Reconstructing, Reimagining: 1865–1900 257in God’s universe,” and he makes this declaration “with the solemnity of prayer,”
affirming the holiness of thrift and the profit motive. Lapham moves his family to
Boston and begins to build a house on fashionable Beacon Hill: Howells uses the
several removals of the family, as other contemporary and later realists were to do,
to measure social status and upward mobility. He also encourages his wife and
daughters to enter fashionable society. The Lapham family does not fit in well or
easily with genteel Boston society. There is no finer piece of social comedy in the
novel, in fact, and no clearer index of the shaky position of the newly rich in an older
society in American literature than the description of a dinner party held at the
house of one high-class family, the Coreys. Unable to negotiate the politics of the
dinner table, and finding the conversation beyond his range, Lapham is at first
uncomfortably quiet and then, fueled by the drinks he does not know how to refuse,
talks far too much and too loud. One member of the Corey family, however, Tom,
falls in love with the older Lapham daughter, Penelope. And although the match
between them is delayed for a while, because the younger daughter Irene convinces
herself and Penelope that Tom is in love with her, the two are eventually married.
Not long after the marriage, they leave for Mexico to escape the rigid social barriers
of New England. Lapham, meanwhile, has been threatened with bankruptcy due to
some unsuccessful business ventures. A former partner, called Rogers, urges him to
save himself by selling some property he knows to be worthless to some British
investors. After a struggle with himself, Lapham decides not to make the sale.
Economically bankrupt, socially disgraced, he is nevertheless morally restored, and
he returns with his family to Vermont.
Structurally, with its movement toward the moral redemption of the protagonist,
the moral “rise” that accompanies his social and financial fall, the story Howells
devises here would have tempted other writers toward moralism and sentimentalism.
But, like his hero, Howells resists temptation. As Lapham makes his decision not to
sell worthless stock, what he is aware of mostly is how deeply unheroic he feels. “He
had a whimsical and sarcastic sense of its being very different from the plays at the
theater,” the reader learns. This is a necessary choice for him, but it is not one that
is accompanied by any theatrical gestures or even with much sense of satisfaction.
“You’ve ruined me!” Rogers – who had a share in the anticipated deal – tells
Lapham, when he learns of his choice. “I haven’t a cent left in the world! God help
my poor wife!” “This was his reward for standing firm for right and justice to his
own destruction,” Lapham muses, as he sees Rogers leave, “... to feel like a thief and
murderer.” Lapham has done what he has to do but done so quietly, hesitantly, even
regretfully. If there is moral grandeur here, it is no more, and no less, than the
grandeur of the commonplace. “You can paint a man dying for his country,” one
character in the novel complains to an artist, “but you can’t express on canvas a man
fulfilling the duties of a good citizen.” Howells can. And he leaves us with his “good
citizen,” Lapham, averring, with a scrupulous avoidance of heroism or sentimental-
ism, his humble acceptance of his citizenly duties. “I don’t know as I should always
say it paid,” he confesses, reflecting on the choice he made; “but if I done it, and the
thing was to do over again, right in the same way, I guess I should have to do it.”GGray_c03.indd 257ray_c 03 .indd 257 8 8/1/2011 7:54:20 AM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 54 : 20 AM