteel feminine humorists [of her time].… She has the horse sense of the lengendary self-taught, self-reliant American man; and in contrast to her sister, the pattern of femininity, she has an odd and active sense of humor.… Penelope has the manner of a vernacular male storyteller.… She may not prop her feet on the rail, but in her improprieties of posture, bearing, and diction she clearly bears the distinctive marks of the proverbial male humorist.… Penelope is in the mainstream of vernacular male humor.”

9. Cady, , Howells as Critic, p. 351.Google Scholar

10. Emerson, , Essays & Lectures, ed. Porte, Joel (New York: Library of America, 1983), p. 379.Google Scholar

11. Ibid., pp. 68–69.

12. When he first met Emerson, Howells remarked on “a strange charm in Emerson's eyes, which I felt then and always, something like that I saw in Lincoln's, but shyer, but sweeter and less sad.” See Hiatt, David F. and Cady, Edwin H., eds., Literary Friends and Acquaintance (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1968), pp. 55–6.Google Scholar

13. Cady, , Howells as Critic, pp. 361 ff.Google Scholar

14. Ibid., p. 53.

15. Trilling, , The Opposing Self, p. 77.Google Scholar

16. Holmes, Oliver Wendell, Ralph Waldo Emerson (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1885), pp. 269–70.Google Scholar

17. Cf. Lynn, Kenneth, William Dean Howells: An American Life (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1971), p. 246.Google Scholar

18. Hiatt, and Cady, , Literary Friends, p. 56.Google Scholar

19. Emerson, , Essays & Lectures, p. 599.Google Scholar

20. Emily Dickinson seems to have gotten the point about Howells's anecdote, for in early 1880 she sent a gift of a pie to Mrs. Lucius Boltwood and apologized this way for not sending a flower: “Though a Pie is far from a flower, Mr. Howells implies in his ‘Undiscovered Country’ that ‘our relation to Pie’ will unfold in proportion to finer relations.” See Emily Dickinson: Selected Letters, edited by Johnson, Thomas H. (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, Harvard University Press, 1971), p. 259.Google Scholar

21. See Conti, Giuseppe Gadda, William Dean Howells (Roma: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura [Studi Americani, 22], 1971), p. 102.Google Scholar

22. Cf. Clara, and Kirk, Rudolf, William Dean Howells (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1962), p. 209Google Scholar: “Emerance (Emerson and eminence combined, perhaps).”

23. Trilling, , The Opposing Self, p. 84.Google Scholar

24. Cf. this passage from Part I, chapter 11, of A Hazard of New Fortunes: “‘Ah, this is nice!’ said Fulkerson, after the laying of the charitable napkin, and he began to recognize acquaintances, some of whom he described to March as young literary men and artists with whom they should probably have to do; others were simply frequenters of the place, and were of all nationalities and religions apparently–at least, several were Hebrews and Cubans. ‘You get a pretty good slice of New York here,’ he said, ‘all excepting the frost on top. That you won't find much at Moroni's, though you will occasionally. I don't mean the ladies ever, of course.’ The ladies present seemed harmless and reputable-looking people enough, but certainly they were not of the first fashion, and except in a few instances, not Americans. ‘It's like cutting straight down through a fruit cake,’ Fulkerson went on, ‘or a mince pie, when you don't know who made the pie; you get a little of everything.’”