American Realist Fictions of Marriage

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Preface

American Realist Fictions of Marriage intervenes in the field of American literary realism by arguing that selected marriage fiction of Kate Chopin, Frances Harper, Pauline Hopkins, Williams Dean Howells, Emma Dunham-Kelly, and Edith Wharton interrogates the possibility of harmonious societies based on racial, gender, and social equality. Megda (1891), An Imperative Duty (1891), Iola Leroy (1892), The Awakening (1899), Contending Forces (1900), and The House of Mirth (1905) express suspicion about marriage and its potential consequences. These six novels use marriage as a forum to explore the problem of the “color line,” sexism, and class difference that promoted social boundaries. These novels demonstrate how choices about marriage made by female protagonists are metaphorical representations of social equality while simultaneously revealing threats to that ideal vision. American Realist Fictions of Marriage explores the ways marriage infringes upon protagonists’ development into autonomous women in imperfect societies.

Marriage holds a distinct place in the American cultural imagination, and it is an important index of female identity in the Age of ← ix | x → Realism. American Realist Fictions of Marriage intervenes in current critical debates in American literary realism by showing how realism functions as a mode of narration for fictive constructions of marriage and the race, gender, and class upheavals these depictions of marriage represent. In a wider context, American Realist Fictions of Marriage aims to widen the conventional narrow focus on canonical realist writers by highlighting intellectual exchanges that were taking place between traditional and nontraditional writers about marriage.

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Acknowledgments

I did not craft this book alone. While working to bring this project to fruition, I received a great deal of support from colleagues, family, and friends. First, I would like to acknowledge Mr. Zeus Preckwinkle of Chicago, Illinois, my 4^th and 6^th grade teacher, who instilled in me very early on a love for both reading and writing. I would like to thank members of the Ervin and Randall families who provided me with invaluable support and encouragement when I needed it most. For intellectual support and encouragement, I am grateful to Dr. Michael A. Elliott, Dr. Frances Smith Foster, Dr. Christine Levenduski, and Dr. Carla J. Mulford. I owe a special thanks to Dr. Sharma, Dr. Erwin, Dr. Vickers, and Dr. Callahan for their supportive friendship over the years. I owe a special debt of gratitude to my mother, Shervia Jean Ervin Randall for her generous monetary gifts and invaluable prayers, wisdom, and encouragement. Mommy, you have always been and will always be my biggest supporter. Finally, I extend my deepest appreciation to my deceased father, Charles Roy Randall. Gone but never forgotten. Daddy, I am forever indebted to you, for you encouraged me from the very beginning until your end. Even in your absence now, your spirit of love, encouragement, and support abounds. ← xi | xii →

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Introduction

Realism and the Value of Marriage on an American Scene

The Age of Realism commonly refers to a period of realist writing from approximately 1865 to 1910. Emerging as a technique of novel writing after the Civil War and becoming a distinct genre by the 1880s, realism was in conversation with other competing modes of representation and cultural practices. Realism emerged after the Civil War, a time of healing and restoring.¹ Some realist fiction of this period depicts marriage as a means of healing and reconciliation on individual, communal, and even national levels. Many changes were occurring in the world, including Reconstruction, the modern scientific revolution, the industrial revolution, migration from rural to urban environments, and high rates of immigration. Realists felt it was their own ethical responsibility to tell the truth about the common everyday life of ordinary people, and they prided themselves in objectively depicting ordinary middle and lower class life in literature that interrogated cultural difference. “Realism was just as much a way of seeing as a set of texts, and those ways of seeing permeated the entire culture through indirect borrowings, common material, and social expectations.”² Characters in realist novels are products of social factors. Their environments play key parts ← 1 | 2 → in the dramatic complications that can occur, particularly in social constructions of consumerism that require characters to make moral and ethical decisions.

Realism was a subject of controversy in its own time, and debates occurred about the suitability of realism as a mode of representation. Concerns about novel reading and novel writing were deeply engrained in the political consciences and literary imaginations of many realist writers. Some realists felt it was their responsibility to both outline their writing philosophies and justify their writing practices. “Fidelity to everyday life and to probability of motive were easy to theorize about than to realize.”³ As a result, many realists often violated theories they claimed to practice in their novels.

William Dean Howells, the lone male author included in American Realist Fictions of Marriage, is nicknamed the “Dean of American Letters”⁴ Howells has an economic vision of realism. “As the spokesman for American realism, Howells uses the terms economy and excess to advertise proportionate views of the world to correct the falsifying, excessive vision of the sentimental.”⁵ Howells describes realism as “nothing more and nothing less than the truthful treatment of material.”⁶ Furthermore, realism depicts “‘the simple, the natural, and the honest.’”⁷ “Simple,” “natural,” and “honest” are classic terms of Howellsian realism.⁸ Howells has poignant instructions for realist writers: “We must ask ourselves before we ask anything else, Is it true?—true to the motives, the impulses, the principles that shape the life of actual men and women?”⁹ According to Howells, realist writers have a responsibility to adhere to the tenants of the genre realism. Presenting life as it is and not as the author wants it to be is vitally important for realists. Howells considers realism the superior tradition to be taken more seriously than the romance and sentimental. “More specifically, Howells’s endorsement of the ‘economy’ of realism consistently included a critique of the ‘excess’ of romance and sentiment”¹⁰ Romantic and sentimental conventions predicate an excess of emotion and sympathy that Howells does not envision for realism. On the other hand, realism seeks “to achieve a balanced economy within a balanced formal structure”¹¹ Yet even Howells is conflicted in his philosophies on writing. ← 2 | 3 → Like a number of realists, he adheres to and also violates theories regarding the function of literature.

Defining realism was a difficult task for writers during the Age of Realism itself, and it remains a difficult task for contemporary scholars of literary realism now. Today, debates surrounding realism still continue. “No genre—if it can be called a genre—is more difficult to define than realism, and this is particularly true of American realism.”¹² The enticing nature of falling into the trap of collapsing realism, the literary movement, into “realistic,” the adjective, explains why it is so difficult to pin down an accurate definition of realism. If something is described as realistic, it is considered to be an accurate portrayal unclouded by false ideals. According to the Webster’s II New Riverside Dictionary, realism is “concern with facts and things as they actually are; the depiction of reality.”¹³ Yet as Walter Benn Michaels has long argued, “Realism, defined by its fidelity to things as they are, can never in principle serve as a model, good or bad, since only when art is not like life can life attempt to be like art.”¹⁴ Realists write to instruct more so than to entertain their audiences. Realist writing is not confined by literary convention or aesthetics. Mimetic, matter-of-fact, and straightforward, realist writing prides itself on verisimilitude. A literary technique of writing practiced by many schools of writing, realism had multiple relationships with other competing modes of writing. Circles of romantics, realists, and naturalists debated ways fictional characters should be represented in relation to the external world. Many novelists often blended other techniques of writing with realism as a solution to the debate.