RISE OF SILAS LAPHAM - Softcover

HOWELLS, WILLIAM DEA

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0451471458 ISBN 13: 9780451471451

Verlag: Penguin LCC US, 2014

Inhaltsangabe

The Rise of Silas Lapham was the first important novel to center on the American businessman and the first to treat its theme with a realism that foreshadowed the work of modern writers. In his story of one of the millionaire industrialists who flourished in the post-Civil War years, William Dean Howells probes the moral and social conflicts that confront a self-made man trying to crash Boston’s old-guard aristocracy. Silas Lapham is a man of conscience who fully realizes his folly; but he is also an ambitious man who lets his aspirations lead him to risk both his fortune and his family’s happiness for status in a society that will never truly accept him.

His perceptions were sure, his integrity was absolute,” wrote Henry Seidel Canby of William Dean Howells, whom he credited as being responsible for giving the American novel form.”

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Über die Autorinnen und Autoren

William Dean Howells was born in Martins Ferry, Ohio, on March 1, 1837. Between 1856 and 1861 he worked as a reporter for the Ohio State Journal. About this time his poems began to appear in The Atlantic Monthly. His campaign biography of Abraham Lincoln, compiled in 1860, prompted the administration to offer him the consulship at Venice, a post he held from 1861 to 1865. He married Elinor Gertrude Meade, a young woman from Vermont, in Paris in 1862. On his return to the United States in 1865, Howells worked in New York before going to Boston as assistant to James T. Fields of The Atlantic Monthly. In 1871 he became editor-in-chief of the magazine. In this position he worked with many young writers, among them Mark Twain and Henry James, both of whom became his close friends. His first novel, Their Wedding Journey, appeared in 1872. The Rise of Silas Lapham was serialized in Century Magazine before it was published in book form in 1885. A Hazard of New Fortunes was published five years later. His position as critic, writer, and enthusiastic exponent of the new realism earned William Dean Howells the title of Dean of American Letters. He died in 1920.
 
Louis Auchincloss was a highly acclaimed novelist, literary critic, and historian. His more than fifty books include The Rector of Justin, The House of Five Talents, and The Atonement. He is also the author of several nonfiction works, including The Man Behind the Book: Literary Profiles, and a member and President Emeritus of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

William Dean Howells was born in Martins Ferry, Ohio, on March 1, 1837. Between 1856 and 1861 he worked as a reporter for theOhio State Journal. About this time his poems began to appear in The Atlantic Monthly. His campaign biography of Abraham Lincoln, compiled in 1860, prompted the administration to offer him the consulship at Venice, a post he held from 1861 to 1865. He married Elinor Gertrude Meade, a young woman from Vermont, in Paris in 1862. On his return to the United States in 1865, Howells worked in New York before going to Boston as assistant to James T. Fields ofThe Atlantic Monthly. In 1871 he became editor-in-chief of the magazine. In this position he worked with many young writers, among them Mark Twain and Henry James, both of whom became his close friends. His first novel,Their Wedding Journey, appeared in 1872. The Rise of Silas Lapham was serialized inCentury Magazine before it was published in book form in 1885. A Hazard of New Fortunes was published five years later. His position as critic, writer, and enthusiastic exponent of the new realism earned William Dean Howells the title of Dean of American Letters. He died in 1920.

Louis Auchincloss was a highly acclaimed novelist, literary critic, and historian. His more than fifty books includeThe Rector of Justin, The House of Five Talents, and The Atonement. He is also the author of several nonfiction works, includingThe Man Behind the Book: Literary Profiles, and a member and President Emeritus of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

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INTRODUCTION

The Rise of Silas Lapham has been a steady seller since its publication in book form in 1885, perhaps the only survivor, except for A Hazard of New Fortunes, of the many-volumed fiction of the writer once known as the dean of American letters. Howells’s gift as a storyteller continues to make this novel a page-turner, and his ability to delineate character to make him a kind of John the Baptist to proclaim the coming of his younger friend Henry James, whose early work he had promoted and whose genius he generously declared to be far superior to his own. Ohio-born Howells was closer to the American soil than the New York– and Newport- bred James, and his characters were simpler and more directly motivated. Even when he moved to Boston and then New York, Howells’s eyes tended to look westward, while those of his more sophisticated and cosmopolitan colleague were directed toward Europe.

Perhaps to the readers of the eighteen eighties, the primary interest in Silas Lapham lay in the interplay of the two plots: the struggle of the newly rich, quinquagenarian metal paint producer, Lapham, to resist the tempting offer of a wicked associate to save his tottering empire, and the equally violent struggle of his younger daughter, Penelope, to maintain her imagined duty to turn down the man she loves—and who loves her—because her sister is also infatuated with him. But we pretty well know from the start that Lapham—a loving and faithful husband and father, a Civil War hero and a decent if somewhat pompously conceited businessman—is going to play straight, even if the standard postwar robber baron would not have, and the details of the villain’s plot fill the only dull spot in the book. And as for Penelope’s problem, it wouldn’t exist for a young woman today, nor does it indeed seem to for any of the more sensible characters in the novel itself. She has had nothing to do with her sister’s attraction to Tom Corey, nor was he himself even aware of it. What solace would it be for the sister to have three persons miserable instead of one? And this very question is asked over and over in the text. The reader’s reaction today is apt to be one of impatience.

The particular interest of the novel for us lies in Howells’s dramatization of the process of amalgamation between the old and the new rich. This dominated the American social scene in the eighteen seventies and eighties, when the rising tide of railroad, oil, and steel millionaires threatened to overwhelm the Boston enclaves of Cabots and Lowells and their New York counterparts of Livingstons and Van Rensselaers. Howells had seen the initial conflict between the two and knew that it could only end in merger, for the common denominator of money was too great to keep them long apart. He also saw that it was a fine subject for the novel of manners, and indeed it has played a predominate role in that genre right up to the day of John P. Marquand and John O’Hara.

Howells chose Boston of the Grant era as the site of his version of the struggle, and he reduced to a minimum the differences between the two sides. Silas Lapham is not a crook, as many of those who resisted the rise of the robber barons liked to allege; he has been, despite the one rough but legitimate ousting of an undesirable partner, scrupulously honest in his business practices, nor do the Coreys, whose ancestors have been painted by Copley, claim otherwise. Lapham and his wife are simple, decent folk, plain as old shoes, and although he is rather pompously conceited and a bit in awe of the bluer blood of the Coreys, neither he nor his spouse would dream of seeking a marital alliance with the latter if Tom, handsome, good-hearted, democratic and in love with their daughter, were not a son-in-law any parent would covet. Mrs. Lapham, indeed, and both her daughters are quite content with their unadorned social position; it is only the attraction of Irene and Penelope to Tom that brings them into contact with the Coreys, and it is he who has invaded the Laphams’ territory by coming to work for their father. The opposition to the match—and it is never very fierce—comes entirely from the Coreys, and in particular from Mrs. Corey and her daughters.

Howells, of course, here puts his finger on the real resister to the social aspirant, i.e., the established society matron. Women, right up to our own times, have been able to wrest very little power from men; society is one of the rare fields in which they had triumphed and held their sway. Look at a social resort like Newport, where the mansions, the dress, the entertainments were solely in the hands of dominating women whose husbands notoriously hid away in Wall Street and only visited them on such weekends as absolutely required their presence. Small wonder that these wives were called “dowagers.” Were such hard-earned positions as theirs to be lightly shared with Jenny-come-latelies? Hardly. One can see in Edith Wharton’s The Custom of the Country how the newcomer could be met with a hate that was almost vitriolic, and this opposition became shriller as conformity in dress and deportment began to steal over the American scene, making it more and more difficult to discern the outward difference between a climber and a tree dweller. But the loss of the appearance heralded the loss of the battle.

Howells sees the ultimate amalgamation as already hovering. Mrs. Corey’s opposition to the Laphams is only halfhearted, not because she doesn’t care—she does, and fervently—but because she knows that her son is going to marry the girl he wants and that she cares too much for him to refuse civility to his wife. She is seen as clinging to her own world in the hope that it will at least last her lifetime and rather listlessly accepting the new. She has called on Mrs. Lapham; she has even asked her to dinner—what more can even her cynical husband expect of her?

In the end it is clear that Mrs. Corey is concerned only with the cultural difference between her family and the Laphams; their wealth is a matter of indifference to her, even though her own is much diminished from what it was. The loss by the Laphams of their fortune does not make Tom’s marriage to their daughter better or worse. “We never cared for the money,” Mrs. Corey tells her husband, and he replies: “No; and now we can’t seem to care for the loss of it. That would be still worse. Either horn of the dilemma gores us” (338).

What they really can’t stand in the new rich is their lack of taste. Bromfield Corey, visualizing his son’s marriage reception in the Laphams’ house, before the Laphams’ art masterpiece—a sentimental statue group showing Lincoln emancipating the slaves—exclaims in horror: “But that drawing room . . . really I don’t see how Tom stands that. Anna, a terrible thought occurs to me! Fancy Tom being married in front of that group, with a floral horseshoe in tuberoses coming down on either side of it” (341).

Nor do they ever quite get over this attitude. Howells predicts that, for all their good efforts, the Coreys will never wholly succeed in taking Penelope to their bosom. Indeed, he seems more pessimistic than the reader about this, for Penelope is shown as culturally far superior to her family. But it is certain, he tells us in the end of his tale, “that our manners and customs go for more in life than our qualities. The price that we pay for civilization is the fine yet impassable differentiation of these. Perhaps we pay too much; but it will not be possible to persuade those who have the difference in their favor that this is so” (353–54).

Bromfield Corey acts as a...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Penguin LCC US
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2014
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0451471458
• ISBN 13: 9780451471451
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 373
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar