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ART FOR HUMANITYS SAKE The Social Novel as a Mode of Moral Discourse
D. M. Yeager
ABSTRACT The social novel ought not to be confused with didacticism in literature and ought not to be expected to provide prescriptions for the cure of social ills. Neither should it necessarily be viewed as ephemeral. After examining justifications of the social novel offered by William Dean Howells (in the 1880s) and Jonathan Franzen (in the 1990s), the author explores the way in which social novels alter perceptions and responses at levels of sensibility that are not usually susceptible to rational argument, push back moral horizons, contribute to the creation of social conscience, and expose the complexity and contextuality of moral discernment. As a concrete example, Howellss 1889 novel A Hazard of New Fortunes is analyzed (and defended against its detractors) in terms of its sophisticated treatment of the dilemmas that arise from a recognition of personal complicity in structural sin, its disclosure of the context-indexed evolution of values, and its attention to the importance and fragility of social trust.
KEY WORDS: J. Franzen, W. D. Howells, middle class, moral discourse, H. Sidgwick, social ethics, social novel, social trust
DO NOVELS MATTER TO THE WELL-BEING of the world they inscribe? Are they
more than entertainment? Do they have social and moral weight? If so, what sort of weight do they have? These are important questions because when ethicists turn to literature as a form of moral discourse, they most frequently turn their attention to novels. In the United States, the years from the Civil War to the Great Depression saw a great surge in morally instructive fiction. Some Christian social novels, like Uncle Toms Cabin and In His Steps, commanded staggeringly large audiences and appear to have exerted a decisive influence
I am grateful to the Georgetown University Theology Department for the research leave during which this article first began to take shape. I am also grateful to Gerald McKenny for organizing and to the American Academy of Religion for funding a face-to-face colloquy for participants involved in this project on genres of moral discourse; the collegial encouragement and constructive comments I have received from Gerald McKenny, Richard Miller, and Lee Yearley have been invaluable in bringing the article to completion.
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on public sentiment and public policies. Nearly all of this vast literary production (a good deal of it scribbled by women) has fallen into obscurity; only a few of the most prominent authors, such as William Dean Howells and Edward Bellamy, are much remembered a century later and then only by specialized literary scholars and historians. The recent release of a new edition of Howellss 1889 novel A Hazard of New Fortunes, with an enthusiastic introduction by Arthur Schlesinger Jr., offers a welcome occasion for an inquiry into the novel as a genre of moral discourse and a means of social engagement. While it may seem idiosyncratic to center such an inquiry on a novel few have heard of, by a writer now regarded as secondary (at best), taking A Hazard of New Fortunes as a case study offers some particular advantages: (1) Howells was a theorist as well as an imaginative writer, and he developed a doctrine of critical realism that still qualifies as one of the dominant accounts of the public role of fiction. (2) Howellss literary theory and his social criticism were grounded in his own religious understanding of the human calling, and his social novels were clearly meant to trouble the Christian conscience of his readers. (3) At the same time that a careful study of A Hazard of New Fortunes makes apparent the historically contingent character of the social novel, such study also suggests that it is the depth and quality of moral insight that the novelist achieves that will determine whether the book will be of ephemeral or enduring interest. In the pages that follow, I will begin with a brief sketch of novels of Christian moral instruction in the second half of the nineteenth century in the United States, giving some attention to the authors reasons for pursuing their moral concerns through the medium of fiction. I will then turn to Howellss theory of critical realism, comparing it with Jonathan Franzens recent discussions of the social novel. Section 3 will examine A Hazard of New Fortunes as an instance of moral discourse.1
1. Christian Social Novels: A Forgotten Genre

Robert Glenn Wright, shelf-reading in the PZ3 classification in the Library of Congress, turned up 1,300 novels published between the beginning of 1867 and the end of 1900, of which 145 (slightly more than 11 percent) directly addressed the discrepancy between professed religious ideals and socioeconomic inequalities (Wright 1989, 111). The classification PZ3 includes relatively ephemeral popular fiction (Horace McCoys They Shoot Horses, Dont They? and most twentieth-century crime stories and science fiction, for example, fall into this domain); this category, therefore, includes only part of the fiction written during the
1 Since familiarity with the characters and plot of A Hazard of New Fortunes will be assumed in section 3, a synopsis of the novel can be found in the appendix to this article.
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period in question. Wrights study did not pick up novels by, for example, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Charles Sheldon, Hamlin Garland, or William Dean Howells. Moreover, since Wright considered only novels related to economic issues (rather than, say, the temperance debate), the title of his published study, The Christian Social Novel, is broader than its actual subject matter. These methodological limitations do nothing to diminish his contribution. The literature he examined has not been the subject of wide research, and his book provides a valuable survey of the nature and quality of a notable body of literature composed by self-conscious Christian writers for the purpose of moral persuasion. Judged by the standard criteria of literary excellence, few of these novels merit continuing attention, but taken as a group, they diversify our understanding of the modes and manners of moral discourse. As Robert Walker and Dewey Wallace write in their introduction to Wrights book, the literary authors in question were social moralists who chose fiction as their vehicle (Walker and Wallace 1989, xii). Wright is supported by Walker and Wallace in suggesting that these novels had Uncle Toms Cabin as their prototype and inspiration. Harriet Beecher Stowe had demonstrated that imaginative literature could drive social change (Walker and Wallace 1989, xvi), and considerable numbers of postCivil War novelists aspired to stir up American Christians to a renewed commitment to social justicewith passion and attention redirected to the depredations and devastations of industrialization. Stowes success had shown that fiction possessed unusual mass appeal, that it operated on the sentiments in such a way as to move people to action, and that it thus provided a medium by which a writer could actively arouse a much broader, and larger, audience than could be addressed, let alone moved to action, by moral essays and analytical texts. Though many of these novelists wrote introductions or prefaces explaining their moral intentions and social aims, Wright notes that only a few set down their reasons for turning to the medium of fiction (they clearly preferred their messages to their style of presentation [Wright 1989, 85] and had little interest in method or justification). Still, the reasons those few gave remain instructive. Ellen E. Dickinson, author of The Kings Daughters (1888), advanced what Wright calls the aesthetic rationale: many of the incidents are true, a web of romance holding them together as the tapestry weaver ties the cords on which his pictures are designed, so as to harmonize the coloring and combination of materials with the best effects (Dickinson 1888, i; cited, Wright 1989, 76). In his preface to Within and Without (1887), J. Thompson Gill indicated that he had chosen the romance because it was a convenient form for impressing popular understanding (cited, Wright 1989, 76). Harriet B. McKeever, in the preface to Westbrook Parsonage (1870), and J. B. Logan, in an introduction to Alice McDonald (1900), both said that they
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had chosen to write novels in order to reach the young, for, as McKeever put it, It is not likely that young persons will read controversial articles; but it may be that a story embodying Protestant truth will interest many youthful readers (McKeever 1870, v; cited, Wright 1989, 77). Logan, although he did emphasize the importance of making the debates and arguments accessible to the young, actually offered a somewhat broader rationale: They [the debates, arguments, and social observations] are placed in the form of a narrative, in the hope that they will be the more readily read and weighed than, perhaps, they would be if presented in a mere abstract form (cited, Wright 1989, 77). Even where the authors made no direct comment on their choice of medium, they often offered a rationale indirectly through characters who comment on the value of Christian fiction. Of the examples that Wright ferrets out, two are particularly instructive. The first, a comment by the heroine of Edgar C. Brosss A Modern Pharisee (1895), reflected a certain impatience with novels as mere entertainment but honored the possibility that what entertains might be elevated by being ordered to a serious moral purpose:
Well, I must confess I have no desire for reading, save occasionally, merely for the sake of amusement. If I can gather facts from a novel, or be led to see the truth of some proposition to which I have been blind, I feel amply repaid. What you deem essentials in Looking Backward [the love story], I look upon as mere framework, the skeleton to which clings the warm flesh through the arteries of which circulates and throbs the rich crimson blood of intellectuality. Plot simply holds the readers attention, while the creator hammers away, driving relentlessly with each heavy blow, sentiment and argument into the heart and mind of the reader [Bross 1895, 34; cited, Wright 1989, 7879].
This is notable in its inversion of the view that concrete, particular stories are required to give truth, life, and interest to otherwise thin and bloodless abstractions. In Helen Dawes Browns The Petrie Estate (1893), the heroine comments on the educative power of fiction, but locates it in the power of the author to introduce the reader, by indwelling and identification, to dimensions of reality of which the reader would otherwise remain ignorant: The good novel often seems to me more real than life itself. . . . The novelist has a great task to reveal us to each other, to interpret us, to educate our sympathies (Brown 1893, 17677; cited, Wright 1989, 79). Fiction has the power of enabling readers to see what otherwise would be hidden. The novel can accomplish this by uncovering the intricacies of the inner life or by carrying the reader, vicariously, into alien neighborhoods: the tenements, the settlement houses, the factories, the union halls, and the revival meetings. Fiction conveys knowledge, but it so anchors that knowledge in concrete representation as to constitute, for
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the reader, a form of personal experience. Albion W. Tourg e picked up e the notion of educating our sympathies and seems to have had a fairly well-developed conception of the moral sentiments. Wright draws attention to his insistence that emotional transformations are the prime motivators of mans actions (cited, Wright 1989, 82). In Murvale Eastman (1890) Tourg e wrote, Impulse, affections, sentiments, convictions, e emotionsthese are more potent than all other forces in shaping the man and, if general in their application, the multitude (Tourg e 1890, e 113; cited, Wright 1989, 81). To all these reasons, Wright adds two perceptive explanations of his own. First, ethics tended to be associated with the ideal, and the novel offered an opportunity to portray idealized action and character:
The novel had the license of not having to be truthful. Particularly in Victorian American before the realists revolution it could harmonize and romanticize events so that virtually every ending was a happy one. Very few social Christian novels end in tragedy. Thus, the readerand the author did not have to face the everyday realities of failure or stalemate. And, of course, the elemental lure of the novel for the author of being able, logically and emotionally, to control and conclude all events was present in the social Christian genre as well as in other forms of fiction [Wright 1989, 78].
A fictive world is the construction of a single imagination, and the story will end the way the author wants. It is no accident that in these pious, faithful, and hopeful works, goodness is always stronger than wickedness, and poverty is only humble, never painful, destructive, or dehumanizing. Second, the novel offers means of persuasion that can affect the reader where reason and logic would fail: the author of a novel, when arguing from a premise with which his reader may disagree, can sometimes convincingly validate that premise through the readers sympathetic involvement with the novels protagonist (Wright 1989, 83). This is an astute insight, at least with respect to realistic fiction. Reason and logic operate within a framework of convictions or premises that are not often altered by conflicting reasoned arguments that rest on different premises. The conflict can only be resolved, the resistance can only be overcome, by changing the premises, but the premises are largely immune to argument. It is just here, Wright suggests, that fiction has a great advantage. Strong rapport with a character whose premises differ from the readers own has the potential to open the reader to the consideration of views that she/he might otherwise reject out of hand. As Wright puts it:
While the authors of social Christian fiction knew that some of their readers would not share their views about the causes of and solutions to the
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economic and social problems of the Gilded Age, they could hope to convince them. If a novelist could establish a rapport between the characters in his fiction and the reader, and then strengthen that rapport with logical and convincing arguments for his thesis, he stood, perhaps, a better chance of converting the reader to his own way of thinking than did the essayist whose appeal was largely intellectual [Wright 1989, 83].
This would mean, Wright points out, that the most persuasive novels would be those that are artistically the most successful: those in which the characters are most appealing, believable, and richly dimensioned; those in which the characters act from a psychological and intellectual logic (Wright 1989, 83) that is plausible and attractive. The irony, Wright admits, is that the authors of these novels felt compelled, by their social intentions and Christian principles, to manipulate their fictive worlds to display moral and religious rewards and excellences; thus, they often sacrificed the character and plot development that would have given their work the persuasive power they sought.2
2. The Theory of the Social Novel

As I have already suggested, many of these Christian social novels belonged to a tradition of fiction writing that deliberately idealized human experience. The conventional assumption was that fiction, particularly if it was to be morally inspiring, must show life as it ought to be rather than as it is. The protagonist should be a hero or heroine readers would strive to emulate. This was a tradition that William Dean Howells (1837 1920) abandoned and attacked. It falsified human experience, he said, and left readers besotted in the fume of the delusions purveyed to them, with no higher feeling for the author than such maudlin affection as the habitu of an opium-joint perhaps knows for the attendant who fills e his pipe with the drug (Howells 1983, 74). It was not, however, their moral intent to which he objected. He, too, believed that fiction should seek to have a moral effect: Neither arts, nor letters, nor sciences, except as they somehow, clearly or obscurely, tend to make the race better and kinder, are to be regarded as serious interests (Howells 1891, 87). What he objected to were their fictional strategies, which he considered to be incompatible with the end they sought. In defending his critical
2 Of course, any interest in determining the degree to which the books actually influenced moral conduct must meet with frustration. No ready means of measurement and assessment present themselves. It is, however, relevant to note that for close to a century after the end of the Civil War, literary societies flourished in large numbers of communities, particularly in small towns, particularly in the Midwest. These seem to have been made up primarily of women, and they seem, in terms of social class and status, to have been fairly inclusive.
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judgments and defining an alternative model of narrative fiction, he defended art for humanitys sake against both art for arts sake and lying sentimentalitythe first because it retreated from responsibility into unmoral aestheticism and the second because it falsified the human condition (Howells 1983, 169). The resulting theory of the social novel and account of moral fiction are cogent and intriguing. Howells was a self-educated and self-made polymath: a poor printers assistant from the Western Reserve (now Ohio) who became the most respected and powerful American literary figure of his time. He was consistently rated among the top novelists of the period (above both Samuel Clemens and Henry James, both of whom were his good friends).3 In addition to wielding a good bit of political influence and being a great success as an author, he was an extremely influential editor (briefly at the Nation and subsequently at the Atlantic Monthly, where he was an assistant editor from 1866 to 1870 and chief editor from 1871 to 1881). As a literary critic, he introduced unknown European writers (such as
3 To speak of Howells as a novelist is to understate his literary reach. Writing launched him into his career as a public figure: as a reward for his campaign biography of Lincoln, he was posted to the American consulate in Italy during Lincolns presidency. Having no independent source of wealth, he supported himself and his family by writing. As he wished to live well and, in his middle age, had to meet the expenses incurred by a very ill daughter and an invalid wife, he wrote constantlyproducing several thousand words a day for much of his adult life. In addition to twenty-six novels, he composed an extensive body of extremely influential literary criticism (amounting to upwards of a thousand pages), thirtythree indifferent plays (as well as dramatizations of three of his novels), various volumes of short stories, four collections of unmemorable poems, a set of probing autobiographical reflections, and a number of travel books that continue to be quite well regarded in the precincts of that tranquil sub-genre. The consequence was that virtually every individual piece he ever wrote could have been better, and he produced no single masterpiece. Yet his works, taken together, constitute a remarkable accomplishment. Henry James, in 1912, drew attention to the force of that collective achievement: They make a great array, a literature in themselves, your studies of American life. . . . Stroke by stroke and book by book your work was to become for this exquisite notation of our whole democratic light and shade and give and take in the highest degree documentary, so that none other . . . could approach it in value and amplitude (James 1912, 1089). Howellss first novel appeared in 1872, and his last, in 1920. Between 1872 and 1881, he wrote graceful comic novels that dealt with the surfaces of life: etiquette, custom, and convention. In the early 1880s, he began to write fiction with a more critical edge, producing a cluster of nine novels that directly engaged social and economic issues: the social effects of religious skepticism, labor conditions and strikes; racial bigotry; the management of wealth, status, and class among urban social elites; the power of monopolies; and the disproportion of reward to merit all up and down the social scale. This second period is generally thought to begin with A Modern Instance (1882) and end with The Landlord at Lions Head (1897). Today interest in his work tends to focus on these social/ethical novels. The final cluster of novels comprises primarily psychological studies (this cluster is chronologically untidy because it includes some novels interspersed among the socially weighted ones); though not remarkable by todays standards, these studies were perceptive and probing for the period in which they appeared.
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Ibsen, Zola, Turgenev, and Tolstoy) to the American reading public, and he energetically encouraged and promoted the work of promising young realist writers in the United States. He was raised in an ardently Swedenborgian household, and he received from his parents a deep and abiding conviction that love is the fundamental element of reality and that love works through truth. He understood the weight of action and the burden of choice for he had been brought up to believe that we decide, in the freedom of our deeds, our own fate in the afterlife. Standing outside the mainstream Protestant establishment and apparently remaining unchurched throughout his adult life, he nevertheless attributed divine authority to the teachings of Jesus and sought, in good Swedenborgian fashion, to live a useful life and, in charity, to serve others. He was, accordingly, greatly revered, even by those who disagreed with him. His correspondence with his own contemporaries includes letters to and from an astonishing array of the people who shaped American culture between 1870 and 1920: Clemens, both William and Henry James, Stephen Crane, Edward Everett Hale, Charles Eliot Norton, and Frank Norris, to name only a few. He was the first president of the American Academy of Arts and Letters (elected at its formation in 1908 and serving until his death), and when his seventy-fifth birthday was celebrated, the guests included William Howard Taft. For a good part of the twentieth century, American literary studies included courses in The Age of Howells. 2.1 Howells on realism and critical realism Through his own literary practice, his critical literary analyses, and his editorial promotion and rewarding of realist works from his contemporaries, Howells was a major force in the shift in American literature from romance to realism. He is reported to have protested to Thomas Sergeant Perry in 1886, No one invented realism; it came, but it is with good reason that Alfred Kazin refers to him as the generalissimo of the realists (the comment to Perry is cited in Tuttleton 1992, 7; Kazin 1982, 76). Though Howellss defense and promotion of realism in fiction is sometimes linked to his European travels and his intense interest in contemporary French and Russian novels (he was criticized for having caught Russian measles), the greater impetus seems to have been his own devotion to American democracy and his desire to see American writers develop a genuinely democratic art form, one that would unfold and explore the conflicts and aspirations that find their home in average and commonplace lives. Kazin frames this in terms of class consciousness: In attacking romanticism, in speaking up for realism, Howells was
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not only defending middle-class American experience against the old snobbish attachment to English literature, he was speaking, as he did all his life, for the emergent class of self-made businessmen who identified romance with the aristocratic culture in which they had no share (Kazin 1982, 76). But if realism was a rebellious reaction against established taste and expectations, it was also a muscularly original effort to lift into the realm of art domains of experience that had not hitherto been considered fit subjects for aesthetic treatment: urban landscapes, commercial centers, shop keepers and businessmen, immigrant ghettos, and working class customs, pleasures, and family life. This shift in subject matter required adjustments in criteria of excellence as well. In 1891, in Criticism and Fiction, Howells declared that the critic of imaginative literature must first ask: Is it true?true to the motives, the impulses, the principles that shape the life of actual men and women? This truth, which necessarily includes the highest morality and the highest artistrythis truth given, the book cannot be wicked and cannot be weak (Howells 1891, 49). The truth that realists were enjoined to discover and represent was not exhausted by accurate observation of enviable, lovely, and inspiring subjects. On the contrary, they were not to edit, censor, or select but were, instead, to expose the whole truth of the social world. The situations portrayed were thus ordinary and familiar situations, experienced and inhabited by recognizable persons reacting in plausible and understandable ways. Howells vigorously championed a literature of the common and typical. Common and typical are, however, indefinite words. In part this literary movement validated the values and perspectives of the middle class, and that was, especially for figures like Howells, its link to American democracy. Otherwise, it was also a body of literature that uncovered for middle- and upper-class readers the humanity and troubles, the suffering and aspirations, of people struggling with poverty, unemployment, failure, and brutality. Here the common and the typical included the vulgar and vicious. We think retrospectively of Howells as a genteel and acclaimed literary lion, but in Boston in the late 1880s he was vilified as a public enemy. Looking back on this period, Hamlin Garland described the city as divided between those who liked [Howells] and read him; those who read him and hated him; and those who just plain hated him (Garland 1917, 12, quoted in Lynn 1971, 286).4 The uproar resulted partly from the monthly columns The Editors Study that Howells had begun contributing to Harpers Monthly in early 1886 and partly from the serialization of The Ministers Charge in the Century in
4 Garland actually said this division of the city was in place by 1884, but Lynn believes that the controversy became acute only in the later years of that decade. It is Lynns view that Garland, looking back from 1917, simply misremembered the sequence of events.
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1886. In The Editors Study, he concentrated his reviews on nonfiction studies in economics, political theory, and sociology, and on socially significant novels, nearly all of which were controversial European affronts to the values of the middle classnovels like Tolstoys Anna Karenina, Thomas Hardys The Mayor of Casterbridge, and Emile Zolas La Terre. He praised the novels that others attacked and attacked the novels that others praised. In The Ministers Charge, he himself focused on subject matter that was widely regarded as repulsive, tracking the disintegrating life of Lem Barker who, coming from the farm to the city, descended into the sordid netherworld of want and violence, moving between jail cells and the hardly better rooms of seedy hotels. Howells, in the face of the abuse and opprobrium heaped upon him, insisted that it was time for fiction to stop lying about life. The disarray and needs of the nation demanded frankness about American civilization in all its dimensions. In the period after 1887, probably as a consequence of his acute distress about the miscarriage of justice in the execution of the Haymarket anarchists, Howells began self-consciously to differentiate social realism from critical realism.5 The theory of critical realism that he worked out provided a theoretical justification for the sea change that had already begun to occur in his own literary practice, while also establishing a set of criteria against which he would subsequently evaluate the literary achievement of his contemporaries. Customary forms of novelistic realism might entertain and might even edify, in the sense of enabling the reader to better understand both her- or himself and other people (particularly other people from economic classes, religious and political communities, or national and ethnic identities with which the reader has little social contact).6 In contrast, critical realism, as Howells conceived
5 Among major public figures, Howells was almost alone in openly protesting the conviction and execution of the labor leaders who were rounded up and indicted after a bomb was thrown into advancing police ranks at a labor rally in Chicago in 1886. The course of events gravely impaired his confidence in the press and his optimism concerning the American future, a darkening of vision that was readily apparent in his novels. It underlined for him the vulnerability of citizens excluded from the centers of power, and it sharpened his perception of transpersonal social forces and systemic disfunction. 6 In most cases, it appears to have been herself. Though I have not located any statistics on this matter, I find repeated assertions that the reading public in the second half of the nineteenth century was overwhelmingly female. Lynn, for example, mentions the predominantly feminine audience of postwar novel-readers and suggests that the twentiethcentury critics who attacked Howells for prissiness failed to understand and take into account the nature of his audience. What his work exhibits, Lynn believes, is not a reluctance to deal honestly with sordid subjects but rather the prudence of a writer whose livelihood depended on his commercial success and who had a finely tuned sense of the line between what his readers would find tolerable and what they would find too offensive to buy (Lynn 1971, 13233). The attack on Howells for squeamishness and self-censuring moralism was famously launched by Sinclair Lewis who, in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech,
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it, had a decidedly more diagnostic and corrective edgeand a moral and political purpose. The realistic novel, allied with truth and humanism, had the power to become a force for social justice, to confront the reading public with public and social problems that cried out to be faced and addressed. The purpose and value of such literary works, dramatic and novelistic alike, lay in dispersing the conventional acceptations by which men live on easy terms with themselves, and obliging them to examine the grounds of their social and moral opinions (Howells 1906, 109). His Editors Study column in December 1888 is sometimes described as his manifesto on critical realism. Ranging himself against the old heathenish axiom of art for arts sake, he asserted that art must make friends with Need or perish (Howells 1983, 169). By this he meant that by taking as its subject real widespread human need and suffering conditions that left to the well-to-do people-of-heart only the recurrent palliative philanthropic patch-work of rescue and almsgivingart could induce the reader to take thought somehow in our social, our political, system to prevent in some future year, decade, century, the destitution which we now relieve (Howells 1983, 168, 169). Far from being impotent pretenders, rightly elbowed aside in American civic life by more manly businessmen and entrepreneurs, literary figures had a duty to serve the nation steadfastly and courageously as creators of an American conscience. He considered novels to be a medium by means of which a writer might hope to reach our enormous commonplace average. Novels could captivate the popular fancy, and therein lay their power (letter to Howard Pyle, October 30, 1893, quoted in Carter 1954, 192). But it would be a power for the good only to the extent that the novelist, somehow making words into deeds (to use Carters words), did something to change received opinion and to unsettle accepted practice. Nonetheless, in defining for himself and other writers a moral mission and a communal duty, Howells did not make himself an advocate of preachy tracts tarted up as fiction or straightforward didacticism representing the triumph of the good. He considered realism to be a particularly felicitous style because he believed that change begins in understanding; it therefore requires a meticulous, true representation of what is actually the case. In late nineteenth-century America, true speaking required recognizing and validating the rightful social and human claims of exploited, disenfranchised, deprived, and discarded human beings. True speaking required refusal to idealize the victims, as the romantic sagas of heroism and redemption had done; rather, literature
characterized Howells as one of the gentlest, sweetest, and most honest of men . . . [who had] the code of a pious old maid whose greatest delight is to have tea at the vicarage (Lewis 1930, 153).
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should show the victims as they are, calling upon the public to consider them not because they are beautiful and virtuous [they are not], but because they are ugly and vicious, cruel, filthy, and only not altogether loathsome because the divine can never wholly die out of the human (Howells 1983, 169). True speaking required a right assessment of who the victims actually werethe poor and hungry, and unemployed, certainly, but also the rich, cursed with the aimlessness, the satiety, the despair of wealth, wasting their lives in a fools paradise of shows and semblances, with nothing real but the misery that comes of insincerity and selfishness (Howells 1983, 170). Waste and want were, he thought, equally pronounced (albeit in different forms) at both ends of the economic spectrum. True speaking required refusing easy answers and oversimplifications; it meant presenting issues in their structural complexity, and representing the full range of responses. True speaking deprived readers of deceptive consolationsillusions about the adequacy of local and individual charity (turkeys for the turkeyless), fantasies about recovering some lost golden age, and utopian visions alike. Two assumptions seem to inform Howellss conviction that literary fiction could and should be written for humanitys sake: (1) that existential encounter (even vicarious encounter) and right understanding of injustice and sufferingof greed and selfishness, deprivation, and despairwill produce a desire that things should be different and (2) that such knowledge and desire will produce personal reorientation and will precipitate action (individual and collective) aimed at social reform. To know what is the case is to want and envision something better; to envision it is to try to bring it about. 2.2 Franzen on connecting the personal and the social A century ago, the novel was the preeminent medium of social instruction. A new book by William Dean Howells was anticipated with the kind of fervor that today a new Pearl Jam release inspires (Franzen 1996, 41). With this remark, Jonathan Franzen draws attention to the social force the novel once exerted, while also acknowledging the degree to which such influence has waned. While realism has been an important strand of American literary history, it flourished primarily between the Civil War and World War II. In 1961, Philip Roth famously pronounced the social novel dead: I am pointing here to . . . the loss of a subject; or, to put it another way, a voluntary withdrawal of interest by the fiction writer from some of the grander social and political phenomena of our times (Roth 1961, 124). What Roth found over and over in American fiction in the middle years of the century was social detachment (128), a spurning of our world (127), and a relentlessly accumulating witness to the fact that the social world
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has ceased to be as suitable or as manageable a subject as it once may have been (125). Confronting a twisted, hopeless, disgusting, impervious, and scarcely believable social world, the novelist suffered a loss of the communityof what is outside himselfas subject (131) and was thus driven to take refuge in personalityin all its separateness and specialness (130). And the stories of those personalities were set in a world that is thoroughly and wholly imagined, but that does not really exist (132). He concluded: The hero is left with the simple stark fact of himself. He is as alone as a man can be (135). Roth clearly captured the literary culture of his era, but he perhaps exaggerated the conclusions it was proper to draw. On the other side of that retreat from the social, we now again find novelists like Franzenand his very different compatriot Tom Wolfearguing for the rehabilitation (or perhaps resurrection) of the socially engaged novel.7 By social novel Franzen means a novel that is engaged with society, both in its reception and in its preoccupations (2001, 23). His own novels, including the highly praised The Corrections (2001), are efforts to write fiction that will matter to the mainstream because it addresses significant public or social concerns. He has drawn attention to the work of Paula Fox (especially her 1970 novel Desperate Characters). He also holds up as exemplary Joseph Hellers Catch-22, together with the achievements of Thomas Pynchon and Don DeLillo, both of whom he praises as very good at getting at certain postwar moods capturing the age of crowds, nuclear weapons, and the denaturing effects of the media and technology on language (2001, 8). In 1996 he published in Harpers Magazine a widely noticed, sprawling, and complexly reasoned article titled, somewhat paradoxically, Perchance to Dream.
7 Wolfe and Franzen are not only very different sorts of novelists; they also make very different arguments concerning what a socially engaged novel is and why such novels are (or should be) important. Wolfe is himself a journalist, and he champions a social novel that offers a realism of deft and imaginative reporting, with representative characters being developed against the meticulously recorded background of the late modern (or postmodern) city (Wolfe 1989). Franzen holds that journalism should be left to the media of ephemeral immediacy, with which the novelist cannot effectively compete in timeliness, image, or detail. He argues not that the novelist should report American urban reality but that the novelists themes should intersect with that reality in ways that clarify what is really going on. In the best of such novels the disclosure will so arrestingly capture the hidden structure of the social world that the revelations of the novel will be absorbed into the cultures own self-understanding as the unconscious made conscious, thus generating resources for self-criticism and social criticism that did not exist before. There is, no doubt, room for both forms of the social novel. Franzens theory is more searching and complex, offering a richer perception of the moral possibilities of fiction, so I have chosen to explore his work here rather than Wolfes, but see Tuttleton 1992, 15, for a comparison of Howellss critical realism with Wolfes theory of the social novel rather than Franzens.
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Written autobiographically, it records his struggle to revive a lost intention.8 Because he holds that in our era, the culturally engaged novel must be content to leave social realism behind, he is not proposing a restoration of the fictional style of Zola or Sinclair Lewis or Theodore Dreiser. Television has killed the novel of social reportage (1996, 42); not only can television do a better job at description, but it can also provide the description instantaneously. Moreover, the explosion of sources of information has permanently diminished the standing of the novelist: I see the authority of the novel in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as an accident of historyof having no competitors (1996, 51). He wants to write and encourage and hold up for praise novels that, while uncompromising in their artistic integrity, ask big questions about where we are as a country, connect with large audiences because they engag[e] with questions that [are] interesting to society, and connect the personal and the more broadly cultural and social (2001, 2, 2, and 4). The successful social novel is, then, one that enjoys wide reception (but manages this without pandering to trends, illusions, and escapism; without joining the ranks of vapid, predictable, and badly written best-sellers that are little more than a portable substitute for TV [1996, 38]), and has a pronounced effecton public consciousness if not actually on states of affairs. At the same time, he is careful to say of his own novels, Im not teaching anything (2001, 6). The novelist who connects the personal with the social, if she/he is truly a novelist and not a tract writer or sociologist, is seeking a complicated rightness (2001, 4); her or his proper purpose is to establish a community of concern rather than to hand down a simple lesson or moral precept. The chief risk of fictional efforts to explore social
8 Franzens reflections concern the situation of the contemporary novelist in the United States. It is the failure of the American novel to achieve the intersection of the personal and the social that is the focus of his concern. Other readers might thus wonder, as Richard Miller did in a communication to me in July 2003, about Franzens views concerning the burgeoning movement of literature and social conscience from post-colonial writers outside the USA context. In Perchance to Dream, he does not discuss this body of fiction, but within the American context he does acknowledge the impressive health of regional novels and the literature of ethnic communities: the new cultural diversity of fiction shows the chauvinism of judging the vitality of American letters by the fortunes of the traditional social novel (1996, 47). He worries, however, that such novelists feel and are ghettoized in their ethnic or gender identitiesdiscouraged from speaking across boundaries by a culture that has been condition by television to accept only the literal testimony of the Self (48). But the deeper challenge that he raises to such literature of social conscience concerns what he takes to be its excessive therapeutic optimism. He is skeptical of any literature that can easily sort out the victims from the victimizers, and he is at pains to differentiate the sort of fiction he wishes to encourage from political novels that offer medicine to cure all social ills. Cultural authority is different from the critique of regnant culture, though it may involve it.
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problems (aside from the folly of trying to replicate what journalism can do better and faster) is that the writer ends up advancing a simplistic or repetitive orincreasingly nowadaysbanal point (2001, 4). As a social novelist, Franzen wants to write novels that matter, that carry their weight in the world, that do something, but by the time that he gets to the end of Perchance to Dream, he can declare that [e]xpecting a novel to bear the weight of our whole disturbed societyto help solve our contemporary problemsseems to me a peculiarly American delusion (1996, 49). The novelist has a duty to the community, and it is a moral duty. But it is less a matter of changing the large movements of the social world than it is of preserving the values that are jeopardized in the broader culture: community, honesty, depth, continuity, and a sense of limitation. Or, put differently, mystery, unpredictability, a tragic perspective, and a sense of history (1996, 52, 53). Writing a century after Howells, Franzen has a notably keener sense of the liabilities unique to socially engaged fiction. First, literary history, and the plight of his own contemporaries, have taught him how hard it is to write socially engaged fiction that has a shelf-life of more than a year or so. Writing directly at and about the present produces books that fade as the present fades. The sheer speed of contemporary communications compounds the problem. Even in the time it takes to write and publish a book, the issues the book seeks to engage may have been superseded by others. The social novel thus becomes a snore (2001, 4). Second, he is wary of the temptations of moralism for two reasons: It ill consorts with the way narrative art is composed, and it corners the writer into a deceptive optimism. One of the turning points in the personal odyssey traced in Perchance to Dream is Franzens discovery that, as a writer, he has been effectively paralyzed by my feeling that I should Address the Culture and Bring News to the Mainstream (1996, 54). The model of literary art as a noble higher calling (1996, 45) produces an alienation that disrupts the necessary cooperation of writer and reader in the creation of the fictive space. Freed of the burden of having to singlehandedly cure the social world of its ills, he recovered his community and found that he could write again. Worse still, moralism confuses literature with social medicine and fosters what he takes to be the wholly mistaken view that the only things that matter, that have weight, are the things that can be fixed. On that model, the conflict by which literature lives always resolves into cant (1996, 53). And finally, the social novel will always have to struggle against superficiality precisely because the notion of literature as Medicine for a Happier and Healthier World (1996, 53) inevitably produces the deceptive optimism that no mature discerning reader would mistake for substance. The novelist who successfully connects the personal and the social is the one who lives in history and is more attuned to it than the great majority of non-readers (1996, 51). Such novels are coherent and
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deadly pertinent, and part of that pertinence is recognition that there are sorrows that have no easy cure (1996, 47). The culturally engaged novel that can lay claim to lasting attention is the one that treats of fundamental problems as they show themselves in the concrete particularity of a given time and place. What assures their deadly pertinence is the fact that answers arent there, there isnt closure (1996, 49). The conventional novel of simple social realism inscribes its own obsolescence; the novel of tragic realism takes history too seriously to think that the besetting problems of the present, correctly understood, dare ever be ignored or imagined overcome.
3. A Hazard of New Fortunes as a Great Sermon

With this background in mind, let us turn to a consideration of one particular social novel as an instance of moral discourse: A Hazard of New Fortunes. Among the ten social novels of Howellss middle period, there are fourAnnie Kilburn (1888), A Hazard of New Fortunes (1889), The Quality of Mercy (1892), and The World of Chance (1893)9 that are customarily grouped together as his economic novels. A Hazard of New Fortunes was published to widespread acclaim, and in a letter written to Howells February 11, 1890, Samuel Clemens praised Howells for the rhetorical skill by means of which the novel is made to preach its great sermon without seeming to take sides or preach at all (Clemens and Howells 1960, 2:630). Because the novel deals explicitly with the economic inequities of the Gilded Age and with the moral responsibilities of the economically secure in the face of the extraordinary distress of the unemployed and the working poor, it is not difficult to surmise what Clemens understood that sermon to be. Unfortunately, the very obviousness of the social justice sermon has obscured the more subtle dimensions of moral concern that the novel probes. Interestingly, subsequent critics have generally treated it as a failed, rather than a successful, sermona sermon too sympathetic to the unjust, too vacillating in its portrayal of the good, and too willing to justify moral compromises. Thus, readers who object to fiction with a normative message disparage Howells as moralistic, while readers who are sympathetic to the notion of the social novel fault Howells for his lack of moral clarity. What both forms
9 Differing dates are cited for many of Howellss novels, particularly those of the middle period; even library records disagree. This may reflect the fact that quite a few of Howellss novels, including Hazard, were published serially in periodicals before being released in book form; moreover, having been serialized in the United States, they were usually published in book form in England before being published herebut in the interim, there were often cheap and uncorrected copies circulating that were not registered with the copyright office or deposited in the Library of Congress. For the sake of consistency in my references to the works of Howells, I have used the publication dates given by Mildred Howells in the appendix to Life in Letters of William Dean Howells (see Howells 1928, 2:4039).
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of discontent have in common is a superficial grasp of the novel itself, coupled with an excessively narrow and didactic conception of how a social novel ought to operate. Without trying to argue that Hazard should be ranked with the novels of Melville, Clemens, or Henry James, I do want to suggest that it is better than the secondary literature implies. In its own context, it was a sophisticated and effective social novel, and it achieved sufficient depth to be worth reading today. To correct over-simple readings of the novel, I will review three dimensions of moral inquiry that can be traced in its pages, only the first of which has been widely recognized: (1) As an economic novel, Hazard sought to awaken the American conscience to the degree of misery, inequality, and injustice forming the underside of the nations prosperity. It did this from a distinctively Christian, though not church-bound, perspective, and it was prescient in identifying impersonal social forces as dominant features of the moral landscape. (2) In a culture that had suddenly become both geographically and economically mobile, it investigated the difficulties of transposing values from one social location to another. (3) In a period of remarkably rapid social change and radical ferment, the novel exemplified the conscience of the bourgeoisie as the field in which social change could be managed by evolutionary transformation. To bring a better balance to the moral criticism of the novel, I will try to show that the characteristics Clemens rightly praisedthat it does not preach, does not take sidescontribute to the novels moral force, rather than betraying a regrettable failure of moral nerve. 3.1 The creation of social conscience: the sermon on complicity In the later decades of the nineteenth century, the social consequences of urbanization and industrialization were becoming painfully evident. Indeed, in his December 1888 manifesto, Howells suggested that although dismal poverty and extreme want had first begun to register on the American conscience as public troubles fifty years earlier, no muscular public purpose had yet come of the recognition; such response as there had been was individual and quixotic rather than structural and effective (Howells 1983, 168). The unprecedented urban concentrations of human beings, the centralization of enormous economic power in the hands of a few, the volatility of labor markets, and the startling inequities in the distribution of wealthtogether with the consequent social strife, amounting to what some have called industrial warproduced a growing sense of social crisis in a nation for whom the Civil War remained a vivid memory.10 When Howells moved to New York in 1889,
10 What concern there might have been about the poverty of the working class in the 1830s was drowned in the abolitionist movement and submerged by the realities of war. John Cort identifies the Boston-based Christian Labor Union, formed in 1872, as the first
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Walter Rauschenbusch was in his first pastorate at the Second German Baptist Church on the edges of the Hells Kitchen area of the same city. The sharpened and awakened sensibilities of both were emblematic of the broadening currents of humanitarian concern, of the struggle to understand and address the forces industrialized capitalism had unleashed in the economic realm, and of the growing apprehension of the determinative power of the institutional structures within which individual freedom was increasingly acknowledged to be constrained. Hazard unfolds against the background of New York City, with its breathtaking wealth and heartbreaking poverty, its gilded mansions and its filthy slums, its self-confident industrialists and its labor strife, its entrepreneurial creativity and its jobless starvation. At the center of the novel are Basil and Isabel March, to whose livelihood all the other characters are in some way related and in whose consciousness the contradictions and conflicts of New York become personal troubles as well as social issues. Basil is a white-collar worker with a financially comfortable happy family life. He stands socially between the industrialists (on whom his paycheck depends) and the poor, exploited, and unemployed, whose plight increasingly troubles his conscience, though they remain an undifferentiated mass encroaching namelessly on the edges of his known world. The novel offers a number of charactersConrad Dryfoos, Margaret Vance, and Berthold Lindauwho are prepared to sacrifice their professions, personal comfort, and even their lives, to address poverty and injustice. It also offers a wide range of characters who remain untouched and untroubled by the moral dilemmas with which Basil struggles. Since at least the 1950s, much of the critical discussion of the novel has focused on what is now almost universally taken to be Basils moral
organized movement to emerge in the wake of the Civil War. Strikes, and their accompanying violence, became a feature of national life in the 1870s. The disparity between the haves and the have-nots was immense. In 1879, Vanderbilt had $30,000,000 in profits while a man earning the standard daily wage of $2.50 in manufacturing would have earned only $780 by working ten hours a day, six days a week, for fifty-two weeks. Cort also points out that although prominent figures like William James Sr. had linked Christianity and socialism as early as 1848, socialist themes were rarely affirmed by Christian leaders after the war. Even figures, like Henry Ward Beecher, who had been voices of justice in the matter of slavery seemed indifferent to matters of economic justice and were disposed to dismiss the plight of the workers with such bromides as God has intended the great to be great and the little to be little. . . . the man who cannot live on bread and water is not fit to live. Though the social gospel movement seems in retrospect to have been the central and distinctive development in Protestant Christianity in that era, it was a movement from the margins. Religiously, devout industrialists found themselves entirely at home in dominant churches that continued to see Gods grace at work in financial success and that preached more about piety, thrift, and industriousness than about justice or love for the downtrodden (see Cort 1988, chap. 10, esp. pp. 22324).
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failure, that is, his failure to follow the novels social activists into the slums and labor rallies. Critics seem to differ only as to whether Basils failure results from and reflects the authors own moral limitations or whether the author intentionally created a morally weak character for the purpose of exposing his flaws as emblematic of widespread failings. Commentators fault the Marches for timidity in the face of evil and selfregard in the face of need. Carter complains of Basil that his primary defect was a lack of decision, an unwillingness to take matters in his own hands, an almost fatal willingness to see all sides of every question; and this hesitancy makes his verdicts less than oracular (Carter 1954, 207). The criticism of the Marches (and Howells, to the extent that the critic believes Howells has embodied his own point of view through them) is usually explicitly or implicitly class criticism. Following Lynns earlier characterization of Hazard as the most unsparing study of the middleclass liberal mind in American literature (Lynn 1971, 302), Schlesinger commends the novel as the first major exploration in American fiction of the liberal dilemma (Schlesinger 2002, xiv). He notes that in contrast to the radical ideologues who populated earlier American political novels (characters possessed by specific formulas for social salvation and fanatically certain that their way was the only way), the Marches are decent and intelligent citizens committed to the social good; unfortunately, the awareness of moral ambiguity that distances them from righteous fanaticism also immobilizes them: They . . . are disarmed by tolerance and a certain complacency, paralyzed by their capacity to see every side of every person and every question, waiting to have decisions made for them. There was no good cause they did not wish well. . . . They are, in short, spectatorial rather than activist liberals. The novels distinctive and original note is liberal anguish (Schlesinger 2002, xiv). In the end, Schlesinger remarks, Howells leaves March still essentially uncommitted. . . . Young Dryfoos points a direction that March approves but to which he cannot pledge himself (Schlesinger 2002, xvi).11
11 In contrast to Schlesinger and most of those who fault the Marches for moral cowardice, Lynn gives their perceived failure a more psychological reading as he links Basil and Isabel with the earlier heroine Annie Kilburn, who was patently homeless in her own birthplace (Lynn 1971, 296). Uprooted and thrown into the chaos of New York, the Marches, according to Lynns interpretation, lose their moral bearings and become paralyzed by their inability to order their new surroundings and understand the events that befall them (Lynn 1971, 300). Lynn takes this to be a kind of fictional externalization of Howellss own state of consciousness in the wake of the death of his daughter (possibly of anorexia nervosa) at the age of twenty-six. Even so, Lynn does not reduce the two novels to psychological studies; Howells was intentionally trying to use fiction as an instrument for widening the bounds of sympathy between social classes in a strife-torn decade (Lynn 1971, 296).
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The line of reasoning captured by the critical consensus seems to be that if an author seeks to instruct her or his audience about social injustice, she/he ought to provide a likable protagonist with a unified will who is prepared to sacrifice everything for the sake of the disadvantaged. Characters of exactly this sort do populate many of the Christian social novels of the era. One thinks, for example, of the parishioners in In His Steps who disperse their inheritances among the needy and find happiness in lives of service to the grateful and tractable poor. Of course, this is just what makes In His Steps seem like a romance or moral parable rather than a responsible probing of better and worse choices in a morally conflicted world. Had Howells fulfilled the apparent moral expectations of these critics, he would have preached a moralistic sermon. He might have placed himself on the side of the angels, but he would have written an inferior novel. Formally, the conflicted consciences of Basil and Isabel are precisely what prevent the novel from falling headlong into what Walter Taylor calls the pit of didacticism, which has been such a prominent failing of cruder social novels, particularly economic novels (Taylor 1932, 93). As a literary character, Basil has a complex function. On the one hand, he is treated as the protagonist. More time is devoted to him than to any other character. He changes and grows. He is the character who experiences conflicts and faces decisions, and his choices, more than those of any other character, move the novel forward. As such, the rectitude of his judgments seems a fit subject for comment. On the other hand, he functions as the observer of events, the intermediary, and his consciousness is the field in which the decisive views of other characters tangle and vie for supremacy. It is precisely by way of his ability to see the strengths and weaknesses of all the others and his ability to align himself sympathetically with almost all of them, that the complexity of the novel is achieved. And it is precisely because he remains the sympathetic center, drawn this way and that, that the novel avoids becoming a didactic tract. We might say that the novel succeeds as moral persuasion to the degree that the problems that perplex Basil also begin to perplex the reader. Howellss intention was not to instruct the reader in right behavior; Howellss intention was to press his readers to confront social changes and issues that cried out for public recognition and debate.12
12 Interestingly, the consideration of Swedenborgian Church History that is available at www.swedenborg.org/history.cfm characterizes Swedenborgian activism thus: The role of the church in social reform movements is yet another important aspect of Swedenborgianism. While the church often took no official stance on social issues, the philosophical stance of the church encouraged individual activism. The church mission, as perceived by its leaders, was not only to teach spiritual truths, but to teach and practice spiritual freedomfreedom not only in spiritual, but in social, moral, and political matters. In
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As Clemens pointed out, the fact that the novel avoids preaching is intrinsically connected with the fact that the novel avoids taking sides. Substantively, it seems to me that such criticism of Basil misses the authors intention with respect to his actual readers. As is widely acknowledged (not least by Howells himself), his effort to address social concerns in his novels owes much to his encounters with the writings of Tolstoy. Between 1886 and 1890, Tolstoys work (My Religion was first translated into English in 1885) figured prominently in at least six of the essays Howells wrote for the Editors Study, and it provided the justification for his December 1888 literary manifesto, The New Christmas Literature:
This is what the new Christmas literature says to us, beginning with Lyof Tolsto, that voice of one crying in the wilderness. . . . he [Tolsto] bears perpetual witness against the life that Christendom is now livingthe life that seeks the phantom of personal happiness, and ignores the fact that there is and can be no happiness but in the sacrifice of self for others. Whatever we may say of his example, we cannot deny that his influence is increasingly vast, and that multitudes hear him who will never follow him to the work of the fields. His audience is, rather oddly, made up as yet chiefly of cultivated people, who have been surprised into the attitude of listening by the spectacle of a man noble, rich, brilliant, like Tolsto, renouncing their world as of no worth. They hear him with heartache and trouble of mind, and many think it is a new prophet come to rebuke them; but Tolsto himself constantly reminds them that it is Christ who has spoken the truth he tells, and bids them hear Him [Howells 1983, 169].
Conrad Dryfoos and Margaret Vance work among the poor out of explicitly Christian motives. Although Lindaus faith seems to be a more secular socialism, he offers an American urban version of Tolstoys principled repudiation of wealth and social standing, living with the poor in a tenement and making their cause and way of life his own. Howells avoids the hortatory character of Tolstoys tracts precisely by giving equal attention to the heartache and trouble of mind that these examples of undivided loyalties stir up in those who are either not able to bring themselves to make such sacrifices or not able to achieve such simple trust in the adequacy of such serviceor both. Thus, although the call to uncompromising fidelity to a rigorous and literal interpretation of Jesus Sermon on the Mount dominates the novel, it dominates it, not
short, the church did not wish to dictate a dogmatic institutional stance to its followers, but advocated reflection and responsibility on social issues. The crucial social concerns of the last century, notably abolition and womens rights, thus found church members active on both sides while the church maintained institutional tolerance. . . (accessed June 16, 2004).
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as morally normative, but as fundamentally problematic.13 It is just this interplay of doubt and conviction, affirmation and critique, that gives the novel its enduring interest: it opens questions for exploration rather than providing a map or program meant to bring reflection to an end in moral certitude. Finally, the customary critical assault on Basils alleged complacency and social passivity misses the fact that the novel gains much of its power and interest from its exposure of structural sin and its acute tracking of social interdependenceand consequently of the complicity of all those who prosper in the arrangements that produce unemployment, poverty, hunger, filth, and disease. It is a sermon more concerned with unrecognized complicity in the structures of injustice than with the plight of the poor per se, and it is interesting to me that Howells explicitly uses the term complicity: March could not release himself from a sense of complicity with it, no matter what whimsical, or alien, or critical attitude he took. A sense of the striving and the suffering deeply possessed him; and this grew the more intense as he gained some knowledge of the forces at workforces of pity, of destruction, of perdition, and of salvation (Howells 1889, 306). What Basil learns (as much through his experiences as from the lectures of his old teacher Lindau) is precisely that he is implicated; he is not a non-participant observer or a neutral recorder of events. The question is not so much whether he should give up everything and follow Jesus as it is the question of what one who wishes to live in love should do once he begins to understand that interplay of transpersonal forces that remain essentially unaltered and untamed by the charitable labors of individuals. In this respect Lindau is more interesting than young Dryfoos and Vance, because he recognizes that structural changes are needed and that only the exercise of collective power can bring them about; thus, he not only refuses, to the extent that he can, to participate in the established economic system but he willingly takes to the streets to support labor in its effort to marshal power against power. However, by this means, he himself becomes complicit in insurrection and violence, at a time when the American experiment was still unstable and governments ability to guarantee social peace still uncertain. For all his high moral principles, he does not have clean hands. It ought to be accounted to Howellss credit that he avoided deceptive optimism and refused to turn his novel into Medicine for a Happier
13 Howells is frequently characterized as an agnostic or an outright atheist (see, for example, Fox 1952, 199; Lynn 1971, 243; and Crowley 1985, passim). Space limitations do not permit an exploration of this issue here, but I think such characterizations result from (1) a tendency to equate religious faith with revealed and sacramental forms of Christianity and (2) inadequate attention to the Swedenborgian understanding of loving conduct in relation to the divine presence.
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and Healthier World. What he produced, whether it is fully successful or not, is properly placed in the category of what Franzen describes as tragic realism. 3.2 Social conscience and social context: the sermon on discernment Although Schlesinger notes that A Hazard of New Fortunes describes the collapse of values after the Civil War and foretells new values demanding to be born (Schlesinger 2002, xiv), this dimension of the novels moral project is seldom the focus of consideration.14 Hazard explores the way in which changes in the structuring of social arrangements necessarily compel adjustments in the moral values and ideals of individuals. Nearly every character in the novel is a migrant. The Dryfoos family have come to New York from the Western Reserve; the Woodburns, from the defeated South (Charlottesville, Virginia); the Leightons, from rural St. Barnaby; Angus Beaton, from Syracuse; and Basil and Isabel March, from Boston. In every case, they try to transplant their prior values into a medium inhospitable to them. In every case, they have to change their viewsincluding their moral viewswhen changing place. For the Marches, Basils change of jobs requires the uprooting and transplanting of their home (37), and their search for housing in New York City infamously takes up chapters 6 through 12, a surprising proportion of the novel and nearly the whole of part 1. Although their wandering inspection of the neighborhoods and accommodations offered by their new world has some of the flavor of both Howells travel sketches (establishing New York as itself a kind of character in the novel) and his
14 In this connection, the passage in Shakespeares King John (act 2, sc. 1, 6675) from which the title is taken is particularly significant. Spoken to the King of France by the French ambassador to England, the lines concern the fighting ships launched against France from England, bearing across the channel Rash, inconsiderate, fiery voluntaries who have sold their fortunes at their native homes. . . . To make a hazard of new fortunes here. He warns that these dauntless spirits ride the swelling tide / To do offense and scath in Christendom. Certainly it is tempting to see the senior Dryfoos as, in this sense, the title character, having sold his birthright and set out aggressively to secure his fortunes in a new environment; indeed, there is ample evidence in Howellss personal papers to suggest that the story of a transplanted entrepreneur was the original center from which the novel developed. Of course, Basil, too, under the captaincy of Fulkerson, is testing his powers in the new world of capitalist forces and mass-marketed publications. Yet in reflecting on the relevance of King John to the novel, one thinks, too, of the lines spoken in the same scene by the nameless citizen of Angiers, when called upon to declare his allegiance either to King Philip of France or King John of England, both of whom claimed the city: A greater power than we denies all this; / And till it be undoubted, we do lock / Our former scruple in our strong-barred gates, / Kinged of our fears, until our fears, resolved, / Be by some certain king purged and deposed (act 2, sc. 1, 36872). The future is uncertain; loyalties are up for grabs. Formal declarations of oughts and shoulds take a backseat to doubt and fear. Power itself can seldom secure legitimacy.
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earlier novels of manners (introducing the reader to the affective economy of the Marches marriage), the critical consensus seems to be that most of the house-hunting sequence should have been cut, and Howells himself apparently was inclined to agree. Critics offer various explanations for the lapse. Everett Carter, for example, suggests that he had begun his book at the moment of overwhelming grief over the death of his daughter Winifred, and . . . he had mechanically clung to the reportorial technique as a routine in which he could forget his torment (Carter 1954, 204). Leaving aside the question of whether the section might have been aesthetically improved by muscular editing, I take this search to be emblematic of the difficulty all of the characters experience in negotiating the requirements of conscience in changing circumstances, and that, it seems to me, is an indispensable contribution to the social themes that are pursued in the novel. We all begin by seeking to make the new situation conform to our established norms and expectations, just as the Marches try and try again to find in New York what would have been normal and expected in Boston. Generally, we keep at this much longer than we should, and it is only when we are completely defeated in the effort that we begin, gradually, to see what there is to be valued in the situation that so perplexes and discomfits and disappoints (even defies) our established values. In the Marches search for a habitation, the treatment of their inflexibility is essentially comic, but the problem of rigidity turns deadly serious in the novels tracking of the fortunes of the Dryfoos family. The elder Dryfoos (whose meteoric rise to wealth and power captures the extreme fluidity of social location at the end of the nineteenth century) brings agrarian values of hard work and self-reliance (if youre poor, its because youre shiftless; if Im rich, its because Ive labored and earned my wealth) into what is essentially a world of chance in which human beings are blown about by transpersonal and impersonal forces over which they can exercise virtually no control. Workers are thrown out of work though no fault of their own, and all correlations have been lost between merit and reward. The responsible self-discipline that made Dryfoos an admirable man and a pillar of the community when he built his prosperity as a farmer becomes mean and selfish callousness when he is transported into a world where few, if any, can any longer be truly self-reliant. His plain and pious wife is miserable and wants nothing so much as to return to the farm where she buried a child. His daughters, for all their wealth, energy, and Midwestern candor, are utterly unfit to appreciate (or even recognize) the cultural values taken for granted by the New York social elite. His son, Conrad, alone seems sensitive to context, and the effect is an almost-complete alienation from his family. The rigidity of the fathers conception of what would constitute the good life for his adult son warps his paternal love into manipulative intervention, then angry abuse, and, finally, physical violence. Conrad himself
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is a particularly interesting study because in his case the adjustment of conscience involves not a reorganization of value commitments, but an unfolding of the meaning of received values in altered circumstances. As he carries his mothers values into a new context, it is not the values themselves that change, but his understanding of the behavior those values require. She clings to the values, but is apparently blind to their relevance to the situation. When this dimension of the novel has been noticed at all, it has often been interpreted in ways that obscure its moral force and insight. Lynn renders it in psychological terms, and treats it as a fictive externalization of the personal anxieties of the author: the Marches are, he suggests, out of touch with the reality of the city; they suffer a loss of bearings and exhibit a stunning inability to locate any meaning in the turbulence of events (Lynn 1971, 300). Taylor, in Howells and the Economic Novel, approaches it as a rhetorical means of character development: Just as Hawthorne sounded out with insatiable curiosity the moral consequences of the Puritan sense of sin, so Howells sounded out, through character after character, the consequences, for American personality, of the effort to live amid conditions wrought by competitive capitalism (Taylor 1932, 94). Howells develops his characters primarily through an account of their actions and conversations, and what he shows is the reactions of various characters to their economic environment (Taylor 1932, 93). While neither of these interpretations is untrue, neither conveys the depth of Howellss moral probing. Taylor touches on it toward the end of his essay: The old economic individualism, Howells feels, is plainly inadequate in dealing with such problems. The intricacy of modern society, the close relationship and interdependence of all its parts, render some sort of collectivistic thinking imperative (Taylor 1932, 97). When social context changes, especially when it changes dramatically, people and behavior do not and should not remain the same. Howells seems to recognize that the problem of managing change is not a straightforward problem of holding fast to clear fixed values; rather, changes in the institution and social matrix of individual experience (that to which the responsible and accountable individual responds) alter the nature of moral response and moral responsibility. Howells shows us the degree of misery that arises out of a failure to grasp the significance of a massive reorganization in the economic infrastructure of the experience of all Americans. At the same time, he seems to be aware of the hazards of such negotiations: Angus Beaton and the Dryfooss daughters lose their moral bearings entirely in the new environment, becoming perfectly self-absorbed and orienting all of their behavior by the north star of their own narrow and private interests. The elder Dryfoos not only must negotiate the moral passage from frontier self-reliance to industrial, urban interdependence, but he must also have the character to maintain
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moral other-regard and republican concern for the common good as he accumulates unconstrained material power. It is his vulnerability to the seductions of greed and selfishness that come with the power to have (indeed, to take) whatever he wants that constitutes his moral decay (Howells 1889, 263). Fulkerson, a marvel of cultural salesmanship with a remarkable gift for reading the barometer of public taste and interest and thus for making arts and letters commercially successfulcomes perilously near to submerging all humane and moral values in the shallows of success and celebrity. His ties to Basil and to Miss Woodburn are the dikes that preserve him from being swept away by the current of commerce. Conrad, Margaret Vance, and Lindau preserve their otherregarding commitments to justice and neighbor love, but feel that remaining true to those central values requires them to abandon other high-level values such as familial responsibility, respect for law, culture and education, and even cleanliness and comfort. Basil and Isabel, trying to maintain their loyalty to the full spectrum of received values, find themselves perpetually self-indicted. They retreat repeatedly into irony and self-mockery as they try to balance their commitment to social justice with their horror of violence and anarchy, their sympathy for (and genuine distress concerning) the downtrodden workers with their desire to provide comfort and opportunities for their children, and social and cultural opportunities for themselves. The novel does not preach because the author does not appear to know what is truly fitting in such a situation. There is no taking of sides with respect to the novels major voices, because in the struggle for discernment, Lindau, Conrad, Basil, Fulkerson, and Dreyfoos read the historically unprecedented situationthe fluidity, contradictions, opportunities, and misery of New York in the 1880squite differently, with corresponding differences in their moral responses. Yet there is a sermon here in the passionate insistence that this suffering makes a moral claim that can be ignored only at grave peril to the individuals humanity and to the nations founding faiththe faith of Bunker Hill and Appomattox (Howells 1889, 282)for which so many had so recently and so horribly died. 3.3 Social conscience and social behavior: the sermon on social trust This brings me, at last, to a dimension of the books great sermon that has been almost completely overlooked: its insistence on the importance of social trust in the pursuit of social justice. Institutionally astute and sociologically informed, Howells understood both the fragility of social order and the inevitability of social change. The moral management of social change both requires and threatens social trust. Alone among critics, Lionel Trilling has recognized Howellss sophistication as
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a social theorist, complaining gently that Howells powers of social insight . . . have for long been slighted (Trilling 1951, 81). Social trust is an elusive but indispensable feature of social life, and moral and social interest in the common good requires attention to this dimension of complex human interactions. Social trust, though it underwrites much of our conduct, is actually as fragile as it is complex, and once damaged, it is perilously difficult to restore. Although Howells never used this language, he possessed an intuitive appreciation of the role of reliability, predictability, and cooperation in all spheres of common life. This appreciation of the stabilizing and liberating role of social trust was mirrored in his intuitive apprehension of the social dangers implicit in suspicion, disruption, and rebellion. One of the ways of defending a judgment like that of Tony Tanner, that Hazard of New Fortunes represents the peak of his achievement as a novelist (Tanner 1965, vii), is to attend to the way in which this appreciation and apprehension are given presence in the book. The failure of critics to notice this has funded a good deal of the negative criticism that Hazard has provoked, particularly on the part of left-leaning commentators. I realize that it might be argued that since social theorists have only recently noticed the role of social trust, the notion can only anachronistically be attributed to Howells. Yet the writings of Henry Sidgwick, from the same period, offer an explicit analysis of social dynamics that today would be likely to be treated as factors properly gathered under the rubric of social trust. Towards the end of The Methods of Ethics (1874/1890), Sidgwick reflects upon social change and considers whether, when the change that is contemplated is a positive one (that is, one that appears, from an abstracted perspective, to be likely to contribute to a better and more just society), the force of moral duty operates always and unambiguously in the direction of such change. He concludes, surprisingly, that it does not. He begins by differentiating circumscribed law from pervasive mores. Within the domain of these unlegislated mores, he further differentiates the comparatively discretionary elements of praiseworthy or excellent conduct from duty as commonly conceived,that to which a man is bound or obliged . . . the ensemble of rules imposed by common opinion in any society, which form a kind of unwritten legislation, supplementary to Law proper, and enforced by the penalties of social disfavour and contempt (Sidgwick 1890, 475). Laws can be changed by formal deliberation and resolutions, the particular deeds of legislators and executives, but duty as commonly conceived can only be altered by the private action of individuals (Sidgwick 1890, 475). During any period when duty as commonly conceived is in flux, the conduct of individuals whose social conscience is at variance with common opinion will, of course, be subject to social disapprobation arising from the received and embedded rules that the majority continue to accept but that the individual
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in questions wants to re-form. Sidgwick identifies four (or perhaps five) domains of consideration that are pertinent to the moral assessment of disobedience, disruption, and ethical innovation. 1. First, there is the matter of cost, which is related to the matter of timing. If a new conception of moral duty is really needed, it will be because the one that is in place has become somehow problematic. The more problematic it has become (or the greater the number of people who regard it as problematic), the more receptive common sense will be to change. As discontent builds, disobedience to societys unwritten legislation becomes more acceptable, but it often takes a long time for discontent to become widespread. During that period, any conduct (however privately principled) that conflicts with established practice and mores will rightly incur penalties (often heavy), and these costs, inflicted upon the individual and the individuals dependents and connections, weigh very heavily in favor of upholding duty as commonly conceived. 2. Sidgwick suggests that a new rule is only preferable to an established one if it can be counted upon to win, in the end, widespread public support. If one advocates discarding some accepted and forceful moral teachings in the interest of adopting some new moral teachings, one must be careful that what is being proposed is practicable, not just theoretically appealing. An innovation may fail through being too subtle and refined, or too complex and elaborate; it may require a greater intellectual development, or a higher degree of self-control, or a different quality or balance of feelings, than is to be found in an average member of the community (Sidgwick 1890, 477). Thus, there is a grave danger that the innovator, rather than making things better, will make things worse, putting asunder old restraints without being able to win common and normal acceptance for the altered sense of social obligation for which he (or, his party) had fought. 3. While moral conduct consists to a large extent in the restraint and governance of passions and appetite, this governance is itself as much the work of regulative habits and sentiments as it is of reason. It is, therefore, quite proper for social leaders to be extremely reluctant to encourage people to set aside habits and sentiments received by inheritance and training (Sidgwick 1890, 477). Sidgwick seems to suppose here that there is a sort of contagion of doubt involved whereby a challenge to a particular established habit has the effect of challenging and thereby weakening the force of all. 4. Any effort to discredit the power of the approbation and disapprobation of the group with respect to some particular expectations or penalties will necessarily endanger the groups moral authority and legitimacy generallyand it is essential to social well-being that the
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community be vested with such authority. Our moral impulses commonly draw the large part of their effective force from the sympathy of other human beings (Sidgwick 1890, 478). It is possible for the rational moral agent to develop her or his own moral rules and to live by them, but Sidgwick thinks this is very difficult indeed. [T]he direct sympathetic echo in each man of the judgments and sentiments of others concerning conduct sustains his own similar judgments and sentiments (Sidgwick 1890, 478). It is thus much easier for us to fulfill our duties to others if we are supported in these duties by this general moral sympathy. An attack on any facet of this complex structure of social sympathy, expectation, and reassurance weakens the entire framework of communal support, making it more difficult for people to fulfill any and all of their duties. 5. As a sort of postscript, Sidgwick adds that if one is going to refuse to conform to a moral rule established in the society, it is important that ones nonconformity should not conduce to ones own advantage and conveniencefor in that case it will almost certainly be attributed to egoistic motives (Sidgwick 1890, 478). Elsewhere Sidgwick also makes the point that social change in a wellordered social world ought always to be gradual enough to allow orderly adjustment. Members of any polity make a great many far-reaching life decisions on the basis of their knowledge of the current laws and practices, and their implicit expectations concerning social continuity; they all, therefore, stand to sustain considerable harm if those laws, practices, and expectations are suddenly changed. There are, of course, times when such sudden and unpredicted changes and such attendant harms are unavoidable, but if the change can be brought about more gradually with less damage to the investment that persons of good will have made in the regnant social order, that, Sidgwick thinks, would be morally preferable. These are not inconsequential moral or social concerns, and they are not concerns that can be dismissed as self-serving ideological opposition to change. They may well reflect a middle-class point of view, but, then, so does a commitment to democracy. When the anxieties and hesitancies and compromises of Basil and Isabel are projected against this background, they look less like cowardice (or great refusals) and more like prudence in the classical sense. That the negative criticism of the book is largely moral rather than aesthetic is a kind of unintentional testimony to Howellss success in writing a social novel with social bite. I have already indicated in section 3.1 the way in which critical disapprobation of Basils choices and commitments usually merges with disapprobation of Howells; the perceived personal failings of both then become the platform for almost universally negative remarks about middle-class bias and middle-class values.
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Certainly, there can be no doubt that the Marches are, and are meant to be, quintessentially upper-middle-class Americans. Likewise, it is certainly true that we do not find in the work of Howells any richly dimensioned representation of impoverished or working-class lives comparable to that offered by subsequent American literary naturalism. It is also true that Howells brings the same satiric edge to his portrayal of Basil and Isabel that he occasionally, in his letters, turned on himself, and the object of his mordant irony is their well-insulated distress about systemic social evils, reflected in the (finely rendered) limits of their sympathies and the partiality of their understanding. Yet when we take the moral significance of social trust into account, it seems to me that this self-critical middle-class-ness constitutes the achievement of the novel rather than being cause for disappointment. For the bourgeoisie, more than any other class, depends on social trust, and middle-class virtues (among them, honesty, fairness, thrift, foresight, hard work, optimism, and personal integrity) are the virtues that make such trust possible. The novel advances, fictionally, the sort of complex understanding of social solidarity and social change that Sidgwick formulates theoretically. What a critic like John Crowley interprets as a pathological fear of extremes begins to look more like a sophisticated understanding of the actual dynamics at work in the organization and reorganization of social life. Just practice cannot, particularly in a free society, be brought about by fiat. The community must evolve in its self-understanding, and that means that the most deeply embedded suppositions and commitments (the received sense of right and duty) must evolveand that takes time. Between tyranny and anarchy is the slow, messy, compromising work of managing change in a way that neither leaves injustice unnoticed and unaddressed nor so loosens the ties of responsibility and trust that the political and social community disintegrates into confusion, lawlessness, and strife. Viewed against this background (rather than, say, the background of Tolstoys moral absolutism), Basil and Isabels concern for the well-being of themselves and their children is not morally defective. Such concern is essential to the deliberative process. Fulkersons entrepreneurial opportunism holds Basils moral principles within the domain of the practicable, while Basils sense of justice sets limits to Fulkersons aversion to any view or action that might offend common opinion and diminish commercial profit. The solid middle, comprising the Marches, the Leightons, and Miss Woodburn, testifies to the continuing power and importance of many of the traditional restraints on behaviorthe traditional habits and sentimentsthat are being eaten away by industrial and commercial exigencies on the one hand, and by civic rebellion and violence on the other. The social nonconformity we find at the extremes of the spectrum of self-interestBeatons hapless selfabsorption at the one end and the selfless dedication to others exhibited
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by Conrad, Lindau, and Vance at the otheris in each case a destabilizing deviation from the received sense of social duty by which the prosaic middle is so unspectacularly guided. In Beatons case, it is the familiar self-isolating nonconformity of indifference to social responsibilities. In the case of Conrad, Lindau, and Vance, it is the nonconformity of those who, being possessed by a vision of a society that they believe to be more just, are prepared to bear the costs and penalties connected with substituting a new understanding of social obligation for the old one. It is significant that all three are individuals who have no dependents. It is also highly significant that Howells holds them up for admiration. For all the reservations the Marches express about the path that they have chosen, the Marches (especially Basil) become steadily more susceptible to their point of view and steadily more sympathetic to their activities. The author frames the deaths of Lindau and Conrad as tragic sacrifices. By this means, the novel shows, within its fictive world, the complex social movement by which a communitys sense of justice and duty is revised. At the same time, the novel actively contributed to that revision in the social world of its readers. Economic novels like Hazard did a great deal to widen and deepen social discontent with prevailing economic arrangements and thus to shift public attitudes concerning poverty and labor strife from opprobrium to moral concern and even sympathy. In addition, Howells gave an articulate voice to a conception of social duty that took account of the power of transpersonal forces and organic interdependence. In Hazard he offered the proposed habits and sentiments not as a utopian vision to be implemented at no cost, but as the object of struggle and sacrifice, a struggle freighted with its own distinctive threats to social order and social good.
4. A Complicated Rightness
The social contingency of the social novel is both its greatest liability and its compelling value. Most of the Christian social novels that were written between the Civil War and World War I command no readership today. We examine them (if we open them at all) as indices of their era, documents relevant to a full understanding of American social history. But, curiously, it can be argued that their ephemerality and their artistic deficiencies alike can be traced to their failure to take contingency seriously enough. Trillings lonely, counter-cultural mid-century celebration of the achievement of Howells (published just ten years before Roth declared the social novel dead) rests on his analysis of Howells as a novelist of the social, particular, and commonplace conditionedness of ordinary lifea sensibility completely alien to late modernitys literary taste for extremity, strangeness, evil, alienation, interiority, and disintegration. Trilling argues that while much of modern imaginative
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writing has retreated into a pursuit of knowledge of pure spirit, Howells retains his value for us because he possessed the much more rare and difficult knowledge of the antagonism between spirit and the conditioned (Trilling 1951, 93). To lose, overlook, or undervalue materiality is to trade actuality for ideality. Trillings fine appreciation of the place of Howells in the tradition of John Donne, Blaise Pascal, and (the early) Tolstoy enables us to identify one of the social novels potential (though not always realized) virtues as a mode of moral discourse: by insisting on the situatedness of any and every act in some particular community at this rather than that moment in a given and inexorable history, it can anchor moral reflection against the fanciful indulgences of pure spirit, against abstract simplification, and against easy moralism. Thus, the very preoccupation with material particularities that tends to date the social novel can also, in the hands of a novelist who, with truth and aptitude, lays hold of the relation of act and context, expose the underlying structure of moral struggle in all places and times. By offering a reading of A Hazard of New Fortunes in terms of complicity, fluidity, and the management of social change, I have tried to show how this resonance has in one particular instance been achieved. Moral discernment is not an abstract endeavor and social conscience is a vector defined by competing forces and many individual choices in a common civic world. The social novelist is at once a witness to that contingency and a force and voice within it. For its reader, the successful social novel contributes to the creation of social conscience by fixing within the bounds of consciousness what had been unknown, unrecognized, unnamed, whether it be the vast fund of suppositions and expectations enshrined in the received framework of belief and practice or the semi-consciously refused problems people would rather not confront. As Franzen insists, it is not the novelists job to provide the curepartly because the troubles we can cure are the ones that are so familiar that we need no novelist to disclose them and partly because the moral troubles with which novelists can give us the most help are exactly those in which there is no unambiguously right path, those where we must pick our way among harms and try to imagine new ways of securing the good in unlikely, conflicted situations. A good social novel is one which, like A Hazard of New Fortunes, can still, after more than a hundred years, remind us of just how difficult and complex our moral calling is. Beyond this lies the simple power of story. The novel, unlike the moral treatise, has the power to plunge us into worlds we otherwise would not know, thus pushing back our moral horizons, laying bare the forces to which we are subject, and drawing us into sympathetic identification with people unlike ourselves in situations we might wish to avoid. The novel, perhaps alone among forms of moral discourse, has the capacity to alter the landscape of perception and response at
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levels of sensibility and supposition that often prove immune to rational arguments. Also, if Sidgwick is right, as I think he is, in insisting that to live well we require social support and the sympathy of other human beings, then perhaps what is most important of all is the way in which these stories cause the judgments and sentiments of others to echo in our minds, thus sustaining our own ability to discern the fitting and to judge actions humanelyand lending us courage in the face of moral duty.
APPENDIX: SYNOPSIS
The launching of a new mass-marketed literary magazine called Every Other Week is the thread that unifies this very loosely plotted story of the intertwined lives of four New York families and three unattached men. The story is set in the 1880s. A quartet of characters, two familied and two unfamilied, anchor the new publication: Basil March, Conrad Dryfoos, Fulkerson, and Angus Beaton. The publication is Fulkersons idea, and he is its shameless promoter, producer, and marketer. He has persuaded Basil to take on the job of editing the publication, which is to be unique in its blend of literature, criticism, social commentary, and visual art. Basil, Isabel, and their two children must leave the refined, homogeneous tranquility of Boston for the rough, diverse vitality of New York. Conrad Dryfoos is the financial manager, a post he holds not because he is intrigued by Fulkersons plans or has outstanding qualifications, but because his father, Jacob Dryfoos, has insisted on it. The elder Dryfoos has the authority to command in this matter because he has agreed to put up the capital to finance Fulkersons venture. Dryfoos has no interest in literary magazines, but he does have an interest in setting his sons feet firmly on the path to a career in business. For his part, Conrad (who exhibits the same gentle piety we see in his mother, and perhaps too much of the same docility) has made it clear that he would much prefer to be a minister. Beaton, an exceptionally talented but self-absorbed and undisciplined artist, is the publications art director. All five members of the Dryfoos family figure prominently in the action of the novel as do both Basil and Isabel March. Beaton is the link to one of the other two families, and Conrad to the other. Mrs. Leighton is a widow, with a talented artistic daughter named Alma. The Leightons struggle to support themselves by taking in boarders, having been enticed to move to New York City by Beatons thoughtless encouragement of Almas artistic aspirations and equally thoughtless (mis)representations of the benefits they would enjoy in the city. Almas feelings for Beaton are deep and ambivalent; Mrs. Leighton views him as her future son-in-law and is distressed that Alma is not more disposed to overlook the faults of so eligible a bachelor. The Leightons boardersColonel Woodburn and his daughter Madison, who have come North from the conquered but unrepentant Southare absorbed into their small family circle. The last of the four New York families (and the family to which Howells devotes the least attention) is the extremely wealthy and venerable Horn family. Mrs. Horn had also encouraged the Leightons to move to the city, but then carelessly failed to offer the support that had been implied in the encouragement. Mrs. Horn has
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the care of a niece, Margaret Vance, who, though extremely accomplished and socially adept, has taken to working in the slums among the poor. In that work she has made the acquaintance of Conrad, who has silently fallen in love with her. The remaining unattached male figure who is pivotal to the story is Berthold Lindau, a German scholar and immigrant. Lindaus egalitarian commitments had originally inspired unbounded loyalty and devotion to the American vision of a just society, and he lost his hand fighting voluntarily for the Union in the Civil War. However, by the time Basil renews his acquaintance with his former tutor, whom he encounters by chance in a Manhattan restaurant, Lindaus disillusionment with America is complete, and his outrage about the systemic exploitation of the working class is as unbounded as his earlier enthusiasm had been. He has developed revolutionary sentiments and lives among the poor, agitating for more just arrangements and denouncing the capitalist system. Just as Alma is drawn into the orbit of Every Other Week as one of the artists upon whom Beaton depends, Lindau is drawn in by Basils editorial need for someone to translate articles that had appeared in European magazines and papers. A Hazard of New Fortunes is what we might call a delayed action novel. For the first half of the novel, we pass among these various characters, both observing the birth of the journal and the psychological landscape of the various families. Basil and Isabel March are established as the anchor of the novel, providing both the center of the moral conflict and the dominant point of view. Morally, they occupy a space of possibilities framed by Jacob Dryfooss entrepreneurial materialism, Fulkersons amoral pragmatism, Beatons self-absorbed irresponsibility, Conrads and Margarets self-sacrificing service of the needy, and the outraged social protest of Lindau. Although the story is not filtered through their consciousnesses, Basil and Isabel are its reflective core, the characters who, in their conversations with one another, process and comment upon the behavior and postures of the other characters. Also, they are the novels ideological pivot in the sense that they are sympathetically bound to and are capable of understanding, at least to some extent, all of the conflicting points of view that the novel explores. Most vividly, Basil stands between the elder Dryfoos and Lindau on matters of civic justice; he has material and mental loyalties to both. Dryfoos and Lindau collide in his consciousness. That is where the conflict between them is actually to be found, for they otherwise move in different life worlds. Likewise, he stands between Fulkerson and Beaton on the question of art and morals, though in this case the nature of his standing between is of a different sort. Neither Fulkerson nor Beaton is capable of seeing any moral dimension to business or to the literary and visual arts, and both thus stand in tension with Basil, for whom art and morality are blended (as they are for Howells). Fulkerson has no understanding of the arts at all; for him Every Other Week is a widget to be sold like any other; success lies in giving the public whatever it finds interesting and attractive. Beaton, in contrast, is superbly gifted with aesthetic sensibility and insight, but his aesthetic sense is completely divorced from moral insight or responsibility. The events that structure the novel are both ordinary and extraordinary. The Marches go apartment hunting. A staff is assembled for Every Other Week, and,
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with a great deal of relentless ordinary work, the first several issues are developed and brought out (with little critical notice but great public enthusiasm). Members of the newly rich Dryfoos family (Jacob Dryfoos has accumulated a fortune, initially from natural gas wells on his farm near Moffitt in northern Ohio or Indiana and, subsequently, from extraordinary good luck in speculative markets) try unsuccessfully to establish themselves in New York society, and they fight among themselveswith the struggle between the elder Dryfoos and his passively resistant son occupying much of our attention. Alma takes classes and grows in artistic stature while contending with and trying to calm her mothers anxieties. Beaton vainly courts Alma, the Dryfoos daughters, and Margaret Vance. Fulkerson gradually falls in love with Madison Woodburn. Lindau prepares his translations for the magazine and spends the rest of his time in labor agitation. Margaret Vance divides her time between Mrs. Horns society soir es (which we observe) and tenement work (which we e do not). The two more extraordinary sequences of events in the novel both involve Lindau. Overriding Basils protests, Fulkerson engineers a celebratory dinner for the magazines financial backer and its entire staff. When the captain of industry comes into direct contact with the socialist reformer, each is deeply offended, indeed, outraged, by the other. The next day Dryfoos demands that Lindau be fired. Basil refuses, generating a painful confrontation within his family and creating a crisis for Fulkerson who must choose between his magazines source of capital and his successful editor. Having had his very flexible moral backbone considerably stiffened by the moral loyalties of Madison (whom he eventually marries), Fulkerson chooses to stand with Basil. The real resolution is provided, however, by Lindau who bursts angrily into the editorial offices, denounces the publication, refuses to do any more work for it, throws on the desk all the money he has received from Dryfoos by way of Basil, and storms out. Shortly thereafter, a transportation strike immobilizes the city (modeled after an actual great traction strike in New York in January and February 1889). As the city is caught up in civic unrest and lawlessness, all the characters must, in some sense, take a standwith or against the striking workers. This time it is Basil who vacillates, drawn toward the strikers by his sympathy for the plight of workers but repelled by the violence, disorder, and lawlessness that their actions represent. At the climax of the novels action, Conrad, Lindau, and Basil all end up at the same intersection, where police are trying to get control of a disorderly crowd. Conrad arrives because he has been exhorted by Margaret Vance to go there and try to be a force for peace in the midst of violence. When he arrives, he realizes that the old man who is being clubbed in front of him is Lindau. As he moves forward to intervene, he is shot in the chest by some unidentified agent in the rioting crowd. At just that moment Basil, who has been drawn to these dangerous precincts despite Isabels admonition that he should, for the sake of his family, keep away, arrives to find Lindau mortally wounded and Conrad dead. The winding down of the novel traces on two fronts, the ordinary and the extraordinary, what we might call the wastes of love. We follow Beaton about the
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city as he is roundly rejected by the three women with whom he has dallied and prevaricated. Alma, whom he recognizes as the only one with whom he might really have been happy and who once longed for his attention and affection, has put a studied end to her love as she has come to understand the depth of his egocentrism. Margaret, whom he patronized but whose attention had flattered him, has charitable interests that now place her entirely beyond his ken. The elder Dryfoos daughter, Christine, whose beauty captivates him and whose money begins to look like the solution to all his problems, assaults him in savage fury at his manipulative indecision. Far more tragically, we behold the racking sorrow of Jacob Dryfoos over the death of the son whom he did really love. Every consolation is denied him, and all he can do is mourn his overwhelming loss and repent again and again his stubborn violence against his gentle, generous, and principled offspring. In a kind of figurative enactment of his spiritual displacement, Dryfoos removes his family to France. Never having had any actual interest in the publication, he sells Every Other Week to Fulkerson and Basil jointly. In the final paragraphs of the book, the Marches encounter Margaret Vance, now in the robes of a Sister of Charity. They do not speak, but it is Margarets happiness in her new life of perfect service that provides the closing image of the book, if not its final word.
REFERENCES
Bross, Edgar Clifton [Eduard DeBros , pseud.] e 1895 A Modern Pharisee: A Novel. New York: G. W. Dillingham. Brown, Helen Dawes 1893 The Petrie Estate. Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin. Carter, Everett 1954 Howells and the Age of Realism. Philadelphia and New York: J. B. Lippincott Company. Clemens, Samuel L., and William D. Howells. 1960 Mark TwainHowells Letters: The Correspondence of Samuel L. Clemens and William D. Howells, 18721920. 2 vols. Edited by Henry Nash Smith and William M. Givson, with the assistance of Frederick Anderson. Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Cort, John C. 1988 Christian Socialism: An Informal History. Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis Books. Crowley, John W. 1985 The Black Hearts Truth: The Early Career of W. D. Howells. Chapel Hill, N.C.: The University of North Carolina Press. 1999 The Dean of American Letters: The Late Career of William Dean Howells. Amherst, Mass.: University of Massachusetts Press. Dickinson, Ellen E. 1888 The Kings Daughters: A Fascinating Romance. Philadelphia, Pa.: Hubb and Brothers.
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Franzen, Jonathan 1996 Perchance to Dream: In the Age of Images, a Reason to Write Novels. Harpers Magazine, vol. 292, no. 1751 (April): 3554. 2001 Interviews: Mainstream and Meaningful. The Atlantic/Atlantic Unbound. An interview with Jonathan Franzen conducted September 6, 2001, by telephone by Jessica Murphy. Accessed and printed March 3, 2003, from http://theatlantic.com/unbound/interviews/ int2001-10-03.htm. Copyright 2001 by The Atlantic Monthly Group. Page citations are from the pages of my printout. Fox, Arnold B. 1952 Howells as a Religious Critic. New England Quarterly 25.2 (June): 199216. Garland, Hamlin 1917 Meetings with Howells. Bookman 45. Gill, J. Thompson 1887 Within and Without, a Philosophical, Lego-Ethical and Religious Romance in Four Parts. Chicago: J. T. Gill. Howells, William Dean 1889 A Hazard of New Fortunes. New York: Harper and Brothers. The novel was first published in installments in Harpers Weekly between March 23 and November 16, 1889. It was issued in paper covers in 1889 and in a cloth cover in 1890. The most recent reprint or reissue of the novel was released in 2002 by Modern Library Paperback Editions with a new introduction by Arthur Schlesinger Jr. All page citations are from the Modern Library paperback edition. 1891 Criticism and Fiction. New York: Harper and Brothers. Reprinted in Criticism and Fiction and Other Essays, edited by Clara Marburg Kirk and Rudolf Kirk (New York: New York University Press, 1959), 987. 1906 Henrik Ibsen. North American Review 183 (July): 114. Reprinted in Selected Literary Criticism, volume 3: 18981920, edited by Don L. Cook, Christoph K. Lohmann, and David J. Nordloh (Bloomington and Indianapolis, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 1993), 10717. Page citations are from Selected Literary Criticism. 1928 Life in Letters of William Dean Howells, edited by Mildred Howells. Two vols. New York: Doubleday and Company. Reissued in 1968 by Russell and Russell. Page citations are from the Russell and Russell volumes. 1983 Editors Study. The collected essays that appeared in Harpers Monthly, 188692, edited, with an introduction, by James W. Simpson. Troy, N.Y.: The Whitston Publishing Company. James, Henry 1912 A Letter to Mr. Howells. North American Review 195 (April): 558 62. Reprinted in The War of the Critics over William Dean Howells, edited by Edwin H. Cady and David L. Frazier (Evanston, Ill.: Row, Peterson and Company, 1962), 1069. The page citation is from The War of the Critics.
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Kazin, Alfred 1982 Good Old Howells [a review of Edwin H. Cadys The Realist at War: The Mature Years of William Dean Howells]. In Contemporaries: From the 19th Century to the Present, new and revised edition, 75 78. New York: Horizon Press. Lewis, Sinclair 1930 The American Fear of Literature. Nobel Prize address, delivered to the Swedish Academy, December 12. Excerpts reprinted in The War of the Critics over William Dean Howells, edited by Edwin H. Cady and David L. Frazier (Evanston, Ill.: Row, Peterson and Company, 1962), 15354. The page citation is from The War of the Critics. Logan, J. B. 1900 Alice McDonald; or, The Heroine of Principle. Revised edition. Nashville, Tenn.: C. P. Publishing House. Lynn, Kenneth S. 1971 William Dean Howells: An American Life. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. McKeever, Harriet B. 1870 Westbrook Parsonage. Philadelphia, Pa.: Claxton, Remsen, and Haffelfinger. Roth, Philip 1961 Writing American Fiction. Commentary, March: 22333. Reprinted in Reading Myself and Others (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1975), 11735. Page citations are from Reading Myself and Others. Schlesinger, Arthur, Jr. 2002 Introduction. In A Hazard of New Fortunes, xixvii. New York: The Modern Library. Sidgwick, Henry 1890 The Methods of Ethics, 4th edition (the first edition was brought out in 1874). London: Macmillan and Company. Tanner, Tony 1965 Introduction. In A Hazard of New Fortunes, by William Dean Howells, viixxxv. London: Oxford University Press. Taylor, Walter F. 1932 William Dean Howells and the Economic Novel. American Literature 4 (May): 10313. Reprinted in Critics on William Dean Howells: Readings in Literary Criticism, edited by Paul A. Eschholz (Coral Gables, Fl.: University of Miami Press, 1975), 92101. Page citations are from Critics on William Dean Howells. Tourg e, Albion W. e 1890 Murvale Eastman, Christian Socialist. New York: Fords, Howard, and Hulbert. Trilling, Lionel 1951 William Dean Howells and the Roots of Modern Taste. Partisan Review, SeptemberOctober. Reprinted in The Opposing Self: Nine
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Essays in Criticism by Lionel Trilling (New York: Viking Press, 1955), 76103. Page citations are from The Opposing Self . Tuttleton, James W. 1992 William Dean Howells and the Practice of Criticism. The New Criterion 10 (June). Accessed and printed May 28, 2003, from http://www.newcriterion.com/archive/10/jun92/howells.htm. Page citations are from my printout. Walker, Robert, and Dewey Wallace 1989 Introduction. See Wright 1989, xixviii. Wolfe, Tom 1989 Stalking the Billion-Footed Beast: A Literary Manifesto for the New Social Novel. Harpers Magazine 279 (November): 4556. Wright, Robert Glenn 1989 The Social Christian Novel. With a foreword by Robert H. Walker and an introduction by Robert H. Walker and Dewey D. Wallace Jr. Contributions in American Studies series, no. 93. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press.

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ART FOR HUMANITYS SAKE The Social Novel as a Mode of Moral Discourse

2005 Journal of Religious Ethics, Inc.

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1. Christian Social Novels: A Forgotten Genre

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