258 Reconstructing, Reimagining: 1865–1900Earlier on in The Rise of Silas Lapham, a character called Mit Kingsbury praises
a popular romance she has just read called Tears, Idle Tears. The “dear old-fashioned
hero and heroine,” she declares, “keep dying for each other all the way through” and
make “the most wildly and unnecessary sacrifices for each other.” “You can’t put
a more popular thing than self-sacrifice into a novel,” another character responds
sardonically. “We do like to see people suffering sublimely.” The whole purpose of
Howells’s novel is to resist such sentimental notions that self-sacrifice is an intrinsic
good. The choice that Lapham makes is not, Howells insists, a wild and unnecessary
one. The subplot involving Tom Corey and Penelope Lapham helps to develop this
purpose. Penelope is tempted, by consideration for her sister Irene’s feelings, to
reject Tom when he reveals his love for the older sister. She does not, however, partly
persuaded by Irene not to do so. According to what the novel calls the “economy of
pain” and the morality of “common-sense,” it is only right that Penelope and Tom
should marry, although a lachrymose tale like Tears, Idle Tears would suggest other-
wise. The romantic sentimentalism of purposeless self-sacrifice is resisted. So too, at
the end of the novel, is the romantic sentimentalism of reconciliation. Through the
marriage of Tom and Penelope, the “old” family of the Coreys and the “new” family
of the Laphams are nominally joined, but only nominally. “It would be easy to point
out traits in Penelope’s character which finally reconciled all her husband’s family
and endeared her to them,” the narrator reflects. “These things continually happen
in novels.” Not in this novel, however: “the differences remained uneffaced”
between “the Coreys and Tom Corey’s wife,” which is one reason why the couple
leave for Mexico. There is no sense of the old leisure class, with its manners and
ease, being united with the new business class, with its vigor and purpose; the two
families remain worlds apart. As with so much in the novel, Howells seems to be
gesturing toward romantic conventions of motive and incident precisely so as to
indicate just how far from the romantically conventional, how close to the actual
grain of things, his story is.
Three years after publishing The Rise of Silas Lapham, Howells himself left Boston
for New York. The move, which reflected a gradual transference of cultural power
from the old New England establishment to the metropolis, was followed by a
change in Howells’s choice of subject and method. He was fascinated by the extremes
of wealth and poverty he found in the city, and appalled by the brutal treatment
of striking workers in Chicago’s Haymarket Strikes and the Pennsylvania Homestead
Strike. Influenced by Tolstoy, whom he began to read in 1885, he gravitated toward
socialism and to the belief that he had to adapt his realistic fiction to the problems
of the machine age and the city. One result of this was a utopian fiction, A Traveler
from Altruria (1894). Several hundred utopian fictions appeared between the 1880s
and the early 1900s, as writers responded to the radical changes and social injustice
of the times by imagining alternatives for America based on economic stability and
principles of justice. The most famous and influential of these was Looking Backward
(1888) by Edward Bellamy (1850–1898), which portrayed the United States in the
year 2000 as a place where government ownership of the means of production
and the “scientific,” rational rule of a business class ensured economic equality andGGray_c03.indd 258ray_c 03 .indd 258 8 8/1/2011 7:54:20 AM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 54 : 20 AM