Abstract
When Robert Frost acknowledged his ‘great debt’ to William Dean Howells for teaching him that ‘the loveliest theme of poetry was the voices of people’, he claimed for Howells powers of representation that the novelist himself prized most highly. ‘No one ever had a more observing ear or clearer imagination for the tones of those voices’, Frost wrote of Howells. ‘He recorded them equally with actions, indeed as if they were actions (and I think they are).’1 In his criticism of fiction and drama, Howells rarely failed to judge the representation of characters’ speech. The novelists and dramatists he most valued, such as Turgenev and Ibsen and Björnson, were those who wrote in language renewed by the ‘never-failing springs of the common speech’.2 He championed the realist who put aside literary models and tried instead to ‘report the phrase and carriage of every-day life … to tell just how he has heard men talk and seen them look’.3
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Notes
Robert Frost to Hamlin Garland, 4 February 1921. Selected Letters of Robert Frost, edited by Lawrence Thompson (New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1965), p. 265.
Through the Eye of the Needle, in The Altrurian Romances, Introduction and Notes to the Text by Clara and Rudolf Kirk (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1968), p. 282.
April Hopes, Introduction and Notes to the Text by Kermit Vanderbilt (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1974), p. 231. Hereafter abbreviated AH, with page numbers given in the text.
‘Our Daily Speech’, Harper’s Bazar, 40 (1906), 931.
Ulrich Halfmann, ‘Interviews with William Dean Howells’, American Literary Realism, 6 (1973), 326–7.
Ibid., 354.
The Early Prose Writings of William Dean Howells, ed. Thomas Wortham (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1990), pp. 243–4.
‘W. D. Howells and the “American Girl”’, Texas Quarterly, 19 (1976), 152. The following is a typical example of the narrator’s identification of himself with men: ‘The two men put on that business air with which our sex tries to atone to itself for having unbent to the lighter minds of the other.’ The Minister’s Charge or the Apprenticeship of Lemuel Barker, Introduction and Notes to the Text by Howard M. Munford (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1978), p. 272. Hereafter abbreviated MC, with page numbers given in the text.
The Rise of Silas Lapham, Introduction and Notes to the Text by Walter J. Meserve (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1971), p. 127. Hereafter abbreviated RSL, with page numbers given in the text.
An Imperative Duty, Introduction and Notes to the Text by Martha Banta (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1970), p. 17.
The Complete Plays of W. D. Howells, edited and with an introduction by Walter J. Meserve (New York: New York University Press, 1960), p. 35. Hereafter abbreviated CP, with page numbers given in the text.
The Son of Royal Langbirth, Introduction and Notes to the Text by David Burrows (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1969), p. 84. Hereafter abbreviated SRL, with page numbers given in the text.
A Hazard of New Fortunes, Introduction and Notes to the Text by Everett Carter (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1976), p. 16. Hereafter abbreviated HNF, with page numbers given in the text.
Howells’s phrase in ‘Editor’s Study’, Harper’s Magazine, 72 (1886), 484.
Howells’s phrase in ‘Editor’s Study’, Harper’s Magazine, 72 (1886), 484. Edwin H. Cady recognized April Hopes as one of Howells’s most important novels. The Realist at War: The Mature Years, 1885–1920, of William Dean Howells (Syracuse University Press, 1958), pp. 58–63. Recent studies of April Hopes are Paul John Eakin, The New England Girl: Cultural Ideals in Hawthorne, Stowe, Howells, and James (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1976), pp. 124–9; Elizabeth Stevens Prioleau, The Circle of Eros: Sexuality in the Work of William Dean Howells (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1983), pp. 88–106; Kermit Vanderbilt, ‘The Conscious Realism of Howells’ April Hopes’, American Literary Realism, 3 (1970), 53–66.
Mrs Farrell, with an introduction by Mildred Howells (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1921), p. 185. Hereafter abbreviated MF, with page numbers given in the text.
Mary Suzanne Schriber, in Gender and the Writer’s Imagination: From Cooper to Wharton (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1987), pp. 86–116, examines the effects of Howells’s conservative views on his portrayal of women characters.
Selected Letters of William Dean Howells, V, 1902–11, ed. William C. Fischer with Christoph K. Lohmann (Boston: Twayne, 1983), pp. 124.
The Quality of Mercy, Introduction and Notes to the Text by James P. Elliott (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1979), p. 103.
Howells’s phrase in a review of Henry Ward Beecher’s Norwood, Atlantic Monthly, 21 (1868), 761.
Habegger has made the fullest study of Penelope Lapham’s humour in Gender, Fantasy, and Realism in American Literature (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), pp. 184–95.
Edwin H. Cady, The Road to Realism: The Early Years, 1837–1885, of William Dean Howells (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1956), pp. 206–7, 233–5; Sidney H. Bremer, Invalids and Actresses: Howells’s Duplex Imagery for American Women’, American Literature, 47 (1976), 599–614.
John W. Crowley, ‘W. D. Howells: The Ever-Womanly’, in American Novelists Revisited: Essays in Feminist Criticism, edited by Fritz Fleischmann (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1982), pp. 170–88; Gail Thain Parker, ‘William Dean Howells: Realism and Feminism’, in Harvard English Studies 4: The Uses of Literature, ed. Monroe Engel (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1973), pp. 133–61.
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© 1997 Elsa Nettels
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Nettels, E. (1997). The Voices of Men and Women in Howells’s Fiction and Drama. In: Language and Gender in American Fiction. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-11406-1_3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-11406-1_3
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