Language, Race, and Social Class in Howells's America

Elsa Nettels

• Publisher: The University Press of Kentucky
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780813185521
• Topic: Littérature
• Subtopic: Critique littéraire nord-américaine

No other American novelist has written so fully about language—grammar, diction, the place of colloquialism and dialect in literary English, the relation between speech and writing—as William Dean Howells. The power of language to create social, political, and racial identity was of central concern to Americans in the nineteenth century, and the implications of language in this regard are strikingly revealed in the writings of Howells, the most influential critic and editor of his age.

In this first full-scale treatment of Howells as a writer about language, Elsa Nettels offers a historical overview of the social and political implications of language in post-Civil War America. Chapters on controversies about linguistic authority, American versus British English, literary dialect, and language and race relate Howells's ideas at every point to those of his contemporaries—from writers such as Henry James, Mark Twain, and James Russell Lowell to political figures such as Theodore Roosevelt, Henry Cabot Lodge, and John Hay.

The first book to analyze in depth and detail the language of Howells's characters in more than a dozen novels, this path-breaking sociolinguistic approach to Howells's fiction exposes the fundamental contradiction in his realism and in the America he portrayed. By representing the speech that separates standard from nonstandard speakers, Howells's novels—which champion the democratic ideals of equity and unity—also demonstrate the power of language to reinforce barriers of race and class in American society.

Drawing on unpublished letters of Howells, James, Lowell, and others and on scores of articles in nineteenth-century periodicals, this work of literary criticism and cultural history reaches beyond the work of one writer to address questions of enduring importance to all students of American literature and society.

Notes

Abbreviations Used in the Notes

AM	Atlantic Monthly
Appl.	Appleton’s Journal
EEC	William Dean Howells, “Editor’s Easy Chair”
ES	William Dean Howells, “Editor’s Study”
GLB	Godey’s Lady’s Book
HJ	Henry James
HM	Harper’s Magazine
HW	Harper’s Weekly
JRL	James Russell Lowell
Lipp.	Lippincott’s Magazine
NAR	North American Review
Scrib. Mag.	Scribner’s Magazine
Scrib. Mon.	Scribner’s Monthly
WDH	William Dean Howells

Introduction

1. HJ to WDH, Feb. 19,1912, The Letters of Henry James, ed. Percy Lubbock (New York: Scribner’s, 1920), 2: 225.

2. Thomas Wentworth Higginson in Literary World, 10 (Aug. 2, 1879): 249-50, quoted in Critics on William Dean Howells, Readings in Literary Criticism, ed. Paul A. Eschholz (Coral Gables, Fla.: Univ. of Miami Press, 1975), p. 17; Saturday Review quoted in Critic, n.s. 4 (Nov. 7, 1885): 224; James Fullarton Muirhead, America, The Land of Contrasts: A Briton’s View of His American Kin (London: John Lane, 1898), p. 172.

3. Public Meeting of the American Academy and the National Institute of Arts and Letters, in Honor of William Dean Howells (New York: American Academy of Arts and Letters, 1922), pp. 27, 39; The Responsibilities of the Critic: Essays and Reviews by F.O. Matthiessen (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1952), pp. 99-100.

4. WDH, Travel Diaries: Ohio, n.d.; Journal of W.D. Howells in Cambridge, Aug. 1, 1869; Venice, April 19, 1883; Capri, 1864; Ronda, Spain, Nov. 11, 1911; at sea, Nov. 2, 1894; London, Sept. 7, 1882; all in Houghton Library, Harvard University.

WDH to Elinor M. Howells, Nov. 6, 1899, Selected Letters 4: 223; T.S. Perry, “William Dean Howells,” Century 23 (March 1882): 682; WDH to William Cooper Howells, Feb. 9, 1890, Selected Letters 3: 274.

5. Alice Meynall, “The Trick of Education,” HM 108 (Feb. 1904): 379; WDH to William Cooper Howells, Jan. 15, 1872. Houghton Library, Harvard Univ. H.L. Mencken, The American Language: An Inquiry into the Development of English in the United States (New York: Knopf, 1921), p. 20.

6. WDH to T.W. Higginson, May 6, 1909, Houghton Library, Harvard Univ. EEC, HM 113 (Sept. 1906): 634, 635; WDH to E.C. Stedman, Dec. 8, 1874, Selected Letters 2: 80-81.

7. AM 22 (Nov. 1868): 635; WDH to Frederick A. Duneka, Feb. 14, 1912, American Antiquarian Society; Oscar Firkins, William Dean Howells: A Study (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1924), p. 308; Robert Frost to Hamlin Garland, Feb. 4, 1921, Selected Letters of Robert Frost, ed. Lawrance Thompson (New York: Holt, Rinehart, Winston, 1964), p. 265. Howells’s interest in language was not limited to human speech. He wrote to his father of a call from Richard Lynch Garner, author of The Speech of Monkeys (1892), “a very interesting man” who “is recording his curious philological researches with the phonograph. He is able to exchange some few elemental ideas with the simians in their own language; and he believes that we shall yet converse with all the animals.” WDH to William Cooper Howells, Jan. 29, 1892, Houghton Library, Harvard Univ.

8. Alexis de Toqueville, Democracy in America, trans. Henry Reeve, ed. with an intro. by Henry Steele Commager (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1947), pp. 3, 287, 288.

Chapter One. Language in Howells’s America

1. Muirhead, America, the Land of Contrasts, p. 186.

2. Richard Grant White, “Americanisms,” AM 42 (Nov. 1878): 619.

3. WDH, AM 27 (March 1872): 395; idem, “Literary and Philological Manuals,” AM 45 (March 1880): 359, 360; JRL to WDH, May 2, 1879, Houghton Library, Harvard Univ.

4. “Contributor’s Club,” AM 43 (Jan. 1879): 114; 42 (Nov. 1878): 639; 42 (Dec. 1878): 773; 43 (Feb. 1879): 258. The item on hesh, hizer, himer is identified as Horace E. Scudder’s by Philip B. Eppard and George Monteiro, A Guide to the Atlantic Monthly Contributor’s Club (Boston: G.K. Hall, 1983), p. 16.

5. John Fiske, “What We Learn from Old Aryan Words,” AM 47 (April 1881): 489.

6. Adam S. Hill, “English in the Schools,” HM 71 (June 1883): 123; Alfred Ayres, “A Plea for Cultivating the English Language,” HM 103 (July 1901): 266-67; T.W. Higginson, “The Test of Talk,” Book and Heart: Essays on Literature (New York: Harper, 1897), p. 219; James Fenimore Cooper, “On Language,” The American Democrat, in James Fenimore Cooper: Representative Selections, intro., bibliography, and notes by Robert E. Spiller (New York: American Book Co., 1936), p. 205.

7. Dennis E. Baron, Grammar and Good Taste: Reforming the American Language (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1982), pp. 167, 187. Intentional slovenliness of speech—its causes and its prevalence in the United States—is discussed by J.M. Steadman, Jr., “Affected and Effeminate Words,” American Speech 13 (Feb. 1938): 13; and by James Truslow Adams, “The Mucker Pose,” HM 157 (Nov. 1928): 661-71.

8. EEC, HM 114 (April 1907): 803; The Laws of Etiquette, or, Short Rules and Reflections for Conduct in Society (Philadelphia: Carey, Lea & Blanchard, 1839), p. 19. Arthur M. Schlesinger, in Learning How to Behave (New York: Macmillan, 1946), pp. 31-37, documents the importance of magazines, newspapers, and books of etiquette in defining proper behavior, including correct speech.

9. Reviews of George P. Marsh, Lectures on the English Language,” HM 20:(April 1860): 694; of John S. Hart, Composition and Rhetoric, HM 42 (Dec. 1870): 141; of William Swinton, Progressive Grammar of the English Tongue, HM 45 (Nov. 1872): 943; and of English Synonyms, ed. Archbishop Whately, HM 5 (June 1852): 137.

10. “Editor’s Table,” HM 14 (May 1857): 842; EEC, HM 76 (May 1888): 962; “Editor’s Table,” HM 14 (May 1857): 843, 845; 14 (May 1857): 845.

11. HJ, “The Speech of American Women,” French Writers and American Women: Essays, ed. with an intro. by Peter Buitenhuis (Branford, Ct.: Compass, 1960), p. 47; Meynall, “Trick of Education,” p. 277; Scrib. Mon. 11 (April 1876): Higginson, “Test of Talk,” p. 220.

12. Richard Grant White, “Words and Their Uses,” Galaxy 4 (May 1, 1867): 103; 6 (Dec. 1868): 824-25.

13. GLB 84 (1872): 94, 572, 92; 82 (1871): 571; 83 (1871): 472.

14. EEC, HM 76 (May 1888): 964; White, Words and Their Uses (New York: Sheldon, 1872), pp. 222-26; GLB 82 (1871): 475; Adam S. Hill, “English in Newspapers and Novels,” Scrib. Mag. 2 (Sept. 1887): 375; Brander Matthews, “New Words and Old,” HM 97 (July 1898): 308.

15. White, “Words and Their Uses,” Galaxy 7 (June 1869): 894; Fitzedward Hall, “Shall We Say ‘Is Being Built’?” Scrib. Mon. 3 (April 1872): 702, 703; GLB 83 (1871): 471; EEC, HM 134 (March 1917): 594; T.R. Lounsbury, “The Story of an Idiom,” HM 109 (June 19...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Introduction
• One. Language in Howells’s America
• Two. “Good Natural English”
• Three. American and British English
• Four. Realism and Dialect
• Five. The Problem of “Negro Dialect” in Literature
• Six. Language, Race, and Nationality in Howells’s Fiction
• Seven. Language and Class in the Early Novels
• Eight. Language and Class in Novels of Country and City
• Nine. Language and Complicity in The Minister’s Charge
• Ten. Language and Equality in the Late Novels
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Works of William Dean Howells
• Index