In October of 1888, at the height of his literary fame and influence,
W. D. Howells wrote the following to Edward Everett Hale:I am persuaded also that the best that is in men, most men, cannot come out until
they all have a fair chance. I used to think America gave this; now I don't. – I
am neither an example nor an incentive meanwhile in my own way of living …Words, words, words! How to make them things, deeds, – you have the secret
of that; with me they only breed more words. At present they are running into
another novel.Howells's tendency to equate his own weaknesses with the social tensions
of late-nineteenth-century America is equally apparent in a letter written
a few weeks earlier to Henry James:I'm not in a good humour with “America” myself. It seems to me the most
grotesquely illogical thing under the sun…after fifty years of optimistic content
with “civilization” and its ability to come out right in the end, I now abhor it
and feel that it is coming out all wrong in the end, unless it bases itself anew upon
real equality. Meantime I wear a fur-lined overcoat and live in all the luxury my
money can buy. (417)While these letters express, most clearly, a sense of disillusionment, a
feeling that Howells like his country has betrayed his early promise, they
also manage to imply the more disturbing fear that the promise may
actually have been kept – that luxury and meaninglessness may be the
logical culmination of both moral projects. There is a feeling here beyond
irony (and he was never a great ironist) that Howells, like America, is
helpless in the grip of a process which makes vacuousness and luxury the
inevitable result of any quest for value. I will argue in this article that one
name for this process is capitalist modernity and that the specific moment
of capitalist development that Howells is reacting to, in these letters and
in his work as a whole, is the crisis of overproduction experienced by the
US economy towards the end of the nineteenth century. Howells's
uncertainty in these letters, about his own life and writing and about the
state of his country, speaks, in this context, to the confusions of a culture
in which the morally sanctioned effort of production had become
somehow itself a problem, a problem whose solution – consumption –
appeared as an immoral, yet inevitable, form of wastage.
