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WHAT IS HOWELLSIAN NATURE? AN EXAMINATION OF CRITICISM AND FICTION AND A MODERN INSTANCE

Journal Name:

  • Khazar Journal of Humanities and Social Sciences

Publication Year:

  • 2009
Author NameUniversity of Author
Abstract (2. Language): 
Spearheading the „realism‟ movement in American literature toward the end of the nineteenth century, William Dean Howells both in his critical documents and essays—Criticism and Fiction—and fiction such as A Modern Instance gently chastises naturalists writers such as Frank Norris for their focus on force that controls man and determines his life. Howells would not have this one-sided belief in and examination of nature. Neither the struggle and survival nor the bestiality—the two facets of Nature of the naturalists—is the whole truth of what nature is, according to Howells. Moreover Howells rejects the romantic celebration of a single passion, the passion of love. To Howells the „romantic‟ approach is both unethical and unbeautiful, while the study of nature by the naturalists “leaves beauty out.” Howells believes that the novelist ought to study the common man and common things in nature. He embraces within the fold of his definition of nature the ethical elements and moral judgment as well. He rejects the ugly aspects of Darwinian nature but accepts smilingly the smiling and beautiful traits. Howellsian conception of nature is not a single ray of light, but it is like a spectrum. It is perhaps an amalgam of the philosophy of Emerson, Wordsworth‟s view of nature as a moral instructor, Elizabethan attitude of order, Swedenborgian belief in a moral governor of the universe, Keatsian conviction of beauty; all this on the spiritual, moral, and aesthetic levels. As regards human nature, which is another facet of Howells‟ concept of nature as a whole, Howells seems to be in line with Alexander Pope‟s dictum that “proper study of mankind is man;‟ and in fiction man can be studied as a character. The inter-relationship of man—human nature—and nature—the universe—is yet another side of Howellsian „nature.‟
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REFERENCES

References: 

1. The Financier (New York:New American Library, 1981 ed.), pp.8-9.
2. Howells‟ Criticism & Fiction and other Essays, ed. with an introduction and notes by Clara Marburg Kirk & Rudolf Kirk (New York University Press, 1959), p. 74. Howells explains all the passions that need to be taken into account in the following terms: “The passion of grief, the passion of avarice, the passion of pity, the passion of ambition, the passion of hate, the passion of envy, the passion of devotion, the passion of friendship....” Page 74.
3. Ibid., p. 282. This essay on Norris by Howells appeared in the North American Review of December, 1902. In his letter to Howells, Norris admits... . “I believe, too, the novel that is true to life cannot afford to ignore the finer things.”
4. Ibid., p. 270. Crane continues: “I decided that the nearer a writer gets to life, the greater he becomes an artist.” In this respect, Crane is close to Howells.
5. A Modern Instance (New York: The New American Library, 1964), Chapter 26, p. 264.
6. Mr. Howells‟s speech, North American Review, April, 1912. “... I thought I saw that while the English dramatists painted manners so wonderfully well, ours painted nature, our everyday American nature, which at the bottom of its heart is always human nature.” Reprinted in Kirk & Kirk, p. 373.
7. Criticism & Fiction, ed. Kirk & Kirk, p. 166. “Exactly what this Tolstoyan truth was to Howells he tells us, as nearly as he can, when he says that Tolstoy taught him to see life not as the pursuit of personal happiness but as „a field for endeavor toward the happiness of the whole human family.‟ The lesson Howells seems to have derived from Tolstoy, then, is that the moral force of such a writer is greater than any rules of art.”
8. Ibid., Introduction to Part I, p. 7 (Quoted by the editors). This is a quotation from Howells‟ Criticism and Fiction.
9. Ibid., Chapter XVI, p. 40. “I ask not for the great, the remote, the romantic... .I embrace the common; I sit at the feet of the familiar and the low... .Man is surprised to find that things near are not less beautiful and wondrous than things remote... .The perception of the worth of the vulgar is fruitful in discoveries... .The foolish man wonders at the unusual, but the wise man at the usual....”
What is Howelisian Nature?: An Examination of Criticism and Fiction … 9
10. The Editor‟s Study, Harper‟s Magazines1 November, 1886. This novel was translated by Mary A. Craig with the title The House by the Medlar-Tree. Howells quite appropriately wrote the introduction in 1890 which reads as follows: “Any one who loves simplicity or respects sincerity, any one who feels the tie binding us all together in the helplessness of our common human life, and running from the lowliest as well as the highest to Mystery immeasurably above the whole earth, must find a rare and tender pleasure in this simple story of an Italian fishing village.”
11. A Modern Instance, Chapter 24, p. 246.
12. Criticism & Fiction, “The Man of Letters as a Man of Business,” p. 308.
13. A Modern Instance, Chapter 9, p. 99.
14. Edwin H. Cady, The Realist at War: The Mature Years 1885-1920 of William Dean Howells (Syracuse University Press, 1958), Chapter IV, p. 122. “It was the „soft‟ Darwinian conviction that Man had climbed from bestiality to civilization by rising above the strong natural lusts--for battle and prey-making as well as sensual indulgences--which had armed him for victory over nature. The next ascent, vide, John Fiske, was to be of new spiritual heights. The old lusts were atavisms; they must be checked if not eradicated or man sinned against progress, and the Beast-man came again. Reference may again be made that Frank Norris deals with the reversal of human-man to Beast-man in Vandover and the Brute.
15. A Modern Instance, Chapter 38, p. 387.
16. Ibid., Chapter 31, p. 323.
17. Ibid., Chapter 39, p. 393.
18. Ibid., Chapter 38, p. 388.
19. Howard Mumford Jones, Jeffersonianism and the American Novel (Teachers College Press, New York: Columbia University, l966), Chapter III, p. 42.
20. Criticism & Fiction, pp. 94-95. This is from the essay on Dickens and Thackeray.

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