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William Dean Howells (1837-1920) William Dean Howells was prolific in his writing endeavors
from an early age. Born in 1837, he was soon drafted into the family business of
newspaper editing and printing. His early works consisted of primarily short
stories and poetry, and it wasn’t until after the Civil War that he wrote his
first novel, Their Wedding Journey. He published A Hazard of New
Fortunes in 1890, a novel that proved emblematic of the realism movement.
The Civil War had a peculiar effect on Howells as a writer mainly because of its obstruction from his perceptible view; Howells fled to Europe at the outbreak of war. According to Daniel Aaron, Howells “had consecrated himself to a literary career that would take more than a civil war to interrupt.” Howells gathered news of the war from family and friends and thus assembled a perception that was far removed from the actual social, cultural, and military revolutions taking place. It was therefore a distant view of the war at home, not a near one, which engendered Howells’ form of distinct, ambivalent literary realism. Consequently one could ask how this removed view formulated by war evasion was perceived by literary critics. Kenneth Lynn, a biographer of Howells, concludes that the writer’s war evasion “adversely affected his performance as a chronicler of American reality.” Many other critics assented that Howells’ postbellum fiction, given his 5 year absence during “the most vivid and consequential reality of his time,” was inherently doomed to fail as an accurate reflection of reality. John Limon offers a starkly converse observation, however: “Howells’s missing the war did not hinder his career as a chronicler of American reality: it made it.” Many literary historians agree with Limon and believe that Howells’s avoidance of the war in his literature is the very premise that defines realism. Realism is postbellum; it focused on life after the war and aimed to expose the new social and cultural conflicts that were emerging in America. Thus fiction written with the Civil War as its core could possess faint realistic properties, but could not embody a true work of realism because it fails to examine postbellum issues. It can be deduced, then, that postbellum realism, as defined by Howells, was paradoxical if it entrenched itself in the War or its battlefield heroics. It’s not that Howells sought to forget the War, but rather validate its significance by subtle, metonymic allusion. One must look no further than A Hazard of New Fortunes to behold Howell’s metonymic allusion to the Civil War in his realism works. Limon offers an insightful look at this phenomenon: “William Dean Howells, to produce realism in A Hazard of New Fortunes, replaces the Civil War with the labor wars of the 80s, and the labor wars with controversies within labor reporting, and journalistic infighting with the war for realism itself, so that, at long last, war evasion becomes the moral and aesthetic equivalent of war.” This series of granular substitutions enables Howells to accomplish numerous of his literary objectives. His nod to the Civil War, even if predominately metonymic, appeased veterans and romanticists alike and proved that his absence from the War was not as blinding after all. Furthermore, he was able to attenuate his own desires by presenting “real” issues facing “everyday” Americans. Ironically, however, some literary critics have actually focused more on the artful Civil War allusions in the novel and less on the actual principles Howells is attempting to trumpet. Observed in this light, Howells’s apparent literary success was not completely triumphant in its ambition. Most analysis of Civil War reference in A Hazard of New Fortunes focuses on two characters: Colonel Woodburn and Lindau. Both are war veterans who fought for opposite sides in the war and yet represent somewhat similar views in its aftermath. Woodburn is a Southern idealist who believes the South was a victim of the North’s capitalist conquest and that slavery could have become a “perfectly ideal condition for the laborer, in which he would have been insured against want, and protected in all his personal rights by the state.”2 Lindau is a German immigrant who lost his hand in war fighting for the Union. He also condemns Northern capitalism based on its merciless labor principles that render him, a one-armed man, useless to society. From a literal perspective, these characters represent “real” concerns of the time. The rise of capitalism did not benefit every American and conversely created a deep chasm between rich and poor. From a figurative perspective, the characters (especially Lindau) serve a deeper purpose in the plot as metonymic “soldiers” in the labor wars. It should be noted that both characters’ views are presented with realistic neutrality, and as Daniel Aaron points out, Howells “sides openly with neither.” Limon concludes that Howells is the definitive source for American realism: “Realism – as an American literary phenomenon – is more or less what Howells said it was; he defined it, wrote it, theorized it, advertised it.” And how would this definition differ without the Civil War? What other event of such immense magnitude could have sparked such a literary movement? Without the war, realism may have never manifested in American literature. A “realistic” notion might propose that romanticism could have remained for years to come as the touchstone in American fiction. Howells must have fostered a covert gratitude for the War, the very one that threatened to “derange all (his) literary plans,”3 for without it the realism movement and his successful career may have never been possible.
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