But let fiction cease to lie about life; let it portray men and women are they are, actuated by the motives and the passions in the measure we all know; let it leave off painting dolls and working them by springs and wires; let it show the different interests in their true proportions; let it forbear to preach pride and revenge, folly and insanity, egotism and prejudice, but frankly own these for what they are, in whatever figures and occasions they appear; let it not put on fine literary airs; let it speak the dialect, the language, that most Americans know—the language of unaffected people everywhere—and there can be no doubt of an unlimited future, not only of delightfulness but of usefulness, for it.
W. D. Howells, Criticism and Fiction (51)

[...] the finest effect of the ‘beautiful’ will be ethical and not aesthetic merely.
W. D. Howells, Criticism and Fiction (42)

La sagesse serait évidemment de définir le réalisme de l’écrivain comme un problème essentiellement idéologique. Ce n’est certes pas qu’il n’y ait une responsabilité de la forme à l’égard du réel. Mais cette responsabilité ne peut se mesurer qu’en termes sémiologiques. Une forme ne peut se juger (puisque procès il y a) que comme signification, non comme expression. Le langage de l’écrivain n’a pas à charge de représenter le réel, mais de le signifier.
Roland Barthes, Mythologies (210)

1In his essay entitled “Un discours contraint” published in 1982, French Structuralist Philippe Hamon explores the many facets of literary realism, its ‘terms and conditions’ so to speak. He draws a list of its traditional components among which one can note a deep concern with verisimilitude, the metonymic ordering of the plot, “reality effects,” “readerly”1 characters, descriptions, narrative closure, the colloquial, etc.

2To some extent, all these ingredients are present in William Dean Howells’ and Edith Wharton’s fictional works. However, it would be misleading to contend that they comply with the constraints of realism in similar ways. Howells’ narrative discourse, suffused with the bustle of mid—and late 19th-century America, and Wharton’s prose with its modernist features, do have things in common, but they also differ immensely. Whereas Howells celebrates his faith in the linguistic sign which he values as a tool for the sake of the Truth, Wharton contemplates the inadequacy between the thing and the sign with lucidity, and, as if to stigmatize the fault-lines of the capitalist society and the lures of fictional representation, she draws the vitality of her style from the past and the classical tradition. Both novelists bear witness to the mutations imposed on the American novel by the multiplicity and circularity of the semiotic systems that record, name and try to order the chaotic profusion of reality, its images and discourses of all sorts. Both, too, feel deeply concerned with the cracks in the socio-cultural edifice that challenge their ideals of Beauty, Justice and Truth. As it was, both Howells the democrat, the champion of “social realism,” and Wharton the aristocrat, felt the need to reassess the topoi of their fictional modes at the very moment when the literary artefact fell into the logic of consumption, of reproducibility, and into scientific materialism.

3This contribution relies on a critical reading of two novels by W.D. Howells (The Rise of Silas Lapham, 1885 and A Hazard of New Fortunes, 1890) on the one hand, and on Edith Wharton’s trilogy (The House of Mirth, 1905, The Custom of the Country, 1913, and The Age of Innocence, 1920) on the other hand. My main argument here will be that all these novels expose how, in capitalist societies, art dissolves into social life, and how the realist genre seeks to tackle the hollow structure of fictional representation when faced with the forerunners of the early twentieth-century epistemological breakdown. I will suggest that both Howells’ and Wharton’s artistic ventures are not simply a matter of aesthetics; they also testify to their deep moral commitment in an age dominated by the business ethics. As regards their modes of story-telling, my hypothesis is that they are based on a tension between the necessity of form, the world of literary semblance and rhetorical ornaments—the robes of fiction—and the desire to tell the truth about the human subject.

4The structuralist approach in general and Philippe Hamon’s in particular provide valuable insights into realism, for they make clear that the production of literary discourse by no means dwells on straightforward and ‘innocent’ stylistic choices and devices. In addition to the essay “Un discours constraint,” my main reference here is to Texte et idéologie,2 where the critic posits that the novelist’s choices are always ideologically biased, either consciously or not. If we accept that text and ideology are correlated, it seems relevant to examine how the latter manages to make all discourses on the world/on the objects of the world sound ‘natural.’ For example, if we contend that verisimilitude3 is meant to comply with social imaginary patterns, this also means that it rests on common experience and that, as a consequence, it must be easily readable, definable, recognizable, in order to appeal to the reader. Thus it becomes obvious that the text is never the result of a random selection operated by the novelist. One fine example is the reference to sociolects, idiolects, and/or vernacular English that address and define a specific social class and support “le rideau de la doxa; ”4 another is the use of clichés,5 either photographic or linguistic. All of them generate verisimilitude and imaginary identifications.

5This paper explores how the realist vein negotiates the problematic relationship between fiction and reality, or more precisely, the relationship between fiction and what is ideologically constructed as reality; as expected, the stylistic devices meant to transform reality into a piece of fiction are crucial here. Within this perspective, it seems relevant to focus on the dialectic between text and ideology in terms of structure, for what matters most is not symmetry per se but how the elements of rupture and decentring intersect and interact. What is at stake is the process described by Terry Eagleton in his Criticism and Ideology:

The text constitutes itself as a structure: it de-structures ideology in order to reconstitute it on its own relatively autonomous terms, in order to process and recast it in aesthetic production, at the same time as it is itself de-structured to variable degrees by the effect of ideology upon it. (Eagleton 98-99)

6Many questions arise from the interplay of literary praxis based on codes and conventions, and ideology which is itself a set of prescriptions, “an illusion that structures our social practices.” (Eagleton 40) Quite unsurprisingly, both Howells’ and Wharton’s politics of writing focus on elements designed to construct a ‘faithful’ vision of the present world. The immediacy of this vision rests largely on the treatment of scenery, characterization and emblematic places and stereotypes. It rests on a linear ordering of temporal sequences, a taste for a vantage point inherited from classical realism, the hierarchy of codes, etc. In addition, it also raises fundamental issues such as: is realism simply a distorting mirror forcing reality into the “ill-fitting vestments”6 of conventional practice? Likewise, does the treatment of subjectivity and social relationships consist simply in dressing the self in a protective, isolating sheath, and in restricting it to a social construct, that is to say, to a sum of prescriptive discourses? Concerning aesthetic matters, to what extent does the social class that rules both the production and circulation of commodities also shape taste?7 Last but not least, how far can Howells’ realism, so conspicuously tinged with idealism, still appeal to us, contemporary readers, in a world that seems to have lost faith in its ideals?

7At first sight, there seems to be a sharp contrast between Wharton’s elitist vision and Howells’ democratic mindset. However, both novelists were well aware of the worldliness of works of art, and both would contest the nouveaux riches and their system of values. The crucial point concerns their respective strategies of fictional representation confronted with the diseased social and political body of the Gilded Age. Even if it is true that Howells seems to abide by the rules of the realist genre more than Wharton, both novelists chose to question conspicuous mass-consumption and new mercantile ‘values’—“les puissances du faux”, in Nietzsche’s own words. For both of them, the major focus was the place of art/of the work of art in the pagan world of human activities and in an age marked by shifting historical truths, by the falsity of meaning(s) and the reassessment of mimesis entailed by scientific progress and new social patterns. Yet, one may wonder if it is still relevant today to consider that the realist genre was simply a mirror held up to the multifarious reality of the time. In other words, is it not too restrictive to assert that Howells’ and Wharton’s fictional worlds are mere descriptions of “what has been sliced-off by the gilt frame of the looking-glass,”8 be it the frame of aesthetic enterprise?

1 “The truthful treatment of material,”9 or Howells’ realism in question(s)

8In terms of narrative economy,10 both Howells’ and Wharton’s fictional works read first and foremost like fine architectural constructions with carefully-laid foundations, discrete but efficient scaffolding, props and stays of all sorts among which the extensive use of “reality effects,” the importance devoted to plot and characterization, to a strict balance between descriptive pauses, dialogues and narrative sequences. One should not forget to mention “a reverence for the English language as spoken according to the best usage,”11 for Wharton would never let the decorative be undermined by a trivial detail, be it a prosaic object or a misnomer. As for Howells, he would resent any contamination of the novelistic form by the romantic spirit or by sentimentalism.12 However, things are not so simple and before we go further, it seems appropriate to examine the above quotation taken from Howells’ Criticism and Fiction, and discuss some of the features of his literary credo.

9What first strikes the reader is his deep concern with the truth. In Howells’ mind, it lies within the novelist’s reach provided he relies on the positivist mind, on scientific tools, on “figures,” for example, a word that belongs to the lexicon of mathematics and that, quite amazingly too, is related to the power of imagination and fictional characterization. The paradox lies in the fact that the etymology of ‘fiction’ is precisely fingere, namely ‘pretend, ’ ‘make believe, ’ two verbs close to the French feindre; and what is a piece of fiction if not a mere pretence, a lie, a linguistic construct? As for the truth, one is tempted to ask: what truth? where is the truth? whose truth? what does the truth refer to? how can we measure it? As is well known, what we call “the truth” is something finite and culturally determined by an epistémè and by epistemological categories, and, as far as nineteenth-century literature is concerned, by a pre-Nietzschean paradigm.

10Howells’ conception of the realist narrative (at least in his early works) rests on a well-ordered vision of the world where meanings and values constitute literal, stable, and absolute entities rather than contextual variables. His ‘confusion’ between the work of art and the immediacy of the objective world is part and parcel of the realist mode that posits that reality is a consistent whole,13 “un déjà-là, un déjà-écrit, support concret de paroles, d’inscriptions et d’écritures” (Hamon, Texte et idéologie 126). For contemporary readers, familiar with Saussurean linguistics and poststructuralist theories, it would certainly be more accurate to claim that reality lies out there as an ideological construct mediated by language. It can also be argued that the ‘confusion’ in question is perhaps between “the truth” and verisimilitude, that is to say between the production of what is true and the reproduction of what seems to be true. On this particular point, my contention is that verisimilitude is precisely what complies ‘naturally’ with one’s own system of values and therefore with what is unquestionable. One may also wonder if the function of fictional writing is to give the reader access to a predictable view of reality,14 or rather to interpret it. For Howells, “the truth” was a social value nourished by his strong sense of equity; for him, what was true was fair and what was realistic was democratic. In the last sentence, the opposition between “usefulness” and “delightfulness” stresses the didactic dimension of the work of art inherited from the Classics: the novelist’s enterprise must serve morality, teach rather than entertain, adapt its language and style to the unrefined masses, to “the unaffected people.”

11Wharton’s strategies diverge somehow from Howells’ politics of “social realism: ” she considered that there was nothing above the art object, and her reverence for Old Europe’s canons was total. Quite logically, she opted for a style that praised Classicism and whose aesthetic principles are exposed in both her treaty, The Decoration of Houses (1898), and her later essay entitled French Ways and Their Meanings where she claims that “The essence of taste is suitability. [...] the word expresses the mysterious demand of eye and mind for symmetry, harmony and order.” (French Ways 41) Her conviction was that the creator was “the mere lover of beauty” (French Ways 41), and that, as such, his daunting task was to provide social harmony in a world faced with the absence of the sacred. She thought that the artist’s most valuable gift, the art object, should comply with Emerson’s ideal of grandeur, truth, integrity, and combine aesthetics with morality, perceptive insights into the emotional world with critical distance on socio-cultural issues.

12To put it briefly, realism for Howells was a mode designed to transcribe the many realities of a rational, Newtonian world, whereas for Wharton it was rather a questioning of the epistemological issues characteristic of modernism. It was, indeed, a way of ‘textualizing’ reality, of transforming it into a text by means of semiotic systems that matched a selected range of ideological values. Of course, all this presupposes that 1/ reality is, by essence, decipherable, nameable, capable of transforming itself into a text, and that its modes of production operate in relation with the modes of production of ideology; 2/ it is through language that we can decipher, grasp, name it. Actually, both systems often interact within a complex pattern of reversal, and they even sometimes overlap. This is precisely what a discussion of Hamon’s essay, “Un discours constraint”, aims to show.

2 “La langue peut copier le réel” (132)15

13My purpose is first to reassert that at no moment do Howells’ and Wharton’s modes of writing totally invalidate the referential dimension of language, or clearly depart from the long-dated tradition of literary mimesis. As if in response to social and moral disintegration, and to compete with the excesses of the baroque style, their fictional art deflates emphatic demeanour. Instead, they privilege verisimilitude, elegance in disposition of form and contents, refinement in thought inherited from the Genteel Tradition. For neither of them was ever taken in by social, ideological or cultural masks. The main difference lies perhaps in the fact that Howells praised the transparency of language,16 whereas Wharton was convinced that there should always remain some flimsy veil to cover up the cracks imposed on the social fabric/on the self.

14It is also true that Howells’s pragmatism was fuelled by his origins, by his education, by his faith in science and industrialisation, as well as by the stimulus provided by America seen as a bustling arena for action and technological progress. One of his main concerns was social justice under capitalism, and his conviction was that integrity and redemption could be generated by the ordinary. Wharton’s target in her major works was rather to go beyond the here and now of tangible experience in order to disclose the unknown and the hidden facets of reality.

15For a better understanding of their works, it is rewarding to take the socio-cultural background of their literary production into account. If we accept that literature is a praxis under influence, it is worth mentioning that in nineteenth-century America, literature was shaped by a plurality of discourses: of/on art, of/on science, of/on money, of/on History, of/on religion and theology. I will argue that in many places, Howells’ artistic enterprise, which strives to give his readers a predictable view of reality, seems somehow trapped in the prison-house of ideology, tinged as it is with the normative discourse of the time. For his worldview was excessively influenced by science and by the positivist ethos: the objectivity and rationality of scientific progress based on perception and observation reinforced his faith in the possibilities of language to name, order, represent the outside world. In Howells’ America, it was science that provided a model for the treatment of literary material, and one can easily note a tight connection between the referential discourse based on the adequacy of sign with referent, the modalities of the visible, knowledge, and the truth. Therefore, it comes as no surprise that the visual process, whose goal is precisely to arrange the material and to bring out its significance, is so conspicuously foregrounded and relied upon in his novels. There is, indeed, a close link between the power of images and knowledge, and Howells’ fictional world (like Wharton’s) is full of references to the world of visual arts, painting, the theatre, and photography. In his mind, seeing was believing, and believing was telling; in other words, textual cohesion was conditioned by the cohesion of the referential world. And if realism means life gauged against a strict system of values and standards, it was certainly for Howells a matter of ‘to be’ or ‘not to be’ sincere/honest/accurate as regards his own modes of perception and representation. His novels show how, in the realist mode, dramatization rests on the ability of language to integrate visual representation and transform visual images into textual images.

16Likewise, it was the world of science and the machine supported by the power of money that operated the shift from metaphysical idealism to scientific materialism The best example is the story of Silas Lapham, a captain of industry who relies totally on progress, technological know-how, pragmatic interpretations of the world of objects, and for whom the morality of business goes with the business of morality. However, he refuses to apply the principles of science to “the human conscience” for he wants to “keep that as free from paint as you can,” (The Rise of Silas Lapham 12) convinced as he is that his Puritan background will provide him with the moral and material measures of success, namely “natural nobility and business sagacity.” (7) Silas has inherited his father’s discovery and has made a fortune thanks to a paint-mine, “a gold-mine” (10) which he considers as “a blessing to the world.” (18) The paint, that was “like my own blood to me,” (17) is the product of personal commitment, unflinching energy and faith in “scientific phrases,” (11) facts and figures:

When folks come in, and kind of smell round, and ask me what I mix it with, I always say, ‘Well, in the first place, I mix it with Faith, and after that I grind it up with the best quality of boiled linseed oil that money will buy.’ (18)

17Silas, “a fine type of the successful American,” (4) belongs to the middle class; his enterprise consists in “an alchemy,” a transmutation of mineral ore into “solid ingots of the most precious of metals,” (20) and his ‘mission’ is to export his paint and see it used “conspicuously everywhere round the world” (15) for his paint is “good: ” (6, 8) it is tangible, it can protect and embellish all types of surface (even though it is also synonymous with reification), and above all, it can be labelled, branded, clearly identified by means of letters and figures, “the mystic devices: ” (13)

But, any rate, every barrel of it, and every keg, and every bottle, and every package, big or little, has got to have the initials and figures N. L. f. 1835, S. L. t. 1855, on it. Father found it in 1835, and I tried it in 1855.’
“’S. T.—1860—X. business,” said Bartley.
“Yes,” said Lapham.

18In Howells’ novel, the scientific mood which is fuelled by a desire for exhaustiveness and homogeneity fits both the entrepreneurial mind and the collective myth of the self-made man, and success is presented as a typically American feature.17 Of interest too, the collusion of science and money, for Silas’ story shows how scientific progress can transform prosaic objects into valuable tokens, and how the utilitarian falls into the logic of capitalist exchange:

The Rise of Silas Lapham suggests that if the dematerialization of cash into a culture of a rarefied class constitutes “civilization” itself, then moral values have an economic basis and economic values have moral implications.18

19The paint motif, central to The Rise published in 1885, serves as a structuring metaphor for Howells’ design: it belongs to an aesthetic of concealment, for what must remain concealed behind the coat of paint is the world of emotions and feelings, even though the signifier “mine” refers obliquely to the world of the inner self. The end of the novel insists, not on Silas’ ruin but on its redemptive quality once morality has been restored: “In the shadow of his disaster they returned to something like their old, united life; they were at least all together again.” (364)

20Like Howells’ novel, The House of Mirth stages the rise and fall of the main protagonist. In it, Wharton focuses on woman as purveyor of beauty in turn-of-the-century America, and she shows how she is objectified by and within the discourse of liberal trade, led to play the part of the “Beautiful Ornament,” or to perform “theatrical mascarades,” “tableaux vivants [which] remain, in spite of every enhancement of art, only a superior kind of wax-works.” (The House of Mirth 133) The story of Lily Bart lays emphasis on an erotic of consumption which articulates gender relations to cultural representations. The female body functions as stop-gap in an economy of desire that rests on money. By the end of the novel, Lily realizes that she has been no scripter of her own story, and that even if “each fall of lace and gleam of embroidery was like a letter in the record of her past,” (317) the record in question turns out to be lapidary and full of holes, and her dresses, mere artefacts meant to conceal the feminine void behind the veils of seduction. In the final episode where Lily casts the robes of the pretty fictions she had constructed for herself, Wharton displaces the thematic of corporeality linked to the feminine onto the body of the text, and she manages to speak the truth of a female aesthetics.

3 “Le réel est un champ complexe et foisonnant, discontinu, ‘riche’ et nombrable, dénommable, dont il s’agit de faire l’inventaire” (162)19

21On the whole, both Howells’ and Wharton’s writings highlight the link between the scientific pragmatism, the visual consumption and the bourgeois values that prevailed in their time. One cannot but notice the heavy number of scenes, sketches, pictures, descriptions, portraits, details, anecdotes, short notes, emblematic places that compose the imaginary scene. They all seek to map the many moods as well as the picturesqueness of urban scapes and life—mainly Boston and New York—,20 the fuss and gloss of social life and rituals (like the Coreys’ dinner party in The Rise of Silas Lapham chapters 13 and 14, or the magnificent banquet given by Dryfoos to show off his wealth, A Hazard of New Fortunes 325-327).21 Like most realist novels, Howells’ narratives are entirely built on fully dramatized scenes, for example Mrs Horn’s musicales where what matters most is not the pleasure of music but the decoration, the furniture, the conversations, the speculation on the guests, as in the short sequence with Mela Vance who “was willing to take [the Marches] at their apparent social valuation.” (A Hazard of New Fortunes 269) Of course, the dress code plays an important part. (The Rise of Silas Lapham 188-189, 192; A Hazard of New Fortunes 268)

22What is true of diegetic places is also true of characterization: the represented world is full of stereotypes, of “flat” characters that point to the mirage of reproducibility and faith in the reliability of the objective world. Much has been said about Howells’“social realism,” about his desire to suggest and describe. The didactic dimension of his art lies perhaps in his choice of characters as technological, moral and political models, for his aim was to express his social awareness along with the social implications of his artistic commitment. Every place and/or process is described with scientific accuracy, a plethora of technical details, and a very strong ideological bias: “Silas’ dim wareroom,” (13) his house, in particular “the pile-driving,” (45) the floors and stairways, “the clean, fresh mortar in the walls mingling with the pungent fragrance of the pine shavings,” (52) the many flats visited by the Marches, “the little parlor, with its gilt paper and ebonized furniture” (A Hazard of New Fortunes 41, 49, 50-51, 57), New York which “shrieks and yells with ugliness here and there [...] but never loses its spirits.” (62), the urban flat “that abolishes the family consciousness” (68), the bourgeois’ pretentious home, or Lindau’s room with its “shabby and frowsy bedding, the odor of stale smoke, and the pipes and tobacco shreds mixed with the books and manuscripts strewn over the leaf of the writing desk.” (188-189), Angus Beaton’s studio with its “gray wall quadrangularly vaulted to a large north light; casts of feet, hands, faces, hung to nails about; prints, sketches in oil and water-color, stuck here and there lower down.” (118), or the Dryfooses’ drawing-room which exhibits the collusion of the economic and the aesthetic;22 as expected, this list is not exhaustive. Similarly, the characters’ descriptions are comprehensive accounts of their physical and moral features, past and present activities, habits.

4 “Le texte n’est plus qu’une répétition, toute manifestation d’idiolecte étant chargée de provoquer un effet de réel” (141)23

23The thorny issue of utterance discussed by P. Hamon is a major concern of literary praxis. There is, indeed, a link between Howells’ taste for linguistic transparency, the status of the narrative voice and his treatment of univocity, a mode copied from the discourse of science. His style is transparent in the sense that it equates one character with one modality of speech, and in doing so, leaves his reader little room for speculation. Howells’ main concern seems to be less the process of utterance than the production of discourse. This is one of the many paradoxes of the realistic discourse: although it always strives to conceal the very place from where ‘it’ speaks, it also uses characters as vehicles for knowledge. As a result, it reads like a linguistic patchwork that tries to ‘copy’ reality and its diversity, a ‘linguistic mosaic’ that combines several modalities of speech: vernacular English, idiolects and sociolects, technical jargon (the editor’s, the journalist’s, the architect’s, the industrialist’s, the banker’s, the broker’s, etc.), Southern accents, to name but a few. Major examples in A Hazard of New Fortunes concern Lindau’s ‘broken’ English, or the Woodburns from the defeated South:

“Yes, my name is Lindau,” he said, slowly, while he scanned March’s face. Then he broke into a long cry. “Ah-h-h-h, my dear poy! Mu yong friendt! -my-my-Idt is Passil Marge-not zo? Ah, ha, ha, ha! How gladt I am to zee you! Why, I am gladt! And you rememberdt me?”
(93)
Miss Woodburn asked, “And is Mr. Dryfoos senio’ anything like ouah
Mr. Dryfoos?”
“Not the least.”
“But he’s jost as exemplary?”
“Yes; in his way.”
“Well, Ah wish Ah could see all those pinks of puffection togethah, once.” (209)

24Howells’ fictional style, which shows a predilection for coherence, relies heavily on commonplace experience, on literal meaning and metonymy rather than on figural meaning and metaphor.

25As for Edith Wharton, her main goal was to respect “the unity of impression” by means of a “reflecting consciousness” able to weave “not more than two (or at most three) angles of vision”24 into a consistent whole. In both her novels and her short stories, authorial presence is never denied, for she manages to combine shifting viewpoints so as to frame a multi-faceted vision of reality within a well-balanced, carefully-mastered perspective. It is as if she were reluctant to yield to the proliferation of narrative and discursive designs, or even to the random play of signifiers. For example, she favours binary oppositions which leave little room for in-between-ness, and she rarely departs from hypotactic sentencing whose aim is to keep control over thought, language, form, and ultimately, over the reader’s perception. However, it would be unfair to restrict Wharton’s style to formal strategies that might too quickly label her works “readerly” texts. It is more rewarding, I think, to consider her fiction in the light of a twofold poetics of the subject/of the voice central to the modernist venture. Insofar as the voice is the very support of an open-ended play between presence and absence, voicing the ‘I’ is a daring enterprise for any writer, and Wharton is no exception. In her fiction, the problematic status of the narrative voice is constantly highlighted: the main narrative instance never fully coalesces but it sometimes gets lost in the meanders of free indirect speech, more precisely in a fine blend of “narrative” and “character” able to verbalize what the character leaves unsaid, or what belongs to a non-linguistic consciousness. Or it sometimes vanishes in the intricacies of irony, with the result that “effects of voice,” rather than a clearly-identified voice, (an omniscient narrator’s voice, for example), break through the tightly-woven textual fabric and challenge the position of dominance over a world and its epistémè dear to the realist mode. Here are a few examples which display Wharton’s taste for ambiguity and equivocity:

She [Undine] seemed as yet-poor child!—too small for New York: actually imperceptible to its heedless multitudes; and her mother trembled for the day when her invisibility should be borne in on her. Mrs Spragg did not mind the long delay for herself—she had stores of lymphatic patience. (The Custom of the Country 10)
She tossed her head back with the movement she had learned in “speaking” school-pieces about freedom and the British tyrant.
(The Custom of the Country 94)
Being a well-bred man he had not (like another recent ducal visitor) come to the dinner in a shooting-jacket; but his evening clothes were so shabby and baggy, and he wore them with such an air of their being homespun, that (with his stooping way of sitting, and the vast beard spreading over his shirt-front) he hardly gave the appearance of being in dinner attire. (The Age of Innocence 51)

26Wharton’s énoncés are by no means smooth and straightforward: instead, they knit together different levels of utterances, many quotations and intonations which account for the ‘loquacious’ dimension of her novels. My contention is that these fictional tricks are much more than mere stylistic ornamentation: they signal the moment in Western history when meanings and beliefs vacillate. Quite symptomatically, the Whartonian text is often made opaque by the many utterances that contest each other within fictional space. Her narrative discourse is a place where meaning is blurred or deferred, put in question whenever the skilful superposition of voices criss-cross within ironical, equivocal statements or authorial comments that destabilize interpretation. Such devices ruffle the surface of the text and challenge its overall homogeneity as if in protest against the reified language of Wall Street financiers and against language as instrument, as “marketable material.” All those strategies unveil other strata of linguistic matter half-hidden behind the seemingly classical façade of her fictional composition. They also reveal the importance of sounds and names in her creative process, and the bliss concealed behind the very flesh of words and the lures of fiction.

5 The Sting of Doubt, or Mimesis Revisited

27Howells’ artistic venture was shaped by classical realism, but gradually shifted toward other moods and modes, new stylistic devices meant to disclose the illusory dimension of the real, that is to say its theatricality. The ironic trope and other processes of defamiliarization like self-reflexivity are parts of this rhetoric, especially in A Hazard of New Fortunes which Howells considered as “The most vital of my fictions.” (4) In it, the reader can feel the novelist’s growing awareness that the outside reality is in fact nothing but a set of illusions: the novel starts as a comedy of manners and then shifts to a social tragedy that denounces the short-comings of the materialistic venture. The turning-point is the dinner-party (337-345) where Lindau the idealist opposes old Dryfoos; its climax is the street-car strike that reactivates the historic and emblematic fault-line between the North and the South. In A Hazard, the process of demystification is at work: in a very pragmatic manner, Howells shows how the social world has become an empty stage overwhelmed by a tension between the materialistic and the idealistic and a sense of deep nostalgia, of disenchantment, for the world has lost its ideals: it has become “dull: ”

The men’s faces were shrewd and alert, and yet they looked dull; the women’s were pretty and knowing, and yet dull. It was, probably, the holiday expression of the vast, prosperous, commercial class, with unlimited money, and no ideals that money could not realize; fashion and comfort were all they desired to compass, and the culture that furnishes showily, that decorates and that tells; the culture, say, of plays and operas, rather than books. (302)

28Like his vision of his contemporary society, Howells’ principles of literary composition evolved. In his fiction, the represented world became less monochromic and monolithic, but also more fluctuating, more ungraspable and sometimes experienced from within by means of internal focalisation. Textually speaking, Howells’ style, in his later works, shows some resistance to the patterns imposed by ideology. His narrative strategies question both surface meanings and the mimetic power of language. They also disclose the superficiality of human intercourse contaminated by money. This is true of family and social links, but also of the press that sustains the collusion of the artistic and the economic: one can read that the magazine Every Other Week operates “the long-felt want of a tie between the Arts and the Dollars.” (177)

29In comparison, Wharton’s prose relies more on ambiguity and metaphor; the result is a prismatic worldview where past and present constantly mirror each other and generate new truths that will eventually blur her idealistic will-to-power over meaning. Her trilogy, which rests on a conspicuous dialectics between lack and excess, authenticity and sham, truth and illusion, is also a way of questioning the realist venture. In her novels which depart from the politics of classical realism, signs and objects abound, and yet meaning is elusive. In The House of Mirth, she dramatizes the gap between sign and referent whereas Howells suggests it by showing the holes in the social fabric. In the very final sequence, Selden’s search for the lost signifier (“love,” perhaps) is emblematic of the mood that prevailed at the turn of the twentieth century. As if to compensate for loss in all its forms, the enigmatic brilliancy of objects of desire (ornaments, clothes, or jewelry) is endowed with high potentialities of libidinal satisfaction. Every object, be they the seductive object of consumption central to new economic contingencies, or the art object left to speculation and profit, connects the discontent of our modern age dominated by vacuity with the delusive presence of ‘the little thing.’ Like Howells’, Wharton’s fiction offers a large selection of those “gap-fillers: ” they range from socially specified objects (mainly money and commodities), to the aesthetic object in all its forms (music, painting, literature, architecture). They also include the woman involved in the sexual masquerade.25

30Trapped as it is between the tradition of the romance, the shift toward naturalism and the emergence of modernism, American realism in W. D. Howells’ and E. Wharton’s works, questions the problematic relationship between literature and the objective reality in an age marked by the failure of moral and social codes. They all provide the critical reader with a reflection on the very nature of the American novel, and beyond, on American identity. In their History of American Literature, Bradbury and Ruland argue that Howells’ realism tries

to reconcile through realism two essential American traditions: the tradition of ‘rough’ democracy, represented by Emerson, Whitman and to some degree Twain, which looked to the self and the West to bring forth a brave New world, and the Genteel Tradition, which asserted the power of society and culture as real forces and looked eastward to the Old World. (Bradbury 208-209)

31It is true that America in the 1870s and the 1880s was still confident in its social and material progress, at least until the Haymarket Riot (Chicago 1886), which put an end to optimism and demonstrated the vital necessity of ethics in society, arts, and literature. W.D. Howells’ “social realism” focuses on the a-morality of the modern world; sustained by a mystic bond that unites economic life, moral responsibilities, financial liabilities and artistic commitment, it is art for humanity’s sake. His ‘modernity’ (if any) lies perhaps in his gradual shift from epistemological concerns to ontological questionings, from the world of objects to the depths of the human subject. I will suggest that E.Wharton’s enterprise is rather art for beauty’s sake. Her protagonists belong to a society obsessed with its lack of origins, and a relentless quest for the aesthetic dimension of reality. Indeed, both novelists share a concern with the ethical and aesthetic frame of American society: their fictions are about the fictions promoted by the master discourses of science and politics; there are first and foremost fictions about cultural and artistic identity:

The simple structure of our society, the free play of our democracy in spite of our plutocracy, the ineradicable desire of the right in spite of the prevalence of the wrong, the generous instinct of self-sacrifice, the wish to wreak ourselves in limitless hospitality, the capacity for indefatigable toil, the will to make our achievement commensurate with our opportunity—these are the national things which the national novel might deal with, better than with Pittsburg chimneys and Chicago expresses.26