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“Something More Than a Drummer's Interest”: Commercial Realism in The Rise of Silas Lapham

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 July 2009

Timothy Spears
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Extract

Amid rising interest in the history of consumer culture and the literary marketplace, The Rise of Silas Lapham (1885) gained new significance in the 1980s when scholars placed William Dean Howells, his novel, and realism as a whole in a complicated relation to 19th-century economic culture. In general, these critics found Howells retreating from an overbearing market system within which he had tried to establish realism as a truer, less sensationalized form of writing. By showing that Howells's writing was itself a market practice, their historicist readings significantly revised our understanding of American realism. At the same time, though, their interpretations tended to rely on abstract understandings of Gilded Age business culture. This essay seeks a new view of The Rise of Silas Lapham by focusing more concretely on the marketing techniques whose emergence after the Civil War benefited Howells's writing career but troubled his conscience. Howells's awareness of his contradictory relation to the market is most obviously manifest in the economic and moral quandary faced by Silas Lapham. But as I argue below, Howells imagined a solution to this dilemma in the form of Lapham's son-in-law, Tom Corey — a figure critics have mainly ignored. Not only does the genteel Bostonian represent the future of the paint business, but his anticipated role in international markets suggests both the expansionist and idealistic nature of Howells's realism.

Type
Research Article
Information
Prospects , Volume 22 , October 1997 , pp. 153 - 172
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1997

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References

NOTES

The author thanks Michael Anesko, Leger Grindon, John P. McWilliams, Michael Newbury, and Nancy R. Spears for their careful readings of this essay.

1. Howells, William Dean, The Rise of Silas Lapham (1971; rept. New York: Viking Penguin, 1983), 290Google Scholar. All subsequent references are to this edition and are cited parenthetically in the essay.

2. Dimock, Wai-Chee, “The Economy of Pain: Capitalism, Humanitarianism, and the Realistic Novel,” in New Essays on The Rise of Silas Lapham, ed. Pease, Donald E. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 647–90Google Scholar. Patrick Dooley likewise addresses Howells's attention to business morality by focusing on Lapham, 's actions in “Nineteenth Century Business Ethics and The Rise of Silas Lapham,” American Studies 21 (1980): 79–93Google Scholar.

3. Critical discussion of Tom Corey's position in the novel is limited. Although scholars have stressed the symbolic importance of his marriage to Penelope Lapham (Foster, McMurray, and Vanderbilt) and commented on his inherited talents (Vanderbilt) as well as his libidinal energies (Prioleau), they have said little, if anything, about his commercial role in the novel. See Foster, S., “W. D. Howells: The Rise of Silas Lapham,” in The Monster in the Mirror: Studies in Nineteenth-Century Realism, ed. Williams, David Anthony (Oxford: Oxford University Press for University of Hull, 1978), 159Google Scholar; MacMurray, William, The Literary Realism of William Dean Howells (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1967), 46–48Google Scholar; Vanderbilt, Kermit, Introduction to Howells, The Rise of Silas Lapham, xiv–xvGoogle Scholar; and Prioleau, Elizabeth Stevens, The Circle of Eros: Sexuality in the Work of William Dean Howells (Durham: Duke University Press, 1983), 82–84Google Scholar. More recent, avowedly economic readings of the novel likewise neglect Corey's commercial role. In addition to Wai-Chee Dimock's essay, see Kaplan, Amy, The Social Construction of American Realism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988)Google Scholar; and Michaels, Walter Benn, The Gold Standard and the Logic of Naturalism: American Literature at the Turn of the Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987)Google Scholar.

4. Michaels, , Gold Standard, 41, 48Google Scholar.

5. Howells, William Dean, “The Man of Letters as a Man of Business,” in Literature and Life (New York: Harper's, 1902), 3Google Scholar.

6. On the growth of the modern mass market, see Chandler, Alfred D. Jr, The Visible Hand: The Managerial Revolution in American Business (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1977)Google Scholar; Lears, T. J. Jackson, “Some Versions of Fantasy: Toward a Cultural History of American Advertising, 1880–1930,” Prospects 9 (1984): 349–405CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Marchand, Roland, Advertising the American Dream: Making Way for Modernity, 1920–1940 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985)Google Scholar: and Strasser, Susan, Satisfaction Guaranteed: The Making of the Mass Market (New York: Pantheon, 1989)Google Scholar.

7. Quoted in Strasser, , Satisfaction Guaranteed, 32Google Scholar.

8. Note that Lapham continues to market his fancy paint even after he has returned to Vermont, the site of his original success and a stronghold of producer values. This conclusion offers further evidence of Howells's qualified acceptance of market conditions.

9. The following discussion of the traveling salesman's evolving commercial and cultural importance in late-19th and early-20th-century America is drawn from Spears, Timothy B., 100 Years on the Road: The Traveling Salesman in American Culture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995)Google Scholar. For an analysis limited to sales methods, see Spears, , “ ‘All Things to All Men’: The Commercial Traveler and the Rise of Modern Salesmanship,” American Quarterly 45 (12 1993): 524–57CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

10. Maher, William H., On the Road to Riches (Toledo, Ohio: T. J. Brown, 1876), 30–31Google Scholar.

11. On personality, see Warren, Susman, “ ‘Personality’ and the Making of Twentieth-Century Culture,” in Culture as History: The Transformation of American Society in the Twentieth Century (New York: Pantheon, 1973), 271–85Google Scholar.

12. Howells, William Dean, Their Wedding Journey (Boston: Riverside, 1871), 65Google Scholar.

13. Howells, , “Man of Letters,” 3, 33, 30, 15Google Scholar. On Mark Twain's capacity to pitch his writing to the subscription trade, see Emerson, Everett, The Authentic Mark Twain: A Literary Biography of Samuel L. Clemens (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1984), 62–63, 108Google Scholar.

14. Borus, Daniel H., Writing Realism: Howells, James, and Norris in the Mass Market (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1987), 60–64, 98–99Google Scholar; and Simpson, Lewis P., “The Treason of William Dean Howells,” in The Man of Letters in New England and the South: Essay on the History of the Literary Vocation in America (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1973), 85–128Google Scholar. In discussing the “Man of Letters” essay, Wilson, Christopher P. offers a compatible analysis of Howells's “ ‘inbetween’ status” in “Markets and Fictions: Howells' Infernal Juggle,” American Literary Realism 20 (Spring 1988): 8Google Scholar.

15. Anesko, Michael, “William Dean Howells and the Problem of Surplus Value” (paper presented at Middlebury College,March 4, 1993)Google Scholar.

16. See, for instance, Howells, 's statements regarding female readers in his 1899 essay, “Novel-Writing and Novel-Reading: An Impersonal Explanation,” The Norton Anthology of American Literature, 4th ed., ed. Baym, Nina et al. (New York: W. W. Norton, 1994), 2: 234–250Google Scholar.

17. Sheehan, Donald, This Was Publishing: A Chronicle of the Book Trade in the Gilded Age (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1952), 158–68Google Scholar; and Tebbel, John, Between Covers: The Rise and Transformation of Book Publishing in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 87–88Google Scholar. Page's remark is cited in Tebbel (87).

18. Lapham, for instance, resembles Henry Oscar Houghton, a one-time tanner-turned-publisher who migrated from northern Vermont to Boston, while Tom Corey appears something like George Harrison Mifflin, the Harvard-educated Brahmin who, enroute to becoming a partner in the house, learned the business in all its aspects, an apprenticeship that, given American publishers' reliance on commercial travelers in the post—Civil War era, may well have included a stint on the road (Ballou, Ellen B., The Building of the House: Houghton Mifflin's Formative Years ([Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1970], 134–36, 271–302, 563–64Google Scholar).

19. As Amy Kaplan has argued, Hubbard represents a new breed of mass-market journalist whose sensational treatment of commonplace subjects threatened Howells's hopes for writing serious realistic fiction. In noting Hubbard's promotional talents, I would add that he resembles the stereotypical drummer (Kaplan, , Social Construction, 15–38Google Scholar).

20. By a similar irony, applied democratically, Howells also dismisses the Coreys' faith in aristocratic lineage.

21. Howells, William Dean, Criticism and Fiction (New York: Harper's, 1891), 95, 104Google Scholar.

22. Emerson, Ralph Waldo, Ralph Waldo Emerson: Selected Prose and Poetry, ed. Cook, Reginald L. (New York: Holt, Rhinehart, 1969), 234Google Scholar.

23. Zunz, Oliver, Making American Corporate, 1870–1920 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 104–8Google Scholar.

24. On Howells's dependence on the conventions of Romantic fiction, see Brodhead, Richard H., “Hawthorne Among the Realists: The Case of Howells,” in American Realism: New Essays, ed. Sundquist, Eric J. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982), 25–41Google Scholar; and Cheyvitz, Eric, “A Hazard of New Fortunes: The Romance of Self-Realization,” also in Sundquist, , American Realism, 42–65Google Scholar.

25. Pizer, Donald, “The Ethical Unity of The Rising of Silas Lapham,” American Literature 32 (11 1960): 322–27Google Scholar. According to Pizer, Lapham proves his moral worthiness in this test. Although critics have recently challenged this reading by questioning Lapham's ethical victory and underscoring his complicity in the marketplace, there has been little denying the linkage between the two plots. See, for instance, the revisionist positions staked out by Pease, New Essays, and summarized in that volume's introduction.

26. Carter, Everett discusses the sexual undertones of this scene in Howells and the Age of Realism (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1950), 165Google Scholar.

27. Lorimer, George Horace, Letters From a Self-Made Merchant to His Son (Boston: Small, Maynard, 1902)Google Scholar; and Miller, Arthur, Death of a Salesman; Certain Private Conversations in Two Acts and a Requiem (New York: Viking, 1949)Google Scholar.

28. For a more positive view of this retreat, see Donald Pease's argument that Lapham's retreat to Vermont helps produce a trust in his Introduction to New Essays (20–21).

29. The phrase comes from the title of an article by Christopher Lasch in which he asserts that Corey's entry into business reinvigorates the Boston elite. My approach, in emphasizing Corey's movement into corporate culture, modifies this argument. See Lasch, , “The Moral and Intellectual Rehabilitation of the Ruling Class” in The World of Nations: Reflections on American History, Politics, and Culture (New York: Knopf, 1973), 82Google Scholar.

30. Howells, William Dean, The Minister's Charge or The Apprenticeship of Lemuel Barker (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1978), 273Google Scholar. Bromfield Corey's aging is apparent and his cultural irrelevance hinted at in the 1887 novel April Hopes and The Quality of Mercy, published in 1892.

31. Kaplan, Amy and Pease, Donald E., eds., Cultures of United States Imperialism (Durham: Duke University Press, 1993)Google Scholar; and Sundquist, Eric J., “Realism and Regionalism,” in Columbia Literary History of the United States, ed. Elliott, Emory (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), 523Google Scholar.

32. Howells, William Dean, A Traveler From Altruria (New York: Hill and Wang, 1957), 113Google Scholar.