Authors
William Dean Howells (1837-1920)
Biography
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Questions for Discussion and Writing
1. Howells gave the lectures which became “Novel-Writing and Novel-Reading” in 1899 - at the end of a decade in which Oscar Wilde, the Aesthetes, and the Decadents had held the limelight for a while, holding that (in Wilde’s words) “All art is quite useless,” and that “There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written or badly written. That is all.” When Howells says “. . . the truth which is the only beauty, is truth to human experience,” is he rejecting Wilde’s principles? As a “Preface” to The Picture of Dorian Gray, Wilde wrote two pages of epigrams that form the basic tenets of Anglo-American Aestheticism. Take a look at those epigrams. Where do you see points of accord between Howells’s values, as a realist, and Wilde’s as an Aesthete?
2. “Editha” is a retelling of a story that in various forms extends back to Classical Greece and Rome, a story of safe hometown idealism in collision with the realities of war. Forty years before Howells’s published his story, Mark Twain told a similar tale as a farcical sketch called “Lucretia Smith’s Soldier,” about a young woman looking for a wounded warrior to swoon and weep over. How would you describe the tone of “Editha”? Why is the “lady” artist introduced at the end, to pronounce the word “vulgar”? Can you think of other novels or stories in which, at the end, a character chooses an aesthetic judgment in order to avoid a moral recognition? How does the narrative lead us to a different understanding of Editha than she has of herself?
3. Howells proposes that “Fiction is the chief intellectual stimulus of our time, whether we like the fact or not; and taking it in the broad sense if not the deep sense, it is the chief intellectual influence.” Do you think this observation is dated? Do you still see truth in it? If so, do you think that “fiction” in its various contemporary forms is an effective sort of “intellectual influence?” Why or why not?