Language, Race, and Social Class in Howells's America by Nettels Elsa;

Author:Nettels, Elsa; [Nettels Elsa]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University Press of Kentucky
Published: 2021-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Eight

Language and Class in Novels of Country and City

When Henry James praised Howells’s early novels, he often expressed his faith in his friend’s power to go farther, to convert into literature more of the American experience. He pronounced The Lady of the Aroostook “the most brilliant thing you have done,” then urged Howells to “attack the great field of American life on as many sides as you can. Plunge into it, don’t be afraid, and you will do even better things than this.” Several months later, in a letter dated July 22, 1879, when he had learned of the subject of Howells’s next novel, The Undiscovered Country, centering on the relationships of a spiritualist, his daughter, and her lover, he commended the donnée as “very promising,” although he confessed “an intense aversion to spiritualistic material which has always seemed to me terribly sordid and dreary.” (Several years later he would convert such material into the brilliant satire of The Bostonians.) “But your subject has the merit of being real, actual and American, and this is a great quality,” he concluded. “Continue to Americanize and to realize: that is your mission;—and if you stick to it you will become the Zola of the U.S.A.—which I consider a great function.” After reading the first installment of The Undiscovered Country in the Atlantic, January 1880, he wrote enthusiastically to Howells: “You have something really new and unworked.” He thought the conception of Egeria, the spiritualist’s daughter, “a most interesting invention—a real trouvaille.”1

Egeria, whose mesmeric trances symbolize her surrender to her father’s will, derives from Priscilla in The Blithedale Romance, Howells’s favorite of Hawthorne’s works. Dr. Boynton, blinded by his obsession until near death, when he condemns himself a vampire for his coercion of his daughter, has attributes of Priscilla’s masters, Westervelt and Hollingsworth, as well as Hawthorne’s Faustian scientists, such as Aylmer and Rappaccini, whose victims are beautiful young women.2 Boynton’s antagonist, the journalist Ford, who eventually marries Egeria, somewhat resembles Holgrave in The House of the Seven Gables, as Egeria, in her association with light, brightness, and the healing influences of nature, resembles Phoebe Pyncheon. Possible antecedents of Dr. Boynton, Egeria, and Ford also include the scientist Gifford, his daughter, and the mesmerist-medium in James’s story “Professor Fargo.” Egeria shares with Kitty Ellison and Lydia Blood physical beauty, moral purity, normal emotions, and the power to reclaim young men, at least temporarily, from the barrenness of snobbery or cynicism.

What are “new and unworked” in The Undiscovered Country are not the roles of the three central characters but their relationship to realistically conceived settings—Boston, the New England countryside, and the Shaker village, where the characters of romance origins encounter a greater variety of social types than Howells had yet portrayed. For the first time, he set main portions of a novel in a city, making Mrs. LeRoy’s seedy boarding house, where a dozen people gather in the first scene for a séance, a microcosm of Boston’s class structure. The lapses in the taste and grammar of Mrs.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.