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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 30 July 2009
Amid rising interest in the history of consumer culture and the literary marketplace, The Rise of Silas Lapham (1885) gained new significance in the 1980s when scholars placed William Dean Howells, his novel, and realism as a whole in a complicated relation to 19th-century economic culture. In general, these critics found Howells retreating from an overbearing market system within which he had tried to establish realism as a truer, less sensationalized form of writing. By showing that Howells's writing was itself a market practice, their historicist readings significantly revised our understanding of American realism. At the same time, though, their interpretations tended to rely on abstract understandings of Gilded Age business culture. This essay seeks a new view of The Rise of Silas Lapham by focusing more concretely on the marketing techniques whose emergence after the Civil War benefited Howells's writing career but troubled his conscience. Howells's awareness of his contradictory relation to the market is most obviously manifest in the economic and moral quandary faced by Silas Lapham. But as I argue below, Howells imagined a solution to this dilemma in the form of Lapham's son-in-law, Tom Corey — a figure critics have mainly ignored. Not only does the genteel Bostonian represent the future of the paint business, but his anticipated role in international markets suggests both the expansionist and idealistic nature of Howells's realism.
The author thanks Michael Anesko, Leger Grindon, John P. McWilliams, Michael Newbury, and Nancy R. Spears for their careful readings of this essay.
1. Howells, William Dean, The Rise of Silas Lapham (1971; rept. New York: Viking Penguin, 1983), 290Google Scholar. All subsequent references are to this edition and are cited parenthetically in the essay.
2. Dimock, Wai-Chee, “The Economy of Pain: Capitalism, Humanitarianism, and the Realistic Novel,” in New Essays on The Rise of Silas Lapham, ed. Pease, Donald E. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 647–90Google Scholar. Patrick Dooley likewise addresses Howells's attention to business morality by focusing on Lapham, 's actions in “Nineteenth Century Business Ethics and The Rise of Silas Lapham,” American Studies 21 (1980): 79–93Google Scholar.
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8. Note that Lapham continues to market his fancy paint even after he has returned to Vermont, the site of his original success and a stronghold of producer values. This conclusion offers further evidence of Howells's qualified acceptance of market conditions.
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18. Lapham, for instance, resembles Henry Oscar Houghton, a one-time tanner-turned-publisher who migrated from northern Vermont to Boston, while Tom Corey appears something like George Harrison Mifflin, the Harvard-educated Brahmin who, enroute to becoming a partner in the house, learned the business in all its aspects, an apprenticeship that, given American publishers' reliance on commercial travelers in the post—Civil War era, may well have included a stint on the road (Ballou, Ellen B., The Building of the House: Houghton Mifflin's Formative Years ([Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1970], 134–36, 271–302, 563–64Google Scholar).
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20. By a similar irony, applied democratically, Howells also dismisses the Coreys' faith in aristocratic lineage.
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29. The phrase comes from the title of an article by Christopher Lasch in which he asserts that Corey's entry into business reinvigorates the Boston elite. My approach, in emphasizing Corey's movement into corporate culture, modifies this argument. See Lasch, , “The Moral and Intellectual Rehabilitation of the Ruling Class” in The World of Nations: Reflections on American History, Politics, and Culture (New York: Knopf, 1973), 82Google Scholar.
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